Max Boot
Subject: Reconsidering Ronald Reagan
Bio: Author, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. Contributer to the Washington Post and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Reconsidering Ronald Reagan.
Our speaker is Max Boot who is the author of a new biography entitled Ronald Reagan: His Life and Legend. I hosted an in-person book club in New York City with Max and you will be hearing questions from me as well as a number of my friends. I want to learn about how Reagan’s early life experiences in radio, film, and TV honed his communication skills to succeed in politics. I also want to hear from Max about Reagan’s hands-off management style and what that meant for policy implementation. Thanks to Max for joining us.
Why did you write this book?
Max Boot:
I thought that there was an opening. There were a lot of books about Ronald Reagan that have been published, but I didn't feel like there was a category killer out there. In part because the mysterious failure by Edmund Morris, who was Ronald Reagan's official biographer and was granted unprecedented access to produce this very strange book called Dutch, in which he inserted himself as a fictional character in Ronald Reagan's life. Very, very odd.
I set out to write his strengths as well as his weaknesses, his accomplishments as well as his failings, and tried to find a balanced perspective on a president who was a polarizing figure.
Larry Bernstein:
What I noticed about the book was it was very critical of him. You went after him almost in every chapter.
Max Boot:
I don't think I set out to write a highly critical book. I wrote based on where the evidence took me. He legitimately deserves criticism, whether it's engaging in fabulism and saying a lot of things that were simply not so, or ignoring the AIDS pandemic.
But I agree with the poll of his presidential historians, which ranks him around eight or nine out of all the Presidents of the United States, which is pretty darn good. He helped America get its mojo back. We were in a dark place after Vietnam, Watergate, Iran hostage crisis, stagflation, a lot went wrong in the sixties and seventies.
Reagan was president from ‘81 to ‘83 during the worst recession we had seen since the 1930s. And yet he kept to this indomitable optimism. He saw America as a shining city on a hill. By 1984, he won 49 out of 50 states, which from our vantage point in this polarized America seems like a mythical achievement.
He deserves credit; he worked with Gorbachev to peacefully end the Cold War. I confront this myth that Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. I think that's an exaggeration, but he does deserve tremendous credit for recognizing that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, somebody he could work with as Margaret Thatcher told him. And then establishing friendship and cooperation with Gorbachev, which was very unlikely given Reagan's decades long history of being a hard liner. But he was able to put that aside and to work with Gorbachev to make the world a more peaceful place.
Larry Bernstein:
He was an actor, a sportscaster on radio, and ran the GE Theater on television. He was one of only two presidents with big TV careers. Tell us about Reagan’s life experiences in skill building that enabled him to get into position.
Max Boot:
He did have a very long and interesting career before he got into politics. This was after a very improbable rise from small town roots in turn of the 20th century Illinois. Son of an alcoholic shoe salesman father and a mother who were devout disciples of Christ believer.
He was the first person in his family to go to college at Eureka College in Illinois. He graduated in 1932 at the height of the Great Depression, one of the bleakest years you could graduate from college in American history.
He found a job with a small radio station in Davenport, Iowa that would hire him. He did so well there that he was quickly transferred to a larger station in Des Moines and became known throughout the Midwest as Dutch Reagan, the voice of the Chicago Cubs and White Sox.
Larry Bernstein:
That job in Davenport couldn't afford to have the radio announcers go all the way to Chicago. Instead, they sent a telegraph of details of the game, and it would be in code, for example, it would say a ball outside down low, and Reagan would have to make a story about a pitch he didn't see. And that encouraged a type of storytelling and creativity that he could use later in life.
Max Boot:
He learned how to communicate because he mastered this simple idiom of radio. He figured out how to use his words to conjure pictures for his listeners, and he would call these games that he didn't actually see and only receive this terse telegraphic account. There was that one famous anecdote that one time the wire went dead, and he had to tell the listeners that the batter was fouling one pitch off after another before finally he got the word on what had actually happened.
When he was president, there was a tendency to ascribe his success as a communicator to his ability to read a teleprompter. And he was very, very good at that. But he was a master communicator long before he had anybody writing speeches for him. Stu Spencer who was his longtime political consultant told me that Reagan was not only the best speech giver he had ever met, but also the best speech writer because he wrote in a way that people could understand by listening.
