Review by Choice Review
Diggins (CUNY Graduate Center) concludes surprisingly that Ronald Reagan may be "after Lincoln, one of the two or three truly great presidents in American history." His argument is as surprising as his conclusion, for he rejects the rationale offered by the neoconservatives who claim to be Reagan's heirs. Instead, the author asserts that Reagan's greatest achievement came because he rejected the martial advice of the neocons. Like Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, Reagan guided the nation through a momentous crisis--the intertwined threats of communism and nuclear war--but of the three, only he did so through negotiation rather than warfare. No ideologue, Diggins makes no attempt to defend Reagan's record on such matters as budget deficits, Grenada, and Iran-Contra. Instead, he roots his interpretation in Reagan's philosophy, derived in his view from the individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the anti-statist arguments of Thomas Paine, and the anti-communism of Whitaker Chambers. Reagan's admirers will find something unexpected here, and, in fact, Diggins criticizes them for being "more interested in celebration than explanation." Indeed, there is plenty in this thoughtful, unconventional, original biography that will provoke both Reagan's critics and defenders; Diggins shifts the field of debate on Reagan's legacy. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. A. J. Dunar University of Alabama in Huntsville
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
RONALD REAGAN'S reputation has been rising for so long, it is no longer shocking to read a respected historian hail him as, after Abraham Lincoln, "one of the two or three truly great presidents in American history." That's how John Patrick Diggins describes Reagan in a book that is a bid to save him from the dismissiveness of liberal historiography on the one hand and from his conservative worshipers on the other. A history professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of many works on American intellectual history, Diggins remembers Reagan as standing for "tear gas and police" as governor of California and for "the age of avarice" as president. The release of Reagan's writings a few years ago "came as a surprise" to him, "revealing an intelligent, sensitive mind with passionate convictions." Having grappled with his newfound respect for Reagan, Diggins attempts a major reinterpretation in "Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History." "Far from being a conservative," he writes, "Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo." In Reagan, there is less Edmund Burke, who "believed in history, precedent and order," than Tom Paine, who "believed in hope, experiment and freedom." And so, Reagan was essentially a liberal. True enough, in a way. It has often been remarked that America doesn't have a European-style conservative tradition, devoted to defending the prerogatives of an established church or aristocracy. American conservatives like Reagan have always sought instead to conserve the habits and institutions of classical liberalism. And yet, in the contemporary context, Reagan's anti-statism - no matter how hopeful and optimistic its packaging - made him unmistakably a conservative. Diggins seems blinded by Reagan's sunniness, which, in this interpretation, was not just a matter of temperament, but reflective of a deep philosophical and religious conviction. Reagan, Diggins maintains, sought to rid "America of a God of judgment and punishment." This is absurd. Reagan had a charitable view of human nature and a relaxed, nonjudgmental air, but there is no denying his deeply felt social conservatism. He wrote - as a sitting president, no less - the anti-abortion tract "Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation." Where Reagan really wins over Diggins is in his handling of the endgame of the cold war. On this, Diggins is at his most effusive, and also sees the greatest opportunity, as he puts it, "to rescue Reagan from many of today's so-called Reaganites." Reagan was certainly much more than a conventional conservative hard-liner. He hated nuclear weapons; his dream of the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) derived directly from his nuclear abolitionism. While conservatives tend to dismiss the value of dialogue, Reagan put great faith in one-on-one talks and in his own prowess as a negotiator. Diggins can find much that is congenial here. The mistake he makes is attempting to co-opt Reagan entirely to his own preferred policy of compromise in foreign affairs. He argues that "Reagan began to think for himself in his second term," as if his confrontational approach to the Soviets until then had been foisted on him. Reagan's attitudes, he maintains, "underwent a profound change, one that made defeating Communism or winning the cold war a less urgent choice than saving the world from destroying itself." This is revisionism gone amok. Reagan always thought he could save the world precisely by defeating the Soviets. Asked by an adviser in the late 1970s what his theory of the cold war was, Reagan replied, "We win and they lose." Early in his administration, he oversaw the development of several key documents realigning American national security policy along these lines. His administration would "contain and over time reverse" Soviet expansionism, while pursuing "negotiations to eliminate, on the basis of strict reciprocity, outstanding disagreements." Reagan stuck to this policy. What happened in the mid-1980s was that he finally had a negotiating partner in the Soviet reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. As Diggins notes, Reagan was far ahead of other, less flexible and less imaginative conservatives in recognizing that Gorbachev represented real change. But Diggins underestimates how Reagan's most important act as a negotiator was saying "No" - rebuffing Gorbachev's attempt at the 