After Ronald Reagan became U.S. president, he angered environmentalists by appointing Coloradan Anne Gorsuch Burford as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Those expressing care for clean air and clean water reacted negatively. Eventually, Reagan ordered Burford to withhold documents from Congress regarding political influence in toxic-waste cleanup sites around the nation.
The president could have defused the controversy by firing Burford. Instead, he publicly supported her. When questioned about that support, he replied in his famously elliptical way, “There is environmental extremism. I don’t think they’ll be happy until the White House looks like a bird’s nest.” Then, suddenly, Reagan fired Burford, contradicting his statements of avid support for her.
Richard Reeves relates that account on Page 149 of his detailed chronicle about the Reagan presidency. When a famous journalist/ biographer publishes a thick book about a famous former president, it is an event worth noting. Reeves has already written books about the presidencies of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton. So why not Reagan?
Well, as Reeves himself notes, more than 900 books have been written about Reagan since he left the White House 17 years ago. Can Reeves add anything worthwhile?
Reeves follows an unusual plan, one used by him in previous books. “I have tried to reconstruct a president’s world from his own perspective. I am interested in what he knew and when he knew it, what he actually saw and did – sometimes day by day, sometimes hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute. I want to show what it was like … to be president.”
As a literate historical document, Reeves’ book deserves a high grade. But, except for an enlightening seven-page introduction in which Reeves offers his overall evaluation of Reagan as president and as human being, the book is heavy going – with a few dramatic exceptions, such as Reagan’s near death from a would-be assassin’s gun and his mind-blowing dependence on wife Nancy.
Presented by Reeves in a relentlessly chronological format, the chapters are so filled with speeches and travels and insider political battles that after a few pages, brain exhaustion is quite likely to set in. For most general readers – those who admired Reagan as president and those who despised him as president (Did anybody fall between those extremes?) – Reeves’ account is probably best consumed one chapter per day, maximum. That is equally true for the domestic-policy sections and the foreign-policy sections, populated as they are with thousands of characters still famous, long forgotten or always obscure.
Those reading to the final page will discover copious evidence to support Reeves’ thesis that Reagan was not simple-minded. “No one ever called Reagan an intellectual, but he did see the world in terms of ideas. He was an ideologue with a few ideas that he held with stubborn certainty,” Reeves says, in one of his numerous insights that populate this ambitious chronicle.
When Reagan died June 5, 2004, his legend lived on.
Thanks to Reeves’ painstaking documentation of Reagan’s White House years, perhaps the legend will square more with messy reality from now on.
Steve Weinberg is a freelance book reviewer in Columbia, Mo.
President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination
By Richard Reeves
Simon & Schuster, 571 pages, $30