That was something he mastered working for these radio stations in Davenport and in Des Moines. And then moving to Hollywood, he mastered the silver screen. And he was a handsome pleasant guy, very easy to work with. He wasn't necessarily the most talented thespian in Hollywood, but he advanced pretty rapidly at Warner Brothers because directors appreciated his reliability. One of his fellow Warner Brothers contract stars was Errol Flynn, who was much more charismatic, much more talented, but would also would roll in like four hours later, hung over, and left the set early.
Reagan was not as talented, but he was much more reliable. And it's funny because Reagan could shrug off a lot of criticism, especially if his political positions, he didn't really care that much if you liked it or not. But he was hurt if people made fun of his acting career. If they said, this is the co-star of the chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo, and he was just the B-actor, and he would bridle at that and he would say, no, he was more than a B-actor. And that's true because he did make a number of A-pictures. He played an idealized version of George Gipp, the Notre Dame football star. His most critically acclaimed movie, Kings Row, where he had that classic line when his legs were amputated by a sadistic surgeon and he woke up to say, where's the rest of me? And that became two of the catch lines that he used throughout his career, “Win one for the Gipper” and “Where's the rest of me?” which was the title of his first autobiography in 1965.
Before Pearl Harbor, he was getting equal billing with Earl Flynn and other stars in the Warner stable. He was a pretty popular movie star. World War II derailed his career working for the Army Air Forces in a film unit that made training and propaganda films in Studio City.
He became President of the Screen Actors Guild, and testified before the House on American Affairs Committee. He became an arbiter of the blacklist in Hollywood.
In the 1930s when he had been growing up, he is a New Deal Democrat. He voted for FDR four times. He worshiped FDR and learned from FDRs fireside chats and his style of communication. In the 1940s when he was very unhappy as a highly paid movie star paying 91% of his income to the federal government. Then he got involved in this battle over communism in Hollywood and that took him to the right.
His was working as host of General Electric Theater on Sunday nights on CBS. He was in everybody's living room and became a well-recognized figure in the country. He was also a spokesman for GE and ran around the country speaking on behalf of the company. Ronald Reagan was reading Readers Digest, Mies, Hayek and Whitaker Chambers and that really completed his shift to the right, so that by the early 1960s, this one-time liberal New Deal Democrat had become a very conservative right-wing Republican who then made his entrance onto the national political stage as a supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Reagan gave this very famous speech, which came to be known as the Time for Choosing Speech. A half hour televised address on behalf of Barry Goldwater, which aired at the end of the 1964 presidential campaign. Didn't do a lot for Goldwater, but it did a lot for Ronald Reagan. People were really impressed by his speaking style and people thought here's this actor, how is he so articulate and speak so convincingly about politics? And what they didn't realize was this overnight sensation had been honing his act for a decade because this is what he'd been doing on behalf of GE. He'd been going to Elks Clubs, Rotary Clubs, Chambers of Commerce giving some version of this speech, talking about what he saw as the main dangers to America from communism and big government at home.
He developed this method of writing his speeches out on index cards, and he would write points he wanted to make. Then he would give a speech and he would shuffle the card so he never gave the same speech twice. As he's giving the speech, judging the audience reaction, and if a card resonated with the audience, it stayed in the pile. If it didn't resonate, it went in the trash can. And after about a decade of doing this, he had a very finely honed speech. It was like one-liner after one-liner. So that's how he made such a smashing debut on the political stage seemingly out of nowhere.
Josh Soven:
Reagan won 49 states in 1984. I think that's fantastic. This guy almost came within a half a percentage point of running the table. You couldn't imagine that today. Do you think that's a good thing?
Max Boot:
I think it is a good thing. Whether you're like Reagan or not, it's nice to have a president who is popular and who is accepted by the vast majority of the public. It's funny because we've become so used to presidents whose approval ratings peak out in the mid-40s, and we forget that prior to the last 10 years or so, it was pretty common for presidents to have approval ratings in the 60s and 70s and certainly Reagan did.
One major factor that distinguishes Reagan's era from our own, this was the last era of mainstream journalism being dominant. This was a time when people got their news from the three television networks, from the two news magazines, from the major newspaper to dominate their town. People had a shared body of information that they drew upon and that the president had to respond to. If the mainstream media called him out, he didn't have the option of going to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart or Newsmax and saying that's a bunch of lies.
