Favorite Son

FAVORITE SON GaJTy Wills. Reagan's America: Innocents at Home. GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. 472 pp. DanE. Moldca. Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and The Mob. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986. xvi + 382pp. Illus. Garin Burbank From the day he was elected Governor of California, Ronald Reagan has done well for himself. American voting majorities have repeatedly endorsed his leadership. Middle-class conservatives in other western industrial countries have admired his fortitude. Among the minority groups opposed to his policies, academic intellectuals have been especially conspicuous in showing their disdain and contempt for Reagan and his admirers in the big public. If the voters have, until recently, gone for Reagan by margins approaching 60-40, the professors, particularly in the liberal arts, have turned their thumbs everlastingly down, perhaps by as much as a 90-10 margin. The enormous gap between popular and academic opinion serves to remind students of politics of a strikingly similar gap during and after the Eisenhower administrations of the 1950s, when the American people adored a president whom the professors ridiculed. Instead of providing a suitable occasion for self-scrutiny, however, the lopsided academic hostility to ''conservative'' political leaders casts serious doubt on the academy's proclaimed commitment to objective standards of research. These doubts will not be dispelled by faculty-club jokes about presidents who own more horses than books. They might be addressed if professors would ponder their automatic support for more economic regulation and social redistribution, and cease to hurl epithets at the majority of voters who agreed with Reagan when he insisted that government was doing too much at home, and too little to assert American interests abroad. 418 Garin Burbank Two new books that attempt to appraise Ronald Reagan's career as a public figure and major politician tell us something about Reagan, but much more about the tensions experienced by the academic-journalistic community as it tnes to grapple with its sense of dismay and lack of understanding in the face of Reagan's success. The approach taken by both authors simply assumes a readership ideologically attuned to unsparing attacks upon Reagan's attitudes and policies.In Reagan's America, Garry Wills uses his celebrated literary skills in an attemptto fashion a knockout interpretation, one whose central claim is that the old trouper ''runs continuously in everyone's home movies of the mind,'' so nearly perfectin reflecting America's sentimental illusions about its past that he "wrests" fromIts citizenry "a kind of complicity" in the communal pretense. In Dark VictOJ)',Dan E. Moldea offers nothing more than the graceless and trivial pursuit of Reaganas the alleged puppet of gangsters, a pursuit bespattered with the conspiratorial catchphrases of the gangland expose. In the end, both books fail on their own terms, though Wills's dazzling effort, distinguished by pirouettes of digressionon all kinds of topics, is the much more intriguing failure. Moldea 's sole claim to subtlety lies in his use of the artless qualifier ''alleged," carefully wedged in front of every modestly significant accusation. The "Mob" in the subtitle turns out to be, for the purposes of this book, one Sidney Korshak, who is supposed to have underworld ties. In the prologue, we are told that Korshak "has repeatedly appeared to be involved with Reagan and several ofhis top advisers throughout their careers." (2) For Moldea, a half-dozen assertionsof vague ''involvements,'' scattered through the text, suffice as proof. After citing an FBI report that "alleged" Korshak to be part owner of something calledthe Bistro, Moldea breathlessly tells us: "according to several sources, the Bistrohas been the favorite restaurant of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.'' (228) Someone Moldea identifies as a longtime employee said that the Reagans, good customer, for years, had been given their own table. Nor is this all. Regarding the 1970 California election, Moldea offers this empty observation: ''the extent of Korshak's alleged support in Reagan's victory remains unknown .... " (259) These petty insinuations, along with three or four others equally insubstantial.are sure signs, in Moldea's febrile mind, of corrupt connections between Reagan. someone named Korshak, and the "Mob." If Reagan were accused of fellowtravelling with the Communist Party, and Korshak had been...