When the former House Republican leader Liz Cheney endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, she made the case that she was doing so, not despite, but because she remains an old-style Reagan conservative. “There is absolutely no chance that Ronald Reagan would be supporting Donald Trump,” she said. John Lehman, who served as secretary of the U.S. Navy under Reagan, made the same point in a Wall Street Journalop-ed this spring. He argued that Trump was an “insult” to Reagan’s legacy rather than the heir of it, pointing in particular to Trump’s “naked admiration” for U.S. enemies such as Putin, his undermining of the NATO alliance, and his penchant for trash-talking the United States—a habit that would have been anathema to Reagan, whose stock-in-trade of gauzy patriotism and sunny optimism was captured in “Morning in America,” the 1984 campaign slogan with which he will always be associated.
So whose Reagan is the real Reagan? Enter Max Boot’s timely, authoritative, and admirably evenhanded new biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend. The decade that Boot, a national security expert who holds a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations named for Reagan’s UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, spent writing this book coincided with Trump’s ascent, during which the GOP rejected many of the tenets of Reagan’s Republicanism. In reaction, Boot quit the party, renouncing it in a 2018 jeremiad, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. He hardly mentions his evolution in the new book, but one has to wonder whether the project was at least in part a personal exercise aimed at examining his own hero worship of Reagan—which began in the 1980s, when Boot was a young and recent Soviet immigrant to the United States cheering the president’s confrontation with the “evil empire”—and whether it is still justified today.
Boot’s conclusion may anger all sides in the debate. Reagan, he acknowledges, was a pragmatic chief executive whose two terms at the twilight of the Cold War were notably successful. But he was also a far-right ideologue whose rise prefigured the Republican Party’s disastrous turn toward demagoguery and dishonesty in the Trump years. In a recent essay in The Washington Post drawn from his book, Boot wrote: “The real Reagan, I realized, was both much more ideological and much more pragmatic than most people understand. The former quality made possible his rapid political rise; the latter made possible his lasting success in office.”