The great delegator

A communicator with an uncanny skill to rally America and hoist her up when she was in need of a confidence boost. Adrian Wooldridge reviews a new biography of Ronald ReaganOn the afternoon before the opening of the Group of 7 summit meeting in 1983, James Baker, the White House chief of staff, dropped in on Ronald Reagan to deliver a briefing book. The United States was the host of the conference, the only one held on American soil during the Reagan presidency; the administration had preemptively billed the meeting as a triumph; and Baker, worried about his boss's lack of preparation and aware that "Reaganomics" wasn't universally popular, had taken a lot of trouble compiling the briefings, which were both concise and comprehensive. On returning the next morning, Baker was furious to discover that the book lay exactly where he had left it – and confronted his boss with his failure to do his prep. Reagan's unflustered reply: "Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night."

Ronald Reagan is a gold mine of presidential anecdotes (this one is from Lou Cannon). But try to understand the man behind the yarns and the gold turns to dross. His official biographer, Edmund Morris, found him such an elusive figure that he resorted to the Reaganesque technique of mixing fact with fiction, producing a dog's dinner of a book. There are wonderful books about the world that created Reaganism, most notably Steven Hayward's Age of Reagan. There are impressive studies of this problem or that policy. But anybody who wants to understand the man must still return to Cannon, who was Reagan's "journalistic shadow," in Richard Reeves's words, in both Sacramento and Washington, and who produced monumental studies of his time as governor and president.

One reason Reagan is so difficult to understand is the contrast between achievement and effort. Reagan was undoubtedly a "transformative" president – arguably the most important since Franklin D Roosevelt. He restored confidence in America after the malaise of the Carter years; re-energized the presidency after the trauma of Watergate; and revolutionized assumptions about what government could and couldn't do. His economic policies supercharged incentives for entrepreneurs, who were taking over from big companies as the engines of the economy; and his huge arms buildup put timely pressure on the crumbling Soviet system.

Yet the man who presided over such dramatic changes was frequently out to lunch. He was never exactly a Stakhanovite: he started his day with the comics and took frequent time for naps, sometimes in cabinet meetings. But as his presidency wore on, his mind began to fail, the victim, as it turned out, of incipient dementia.

The other reason he is so elusive is the contrast between his geniality and his remoteness. Reagan had the gift of likeability, always ready with a smile and a joke. Yet he didn't really need people. He was perfectly content with his own company – reading conservative publications or watching old movies – and he tended to treat people as either hired help or an audience. Martin Anderson, an adviser, described him as "the most warmly ruthless man I've ever seen".

"You can get just so far to Ronnie, and then something happens," said Nancy, who was probably the only person who really got close to him.

Now Reeves brings a biographical technique that he has honed in two previous books – on Kennedy and Nixon – to the Reagan enigma. The essence of this technique is to focus on the goals that his subjects set for themselves and then immerse the reader in a river of narrative. "I have tried to show what it was like for each of these men to be president," he explains. This makes for refreshingly nonjudgmental books (though Reeves is clearly no fan of Reagan's economic policies); it also makes for highly readable ones, with the president's goals providing a spine but never getting in the way of the unfolding story.

Reeves is unlikely to displace Lou Cannon as the Virgil of Reaganland. He spends too much time reciting the daily headlines; he sometimes loses sight of his central characters in the rush of events; the whole effect is of a story written from a distance rather than with insider's knowledge. Still, for all these faults, President Reagan is a compelling read, fastpaced and scrupulously fair. The account of the Iran-contra affair is particularly gripping. Anybody who is interested in Reagan's extraordinary presidency needs to reckon with Reeves.

Reeves argues that Reagan was a master of both imagination and delegation. He stuck firmly to a small number of clear goals – reducing the size of government, restoring America's power and pride, and facing down Communism – and then delegated implementation to the "fellas". He did not so much do things as persuade others to do them for him. But his preference for delegation should not be confused with passivity. He insisted on using the phrase "tear down this wall" against the advice of his underlings, for example. The arms control deals that crowned his administration would have been impossible without his mixture of sci-fi fantasy and idealism. A Russian note taker who watched him carefully at two summit meetings likened him to an aged lion. If the prey was 10 feet away, he couldn't be bothered to move; but when it wandered to within eight feet, he suddenly came to life – and Reagan the negotiator dominated the room.

Reagan's imagination was fired by ideology but tempered by pragmatism. He was a product of the conservative revival of the 1950s and 1960s, a revival that was driven by a combination of free-market enthusiasm and antitax fervor, superpatriotism and anti-Communism, religious revivalism and, to be frank, wild-eyed lunacy, and he possessed a rare gift for rendering conservative ideas into emotion-laden rhetoric. Even as a senior citizen in the White House, Reagan was a sucker for far-out conservative ideas: from the "space lasers" that were being championed in Human Events (which his aides tried to prevent him from reading) to Arthur Laffer's supply-side economics.

Yet this ideological zeal coexisted with a canny pragmatism. The man who slashed the top rate of tax in 1981 later raised taxes and fees by more than $80 billion a year; the man who championed "creative destruction" introduced "voluntary" export restraints on Japanese cars; and the man who denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" ended up traveling to Moscow to visit his "friend" Mikhail Gorbachev. This provoked a growing rumble of criticism from the right during his presidency. As Reeves writes about the Moscow summit meeting: "The president threw an arm around Gorbachev's shoulder as they walked along like a couple of guys coming off the field after the big game. That was just too much for America's anti-Communist establishment." But most of these former critics have long ago forgotten their complaints – and Reagan memorials are now springing up as fast as Wal-Marts. Among the many arts that conservatives have mastered is the art of fabricating heroes.

Everybody will have his or her complaints about Reeves's sins of omission. He could have said more about Reagan's ideas ("good ones, bad ones and odd ones," as he puts it). He could have said more about the influence of the American West in shaping a man who was given the Secret Service nickname Rawhide. But in one area Reeves scores a bull's-eye: exposing the sheer strangeness of the Reagan years. Top billing goes to Iran-contra – that remarkable story of semi-privatised foreign policy and Reaganauts gone wild. But there are plenty of other gems: Reagan going to sleep during Gorbachev's address to the Moscow conference; astrologers helping to decide everything from Reagan's choice of George Bush as his running mate to the president's schedule; the director of central intelligence, William Casey, mumbling so badly that Reagan couldn't hear a word he said ("the mumbling leading the deaf," according to one of the president's men); and Reagan trying to persuade a Southern Democrat to support the sale of Awacs to Saudi Arabia by reminding him the Bible tells us that Armageddon will begin in the Middle East and involve the Russians. If Reeves were in the thriller business, he would be accused of stretching the bounds of credibility; as things are, readers will simply have to keep pinching themselves, checking Reeves's footnotes and realizing that, yes, all this actually happened.

ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE

© 2006 The New York Times

Adrian Wooldridge is the Washington bureau chief of The Economist and the author, with John Micklethwait, of The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America

PRESIDENT REAGAN.

The Triumph of Imagination.

By Richard Reeves.

Illustrated. 571 pp. Simon & Schuster. €26