Chatter: Ronald Reagan Reassessed, with Max Boot

[Music] welcome to chatter I'm David priest this week historian and author Max boot on Ronald Reagan reassessed there's so many contradictions and dichotomies about Reagan who was often accused of having simplistic views but he could be really intensely ideological and I think more so than most people realized he was somehow able to draw kind of a separating line between his rhetoric as a campaigner and his actions in office where he was very far to the right as a campaigner but he had actually moved pretty far to the center as both governor and and president he was often criticized for compromising and he brushed it off because he said that's the nature of politics you have to be realistic about what you can get and if you're an absolutist you're not going to get anything done [Music] Max boot welcome to chatter good to be here David it's great to be talking about this at this time because you have a new massive Tome out because you just haven't written enough you know three books on war a self-reflection a biography of Edward Lansdale and you decided to take on one of the most iconic presidents and write hundreds upon hundreds of pages about The Life and Legend of Ronald Reagan you started this back in what 2012 or 2013 to the best of your memory what was on your mind then that drove you to start this well it's pretty simple really because it was really just the realization that Reagan was a very consequential very important president but there had not been a great biography of him that had been done so I felt like there was kind of a Market opening there and so I I signed up to do this book I did not realize quite how much effort it would take how long it would take but I I knew it was going to be a big project and you know it certainly lived up to that billing and of course at the time this is what 2013 so this is the Barack Obama presidency right we'd had the bushes since Reagan as Republican presidents Trump was on no one's mind other than people who apparently watched television who would see him but generally was uh not considered to be someone of importance so the vibe when you're starting this is very different than when you're completing it and you're putting it into the context of today how did you tackle this massive project you did a lot of work on this including a lot of travel how did you get your hands around Reagan and and even get started on doing a full scope biography well it was a daunting Prospect for sure I think you know David the big thing that's actually changed in my mind since 2013 is is my own Outlook somewhat because in 2013 I was a Republican and you know it took the changes of the last 10 plus years to wrench me out of my historic affiliation with the Republican party to become an independent and I think that's actually been helpful for the biography because you know I'm not approaching it as a as a Reagan Fanboy I'm approaching it as a historian who's trying to get the story right and I think you know no longer thinking of myself as a republican has allowed me to gain greater distance and object activity on the 40th President and again this is not meant to be either a hagiography or a hit job it's really meant to be a balanced Fair account and I think you know not having kind of a partisan dog in the fight has allowed me to achieve a greater degree of objectivity but to you know to answer your other question about how did I wrap my hands around it it was it was a pretty daunting Prospect I have to say you know there were certainly moments throughout this project especially early on when I was feeling kind of overwhelmed and I was thinking oh man there is so much to do and is there really something new to be said about Ronald Reagan because obviously there have been a lot of words written about Ronald Reagan over the course of many many decades and eventually I decided yeah there's actually a lot more to say about Reagan but that was only when I got really deep into the research which was basically on two tracks the first track and the initial track was really oral history interviews because I understood that there was kind of a a ticking clock yeah you had a clock operating didn't you right talking talking to folks who were close to Reagan they weren't getting any younger to put him modly and in fact quite a few of the folks that I talked to early on are no longer with us you know folks like George Schultz or colen poell or Bud McFarland or or so many others so I was really lucky to be able to talk to them and I think I kind of hit a sweet spot because I was far enough removed from the Reagan presidency that I could have some balanced perspective and objectivity on had happened but there were still a lot of people who knew Reagan well who were still around able to talk and in some ways maybe talk more frankly than they had in the past because uh they had moved so far away from the partisan ranker of the times so that was kind of my first objective was to talk to as many people as I could who really knew him and of course as I'm sure we'll discuss finding somebody who quote unquote really knew Reagan it can be a bit of a struggle because a lot of people knew him but who really knew him but so anyway that was one track the other track was the archival track and going to the Reagan Library primarily to examine the archives which are also kind of daunting and overwhelming I know Robert Carrol has spoken about this with his own Monumental lifelong LBJ biography how it doesn't matter how long he spends in the lynon Johnson archives and Lyn Johnson Library he's never going to see every piece of paper in there it's just Limitless and endless and you could spend your whole life and and still not read every piece of paper so that was always also a very d haunting thing for me just sitting in that kind of overly air conditioned reading room at the Reagan Library in SEI Valley freezing even in the California climb and you know just trying to go through as many documents as I could and it frankly it was just a struggle to concentrate because from having worked in government I mean the government just produces so much paperwork and so much of it is just so boring repetitive uninteresting bureaucratic and so I'm Turning Page after page struggling to stay aake cuz it's really really boring and then I'll suddenly light up cuz there's like oh this is like really interesting and there's something in there that I can really use and that really sheds light on Reagan but it was definitely a challenge to a you know to to read as much as as I could and I read thousands of pages but B just even to be selective in what I was reading because again you can't be indiscriminate you can't say like send me every file on Ronald Reagan because then I would be sitting there 30 years from now so I had to strategize and think about like whose files so I want to see and then you know if I see something interesting in one file then that'll say to me like oh maybe I should look at this other person's files and see what's there and so it was kind of this ongoing archival kind of mystery story or or investigation so many questions in all of that but what was the greatest gem you found in the archives because anybody who spends more than a few hours in the archives thing for any research project I think has the same experience you did which is mon boredom taking as many pictures as possible because you can process them later you can't read them in real time or you'll be there for literally lifetimes but at some point you find the gem in my case it was at the Kennedy Library and looking for intelligence documents and things related to them I found a note that Jackie had left for John Kennedy that seemingly was being used as a bookmark in his intelligence report that said can you turn the TV down um just and it didn't appear to have been discovered before what was the biggest gem you found well there were a lot of gems it's kind of hard to to choose one I mean it was fascinating just to read all of Reagan's personal letters and that is one file where I read every single thing that was in there everything that he had handwritten himself and you know often later typed up by his secretaries both as governor and as president and even when he was out of office and it was really just fascinating a great insight into his mind and he was a beautiful letter writer which I know will surprise a lot of people but his letters were always a pleasure to read and he always found exactly the right words whether he was expressing sympathy or anger or whatever the emotion was he always found a very pithy and compelling way to phrase things and I was also very struck by reading Ronald Reagan's Love Letters to Nancy which she carefully saved and box after box and it wasn't just love letters it was also like every Thanksgiving every Easter Easter every Christmas every New Year's every birthday he would send her a card a loving card and he would go out and buy the card and write it up and she would save it so like Decades of cards decades of Love Letters really fascinating Insight because you know some cynics have suggested that there was something manufactured or kind of made for TV about their relationship but obviously it was very genuine deeply heartfelt and went back to the beginnings of their relationship in the early 1950s so that's just kind of two general categories but there were also a lot of specific things like not all of which cast Reagan in a good light I mean for example I remember having an aha moment when I ran across a letter that he had written I think it was in 1972 referencing some John bur Society Publications and how he had read them and found them to be very interesting well I don't think anybody's ever reported that Reagan as governor was reading John Burch Society Publications that showed how he was kind of susceptible to Crazy conspiracy mongering and propaganda or in a similar vein a letter that he received as president from one of his old Hollywood Pals in kind of red hunting days in the late 40s from the mccarthyite era and this pal was telling him that Alan cranon Tom Bradley and Willie Brown who are all kind of mainstream Democrats in California were all secret Communists who were conspiring to sabotage Robert bork's nomination of the Supreme Court on orders from Moscow and this is like Looney Tune stuff but he received it very politely and seemed to take it under serious advisement but that actually cast more light