Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years (review)

Robert Collins has written two superb books treating modern American business history—The Business Response to Keynes (1981), and More: The Politics of Growth in Postwar America (2000). In this, his most recent and elegantly written book, he takes on the rather more slippery, amorphous cultural history of the period. He even dives undaunted into that most murky phenomenon, "postmodernism." There, he has some delightful things to say about "the therapeutic culture" and the "self-esteem" fad that it produced. In his treatment of business during the Reagan years, he tries to balance the good with the bad, sometimes stretching to claim positive outcomes when the negatives seem outstanding. For instance, though we may not much like Greed and the crookedness that it encourages, he suggests, nevertheless we must acknowledge that in its pursuit, the crooked "geniuses," such as Michael Milken, led the way to a creative response to the dire challenges of the seventies and eighties.

His treatment of Ronald Reagan seems similarly "balanced." He explains Reagan's dreamlike "optimism," noting, for example, how "Reagan's irrepressible sunniness sometimes caused him to see certain unpleasant aspects of reality less clearly than he arguably [?] should" (54). But, Collins quickly adds that such optimism was just what the American people needed. And, although it also underlies Reagan's promotion of the exorbitantly expensive fantasy of an effective anti-ballistic missile defense, Collins follows up by noting that chimerical as it was (and is), it scared the hell out of the Russians and, in his view, contributed to the collapse of the USSR. (Who are we supposed to be scaring now?) The same was true of the bellicose "evil empire" opening of the Reagan presidency—an approach to diplomacy that heightened anxiety about a nuclear confrontation and, as Collins notes, moved the nuclear clock for a while to "three minutes to midnight;" but, says Collins, in the end it put the Russians on the defensive and (again) contributed to the USSR's collapse. Maybe Reagan can be faulted for supporting the hideous regimes of Pol Pot in Cambodia and of the Argentine generals, but then we cannot always pick our friends in the world of power politics. And, maybe the support for the Contras in Nicaragua was illegal, and created "a constitutional crisis," but Collins believes Reagan "persuasively" denied he knew about Ollie North's "shenanigans" (Reagan also denied, against all the evidence, that he authorized arms for hostages with Iran); and anyway, (again) Reagan successfully thwarted the spread of communism in Central America. Collins agrees that Reagan did not single-handedly win the Cold War, but he also believes that the Cold War would not have ended when and how it did except for Reagan. There he cites Jack Matlock, a scholar and Reagan's ambassador to Moscow, whose book, Gorbachev and Reagan (2004), actually takes a more cautious view about Reagan's role.

Early on, Collins lets us know he does not accept the mostly critical tones of Haynes Johnson's Sleepwalking Through History (1991), and even Lou Cannon's gentler President Reagan (1991). Fair enough. But, as the book proceeds, he becomes ever more "revisionist." A glance at Collins's supporting notes reveals that his choice of sources gravitates almost entirely to the right side of center—from Peter Rodman, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Weyrich, Robert Bork, George Gilder, and William Bennett to David Brooks and Gertrude Himmelfarb, while at the same time deriding such scholars as Paul Kennedy, David Calleo, and Mancur Olson for getting it "quite wrong" (238). Reagan, on the other hand, "had it right" (238). Well-respected critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith, John Ikenberry, Barbara Ehrenreich, Garry Wills, Robert Lekachman, and Kevin Phillips are nowhere to be found.

In reminiscing, Reagan disavowed the importance of being a "great communicator," claiming that it was the content of his message and meaning that mattered. Collins does not challenge this, but neither does he...