Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and Making of History (review)

More words have been written about Ronald Reagan than most other presidents combined, but few of these volumes are serious historical treatments—the history has been too fresh and the archival material too difficult to access. As a result, while the literature on Reagan is vast, the scholarship has been scanty. But, over the past few years several books on Reagan have appeared (including Richard Reeves' President Reagan and Gil Troy's Morning in America) that mark the emergence of a real historiography. These new studies have revised the old liberal condescension towards Reagan. No more is Reagan seen as a man on the brink of dotage, an empty shell with a beaming smile whose political decisions were controlled by his aides. Rather, Reagan appears in these books as a serious political thinker, setting the course of his administration and pursuing his ends with great intensity. Increasingly, liberals as well as conservatives have started to depict Reagan as a visionary who ended the Cold War, while also maintaining relationships with those on both sides of the aisle—a sharp contrast with the partisan conservatives of the 1990s and with the missteps of the second Bush presidency.

Now, John Patrick Diggins, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, has joined the movement to re-interpret Reagan's presidency, with Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History. Reading Reagan's published letters and speeches in the early twenty-first century awoke in Diggins a "belated respect" (p. xvii). Reagan's philosophy, he came to believe, provided the United States with solutions to deep-seated political and cultural problems—the fears and threats of the Cold War, the dependency induced by the welfare state. "Far from being a conservative, Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo" (p. xvii).

Diggins is an intellectual historian, and his study of Reagan emphasizes the ways that Reagan's political ideas echoed those of other thinkers in the American intellectual tradition, in particular Thomas Paine and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Large parts of the book closely resemble an intellectual or even psychological study. While other conservative intellectuals were inspired by Edmund Burke, seeking out order and tradition, Reagan, like Paine, believed in "hope, experiment and freedom" (p. 2). Reagan's economics embraced self-creation and encouraged people to amass wealth without guilt, while his freewheeling Christianity rejected the idea of original sin, treating people and their desires as fundamentally good.

In the end, Diggins's real disagreement with Reagan is precisely that the president was too hopeful, his innate faith in America bordering on gullibility: "My personal reservation about Ronald Reagan is not that he was a conservative; on the contrary, he was a liberal romantic who opened up the American mind to the full blaze of Emersonian optimism" (p. 51). Such "optimism," Diggins argues, inspired Reagan's reckless deficit spending and his anti-Communist adventures in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, including the funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan (although he surprisingly suggests that Reagan's crusade to raise money for the Nicaraguan contras—though not the Iran-Contra affair—was "positive" and "edifying," as demonstrated in the ultimate electoral defeat of the Sandinistas) (p. 260).

While Diggins is right to focus on the consistency of Reagan's world-view and the ways in which it helped to determine the course of his presidency, Ronald Reagan says little about the historical evolution of Reagan's intellectual vision or about the president's relationship to the conservative movement. The book is an interpretive essay based mostly on secondary and published sources; the Reagan years still await a historian who relies primarily on the archives. Finally, and most surprisingly for an intellectual historian, Diggins gives an oddly incomplete reading of Paine, who held many ideas—such as his scathing hatred of inequality and his endorsement of progressive taxation and a...