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The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989
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Item Description...
Overview
Examines the daily realities of Reagan's presidency, showing how his dedication to reducing government led to his foreign and domestic successes and his legacy as one of the only heroes of the 1980s.
Publishers Description
“Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look.”
–President Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1981
Hero. It was a word most Americans weren't using much in 1980. As they waited on gas and unemployment lines, as their enemies abroad grew ever more aggressive, and as one after another their leaders failed them, Americans began to believe the country's greatness was fading.
Yet within two years the recession and gas shortage were over. Before the decade was out, the Cold War was won, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and America was once more at the height of prosperity. And the nation had a new hero: Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Reagan's greatness is today widely acknowledged, but his legacy is still misunderstood. Democrats accept the effectiveness of his foreign policy but ignore the success of his domestic programs; Republicans cheer his victories over liberalism while ignoring his bitter battles with his own party's establishment; historians speak of his eloquence and charisma but gloss over his brilliance in policy and clarity of vision.
From Steven F. Hayward, the critically acclaimed author of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, comes the first complete, true story of this misunderstood, controversial, and deeply consequential presidency. Hayward pierces the myths and media narratives, masterfully documenting exactly what transpired behind the scenes during Reagan's landmark presidency and revealing his real legacy.
What emerges is a compelling portrait of a man who arrived in office after thirty years of practical schooling in the ways of politics and power, possessing a clear vision of where he wanted to take the nation and a willingness to take firm charge of his own administration. His relentless drive to shrink government and lift the burdens of high taxation was born of a deep appreciation for the grander blessings of liberty. And it was this same outlook, extended to the world's politically and economically enslaved nations, that shaped his foreign policy and lent his statecraft its great unifying power.
Over a decade in the making, and filled with fresh revelations, surprising insights, and an unerring eye for the telling detail, this provocative and authoritative book recalls a time when true leadership inspired a fallen nation to pick itself up, hold its head high, and take up the cause of freedom once again.
Praise for Steven F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964—1980
“Grand and fascinating history . . . The Age of Reagan goes far towards making the definitive historical case for Reagan's greatness.”
—National Review
“Reads at times like a grand historical drama, a kind of War and Peace of the American century, complete with romance and adventure and tragic characters, a thrilling survey of what we might have thought to be familiar history but which appears here quite transformed.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“A massive achievement . . . It is hard to imagine anyone doing better. . . . Mr. Hayward leaves us awed by his achievement and looking forward hungrily to Volume II.”
—Washington Times
“Excellent . . . [Hayward] acknowledges Mr. Reagan's sunny personality and ease in public, but he dismisses these as significant factors in his election. What mattered was Mr. Reagan's unflinching conservatism and strong character, coupled with liberalism's failures. Mr. Hayward is persuasive on this point.”
—Wall Street Journal
“A big, bold, ambitious book by one of the rising stars of the conservative intellectual movement, Steven F. Hayward . . . The best historical biography yet written about our fortieth president.”
—World and I
“An invaluable contribution to the small but growing body of serious work that finally gives Reagan his due. Readers not only will profit immensely from reading this first volume, but will long for the publication of the next.”
—Weekly Standard
“A magnificent new history of our times. It is a big book in every way and yet it reads quickly and delightfully. . . . The Age of Reagan is the best single-volume account of Reagan's rise and liberalism's fall. This superb book deserves and undoubtedly will get a wide readership.”
—Claremont Review of Books
STEVEN F. HAYWARD is the author of The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964—1980, the first of two volumes on Ronald Reagan and his political legacy. He has also written Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders; The Real Jimmy Carter; and Churchill on Leadership. He is an F. K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute. He divides his time between Washington, D.C., and California.
chapter 1
"THE TOWN TREMBLED":
From Election Day to Inauguration Day
No strongly centralized political organization feels altogether
happy with individuals who combine independence, a free
imagination, and a formidable strength of character with
stubborn faith and a -single--minded, unchanging view
of the public and private good.
