‘Reagan: His Life and Legend’
By Max Boot
Liveright, 880 pages

A line in a John Ford movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” expresses the ethos of Max Boot’s biography: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” To a large extent, Mr. Boot’s biography demonstrates that believing in Ronald Reagan’s greatness is a matter of making the legend a fact.  

Mr. Boot is too honest to simply print the legend of Reagan, the successful Cold War warrior who as president brought down the Soviet Union, the leader who made America great again and dispelled the malaise of the Jimmy Carter epoch, the underestimated Hollywood actor who outsmarted the professional politicians and pundits — and who may well have been the luckiest man to have ever occupied the White House.

That luck had a good deal to do with timing. Reagan might not have been as successful if he had been elected a decade earlier or a decade later.  Without Mikhail Gorbachev’s willingness to compromise in arms deals, his determination to reform the Soviet system and to end Soviet adventurism abroad, Reagan could not have looked so masterful, winning the Cold War by presiding over events that led to America’s ascendancy as the world’s sole superpower after Gorbachev’s reformist efforts resulted in the demise of what Reagan had called an “evil empire.”

At the same time, though, as Mr. Boot carefully lays out, Reagan, who had seemed such a staunch and unremitting Cold Warrior, showed a flexibility in his approach to the Soviet Union as soon as he recognized that Gorbachev was not the same as his totalitarian predecessors.

Mr. Boot’s Reagan is the same practical politician who impressed an earlier biographer, Lou Cannon, who showed that as both governor of California and as president, Reagan understood that while he would remain faithful to his ideology, he would have to strike deals that won enough support from Democrats even if some of Reagan’s conservative supporters objected.

Certain of Reagan’s policies and decisions were catastrophic: The arms for hostages deal known as the Iran-Contra affair was one. Reagan never could quite admit that he had done business with terrorists. He did not lie about his own culpability but rather, as Mr. Boot explains, he lost touch with his own role in Iran-Contra — partly because he relied too implicitly on his staff.

Mr. Boot realizes that Reagan’s career as an actor and as president of the Screen Actors Guild honed his political skills, his ability to sense public opinion and to suit his rhetoric to the concerns of both his supporters and opponents. As in the studio system, where Reagan remained a favorite of studio executives while on the lookout for the roles he could best perform, Reagan as president crafted the political language that permitted him to rule with a grace that perhaps no other president has quite equaled.

Reagan was a quick study, memorizing his lines as an actor effortlessly, absorbing presidential briefings and presenting them with clarity and panache to the public. His resolute rhetoric sometimes belied important instances in which Reagan was an indecisive president, especially when his advisors disagreed. Without consensus he could not take the initiative himself.

In some respects, like Woodrow Wilson, Reagan created his own world, his legend, which he carried with him in the form of index cards that included favorite quotations — many of them spurious, though his advisors never were able to convince him that his convictions were in fact based on fiction. Reagan could quote Lenin, say, quite readily, except that what Reagan quoted was not what Lenin had ever said.

Mr. Boot comes close to saying that if he feels obliged to point out the fissures in the legend of Ronald Reagan, that legend nonetheless had the power of a Hollywood epic, even if his private life as a family man made him seem aloof and inaccessible to his children.

Mr. Boot documents Reagan’s passions for reading and writing, including many of his own speeches, and letters to individual Americans, white and Black — though the president’s record on civil rights is given a thorough drubbing.

In sum, this is a biography that does not want to dispense with the power of a legend, even if that legend has to be tempered by fact.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”