What Would Reagan Do?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Heilbrunn2-t.html

March 2, 2008
What Would Reagan Do?
By JACOB HEILBRUNN
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REAGAN’S DISCIPLE

George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy.
By Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon.
382 pp. PublicAffairs. $27.95.

When George W. Bush became president, he set out to honor Ronald Reagan’s approach to foreign and domestic policy. He succeeded. The more Bush flounders, the better Reagan looks by comparison. The result has been a fresh wave of Reagan nostalgia.

Among Republicans the yearning for a new Reagan to blot out memories of the Bush era is palpable. First Fred Thompson was supposed to be the next movie star who could restore good, old-fashioned conservative values.

Then Mitt Romney depicted himself as the true Reaganite. Now John McCain, who calls himself a member of the “school of Ronald Reagan,” is trying to reassure conservatives that he is the genuine article.

And among liberals, Reagan’s reputation is enjoying a distinct uptick: Russell Baker, writing in The New York Review of Books, described Reagan as a canny old bird in contrast to Bush, while Senator Barack Obama has hailed Reagan’s ability to change the “trajectory” of America.

In “Reagan’s Disciple,” Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon contrast the two presidents. Lou Cannon, who has written five books on Reagan, is a veteran journalist. His son Carl, the co-author of a Karl Rove biography, is the White House correspondent for The National Journal.

The Cannons contend that far from being a militant crusader, Reagan was a prudent leader — prepared to compromise with Congressional Democrats, hesitant to embroil the United States in foreign wars, eager to maintain America’s alliances and acutely aware of the limits of American power. Their sharp and discriminating account suggests that in seeking to win one for the Gipper, Bush, like not a few conservatives, has substituted a cartoon for reality.

Misunderstandings about Reagan were endemic among the conservatives in his own administration, the Cannons demonstrate, beginning with his truculent secretary of state Alexander Haig, who confused Reagan’s hard-line rhetoric with his actual intentions. Haig, they write, wanted to lay down what he called “markers” in Central America to stop Communist subversion. The markers included the threat of bombing Cuba. Reagan was not amused.

In 1982 he replaced Haig with George Shultz. To the frustration of bellicose conservatives, Reagan lifted the grain embargo on the Soviet Union and, at Shultz’s urging, proceeded to sign arms treaties with Moscow. And when it came to warfare, Reagan’s dominant approach was to fund proxy forces like the contras or the Afghan mujahedeen rather than send in American troops.

When he did deploy troops, it was in highly limited and staged operations like the liberation of Grenada from a Marxist government and its Cuban allies. His one debacle came in Lebanon, where he deployed about 1,200 marines in September 1982 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.

There was, however, no peace to keep. In October 1983, a suicide bomber drove into a Marine headquarters and murdered 241 servicemen — the worst loss of troops in any single incident since the battle of Iwo Jima. According to the Cannons, “Lebanon left a mark on Reagan that would make him even more disinclined to risk U.S. troops in foreign adventures.”

His disinclination went so far, the Cannons report, that Reagan overrode his advisers’ opposition to his efforts to arrange the peaceful departure of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega from office. Reagan tried negotiation. His successor, George H. W. Bush, invaded. (Reagan, we learn, apparently viewed the invasion with misgivings.) The irony, of course, is that George W. Bush came into office determined to look not to his supposedly wimpy father but to the tough Reagan as his lodestar.

Bush II, the Cannons write, had been transfixed by Reagan ever since he defeated Bush I for the Republican nomination in 1980. He called Reagan a “Western man” and “a man of decisive action.”

As president, Bush reverentially invoked Reagan’s name on behalf of the war on terror and became, the Cannons write, “a de facto neocon.” Where Reagan had wisely kept his own counsel, “Bush had surrounded himself with dreamers telling him what they hoped would happen.”

The Cannons have little that is really fresh to add about Iraq. Nevertheless, as Bush’s presidency lurches to its desultory conclusion, even familiar stories offer potent reminders of why the Iraq venture went wrong. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, makes a cameo appearance here, once more to inform Congress that when Gen. Eric Shinseki estimated several hundred thousand occupation troops would be needed after the invasion, he was “wildly off the mark.”

The Cannons point out: “This was not how civilian leaders of the Pentagon usually talked publicly about four-star generals. It never happened in Reagan’s presidency.” They insist that Reagan would never have engaged in a foolish adventure like invading Iraq. They’re probably correct.

Though his followers on the right demanded that White House aides should “let Reagan be Reagan,” in fact he always was. He decried the evil empire and wound down the cold war by embracing the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan said that he would never deal with terrorists and secretly sold missiles to the mullahs in Tehran. He embraced the Christian right and family values, but rarely attended church, let alone anti-abortion rallies. Were Reagan to witness the latest efforts by conservatives to claim his mantle, he might well cry out, as he did in the favorite of his films, “King’s Row,” “Where’s the rest of me?”

Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to the Book Review, is the author of “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.”