on one of his chief Associates from Hollywood days than it did on him there were also you know as president there fascinating files that I read from one of the few African-American staffers in the White House complaining about how the Reagan administration had alienated African-Americans and how African-Americans just felt ignored and slided by the president this was somebody who was a fan of the president who worked for the president but was trying to get senior White House officials with relatively little success to pay attention to how they were alienating minority communities so those are you know just three random things that just came to mind there's like a million other things in there that are equally fascinating those are good though and they did stand out to me reading the book you know it's amazing having read several biographies of Reagan and you know spent a lot of time in the archives myself and interviewing folks that I was surprised by many things in part because this is a full biography and not focused on something narrow like intelligence or even National Security I mean I think the highest compliment I've received on the biography came from Reagan's kids Ron Reagan and Patty Davis who have both read the book and told me that not only did they like the book and they thought it was very fair and accurate but they learned new stuff about their dad from the book which I take as the highest compliment I can imagine I mean Imagine Learning something about your own parent from a book absolutely one of the things I do want to get to in the substance here is talking about the the image of Reagan Reagan as an icon in different ways and how that relates to the actual experiences of Reagan and one of those stood out to me when I was reading this I remember John negr pante who was Deputy National Security adviser at the end of the Reagan experience but had been Ambassador and an assistant Secretary of State before that so had pretty intense experiences with Reagan in those last couple of years and he told me that he never heard Reagan use profanity and that the idea of using profanity in front of the president was also just verboten and yet you found moments you found times when Reagan did and just how much that stands out so it's almost the exception that proves the rule that he was a very um almost polite Gentile person he was very personable face to face to the extreme that he avoided profanity most of the time but when he used it it it really meant something and and that that comes off the page in a way that does get to the personal and the image side of it really well that's one of many fascinating aspects of him and if you read his diary he would not even spell out mild curse words like hell and damn he would do he would do the first and last letters and then not fill in what's in in the middle because he thought this would be offensive and but you're right he did occasionally curse he certainly got mad occasionally this was actually something I asked a lot of people about this was actually one of the questions I kept asking you know obviously Reagan is a very mild mannered very low-key person uh who seldom flow off the handle but have you ever seen him get mad or like really Furious about something and that would often produce you know a very interesting answer about what really got him exercised for example I just remember in 1976 when he was running against Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination and one of Ford's Chief strategists was Reagan's former strategist St Spencer who was one also one of my best sources I would add for the book and I remember hearing about how Spencer working for Ford put up a very effective campaign commercial basically suggesting that Reagan as president if he becomes president could be a warmonger and raising you know questions about his Fitness to be Commander Chief and that was one where Reagan did get pretty teed off and you know was like pounding the bulkhead of the airplane and just furious that Spencer had done that to him so there were not many examples of him losing his temper but the ones that were out there were certainly telling right on so your research obviously took you to California many many many times but also to Iowa where he had been working as a broadcaster you had interviews with people all over over the country in person and I'm assuming by telephone and zoom as well but interestingly probably the most interesting place you visited I will say must have been Bloomington Normal Illinois because that's where I'm from and Adam kininger also by the way grew up there but you told me years ago that you were visiting when you were doing an Illinois Iowa trip that you were going to Bloomington normal to check out a it barely shows up in the book because you did your research and you found there wasn't a story to tell but what was the angle involving Reagan as a Young Man a testosterone Laden man what was the story that you were trying to chase down in Central Illinois well there was a previous Reagan biographer had claimed that Reagan's high school and college girlfriend Margaret Cleaver had been secretly impregnated by The Gipper and then had left college at Eureka College to give up the baby for adoption and M uh that this was what she was actually doing instead of spending a year at the University of Illinois as she claimed to be doing having transferred from Eureka College and I just could not find anything to substantiate that story uh and in fact there's a lot of substantiation the other way including pictures of her in the University of Illinois yearbook and uh pretty clear indications that she actually was attending the University of Illinois but these are the kind of things that that you know I tried very hard to track down I just love a fact that as a a biographer this is the kind of thing you couldn't have done even if you worked full-time on this book for two or three years you could not have gone to check out the home for orphaned children or whatever it was in a remote town in Illinois just to check to see if they had any records that might be relevant but when you spend this much time you can actually Chase it down and do that so you mentioned when when you started this it was just because Reagan is a fascinating figure for many different reasons and you weren't satisfied with the biographies that you saw in the course of writing it you at some point developed a sense of the framing and the framing comes out very clearly in the final product which is Reagan was both an ideologue but also and perhaps more often a pragmatist that he had his ideas and they would drive him but when it came to decisions when it came to key turning points he almost always chose the pragmatic way and this goes across Decades of his life uh it's a powerful frame that doesn't come across clearly to me in any of the other biographies I've read when did this Frame hit you was it early in the research that you noticed that this was a guiding principle or was it as you're drafting it and that then becomes the vehicle to take it over that final speed bump to publication I'm not really sure because I really did not start off with the thesis beyond the very general idea that there was not a good biography of Ronald Reagan but in terms of who Reagan was or what was going to be new about my research didn't really know because it was really driven by the research it was I mean some books start off with a thesis and then you find substantiation for that thesis this was kind of the opposite it was like it was just driven by curiosity and then it was a question of figuring out who was Reagan and what did I want to say about him and I I really don't know when this this theme emerged but it certainly emerged in the course of my research as I was trying to make sense of what I was learning and you know there's so many contradictions and dichotomies about Reagan who was often accused of having simplistic views but certainly was not a simple man or was kind of deceptively complicated he looked simple on the surface but there was a lot underneath the surface and but so I think this is one of the core contradictions of Reagan or one of the core realities that you have to struggle with as a Reagan biographer is that he could be really intensely ideological and I think more so than most people realized because most of us tend to remember him as president when he was moving more to the center but there was a previous Reagan who was very very far to the right in the late 50s early 60s and and even into the 70s where he was often repeating John Burch Society conspiracy theories accusing Democrats of leading America to Communism suggesting that Medicare and Medicaid would lead to to the destruction of freedom in America opposing civil rights laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the 1965 Voting Rights Act kind of winking at White bigots with phrases about Law and Order and Welfare queens and states rights and all the rest there were real reasons why when he was elected governor and and especially president a lot of liberals thought wow this is really scary this guy can blow up the world he can do horrible things he's going to cast widows and orphan into the snow it's going to be this this horrible right-wing hellscape basically that was kind of the the fear that many had and in office he acted in ways that were very much counter to those perceptions such that again some of the more fascinating interviews I had was just asking Jerry Brown the former Governor of California Willie Brown the former speaker of the California Assembly what did they think of Reagan as governor and they both told me he was actually a pretty good Governor he was he was actually pretty Centrist and by comparison a lot of right-wingers in California were very frustrated with Reagan as governor and thought you know he was some kind of Manchurian Candidate had sold them out was not acting as they expected and there was you know a lot of repetition of that when he became president as well where and this is something that a lot of conservatives don't want to remember today but one of the consistent themes of his presidency was that conservatives kept accusing Ronald Reagan of being a sellout in particular in foreign policy where they never thought he was tough enough on the Soviet Union and I uncovered this kind of amusing 1982 opad in the New York Times from Norman pitz the editor of commentary you know the title was why neocons are so