Volume 54, Number 3 · March 1, 2007
Reconstructing Ronald Reagan
By Russell Baker
Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History
by John Patrick Diggins
Norton, 493 pp., $27.95
Reagan: A Life in Letters
edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, with a foreword by George P. Shultz
Free Press, 935 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan Years
by Robert M. Collins
Columbia University Press, 310 pp., $29.95
The Reagan Imprint: Ideas in American Foreign Policy from the Collapse of Communism to the War on Terror
by John Arquilla
Ivan R. Dee, 272 pp., $26.00
Of the seventeen presidents the United States has survived since Theodore Roosevelt declined his third term, none is so mystifying as Ronald Reagan. A New Deal Democrat until the age of fifty, he became the most revered Republican of his generation; a child of the working class, he inspired business to heightened resistance to labor. Admired for his belligerence toward the Soviet Union—'the evil empire'—he became the great peacemaker of his generation. Tirelessly denouncing big government, he made government bigger; a champion of fiscal conservatism, he inherited a deficit of $80 billion and in eight years increased it to $200 billion.
Review, 4053 words
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