The environment in which Reagan operated was much more bipartisan, but also his personality was sunny and likable. He had a unifying approach and spoke very optimistically about the country. Those things accounted for the degree of unity you saw in 1984.
Larry Bernstein:
To go back to his time as Governor of California, disturbances at universities, and in 1968, there was some violence at Cal Berkeley. The SDS took down some of the university faculty buildings and Reagan sent in the troops. Tell us about that decision and why that made him a hero in some quarters.
Max Boot:
I'm a Berkeley graduate. So, this was fascinating to me to write about these dramatic events happening in Berkeley in the 1960s. There was violence carried out by Students for Democratic Society and then offshoots like the Weatherman. But that was going on, but that wasn't the primary issue that got Reagan riled up because when he was running for governor, he was denouncing the hippies and beatniks at Berkeley who were demonstrating for free speech, civil rights, and against the Vietnam War. All these were offensive to the middle-class white constituency who backed Ronald Reagan including many Democrats who crossed over to back him.
It reached another boiling point in 1969 with the Battle over People's Park where a bunch of hippies took over this abandoned lot in Berkeley. The university administration went ballistic. They sent the cops and a student leader speaking on Sproul Plaza urged the students in the audience to take the park. They wound up getting into this titanic clash with the police. The police killed a couple of people. In fact, I think what happened was similar to Chicago that year where the police went wild. They felt like they were outnumbered. They panicked and started cracking skulls. A lot of the chaos was actually created by the police response.
Reagan saw it as this plot against law and order by this hippie communist conspiracy. And he called out the National Guard and pursued very confrontational policies. Most Californians loved it. Most voters did not like what they saw as these weirdos on college campuses with their bell bottoms, long hair, drug use, promiscuity, weird music like Jefferson Airplane now called classic rock but then seen as pretty subversive.
Larry Bernstein:
One of the most memorable moments of the Reagan administration was when he got shot in front of the Washington Hilton. In the George Washington Hospital emergency room, Reagan said that he wanted to walk into the emergency room on his own accord and immediately collapsed and was put into a wheelchair, and then wheeled up to triage where the head nurse interviewed him. Name: Ronald Reagan. Address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And she dropped her bifocals and said, if you're in here, who's running the government? And he said, there might be a misunderstanding. I have over a million direct reports. I don't do much. Today, I gave a speech in front of some union leaders. I give broad mandates and ask my people to take care of it. Max, how do you think about his management style, his willingness to leave the details to experts?
Max Boot:
First, let me say something about his near assassination in March of 1981, where he came much closer to dying than his aides revealed. Reagan had never seen actual combat. He played heroes in the movies, but when he was shot and was close to bleeding out, he maintained his sense of humor. When Nancy Reagan showed up in the hospital emergency room, he told her quoting Jack Dempsey, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” And then a few minutes later when he was going into surgery, he told the doctors, “I hope you're all Republicans.”
An amazing display of fortitude and heroism under the most severe circumstances. Lyn Nofziger shared those anecdotes with the reporters that sent his popularity soaring. It was an important moment in his administration made possible the passage of his economic program, which was in doubt. When he came back from the hospital and spoke to a Joint Session of Congress, his popularity was sky high.
In terms of your question about his management style, I think that was one of his big weaknesses. Reagan was a great leader but a poor manager. He was very good at communicating his ideas but very bad about implementing them. It's amazing to read Don Regan's memoir his first term Treasury Secretary, second term Chief of Staff, where Don Regan said during his entire four years as Treasury Secretary, he never had a private conversation with Ronald Reagan about what he wanted to accomplish in economic policy.
The administration read Reagan's speeches and from there divined what it is the president wanted to do. He viewed his job as being primarily about communication.
This was an area where he was the diametrical opposite of Jimmy Carter who was a policy wonk but didn't really know how to communicate or inspire. Reagan didn't have any idea what was going on in the weeds but he was very good at communicating and inspiring. That meant he relied on aides to make up for his managerial deficiencies. When he had good aides, he did very well. When he had bad aides, bad things happened.