disappointed with the Reagan foreign policy which is kind of ironic because of course today conservatives think that Ronald Reagan was the gold standard of foreign policy and everything else but the reality was if you actually look at the historical record and not succumb to kind of the Nostalgia that that surrounds Reagan the reality was he had actually moved pretty far to the center as both governor and and president doing things like raising taxes as Governor signing a very liberal abortion laws president cutting deals with tip O'Neal and Mika gorich off all these things that were huge disappointments to a lot of conservatives but that was who Reagan was so he was somehow able and this is I think one of the central mysteries of Ronald Reagan he was somehow able to draw kind of a separating line between his rhetoric as a campaigner and and a speaker and his actions in office where he was very far to the right as a campaigner but shifted to the center and governed very pragmatically making deals with Democrats that I think that's what really enabled his governorship and a and his presidency to be as successful as they were absolutely and and that does come out clearly across many different stories and I do want to talk about those stories and talk about several times in Reagan's life that you dive deeply into in the related themes let's start with his service in World War II and how he later characterized it and and I'll notice here I'm not going to hit everything in his life and there many many aspects of the biography and of rean that we're not going to talk about but I'm going to really focus on the things that struck me as new or really interesting for this contrast of Reagan the man and Reagan the myth so talk about his service in World War II what he actually did and how he later characterized it well his service in World War II was really limited to a Backlot in Hollywood in Culver City California to be exact where he was working for the first motion picture unit of the US Army Air Force and he was you know Rose to the rank of Captain but he was basically making propaganda and training films a few miles away uh from his house uh and this was after his Studio Warner Brothers had used their political connections to win him a number of draft deferments because they wanted him to finish various films that were underway as world War II was breaking out so he never came close to seeing any action he was never sent overseas there was nothing dishonorable about his service there were a lot of service Personnel who who did not see action and a lot who did not even leave the us but there was certainly nothing heroic about his wartime service either unlike a lot of his fellow actors you know Clark Gable and and Jimmy Stewart and many others actively sought out service and combat units and went into Harm's Way and he he did not do that and he may not have been able to do that even if he wanted to because he had problems with his eyesight so he he probably might not have qualified but there were certainly other privileged people like John F Kennedy uh who had horrible back issues which should have disqualified him from combat service on a PT boat in the Pacific but he basically pulled strings to get onto that PT boat and and we know what happened next or you know George HW Bush is one of the youngest aviators in the Navy desperately trying to get into combat that wasn't Reagan and that's fine but I mean it was kind of striking that when he spoke about his wartime experience afterwards he would write sentences like saying when I came back from the war I was you know sick of all the killing and desperate to make a better world and you know talking as if he was this this grizzled combat veteran who' landed a D-Day which was obviously very far from from the reality uh and he he didn't tell any outright lies that I can tell but it was right on the edge of you know spending so much time away from home was hard and well you were down the street really yes yes yeah it wasn't a lie but it was it kind of gave a deceptive impression and I think one of the historians I quoted pointed out that he was actually photographed in uniform probably more than any other 20th century president other than Dwight D Eisenhower because the movie magazines had a field day with Ronald Reagan in the Army and and the movie magazines perpetuated this myth as well talking about they would really literally write stories about how Reagan was home from the front and things like that like the front that was like the front was like two miles away from his house the front of the studio lot yes that's about it yeah it's surprising to me and it does also point out something that I think is lost in the popular conception of Reagan is at least in growing up and hearing about him since Reagan yes was an that's how he started but the impression I always had is he was always a b actor at best and sometimes almost a comically bad actor and what your book reminded me is no actually there was a brief window where he was in the top tier and but for a couple of breaks he he could have been in Casablanca he would have been with perhaps one more hit in a Perpetual tier perhaps Decades of a listing um but he he was not a failed actor by any means at that point I mean that was actually the cost that World War II exacted on him and he was never at risk of losing his life but he basically lost his career to some extent in World War II because I mean the bitter irony is that there were actors who were very heroic and sought out combat service but there were also others like John Wayne who you know played this Uber Patriot on the screen but who dodged the draft entirely and his career actually took off during World War II because in part because all these other actors were in uniform and John Wayne wasn't so he was actually making movies where he was playing you know Marines or soldiers while his colleagues were actually real soldiers and real Marines but Reagan I mean Reagan was not at either one of those extremes he was you know in uniform in the Air Force on a Hollywood Backlot but it still interrupted his civilian movie career he was still making propaganda and training movies he wasn't getting the starring roles that John Wayne or others were getting and that so by the time the war was over he had lost the traction on his career that he was really gaining when he was kind of joining the A-list in 1940 1941 with Kings Row his most celebrated movie and he was actually I mean people forget this now but he was getting equal billing with Errol Flynn in Warner Brothers movies right before Pearl Harbor and that was he would never achieve that level of movie success in the future yeah the experience of being an actor and being fed to lines memorizing lines delivering lines that other people give you and then of course much later in life as a politician many perhaps most politicians become very good at reading talking points about reading a policy paper and parting back figures of memorizing what their speech writers have crafted for them hopefully based on their own ideas and and so for Reagan it seems like the perfect match of here's somebody who is always somebody's spokesperson right he he is always reading a line that somebody else has drafted and he doesn't have an original thought or the ability to put together a speech but you found out quite differently after World War II and after his acting career doesn't become sustaining he starts doing public speaking as a living for a while describe his method of developing speeches and delivering speeches and what it reveals about him that's different than what I just described as what many people would assume yeah the the myth of Reagan is that he was just an actor who was reading lines fed to him by others as you suggested but the reality is that he was his own script writer for the first few Decades of his public speaking career when he was speaking on behalf of General Electric in the 1950s when he was the host of General Electric show on TV and he was also a spokesman for General elector going from plant to plant giving speeches which was really his kind of training school as a politician he didn't have anybody writing those speeches for him he was doing it himself and he would you know write them down on index cards basically the saing points he wanted to make and he was a voracious reader as well now he was also often an indiscriminating reader because he would often read very questionable sources like human events or National Review or others and pick up kind of apocryphal stories or not quite true anecdotes and he would commit those to memory and then write them down as index cards and use them for decades afterwards but he would also you know read the LA Times and other more mainstream Publications and he was constantly writing down facts that were of interest to him arguments and he would give these speeches where he would basically Shuffle his cards and shuffle them into new variations every time and he would basically test his message and he would see what worked and what didn't and he could certainly read an audience and he knew some audiences soared others fell flat so the ones that fell flat that index card would go in the garbage and then he would emphasize the lines that work so he kind of in a way he took a lot of people by surprise uh when he well first off his introduction to the National political scene in 1964 giving his famous time for choosing speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater this nationally televis the dress and then two years later he was running for and winning the governorship of California and you know there's not a lot of beginning novice politicians who start in their 50s who are as polished as Reagan was but the reason he was polished was because he had been practicing this for years you know really beginning in post-war Hollywood when he was a labor leader president The Screen Actors Guild then spokesman for General Electric he gave a ton of speeches all over the country to many many different audiences he was also a very polished TV performer he was there have been only two US presidents who were hosts of nationally televised shows before becoming president one of course was Donald Trump with The Apprentice but the other one was was Ronald Reagan uh in the 1950s with his GE show so uh he was a very polished communicator and it it wasn't just reading other people's lines he was really writing his own lines in those days and