--Isaiah Berlin on Winston Churchill
Washington, D.C., awoke on Wednesday, November 5--the day after Ronald Reagan's election--to an unimaginable scene. Reagan's victory had been anticipated, but the depth and sweep of it had not. His -ten--point margin in the popular vote translated into a 489-49 landslide in the electoral college; Reagan won forty-four states, Jimmy Carter just six. Unlike Nixon's forty-nine-state landslide in 1972, Reagan had long coattails: a twelve-seat GOP pickup--and a majority for the first time in twenty-four years--in the Senate, and a thirty-three-seat pickup in the House, enough for a working majority.1 The political landscape was littered with the carcasses of slaughtered Democratic bulls. By Thursday the magnitude of the election was starting to course through the news cycle. "The election was a shocker," Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote in a front-page article with the banner headline "A Sharp Right Turn." "The conservative victory could hardly be more complete." For establishment Washington it was as if a barbarian horde had sacked the city. "The Town Trembled," read another Post news headline.
The Post editorial page was less restrained than the stately Broder. The Post house editorial, "Tidal Wave," admitted that "[s]omething of gigantic proportions happened--must have been happening for a long while--and the capital and the political wise men were taken by surprise. . . . [A]n 'anti-Washington,' 'anti-establishment' political storm warning was missed by Washington and the establishment."2 Reagan had predicted since the early 1960s that a "prairie fire" of conservative populism would someday sweep the nation; on November 4 it appeared that Reagan had finally struck the match. The Post blamed "the used-up, unrenewed and reflexive quality of so much Democratic Party thought and dogma these days." Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts summed up the election's meaning in one sentence: "Basically, the New Deal died yesterday."
The Style section of the Post may have been a better barometer than the staid news pages at capturing how truly aghast was the social sentiment of elite Washington. Columnist Henry Allen wrote: "It's like one of those old horror movies where the atom bomb rouses the dinosaurs from the ice they've slumbered in all those eons . . . and all of a sudden you can hear the cry going up in liberal strongholds: The Reagan People are coming."
John P. Roche, a former head of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, wrote in 1984 that Reagan's election was "an 8-plus earthquake on the political Richter scale, and it sent a number of eminent statesmen--Republican and Democratic--into shock."3 It was a welcome shock in at least one important establishment neighborhood: the stock market rallied sharply the day after the election, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average soaring fifteen points to 953.16 on record volume of eighty-five million shares. The dollar rallied sharply on overseas currency markets. (The "Reagan rally" proved short-lived; the following day the market slumped again after banks raised their prime lending rate by a full point, to 15.5 percent.)
If American elites and intellectuals were wary of Reagan, among opposition leaders in Eastern Europe Reagan's victory was a glimmer of hope. Lech Walesa, the leader of the Polish resistance, remarked to American reporters after the election that "Reagan was the only good candidate in your presidential campaign, and I knew he would win."4 Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent Reagan a telegram of congratulations that the Washington Post described as "noticeably cooler" than the message sent to Jimmy Carter four years earlier. According to the New York Times, "Soviet officials, whose job it is to study the United States, said they were depressed by the defeat of such Democratic advocates of detente as Senators George McGovern, John Culver, and Frank Church."
Back in the United States, the far Left twitched with predictable paroxysms of paranoia. In Berkeley, more than two thousand people turned out to protest Reagan's election for three nights in a row, forgetting the irony that it was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 that had helped propel his entry into politics. To borrow Yogi Berra's solecism, it was deja vu all over again: police arrested fifty-four people for occupying the chancellor's office.5
To the agitated Left, Reagan's election meant only one thing: the dark night of American fascism was about to descend. Eddie Williams, head of what the Washington Post described as "the respected black think tank, the Joint Center for Political Studies," reacted to Reagan's landslide thus: "When you consider that in the climate we're in--rising violence, the Ku Klux Klan--it is exceedingly frightening."6 This was not far removed from Fidel Castro's opinion about Reagan offered right before the election: "We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany." Libya's Kaddafi was not to be left out of the parade, saying, "Reagan is Hitler number 2!" (This is admittedly confusing, since most radical Arab leaders like Hitler.)