One of the best things that he did as president was his appointment of Jim Baker as his first term White House Chief of Staff. Then his second term got off to a disastrous start when Ronald Reagan assented to this cockamamie deal that Jim Baker and the Don Reagan decided it would be cool to switch jobs. Don Regan would become White House Chief of Staff. Jim Baker was a very capable Treasury Secretary. But Don Regan was a complete disaster as White House Chief of Staff. As Jim Baker told me, Don liked the chief part of the title, but he didn't understand that he was staff. He had terrible political instincts, and it was his mismanagement, which got Reagan into the Iran Contra affair, the worst scandal of his administration.
Nancy Reagan, in 1987, in the midst of the Iran-Contra, had to step in and convince her husband to fire Don Regan and to bring in Howard Baker who righted the ship in the White House.
Larry Bernstein:
I'm going to call on Myron Scholes next. Myron, you were next door neighbors with George Schultz for a while in San Francisco, and you got to observe some of his strengths when you were together at the University of Chicago. I want you to comment about choosing the right people to implement your strategy. Why the executive should be leading a path, but not going into the details, finding the right guy, and when successful, giving them some room to maneuver.
Myron Scholes:
I agree. You mentioned Baker, but if you look at the list of people, and I don't know if you gave enough credit as being the leader of the country to build a team together. I was friendly with George Schultz, and I was so impressed when he started off as Secretary of Labor and then he moved to Treasury and he was involved in the tax bills. The whole list is unbelievable of people that Reagan brought together.
You're making it as if there's tons of distractions which are primary as opposed to the accomplishments that all these people did during that regime.
Max Boot:
George Schultz was a tremendous Secretary of State, one of the best we ever had, Reagan was very good at communicating and inspiring him. But he really relied on aides to make up for his managerial deficiencies.
David Wecker:
What do you view as Reagan's legacy in today's Republican party?
Max Boot:
Reagan was in some ways ideologically pure on the campaign trial, but in office he was a compromiser. As Governor of California, he signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country and one of the toughest gun control bills. Yes, he derided the University of California, but he also raised states spending on higher education by 145%.
As President of the United States, he signed an immigration law which legalized millions of undocumented immigrants. Yes, he cut taxes but he also raised, so he was somebody who was a quintessential compromiser who sounded on the campaign trail like this true-blue conservative ideologue, but in office made deals.
A lot of the positions the Republican Party takes today are different from the positions that Reagan took. He was an internationalist, a free trader and believed in American alliances. The Smoot-Hawley tariff was passed when he was in college, he understood the cost of American protectionism, even though he switched parties, he never changed his foreign policy or free trade views.
Trump does have a picture of Ronald Reagan hanging in the Oval Office, but he's never been a fan of Reagan. In the 1980s, he was taking out newspaper ads saying that the world was laughing at us and that Reagan's policies were a sellout of American interest.
Trump, there's some continuity because he believes in appointing conservative judges and cutting taxes.
Reagan and Trump had a sense of how to communicate, although very different styles, but both hosts of national television shows. Reagan was a uniter not a divider. It would never occur to him to say a negative word about his political opponents, much less to threaten to lock them up. He was somebody who believed in the workings of democracy, believed in compromise, and he was always incredibly sunny and upbeat. But he always imagined America as this shining city on a hill. Our best days are always ahead of us, and whereas Trump has this negative, divisive vision.
One of Reagan's strengths was he prioritized very few things, reviving the nation's defenses, ending the Cold War, reviving the economy. He wasn't going to make repeal of Roe v Wade a priority. When he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court fulfilling a campaign promise to appoint the first woman justice, he never asked her what her view was on abortion.
Democrats were attacking him for his budget, which in hindsight don't seem so bad because in those days we were measuring budget deficits in billions of dollars. Today, we measure them in trillions of dollars. Passage of time gives you a different sense of what's important.
Larry Bernstein:
It's not every day that we have the Chief Equity Strategist of Goldman Sachs in our midst. David Kostin.
David Kostin:
Ronald Reagan's perspective on taxes. The marginal personal income tax was like 90% until 1971. Reagan took that first down in the 1981 to about 50%, and then later the ‘86 Tax Reform Act, they took it down.