in fact Stu Spencer his longtime political consultant going back to 1966 told me that Ronald Reagan was the best speech writer he ever met in part because Reagan really wrote sentences for the way that people heard them and listened to them he wasn't writing for the way that people read them because of course his initial job out of college was as a radio broadcaster in Iowa so he knew how to communicate orally whether it was on radio television or in person and he was very very good at it he knew what what worked with an audience I really wish that um to just do a sanity check on your editors at liver light and imprint of WW Norton that you would have put Reagan was one of only two presidents to host a television show before his presidency you know along with Rutherford be Haze and just see if they caught it that would have been fun um I mean there are a couple of shifts in rean life that are important and that as a biographer that's gold right you get to write about an interesting moment and then how one's trajectory appears to change from it and you mentioned one there right the time to choosing speech just the idea of going out and giving more political speeches and then suddenly you know within a matter of months you can almost count on your hands he's running for governor and then soon after he's considered a presidential or vice presidential candidate but another one came before that which is his internal shift he was basically a new deal Democrat he he was a fan of FDR as the majority of Americans were and even though he didn't appear to have any strong political event that changed him something in that milu of Hollywood and blacklisting and his work pattern suddenly in a matter of years he goes from seeming like he's still a full fan of New Deal Democratic politics to becoming associated with and reading the radical John Burch society and going out and talking about some very different ideas I still don't think I understand that turn what actually happened inside his brain to turn him other than just the momentum of starting to go down that road and letting it carry him what do you make of that period and why did Reagan make such a fundamental shift in a relatively short period of time well it takes some unraveling because the account that he himself always gave was completely deceptive because he often said I didn't leave my party my party left me the implication being that he had been kind of a mainstream Democrat and then the Democratic party went so far to the left that he couldn't stomach that and so he had to become a republican just to stay in the center but that is completely inaccurate because in fact the period of time when he became a conservative and a republican was the 50s and early 60s and the Democratic party was very Centrist even conservative in that time remember the leading Democrats in the 50s in Congress were Sam Raburn and Lyndon Johnson their Democratic Presidential nominee in 1960 was John F Kennedy who ran to the right of Richard Nixon on National Security so this was a very hawkish Pro capitalist anti-communist party the party that in fact created the containment policy and RIS war with the Soviet Union or took the us into war in in Korea and Vietnam so this was not some hard left turn by the Democratic party in fact it was a hard right turn by Ronald Reagan uh which took him very far from his roots in the 1930s as a very committed and emotional new dealer whose hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and so the issue is why did he shift to the right and I think there's there's a bunch of different you know forces at play here that I try to unravel in the book and this was actually one of the most important and most difficult mysteries about Reagan do unravel I think in some ways it began during World War II when he was very upset at having to pay the extremely high like 90% wartime tax rates and of course he was one of the very few Americans who qualified for those very high tax rates because he made a lot of money as a Hollywood actor so he was grieved about that he was upset about a lot of the bureaucracy that he encountered in the Army as you would expect in any large organization but then I think he was really radical started become radicalized or shift to the right after World War II in some of the battles over supposed communist subversion in Hollywood when he became a Reagan became a labor leader and he became drawn into this very bitter dispute between two craft unions in Hollywood that bidding you know competing with one another to represent uh the behind the scenes workers on in Hollywood movies and one of them was a very pro- Studio mobbed up Union that was very corrupt and the other one was this more r IAL Union called the conference of Studio unions led by this former boxer named herb sell and so there was this you know interesing dispute in Hollywood that he got into the middle of and the studios and the FBI and a lot of the red biters in Hollywood like his good friend the gossip colonist the Parsons all accused herb sell in the conference of Studio unions of being communist of being part of a red attempt to take over Hollywood and I looked into that very carefully I really did not find any evidence to support that I think it was just a battle between two different unions one of whom happened to be a little bit more radical and the other one happened to be a little bit more corrupt but it was this was cast as this epic good versus evil battle to stop a communist take over of Hollywood and Reagan bought at hookline and sinker in part because the FBI told him this was the case and of course the FBI was very much in in in red baiting red hunting mode in those days and so he created this mythology ol that he had stood up to communist he had stopped Moscow from taking over Hollywood he had risked his life and so that became kind of the foundation of his political Evolution and so by the early 1950s he was a pretty hardcore anti-communist who in fact was integral to the operation of The Blacklist in Hollywood uh cooperated with the house on American Affairs committee cooperated with the FBI name names he was you know part of this very fraught period in in Hol with history and that moved him to the right on foreign policy and anti-communism but there were also plenty of you know liberal anti-communists uh including of course Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson and many others but he also moved very far to the right on economics and social issues and civil rights and those kinds of issues and that was really I think a process of radicalization that occurred in the 1950s when he was working for GE which was a very right-wing Corporation in those it's its Outlook was likened by one of its Executives so that of the John Burch society and GE went out of its way to prosze their employees they really they gave reading lists they told you know employees to read these right-wing magazines these right-wing Publications often kind of conspiracy mongering a warning about you know that socialism was coming to America that every social welfare program was going to be the end of freedom in America and Reagan had a lot of time to read that literature because he would be taking these because he he was afraid of flying in those days and he would take these CrossCountry trains from LA to New York and Chicago to do these tours for GE and so he would have you know many many hours to sit there and of course this was long before the days when you would be looking at your phone or your Tik Tock feed or whatever he was just reading on on these trains and he was reading a lot of right-wing literature and as he later said he basically converted himself to the right and I think that's essentially what happened because he believed what he read and also I think there was kind of an element of he was eager to please he always wanted to please his bosses or coaches this is going back to his days in high school and college where his teachers and football coaches found him to be extremely Cooperative he was somebody who would do what he was asked to do and you know he was eager to please in Holly with Jack Warner and War Warner Brothers and same thing in the 50s he was eager to please with his G bosses and one of the ways he pleased them was by embracing the same very conservative Outlook that they had and I think that was how he wound up really between 1950 and 1960 was the key time because even as late as 1948 he was endorsing Harry Truman in 1950 he was campaigning against Richard Nixon for the US Senate but by 1960 he was the head of of democrats for Nixon and you know the only reason he didn't become a republican in 1960 was because Dick Nixon personally asked him not to do that because it would be more powerful to have him still be a a Democrat yeah it's interesting you rais the issue of him I don't it's not being a follower but it is it is taking the lead from someone in his life an opportunity presents itself to put it in a positive light and he goes well okay but it's making people happy avoiding conflict and that's not Universal but it's close I mean you see it it's a very strong theme but it also points to the fact that on a lot of these issues ranging from those early life experiences to even deciding to help you know run the the Union in Hollywood it didn't seem like he had a strong passion to do it it was more like it came up and somebody said you should do this and it's just like either said yes or just started doing it without ever saying yes which previews some of the things in his presidency when there would be policies being discussed and he wouldn't actually make a decision but people would leave the room and say well he seemed to agree with it so let's do it it seems like he really stands up to the quote that I found recently from Abraham Lincoln I attempt no compliment to my own seacity I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me and that kind of felt like what happened in a lot of ways to to Reagan as opportunities presented themselves and advisers said well you know you really should challenge Gerald Ford for the presidency in 1976 and it's it's not clear that he sat down and had a rational strategy meeting to decide the pros and cons he just kind of went into it and I'm wondering what that revealed to you you you've studied presidential decision-making a lot especially in foreign policy and most go through maybe not an Eisenhower level rigor of long strategy meetings and deciding it