1986 Reykjavik summit to confine S.D.I. to the laboratory. The Soviets were terrified that they wouldn't be able to keep up with American technology. Once they realized they couldn't kill S.D.I. in the crib, greater political and economic reform was their only alternative. Diggins is so enchanted with Reagan the dreamy optimist that he obliterates his stern side, making for a lopsided portrayal. He insists that Reagan didn't truly believe in evil, and so dismisses Reagan's famous 1982 "evil empire" speech as the work of one "ill-advised speech-writer." But Reagan used such language throughout his life. In the 1960s, he was calling the Soviet Union the "evil enemy." During his first press conference as president, he said the Soviets "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat." Not very sunny. If Diggins's account of Reagan is ultimately unpersuasive, both liberals and conservatives will find it challenging. And if the repetition and poor organization of this book sometimes keep it from being enjoyable reading, it is nonetheless a sign that across the political spectrum we are beginning to agree that Ronald Reagan was an important, even admirable, figure. What liberals and conservatives will probably never agree on is why. Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Because Reagan has been misinterpreted by both the Right and the Left, his legacy in American political history has been distorted and undervalued, according to Diggins, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Left (1992). Contrary to liberal opinions, Reagan was no philosophical lightweight, nor was he the moral absolutist lauded by conservatives. He was a man of consistent beliefs, forged during the cold war. In his efforts to end the cold war, he was closer to liberals who always thought it possible than to conservatives who didn't believe it could ever be done. Reagan was the only president in American history to have resolved a sustained, deadly international confrontation without going to war, defying liberal expectations of him personally and conservative expectations of the value of diplomacy. Reagan rejected the authority of religion as much as government. By convincing Americans to believe in themselves, Reagan demonstrated the duality of American political culture, that it is both liberal and conservative. This is a thoughtful book for both Reagan admirers and critics. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center, Diggins (The Rise and Fall of the American Left) provides an original reappraisal of Ronald Reagan from the conservative perspective. Throughout, Diggins discovers nuances that have heretofore escaped notice by most other Reagan scholars. For example: in appraising Reagan's reaction as California governor to '60s radicals, Diggins is the first writer to acknowledge the extent to which the onetime movie star shared common ground with rebels on campuses nationwide. Reagan, with his reverence for Thomas Paine and passion for limiting the reach of government, was-on at least one level-more than sympathetic when Berkeley protesters chanted, "Two, Four, Six, Eight, Organize to Smash the State!" Although a fan of Reagan's, Diggins doesn't hesitate to be critical-as when he discusses Reagan's attitude as president toward environmental issues, which Diggins characterizes as "puzzling" and "disastrous." (Diggins notes that Reagan's record as governor of California, where he allied himself with old guard Republican conservationists, was far more environmentally-friendly.) Overall, Diggins does a superb job of tracing Reagan's intellectual development from old school New Dealer to thoughtful, Emersonian libertarian, and also firmly establishes Reagan's credentials as a major architect of communism's final collapse. 13 photos. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
CUNY historian Diggins argues that Reagan was a great President who hasn't been given a fair shake by the liberals dominating the teaching of U.S. history. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A middle-of-the-road liberal (John Adams, 2003, etc.) looks into Ronald Reagan's soul and concludes that it was great--and that the president was "politically wise, humane, and magnanimous" to boot. Reagan was more radical than conservative, by Diggins's account. He found inspiration in the life and work of Tom Paine, that little acknowledged founding father; he quoted Paine to the Soviets and hailed the Afghan mujahedeen and Nicaraguan contras as Paine's rightful heirs. He considered the state to be the source of most evil, though his actions, Diggins writes, made big government inevitable; his dream of an almost stateless society and his sensibility generally "partook of the tragic vision of liberalism." And, Diggins suggests, Reagan's religion was less inclined to Christian fundamentalism than to a Jeffersonian deism: "He seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice." All in all, Diggins writes, Reagan "was a liberal romantic who opened up the American mind to the full blaze of Emersonian optimism." For this and many other reasons, not least because Reagan knew his Transcendentalists, Diggins holds that Reagan needs serious attention from intellectual historians, who have largely dismissed him as a nonintellectual. Not so, Diggins counters: Reagan was aware of the nature of his arguments, was well schooled in them. If Diggins has a beef, it is with the unworthy neoconservatives who claim Reagan as their own; Diggins faults Reagan's view of the Cold War as inaccurate and lacking in complexity, for instance, but clearly favors it to the reckless warmaking of the current administration. "To rescue Reagan from many of today's so-called Reaganites may help rescue America from the pride of its present follies," he adds. A significant book, if surely arguable in granting Reagan more depth and ability than most nonbelievers have hitherto suspected. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