Kaddafi's and Castro's reductio ad Hitlerum could also be found in the American press. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Claremont College professor John Roth wrote: "I could not help remembering how forty years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism--all intensified by Germany's defeat in World War I--to send the world reeling into catastrophe. . . . It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our -post--election state with fear and trembling." Harry Stein wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the "good Germans" in "Hitler's Germany."7 Sociologist Alan Wolfe wrote in the New Left Review: "The worst nightmares of the American left appear to have come true."8 In the pages of the Nation, Wolfe's nightmare took a familiar shape: "[T]he United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era."9 The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, keeper of the "Doomsday Clock," which purported to judge the risk of nuclear anni-hilation, moved the hands on the clock from seven to four minutes before midnight.10
Triumphant conservatives were more than willing to stoke the Left's paranoia. The election seemed to be more than merely the turning out of the bums; it was, as Harvard's Harvey Mansfield Jr. put it, "a general repudiation of the values of the 1960s."11 The Washington Post's Haynes Johnson quoted an unnamed conservative political activist saying, "This country's going so far to the right you won't recognize it."12 In Oklahoma and Wyoming, Republican enthusiasts placed roadside billboards proclaiming: Welcome to the Reagan Revolution.
* * *
Although the frothier expectations of partisans at both ends of the political spectrum would turn out to be overwrought, the shock of the 1980 election would have a long half-life. For movement conservatives, Reagan's election was a golden moment whose like shall never come again. There was a clear sense of destiny, the overwhelming feeling that Our Time Was Coming. Reagan's decisive victory in 1980 produced an upwelling of sentiment leagues ahead of the usual thrill of electoral victory.
Democrats would take nearly a year to recover their bearings and go on the political offensive again. The media and the Washington establishment had set themselves up for a shock with their pre-election predictions of a close vote. Pollster Burns Roper admitted, "The Press, political analysts and political strategists all missed the magnitude and breadth of the sweep."13 A week before the election, the New Republic's Morton Kondracke wrote that "it seems more likely by the day that Ronald Reagan is not going to execute a massive electoral sweep. In fact, the movement of the presidential campaign suggests a Carter victory."14 David Broder had written: "There is no evidence of a dramatic upsurge in Republican strength or a massive turnover in Congress." Though polls in the days leading up to the election showed Reagan ahead of Carter, most were near or within the margin of error, and everyone was predicting a late-night nail-biter. The New York Times poll three days out had Reagan ahead by a single point; veteran California pollster Mervin Field said, "At the moment there is a slight movement toward Carter." George Gallup said, "This election could very well be a cliffhanger just like 1948."15
During the last forty-eight hours, after most major media and polling organizations had completed their final polls, voters broke sharply to Reagan. The combination of public disgust with Carter and Reagan's reassuring performance in the debate the previous Tuesday provided the catalyst for the Republican surge. Only the two campaigns, each conducting relentless tracking polls, knew what was happening. Both Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, and Carter's, Pat Caddell, saw the same results from their final polls over the last two days before the election. Caddell's polls showed that Reagan's margin moved up to five points on Sunday and grew on Monday to ten points. The pollster's alarm deepened when he saw that the "generic" vote for Democratic House and Senate candidates was plummeting along with Carter. "The disaffection was spreading across the board," Caddell told Public Opinion magazine after the election.