and getting inputs from everybody but that really is the NC process now to very much do that before a decision reaches the president and then get in the case of a covert action finding at least a formal presidential signature to do it Reagan style was different and it really echoed his experiences in his life didn't it yeah the way I would put it is that I think Reagan was a great leader and certainly an inspirational leader but he was a pretty poor manager and he had a lot of trouble sorting out conflicting advice and that was something that I think became increasingly problematic when he was president especially in areas where he didn't know heck of a lot like for example the Middle East I mean he studied the Soviet Union and communism for decades but he knew next to nothing about the Middle East and his one visit to the region was a very brief trip to Iran in the 1970s so he had very little information based when dealing with very complicated issues like the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which eventually led to this terrible tragedy of US Marines going in there as quote unquote peacekeepers and in 1983 the terrible bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut which killed you know 241 Marines uh a lot of that was just one mistake after another in part because Reagan was getting very conflicting advice from Secretary of State George Schultz and and defense secretary cap Weinberger those two guys were always almost always completely at odds with one another and Reagan would listen to them and he didn't know how to sort it out he would just say well you're both my friends you guys figure it out basically and so the result was not making the hard decisions papering over disagreements and kind of taking the path of least resistance which sometimes worked but sometimes led to disaster and yeah I mean that's that's kind of at odds with what the image of Reagan as being like this bold Fearless decision maker who would make the hard calls and would settle difficult issues and confront enemies and so forth and he sometimes said that for sure but at other times you know he tried to avoid uh personality conflict in fact that was one of the dominant strains in his life he hated personality conflict whether it was with family members his kids for example or with AIDS and so he would often try to basically slide along the surface on this kind of surface amiability where he would make everybody feel good with his quips and jokes and very charismatic guy he certainly knew how to you know touch a cord in anybody he spoke with but you know often when he was doing that he was actually evading kind of the hard decisions not make not really making the hard call and so the result was as as you said his aids would often leave cabinet meetings or they would leave you know National Security Council meetings or leave the Oval Office and they would have different ideas about what he had decided because he would kind of give everybody the the impression that he agreed with them even when their advice was diametrically at odds and so you had this after the Marine Barracks bombing in 83 there was this endless dispute over whether the US was going to retaliate by bombing these Iranian military inst installations in the Valley where apparently the bombing had been planned and George Schultz was convinced and Bud McFarland they were both convinced that Reagan had agreed in a meeting to bomb those installations but cap Weinberger the defense secretary was opposed to doing that and he was convinced that Reagan never gave the Execute order so he never actually did it and then for years afterwards Bud McFarland claimed that cap Weinberger had subverted the president's will and had flatly refused to do what the president had ordered and in fact is when I looked into it there wasn't any indication that the president actually ordered this I mean he he may have given Bud mcfarling the impression that he was sympathetic to Bud's view but he didn't sign that order so you know he did not have that kind of Eisenhower likee rigor about reaching decisions and sometimes it worked out sometimes it didn't and then it's interesting to contrast the the first term and the second term in that regard because on the one hand Reagan is getting if anything more distant from decisionmaking he's a little less focused you know there's still dispute over how much he was impaired in the last year or so of his presidency but even if you put that aside he certainly was engaging even less but in the first term you had the Al haags and the Allens and Clarks and mcfarlands and everybody fighting manipulating taking things out of meetings they could and I love the contrast with the closing year or so of the presidency when Frank carluchi noted so he he had become Secretary of Defense replaced ing cap Weinberger and he noted that he and George Schultz the Secretary of State anden Powell who had succeeded karuchi as National Security adviser every morning they would get together at 7 o'clock and they would decide on every foreign policy issue what the three of them could agree on and karuchi noted there were times when he strongly disagreed with something but he would change his position or Schultz would change his position so that they could go to Ronald Reagan with a a unanimous uh recommendation and Coen Powell would simply brief him and say Sir this is what we're doing if you have no objections and invariably he would have no objections it would keep the issues off his desk and reduce the cognitive load if you will on the president but I don't think that's an issue about mental impairment because it goes back to Reagan's strategy for decision-making through most of his life which is you know if there's an easy path in front of me I'll just take it and I will avoid personal Conflict at almost any cost I think that's right I think there was impairment towards the end of his presidency not necessarily caused by Alzheimer's but just caused by aging because this is a guy who was in his late 70s and we and we've seen today what it's like to have a president in his late 70s they're just not as sharp as as they once were and so yeah he was he was happy not to have to sort out these disagreements and you know Schultz carluchi and pal figured out that uh it was better for everybody if they would just sort it out among themselves but I think that but there was I think there was a this was kind of a constant theme throughout Reagan's time in government whether he was governor of California or president that he was most successful when he had the best aids working for him and he was much more dependent upon his AIDS than a lot of other presidents who are much more Hands-On and who are themselves involved in the nitty-gritty of of policymaking Reagan was not he would kind of set the broad Vision in his speeches and he would expect people to go out and execute but sometimes they did sometimes they didn't so he was it was really at the mercy of his AIDS and certainly during the first term as president there was a massive amount of backbiting and disputes and leaking and bureaucratic politics in the white house because of this unwieldy triumvirate of Jim Baker Ed me and Mike dver who were the top three AIDS in the white house but it was actually also a pretty successful period largely because Jim Baker emerged as the dominant personality in the troa and Jim Baker was not only one of the most effective White House Chiefs of Staff of History maybe the most effective white house chief of staff in history he was actually kind of I I argue in the book he was kind of more than that he was almost like the Prime Minister he was really running a huge chunk of the government and he couldn't make like National Security decisions for the president and Reagan reserved those for himself generally but on domestic policy Jim Baker easily outranked any Cabinet member his decisions could really could not could seldom be appealed So Reagan was very lucky and and it wasn't just luck because he picked Jim Baker which was very unexpected and that was in many ways the most important decision of his entire presidency to pick this guy who had worked against them to be his white house chief of staff and so that made the first term pretty effective the second term was a disaster early on because of this job switch that that Jim Baker negoti iated with Don Regan the treasury secretary where they decided it would be nice if they switched jobs and again to show you how passive Reagan was they cooked this up between themselves Jim Baker and Ed me did or Jim Baker and Don rean did and they took it into the president and he kind of signed off in a half an hour meeting in the Oval Office without asking a lot of questions basically like well if you fellas think this is a good idea sounds good to me I mean this was a hugely consequential decision because Don rean turned out to be a horrible white house chief of staff is as Jim Baker said to me Don's problem was that he liked the chief part of the title but he didn't understand that he was staffed so he was like this former you know Merl Lynch CEO who thought he was going to be the CEO of of Washington as well but had horrible political instincts and the result was the Iran Contra affair and various lesser uh disasters So Reagan was really in trouble while Don rean was in charge and then in the height of the Iran Contra affair Nancy Reagan finally persuaded the president to fight Don rean which he hated to do Reagan hated to fire anybody and but he finally was persuaded to get rid of Don rean and bring in Howard Baker to study the ship and then Howard Baker and then his deputy and successor Ken dubberstein really imposed order and discipline and good decision- making at the White House and so that's what really rescued you know the final couple of years of the Reagan presidency was once again having a chief of staff that he could rely upon and it's especially ironic that you have a Jim Baker playing that role as somebody who had no personal connection to the president he was friends with his political opponent in 1980 George HW Bush and Reagan didn't really have anybody that was the true Reagan Whisperer even Reagan himself probably did not understand Ronald Reagan Nancy probably understood him better than he did but obviously she was not going to have a formal role as chief of staff and operating the machine machery of government even though I think it it's arguable that she had more influence on