President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination(里根传)

Book Description
Twenty-five years after Ronald Reagan became president, Richard Reeves has written a surprising and revealing portrait of one of the most important leaders of the twentieth century. Reeves has used newly declassified documents and hundreds of interviews to show a president at work day by day, sometimes minute by minute.

President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination is the story of an accomplished politician, a bold, even reckless leader, a gambler, a man who imagined an American past and an American future - and made them real. He is a man of ideas who changed the world for better or worse, a man who understands that words are often more important than deeds. Reeves shows a man who understands how to be President, who knows that the job is not to manage the government but to lead the nation.

Reagan's ideas were so old they seemed new. He preached an individualism, inspiring and cruel, that isolated and shamed the halt and the lame. He dumbed-down America, blending fact and fiction, transforming political debate into emotion-driven entertainment. He recklessly mortgaged America with uncontrolled military spedning, less taxation, and more debt.

In focusing on the key moments of the Reagan presidency, Reeves recounts the amazing resiliency of Ronald Reagan, the real "comeback kid." Here is a seventy-year-old man coming back from a near-fatal gunshot wound, from cancer, from the worst recession in American history. Then, in personal despair as his administration was shredded by the lying and secrets of hidden wars and double-dealing, he was able to forge one of history's amazing relationships with the leader of "the Evil Empire." That story is told for the first time using the transcripts of the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings, the climax of an epic story - as if he were here

Using the techniques he employed in his highly original bestselling books on Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, concentrating on the goals each president set for himself, Reeves takes us inside Reagan's Oval Office to show us this president moving easily into his role, finding the words and acts to move his very focused agenda: regain military superiority, roll back taxes, diminish the government, restore American pride and destroy communism. Reagan imagined a different world and had the right words, the personal optimism and unshakable will to make it happen. At home he drove enduring wedges into the body politic by turning political questions into moral issues. Abroad he waged unconstitutional covert wars. The Ronald Reagan we see is a charismatic, crafty, often deceptive politician. He expanded the power of an office believed to be in decline. Arguments about what he did with that power endure. The way Reagan did it - because he changed the presidency itself, and perhaps the world - will long be studied. Astonishing in its intimacy, authoritative in its sourcing, "President Reagan" is a portrait of modern presidential power that will stand as the definitive study of Reagan in the White House.

From Publishers Weekly
Celebrated journalist Reeves (President Nixon: Alone in the White House) takes the same vivid, fly-on-the-wall approach he's previously applied with such success to Nixon and Kennedy, and uses it just as skillfully to take us inside the administration, mind and character of Ronald Reagan. As usual, Reeves's omniscient form of narrative requires him to delve deeply into oral histories and other first-person accounts from key participants, mining them for details concerning scores of meetings, negotiations, pranks and tragedies. Reeves is particularly strong at portraying Reagan's almost organically intuitive approach to management. Here we have the Gipper's artful delegation of details along the road to fulfilling his short list of grand goals: the destruction of world communism, the downsizing of taxes and government, and a revival of nearly jingoistic American patriotism. Reeves detects the subtle craft of a shrewd actor within Reagan's apparent wide-eyed na?veté: the wily political performer playing a carefully calculated role—innocent patriot, Boy Scout grown big, the model Mr. Smith going to Washington. This is the imagined president, the facade emerging triumphant after eight years in office, affecting the sense—more contrived, some said, then real—of great battles won and great beasts slain.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
He finally got it. In the end, after the tantrums, after hanging up on Nancy, after hearing about his own firing from a CNN report, Donald Regan at last came to see the truth about Ronald Reagan, the man he served as secretary of the treasury and chief of staff.

"What was the biggest problem in the White House when you were there?" the biographer Richard Reeves asked Regan.

"Everyone there thought he was smarter than the President," Regan replied.

"Including you?"

"Especially me."

That brief exchange tells us much about Reeves's illuminating new President Reagan and about a significant shift in elite opinion about our 40th president. Long dismissed and derided by the upper reaches of the press and by denizens of the blue-state bubble, the man who swept two national elections, helped bring down the Soviet Union and fundamentally changed the terms of the American debate over government is no longer being viewed as "an unwitting tool of a manipulative staff," in Reeves's phrase. In a way, Reeves took up "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau's challenge and went "In Search of Reagan's Brain." He found a formidable one.

President Reagan marks a surrender of sorts. The establishment has, for the moment at least, given in and decided that Reagan was a great historical figure after all. That Reeves arrived at such a conclusion is particularly notable. Twenty years ago, in 1985, he published The Reagan Detour, arguing that "the Reagan years would be a detour, necessary if sometimes nasty, in the long progression of American liberal democracy."

As it turned out, Reagan's America was neither coldly conservative nor intractably hawkish, and we are still living in the nation he seduced and shaped. Before him, it was difficult to imagine a Democratic president saying, "The era of big government is over," but in 1995, Bill Clinton did, and no Democrat since has tried very hard to make a case for traditional 20th-century American liberalism.

As in two earlier works -- the excellent President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993), and President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001), a very strong account that strangely stopped the day senior White House advisers H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman resigned -- Reeves puts a premium on evidence of what the president knew and did moment by moment. Rich in anecdote yet sparingly written, President Reagan puts us in the room with a president who lived what Reeves calls a "life imagined." Like Winston Churchill, Reagan had a remarkable capacity to recast reality to suit his emotional and political purposes.

The child of a pious, theatrical mother and an alcoholic Midwestern shoe salesman, Reagan did not have the happiest of childhoods. In the winter of 1922, when "Dutch" was 11, he found his father, Jack, passed out on the front porch. "He was drunk, dead to the world," Reagan recalled. The boy's first instinct, he admitted, was to "pretend he wasn't there." Something else, though, stirred in him on that cold night. This was the time to take command, "the first moment of accepting responsibility." So he saved the old man, bringing him in out of the cold.

Reagan liked playing the rescuer. His years as a lifeguard on the Rock River were the stuff of legend -- a legend Reagan carefully cultivated even then……