Max Boot:
I'm not sure that Reagan had a magic number that he was trying to attain in income tax rates. He thought it was a good thing to cut income taxes. A lot of Republicans figured out in the 1970s that was their counter to Democratic big spending to win votes. They weren't going to propose big spending programs. They're going to propose big tax cuts and win votes that way, and it turned out to be a pretty popular policy.
In 1980, he was running on a platform of we're going to cut income taxes to 25%, we're going to increase defense spending, and we're going to balance the budget. And it didn't really add up, which is why George H. W. Bush called it voodoo economics. And lo and behold, he cut taxes, raised defense spending, and he didn't get rid of the budget deficit. In fact, budget deficit soared. But the reality was very few people cared, and it didn't do much political damage.
This was one of the few regrets about his presidency because he'd been complaining for decades about budget deficits and promising to pay down the debt. And he couldn't do that. He prioritized cutting taxes and raising defense spending.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986, which took to the top rate down to around 30%, that was a bipartisan legislation passed with very strong Democratic support because it was getting rid of tax breaks for businesses at the same time that it was cutting personal rates for individuals.
Larry Bernstein
We got a Roberts and Holland tax partner here to discuss the Tax Reform of ‘86. We talked about marginal tax rates, but it also broadened and redefined the code. This is your bailiwick.
Ezra Dyckman:
So luckily tonight, I'm not being called on for the Orthodox Jewish perspective. Tax policy is really complicated. My first tax course I ever took was right after the 1986 changes were made. But prior to that, the rates were so high that the tax shelter industry was a major force in the country. There was desperation to come up with shelters because of those tremendous rates. And part of the 1986 act was code section 465 the at-risk rules part of the 1986 Act, code section 469, the passive loss rules.
It shut down very effectively these tax shelters, because a lot of people were not paying those rates. They were finding different ways to shelter the income. And the result after 1986 was a fair tax system. And maybe that's part of why there's so much resistance to bringing the rates back up.
Larry Bernstein:
I am going to repeat back what Ezra Dyckman just said in layman’s terms. When Reagan became president in 1980, the top income tax bracket was 70%. Reagan cut it to 50% right away and then to 33% at the end of his term. The 1986 Tax Reform Act got rid of tax shelters by disallowing the use of losses on passive investments to reduce ordinary wage income.
Previously, successful doctors, lawyers and businessmen would invest in real estate, oil and gas, and movies to take advantage of depreciation expenses to shelter their ordinary income from the highest marginal tax rate and instead pay a lower capital gains rate.
Reagan wanted to reduce tax rates in exchange for getting rid of the tax shelters which were generally mediocre investments other than the tax benefits. The result was a broadening of the tax base, a fairer tax system, and a better allocation of capital to the most productive parts of our economy.
David Brail:
Did you have a higher opinion of Reagan before you began your research to write the book?
Max Boot:
I grew up as a big fan of Ronald Reagan. I was born in the Soviet Union, came here with my family in 1976, grew up as a young Republican in Southern California. As a refugee from a communist country, naturally gravitated towards the right side of the political spectrum. And so thrilled when Reagan called out the evil empire or said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
I was an advisor for Republican presidential candidates and worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and wrote for Commentary Magazine. I was a Republican until the day after the 2016 election when I re-registered as an independent because I did not want to pay allegiance to the party of Donald Trump.
I think that enabled me to write a much better more clear-eyed book than I would've written if I were writing from the perspective of the youthful Reagan fan. This book is not intended as a condemnation of Ronald Reagan. It talks about his failings and weaknesses but also his strengths and accomplishments. Most historians judge him to be a very successful president, but a lot of the Reagan literature is a tendency towards hagiography. Being out of the Republican bubble allowed me to write a much better book than I would've done if I were still in it.
Larry Bernstein:
If you missed the last podcast, the topic was Terminating Visas for Foreign Students at Harvard.
Our speaker was Jay Greene who is a Senior Research Fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. Jay discussed the escalating dispute between Harvard and the Trump Administration over Harvard’s unwillingness to disclose its foreign students who engage in illegal activity, commit violence, or threaten their fellow students. As a result, the Federal Government is attempting to cancel all the current and future visas for Harvard’s foreign students.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, Terminating Visas for Foreign Students at Harvard, here.
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