his decision making and certainly his pattern of decision making than anyone else if there had been no Jim Baker I we can run the counterfactual in our head and look at everyone else who was around whether it was the divers or the hages or the Reagan presidency could have turned out very very differently with just that one factor different absolutely and that's that's why I say you know choosing Jim Baker was in many ways the most important decision of his presidency and some of the people that that Jim Baker clashed with like Bill Clark the National Security adviser they complained I think with some justice that the real troa it was not me Baker and dber the real the real troa was Nancy Reagan Jim Baker and Mike de those were really the people who were running the government on the White House because you know Baker was was in charge of most things and he was backed up by Nancy and Mike dver who were the ones who had the closest relationship with the president the personal closest personal relationship with the president I want to get back to image again now that we're in the presidency So Reagan wasn't quite at the Charlton hon level of doing one-armed push-ups on a stage while he was president but for a man of his age he was in pretty good shape right he would do the horseback riding he would go and clear the ranch and he probably was he certainly presented himself as one of the more fit presidents at the same time in the early 80s there was a dramatic shift in pop culture relating to National Security you had had for years movies like Apocalypse Now and the deer hunter you know very dark on the military experience and how corrupting and evil it is or the bumbling military like stripes or uh Private Benjamin and others like that um and a lot of that is of course mixed in with feelings about Vietnam and um America's role but then that shift happens sometime around 82 883 you really notice it and it's taken time for Reagan to really use that image as president and it's taken time for Hollywood to start producing films that they probably were greenlighting years earlier but suddenly you're getting Rambo and you're getting Top Gun and Rambo is dark too yes but it still shows an image of almost jingoistic right American heroism top is in that category you get to Iron Eagle and all of these others when you looked at this you're not doing a cultural history you're doing a biography of Reagan but you can't help but notice this that in the in a very short period of time there is that shift from America dark reflecting negatively upon itself and its role in the world to America strong and proud how did you think through that and see that through what Reagan did and how he was pered in that first term well in some wayse I think this was actually Reagan's most important achievement because if you look at other things for which he is credited I mean if you look at the economic recovery for example a lot of that to be honest was really Paul vulker the FED chairman who took inflation out of the economy if you look at the end of the Cold War for which he is again often credited a lot of that was maau gorbachov on the changes he WR in the Soviet Union but the Improvement in American morale the lifting of American of spirits the recovery from the dark days of the 1970s that was really where I think Ronald Reagan played a central role because of his Sunny optimistic nature his and his unfeigned faith in America as a shining City on a Hill his his patriotism all these that was really where the values he learned growing up in the small town Midwest in the 19s and 20s that's really where it paid off because he was there was not a cynical bone in Ronald an's body and he sincerely believed in in the goodness of America now as I point out he often kind of glossed over some of the darker and more disreputable episodes in American history the you know the terrible denial of civil rights to African-Americans for example but he had a very optimistic outlook on the world which went back to his earliest days really really taught by his his mother Nelly to always look on the sunny side of life and she was this inveterate Optimist very religious woman who imbued him in this faith that everything would work out for the best and that was kind of The Secret of his political success I would argue and in fact I suggest in the book that in in that respect he was very similar to his Boyhood hero FDR because they were both imbued with this incredible sunniness this optimism this faith that everything would work out and they were able to project that Faith onto the entire country and to bring the country out of some very dark time in part through the strength of their own character the strength of their own belief and their and their ability to communicate those beliefs and so I think what Reagan did on the in the in his first term was very important because he really helped America to recover from Watergate from the defeat in Vietnam from stagflation from the Iran hostage crisis all these disasters the 1970s and there there was kind of a sense that Jimmy Carter was kind of Dow he was a downer you know he was lecturing people instead of inspiring them and came in and he kind of restored this flag waving extravaganzas to the White House and made that a center Mark of his presidency and he really helped to restore morale in the military which I think was very important which had fallen you know from the 1970s but I think he also helped to inspire kind of confidence in the country at large and I think that was a real achievement that was where his communication's ability and his and his sunniness really paid off what I liked in your book Max was how you write about the optimism and you know always look on the sunny side but it really pairs well with the pragmatism and you don't always think of those two as going together in life but they really do and that came out I think it was back I'm trying to remember now but there was a quote you included from probably his first when he was first governor in in California where he was making compromises he was doing things different than people thought he would but his quote was something like I'm willing to take what I can get and go out and get some more next year and that pragmatism right I need to reach a a bargain now I need to compromise to get 80% or 50% of what I want but I'll go out and get more next year that's where the pragmatism meets the optimism it's okay to compromise because things will work out in the end yeah and and Stu Spencer who knew him very well the way Stu explained it to me was that this was really this Midwestern ethic that he learned as a young man in the midwest that's actually one of the keys to Ronald Reagan because we we of course think of him as a Californian and as a Westerner but he didn't move out to California until he was something like 27 years old so he really was formed by the Midwest by kind of Main Street USA that's the way kind of steu explain it that's kind of the fundamental pragmatism of a farmer who wants to get $20 a Bushell for his grain can only get 15 or 10 and says okay well I'll take it and hope for you know a better payday in the future that was very much Ronald Reagan you know growing up not only with that faith in America but also with that fundamental pragmatism and he had and very interesting to see how Reagan had nothing but contempt for conservatives who go over the cliff with their flags flying which is the way that he put it that's a quote uh because he was often criticized for compromising and he kind of brushed it off because he said that's you know that's the nature of politics you have to be realis about what you can get and if you're an absolutist you're not going to get anything done and that's you know that's very different from uh a lot of what you hear from Reagan successors in the Republican party today who view uh compromise as a synonym for betrayal you mentioned something in there that uh makes me want to go back in time because I think people need to hear this I certainly had forgotten it from earlier biographies but Reagan did get the idea in high school and into college that it be fun to go to Hollywood and be an actor but he found an actual for for the times the Depression era he was doing really well in the midwest doing broadcasting making salaries that were allowing him as a very young man to support his family and live much better than probably the top five perc of of Americans at that time in that area yeah and yet he found an opportunity to get to Hollywood and stay there so what what opportunity came up that allowed him the ch chance to visit Southern California and and how did he translate that into acting well one of the myths of Reagan which he propagated himself was that he never had any kind of personal ego or ambition that this opportunities just kind of fell in his lap and he felt compelled to take advantage of them because that's what people asked him to do and you know I will say that he was less egotistical than a lot of people who become president of the United States but and certainly more self-effacing but underneath the surface there was this kind of burning to succeed where you know he told his fraternity Brothers at Eureka College that within a few years he'd be making $5,000 a year which was big money at at the height of the Great Depression uh so he was not satisfied with kind of settling down in his hometown and living this quiet uneventful life he did have these Ambitions of going to Hollywood he didn't know how to get there from you know Dixon Illinois at the height of the Great Depression but what he figured out was that working at a radio station could be getting his foot into the door of chz because there was not a single movie studio anywhere in Illinois but there were a lot of radio stations around so he got a job at a small radio station in downport Iowa and then did such a good job there that he very quickly got moved to a larger station in De Moine and he became the voice of the Chicago Cubs throughout the Midwest known as Dutch Reagan became a very well-known sports caster and then he got the bright idea of asking the station owner to send them with the Cubs on their spring training to Catalina Island off the coast of California brilant and lo and behold Catalina Island is pretty close to Hollywood pretty close to where the movie studios were located and so he was basically he was kind of sneakily ambitious because while ostensibly out in Catalina Island