Why Ronald Reagan didn't completely suck

In "The Age of Reagan," liberal historian Sean Wilentz reckons with the enormous, ongoing influence of the teflon president.

By Louis Bayard

Read more: Republican Party, George W. Bush, Books, Ronald Reagan, Cold War, Reviews, Book reviews, Politics Features, Louis Bayard

AP Photo/Lana Harris

President Reagan eats at a McDonald's restaurant in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Oct. 16, 1984.

May 13, 2008 | Between Ronald Reagan's last year of presidential office in 1989 and his death in 2004, a strange transformation took place within the Washington Post. I only noticed when, in a fit of masochism, I began to plow through the paper's coverage of Reagan's state funeral. As expected, there were the usual encomiums from Krauthammer and Will and Novak -- no different in kind than what they'd been churning out for a quarter-century -- but where was the other side? After decades of antagonism to Republican presidents in general and Reagan in particular, Post reporters, analysts, columnists and editorialists were sprinting -- practically elbowing each other out of the way -- to apotheosize a man they had never even liked, let alone endorsed.

I finally had to call my brother in Chicago and ask: "When did Reagan stop sucking?"

Nostalgia lies so thickly over the '80s that it's hard now to recall what Ronald W. Reagan represented to your average card-carrying liberal. Hating him then was as much an article of faith as hating George W. Bush is now. Everything his supporters loved --the Plexiglas optimism, the blithe disregard for detail, the chuckle, the very cock of his head -- we loathed. To this day, many of my friends refuse to call National Airport by its new title, and to this day, I refuse to pass the Ronald Reagan Building without a private snigger that Mr. Government-Off-Our-Backs has his name forever attached to a massive concrete bureaucratic complex.

But who's sniggering now? History, it seems, is on the side of the turncoat Washington Post, and there's a distinct possibility that if we paleo-libs continue in our ancient rancors, we'll start looking like those troglodytes who still plump for Alger Hiss' innocence. We may finally have to admit that Ronald Reagan didn't ... completely ... in every respect ... suck.

And to guide us down this road of pain, we have liberal historian Sean Wilentz, whose latest volume bears the ominous title "The Age of Reagan: 1974-2008." As in what we've been living through since 1974. As in what is only now just ending. As in how did this happen?

Wilentz's book is couched not as polemic or reportage but as history. Right upfront, he announces he has little in the way of new information to bring to the subject. (Official documents from the Reagan White House are still in short supply.) He acknowledges his own distaste for interviewing, which inevitably co-opts the historian and also takes a really long time. For nearly half the book, Reagan drops out altogether as Wilentz picks over the old scabs of healthcare reform and Monica Lewinsky and the 2000 election dispute -- stuff that doesn't have much if anything to do with the author's nominal subject. The resulting volume is pretty much a survey course in current and not-so-current events, and the response of anyone who actually lived through those years will not be "Really?" but "Oh, yeah, I remember." Phyllis Schlafly ... Ed Meese ... remind me who the hell William French Smith was again?

Whatever news value adheres to this book, then, has little to do with its contents and much to do with its author. Sean Wilentz is the kind of liberal scholar who, when I was attending his lectures more than 20 years ago, could be counted on to jab the Reagan administration every chance he got. As recently as 2006, in a Rolling Stone article, he was making the case that the current Republican president is the worst in history. He's a contributing editor to the New Republic and a Clinton family friend -- an ardent Hillary booster in Salon and elsewhere -- and probably his most enduring sentence came during the 1998 impeachment hearings, when he warned the Republicans howling for Bill Clinton's blood that "history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness."

The record is clear: Sean Wilentz is no Peggy Noonan. But now, summoned before his own tribunal of history, he matter-of-factly writes: "If greatness in a president is measured in terms of affecting the temper of the times, whether you like it or not, Reagan stands second to none among the presidents of the second half of the twentieth century."

Thanks to the Great Communicator, propositions that were considered extreme 30 years ago -- lowering taxes on the rich, shrinking the domestic safety net, prying people off welfare rolls -- are now so entrenched as to be conventional wisdom. Reagan, more than any conservative reformer before him, succeeded in "redefining the politics of his era and in reshaping the basic terms on which politics and government could be conducted long after he left office. Add in Reagan's remarkable turnabout in helping to end the cold war, as well as his success, albeit easily exaggerated, in uplifting the country after the disaster in Vietnam and the Carter years, and his achievement actually looks more substantial than the claims invented by the Reaganite mythmakers."

And he's still, in some sense, with us. By Wilentz's reckoning, the Reagan era has lasted longer than "the ages of Jefferson and Jackson; longer than the 'gilded' age or the Progressive era; and virtually as long as the combined era of the New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society." Which means that the GOP's happiest warrior can now be spoken of in the same breath as Jefferson and Jackson, as Lincoln and the Roosevelts.

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