Reagan: His Life and Legend [Hardcover]

This elegant biography of the 40th president stands out for its deep authority and nimble style. Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan, but after a decade of interviews and research, he finds himself asking whether his onetime hero paved the way for Donald Trump, the man whose ascent to power led Boot to abandon the right. The book is a landmark work that shows how Reagan emerged from his New Deal roots to become a practiced Red baiter and racist dog whistler before settling into the role of the optimistic all-American elder statesman. It is no exaggeration, Boot writes, 'to say that you cannot fully comprehend what happened to America in the 20th century without first understanding what happened to Ronald Reagan.' A movement conservative turned Never Trumper, Boot set out to explore where the G.O.P. went wrong by writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, and the result is a definitive one. Boot idolized Reagan while growing up, but his book is not a defense of Reagan as the Last Good Republican. It takes up Reagans hostility to civil rights and Medicare, and deems him complicit in the 'hard-right turn' that 'helped set the G.O.P.and the countryon the path' to Donald Trump. And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. He had relinquished 'the dogmas of a lifetime,' Boot writes. This biography carries a pointed message for conservatives: Reagan achieved greatness, Boot argues, by abandoning his ideology. Max Boot... provides an unusually well-balanced and vividly written profile of a man almost as enigmatic as his contemporary the American sphinx Johnny Carson. [A] magisterial new biography... Boot has written the first important Reagan biography of the post-Reagan era&. [His] vividlƒ!