just to cover the Cubs he snuck away and did a screen test with Warner Brothers and that's how his Hollywood career began that's a great example to counter the earlier idea I had of him just being Carried Away by whatever came to him that one he seems to have engineered it pretty well himself so okay back to the presidency you you have read and written quite a bit about Reagan's presidency before having looked at all of this having put his presidency and especially his foreign policy uh into the context of his overall life did you look a little bit differently in particular at the relationship with the Soviet Union and what ultimately became the end of the Cold War absolutely uh because before uh starting the research on this project I you know tended to credit kind of the popular conservative story that Reagan had a plan to bring down the evil empire and that's what he did he brought down the evil empire into the the Cold War but as I got deeper and deeper into the research for this and and learn more and more it very quickly became apparent to me that that was a complete oversimplification and and and not accurate at all in fact I asked George Schultz that very question I said hey did you have a secret plan to to win the Cold War and he said well I wish we did but we didn't uh we had a general attitude of peace through strength but we certainly didn't have any idea that we were going to bring down the Soviet Union and the reality is if mik gorbachov had not become General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 the Soviet Union might still exist and that's not a very far-fetched concept because in some ways Putin has revived the Soviet Union at least within within Russia itself so there wasn't anything inevitable about the collapse of the Soviet Union and I don't think it was caused by Reagan's defense buildup or his Aid to Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan or Nicaragua or whatever he did a lot of things that that put pressure on the Soviet Union for sure but he also did a lot of things that took pressure off the Soviet Union which his admirers often forget for example when he came in in 1981 he lifted the grain embargo that Carter had opposed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and after the imposition of Martial law in Poland in December of 1981 Reagan briefly imposed sanctions on the Siberian gas pipeline from the Soviet Union to Western Europe and then he lifted the sanctions within less than a year because European allies were not very happy about it so it's a gross oversimplification to say that he declared economic Warfare on the Soviet Union or he had a plan to bring down the Soviet Union that's not really the case he did have a lot lot of Hardline policies in the first term but they weren't getting them very far because he was dealing with these implacable aaric like brv andropov and chernenko who were not going to compromise with him his policy with the Soviet Union only became a great success and helped to end the Cold War because gorbachov came into office in ' 85 and gorbachov was a very different kind of communist leader who was determined to relax the Communist dictatorship he wanted to end the Cold War he wanted to and more on the civilian sector of the economy and he wasn't doing that because he thought he was losing an arms race he didn't want to be in an arms race in the first place and that really came from his own experience having lost faith in the Soviet system even as he was rising up within that that very system so you know my conclusion was that Reagan was not really responsible for gorbachov coming to power he was not responsible for gorbachov reforms and it was really gorbachov's reforms that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union but what Reagan was responsible for and this is back to his pragmatic streak he was responsible for recognizing that gorbachov was somebody he could do business with as Margaret Thatcher told him he recognized that gorbachov was not just another Hardline communist who is out to defeat the West which is what a lot of people including cap Weinberger and Robert Gates and many others they believe that to the end of the Reagan presidency but Reagan did not because he met gorbachov in Geneva in 1985 and he concluded that gorbachov was somebody he could work with and in fact his Reagan's great achievement was to work with gorbachov to peacefully end the Cold War that's a Monumental achievement but it was really based not on confrontation with the Soviet Union but on cooperation which is completely different from the mythology you get from example this new Reagan movie or or other sources of this Reagan Legend that's not what actually happened and I think that it's a little older than that because it has set root in what I'll call the younger generation which we can now say as wisened old men but when I when I teach I've taught undergrads I've taught graduate students when we talk about Reagan unless they are really immersed in American political history and they've studied it and we connect it to the Cold War the general thought not Universal but the general thought is Reagan built up the military was tough on the Soviets made it clear that they weren't going to win and then George Bush was the pragmatist who ended the Cold War without a shot and there are elements of Truth in parts of those but it doesn't really hold up as a as a unifying narrative there it's more like well yes there there were some things that were done in the 1980s that brought America back but some of that was started under Jimmy Carter in terms of military buildup but rigan himself was the pragmatist who set the stage for the end of the Cold War and yes it could have turned out differently if someone other than Bush 41 followed him somebody who wanted to rub the Russians nose in it instead of finding a peaceful Landing for the post-soviet states but it's amazing how that narrative really has taken hold among generally educated people that Reagan was the tough cold warrior who forced the Soviet Union into submission and Bush saved it at the end yeah that's the legend of Ronald Reagan that's not the life and I as we were discussing the reality is very different and more interesting and in many ways more flattering to Reagan but this is the legend that has been propagated over many decades one other thing I want to address uh about Reagan and this doesn't come out as much in your book but I'm struck by the contrast and there are many reasons for it but I'm struck by the contrast between the post presidency of Richard Nixon and the post presidency of Ronald Reagan and of course there are also strong contrasts with the post presidencies of Carter and others but I focus on Nixon and Reagan because they are similar in certain ways that make the comparison interesting you know both California both grew up poor both ended up right-wing in some ways but in some policies not so much Nixon as a post president never stopped he was writing letters to every successor of his he was having meetings with many of them he was going on foreign trips I mean and Reagan himself including Reagan he was constant final advice to Reagan now whether Reagan always wanted it or appreciated it we can't tell we can't get into Reagan's head but Nixon was a presence for everyone whether they wanted it or not and he was still flying around talking to world leaders Reagan obviously at an older age when he left the presidency in US domestic politics he basically walked away sure he went and gave some speeches in Japan and made a lot of money sure he spoke at a convention and but he was not playing the role in American political life that almost any other president has in modern times I'm wondering what you think about that contrast and can we attribute all of that to to his age and condition or do you think that's part of who Ronald Reagan was that he did his bit he played his role and he really just wanted to relax on the Range I think that's exactly right I think both elements come into play and remember his post presidency was was tragically cut short because he left the presidency in 1989 and in 1994 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer so he didn't have a long time to really be active as post president but you're right he had no desire to basically stay in the Limelight and I think that's actually one of the most appealing and attractive qualities of Ronald Reagan was that he was although he had a healthy ambition for sure he was not an egomaniac he was not somebody even who sought the spotlight at all cost in part because he had been in the spotlight since his late 20s he didn't feel compelled that he had to go out and grab but and and with some presidents it's like Nixon and Carter really I think there was a sense that they needed to be very active post presidency to redeem the failures of their presidency but of course Reagan viewed himself and I think most people viewed his presidency as being a success so he didn't have a lot to prove after the presidency and in fact he looked more and more successful as time went by with the fall of the Berlin Wall the collapse of the Soviet Union America's emergence as the one great power in the world so you know he was happy to bask in accolades but he didn't go out and seek him and he didn't really care about things like the Ronald Reagan Library which was really Nancy Reagan's initiative he didn't really care subsequently Reagan admirers started renaming everything after Ronald Reagan including you know the airport in Washington many other things and that wasn't something that he was seeking he didn't really care much one way or the other because at the end of the day he was very secure and who he was and one of the fascinating insights I got on Reagan was I think Stu Spencer told me he would have made a pretty good hermit although he was somebody who who enjoyed you know Applause in the Limelight as anybody does he was actually pretty happy just to go home eat his dinner in front of the TV and watch you know Mission Impossible or banan or Murder She wrot or something else he wasn't addicted to the Applause of crowds he wasn't addicted to the media Spotlight he was perfectly happy to give it all up and go chop put at his Ranch yeah um briefly about his his movies I'm assuming you watched all or the vast majority of his films as part of your research yeah I can't I mean I think he made like 54 feature films so I cannot claim I saw every single one but I saw most of them and certainly all the notable ones okay so most Americans have not and I would bet that even when he was running for president most Americans did not go back and watch them because the technology didn't make it easy back then but from the relatively early ones the you know Secret Service of the air and the code of the Secret Service when he was playing the the young agent who was doing well bankra yeah secret service agent through Hell's Kitchen and Kings Row those those by by the way were super cheesy and difficult to watch movies because those were B pictures even in Hollywood in the 30s and most of those of the era were but you're saying like the special effects the production quality it was really agonizing for people who are used to like the digital Graphics of today but then he ends up doing you know new rockney allamerican Santa Fe Trail and you mentioned King's Row already before later if you go to 100 Americans and ask what movie was Ronald Reagan in the vast majority if they can name one will name bedtime for bonso and that's it and and very interesting that Reagan as I noted his ego was firmly in check in politics and he didn't really mind being attacked for his political positions Nancy Reagan minded Ronald did not but Ronald Reagan hated to be critic criticized for his acting ability because he was very proud of his acting ability and he did not like people like scoffing at him making fun of bedtime for bonso or some of these other movies right so clearly bedtime for bonso was not his top or top five it was actually I got to say I did I have watched Bedtime for Bonzo it's actually a perfectly Pleasant and entertaining movie it's not like one of the great movies of all time but I found it much easier to watch than like the brass bankr movies which were just cheesy and low bedtime for bonso is actually kind of this very light romantic comedy which is actually this is the this is another one of these things I discovered because there's this mythology of Reagan as the cowboy and so people assume he must have been in a million westerns in fact I think he was in five western movies throughout his entire career that was actually a sore point for him because he wanted to be cast and westerns he wanted to be Gary Cooper he wanted to be John Wayne he wanted to be one of these you know swashbuckling Gunslingers of the West but that's not actually who he was and Jack Warner and his bosses realized he just did not project that kind of Charisma and danger you needed to be a western Action Hero he was actually a super nice guy who played best in light romantic comedies like Bedtime for Bonzo so those are actually his most enjoyable movies that's what he was best at those classic westerns you need grit right not the nice guy persona yes he did not have grit yes so other than Bedtime for Bonzo of the movies you watch watched what are the one or two that you say yeah people should watch this either because it's a good movie which is possible or because Reagan's role in it was interesting yeah well I think that the two that are his iconic roles new rockney All-American or he played George G the Notre Dame football star who died tragically young uh and then Kings Row the melodrama about sorted goings on in in the small town Midwest which was the same U that he came from those were his best acting jobs and those were his his iconic roles and again some of his movies completely unwatchable now like love is on the air his first one in Hollywood or the brass bankr movies terrible but uh you know new rockney All American and Kings Ro are are still I found pretty entertaining I found bedtime for bonso uh there was one where he played uh Grover Cleveland Alexander the Great pitcher which was also I thought pretty entertaining and he enjoyed doing it cuz he loved playing sports you know I think there's a there's a myth about what a terrible actor he was he really wasn't he was he was actually a pretty decent professional actor he was certainly not one of the all-time screen greats but he was pretty confident within his range and that that was kind of the issue with him was he had a somewhat narrow range because essentially he wanted to be Ronald Reagan on the screen he did not want to play roles that made him look bad so he had trouble giving the the depth of characterization that you needed for more complex characters and he certainly I think in his entire career he only played a villain once and that was a complete disaster he just didn't have it in him because he was just a nice guy he wanted to play nice guys on the screen and sometimes that worked but it limited his range and limited his prospects in Hollywood at the end of the day yeah well now I'm going to put you on the spot because there's a question that occurs to me it occurred to me when I was trying to write about Reagan um and many many many other s but I'm going to ask you to come up with a question that if you had the chance to interview Ronald Reagan for this book like any good biographer you would have 10 years worth of questions literally thousands of questions but what's one fact or one reflection above the others that you would want to ask Ronald Reagan himself oh man that's really difficult because the problem with Reagan as you know know is that he was a terrible interview subject and he drove interviewers like Edmund Morris his authorized biographer to distraction I mean Edmund arguably went went mad trying to interview Ronald Reagan because Reagan had absolutely no self-reflection and he was incapable of giving a thoughtful answer about himself he would just go back to the same time warn anecdotes and stories in one liners that he had been repeating for decades so yeah so you're thinking about what can you get insight or information from given that and that narrows the range quite a bit exactly so that's a huge challenge I can't really think of any question that I could ask Ronald Reagan that would probably tell me something I didn't know because people like Edmund Morris tried and tried and tried and they really didn't get anywhere because he just did not have that that ability to be self-reflective which is made which is I think part of what has made him such a challenging subject for biographers and that's what with Edmund Morris you know know he inserted himself as a fictional character in Reagan's life which was a crazy crazy decision but it I I think in some ways and I talked to Edmund who who died recently but Edmund I think was just kind of driven to distraction by Reagan's inability to get beneath the surface of his own life yeah I'm with you I think it would be a frustrating experience very limited returns and you'd have to choose your question carefully it couldn't be something like you know in in August of 1981 when you made this decision what were you thinking no that's not going to work and it can't be you know if you had selected Jim Baker for National Security adviser instead of no the counterfactuals probably don't work either it's probably more like you know what did you like about Errol Flynn as an actor or you know what movie would you really have love to be in something like that you might get something out of him but of course that's not going to be compelling for the core issues of the biography the RN is from having read all of Reagan's letters and Diaries and all the rest of it I can actually answer questions like that because he was actually I think most self-revealing in writing letters not in speaking but in writing letters he actually gave a an account of of you know Erol strength's right uh weaknesses and his attractiveness as as an actor but also his weaknesses so I actually know what you nailed that what what Reagan thought about Errol Flynn but so the challenge is to find out ask him something he hasn't already said that he would offer new insights about and oh man that would be a huge challenge I mean I would have loved to have been able to do that but right I don't have a lot of confidence I would have gotten anything new out of him yeah all right I went to the grave site but he wasn't talking so I got nothing out of him Now's the Time in uh the podcast when we reach into the chatter box and pull out a random question for you Max recommend any recent book you've read podcast you've listened to or TV show you've watched something that you think people would get something out of good question well you know I'm reading two books right now both of which I like one is the great unwinding by George Packer which I think is really a masterpiece of non-fiction where Packer really writes almost novelistic about what's happened to America in the last 20 30 years with the loss of Industry the the huge economic changes how these things affect individuals and he tells the story through a series of lives uh so I think it's a very compelling portrait of how 21st century America got the way it is and it's it's just a brilliant read I think the other thing I'm reading which is a lot lighter uh is my secret addiction which is that I'm addicted to Michael Connelly books I love the Harry Bosch books I'm reading a Renee Balor book right now I think uh Connelly is a brilliant crime writer who I think was inspired by one of my favorite authors Raymond Chandler and kind of updated the Raymond ch pi and La genre for for a modern era and I think they're actually terrific reads but also the problem I often have with Thrillers or crime novels or what have you is I often throw them down and discuss because they take such an unrealistic turn they're so crazy and I want things to be at least believable and that's I think where Conelly really shines because although there's no detective in the world that would all these cases that Harry Bosch solves but each individual one actually reads uh pretty realistically and pretty believably you can imagine that these things actually happen to somebody and so that's kind of my my secret advice as Michael Connelly well I will put links to those in the show notes so people can uh see if they share your passion for those things um but of course I will also link to the massive but massively worthwhile new book Reagan his life and Legend uh Max thanks for spending so much time chatting with me about it I really appreciate it it was a pleasure really interesting in- depth conversation enjoyed [Music] it that was chatter a production of law fair and goat Rodeo please subscribe to the podcast and find us on Twitter at that was chatter [Music] w