While Caddell, a brilliant if idiosyncratic analyst of public opinion, had always been wary of Carter's chances for reelection, most of Carter's inner circle was incredulous at their fate. For months White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan had been so confident of victory over Reagan that he openly predicted, "It's not even going to be close." Wirthlin couldn't believe what he was seeing either and, knowing Reagan to be guarded until the votes were counted ("I remember President Dewey," Reagan often said), put his final poll results in the bottom drawer of his desk and didn't tell the candidate.16
Reagan passed Election Day calmly, voting early in the same Pacific Palisades precinct as Lawrence Welk, Sylvester Stallone, and Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully. Asked by reporters how he felt about his prospects, Reagan said, "You know me, I'm too superstitious to answer anything like that." His horoscope--Reagan was an Aquarius--for that day read: "Ideal day to spend more time on home affairs so that everything there is more harmonious." And so he did. After voting Reagan went to get a haircut at his usual Beverly Hills barber (Druckers) and then lunched on tuna salad at home. Ed Meese and Mike Deaver, top advisers since the California years, dropped by his house after lunch to talk over transition planning. In Washington, the phone company activated phone lines at the office space the Reagan campaign had secured for the transition. Over at the campaign command post at the Century Plaza Hotel, the early exit poll results were confirming what Wirthlin called "those numbers no one could believe." The TV networks were seeing the same thing with their exit polls of more than twenty-three thousand voters. ABC News political director Hal Bruno said afterward, "Our exit polls told us by 1 p.m. that it was going to be a landslide."17
Despite the confidence of his pollsters, Reagan still expected it to be a long night. He was stepping into the shower when NBC News "officially" declared Reagan the winner at 5:15 p.m. Pacific time, even though only 4 percent of the vote had been counted. (A few days before the election, NBC anchorman John Chancellor had said, "I think we'll be here until way after midnight before we can predict the winner.") Nancy Reagan had to roust the -president--elect from the shower to take President Carter's concession phone call.18 While Reagan's campaign aides were erupting in giddiness at the Century Plaza, Reagan appeared serene and relaxed during dinner with fifty of his closest longtime supporters at the Bel Air home of steel magnate Earle Jorgensen, causing Newsweek to speculate that "perhaps jubilation, like depression, is not in his emotional repertoire."19
Reagan clearly relished the moment when he appeared before supporters at the Century Plaza Hotel after the polls closed on the West Coast. "There's never been a more humbling moment in my life," he told the rapturous crowd. Then he invoked the memory of his two most distinguished predecessors:
Do you know, Abe Lincoln, the day after his election to the Presidency, gathered in his office the newsmen who had been covering his campaign, and he said to them: "Well boys, your troubles are over now; mine have just begun."
I think I know what he meant. Lincoln may have been concerned in the troubled times in which he became President, but I don't think he was afraid. He was ready to confront the problems and the troubles of a still-youthful country, determined to seize the historic opportunity to change things.
I am not frightened by what lies ahead. And I don't believe the American people are frightened by what lies ahead. Together, together we're going to do what has to be done. I aim to try and tap that great American spirit that opened up this completely undeveloped continent from coast to coast and made it a great nation, survived several wars, survived a great Depression, and we'll survive the problems that we face right now.
* * *
It was not clear in November 1980 whether Reagan's election would entail a decisive break with the enervated 1970s, as John F. Kennedy's election signaled a sharp turn from the staid 1950s. On the surface it was supposed that Reagan was Eisenhower redux, that the political cycle had run full circle: Reagan would try to take us back to the 1950s. It was an easy mistake to make about the nation's soon-to-be oldest president, who often spoke in nostalgic terms about the good old days of his Hollywood career. The paradox of Reagan was what might be called his old-fashioned futurism. As Lou Cannon put it, "Reagan spoke to the future with the accents of the past"; George Will's equally serviceable formula was "He does not want to return to the past; he wants to return to the past's way of facing the future." Reagan's variety of future-oriented optimism rooted in historical attachment has become almost unrecognizable in the age of a postmodernism that is openly contemptuous of history and historical experience.
The sense of national crisis in 1980 was palpable, more so than at any other time since 1932. Persistent high inflation and unemployment had shattered the nation's confidence that it could fine-tune the economy. This was more than just a crisis in economic doctrine; it seemed to herald the end of the American Century. Starting in 1979, for the first time since public opinion surveys had begun to be taken, the majority of Americans doubted that the future would be better than the past, or even equal to the present. The number of Americans who told the Gallup poll that the country was on the wrong track hit a new peak of 84 percent in August 1979; 67 percent agreed with the statement that the United States was in "deep and serious trouble." A popular bumper sticker of the time read: God Bless America--and Please Hurry. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 768
Dimensions: Length: 9.4" Width: 6.2" Height: 2.3"
Weight: 2.35 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date Aug 25, 2009
Publisher Crown Forum
ISBN 1400053579
EAN 9781400053575
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Availability 0 units.
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 | Detailed beyond other books on Pres. Reagan Dec 15, 2009 |
Hayward shows his passion and reverence for the greatest president of the post-war era in this, much more that Wilentz in his plodding work of last year. Even at the first chapter, I could imagine myself actually sitting into the office with Baker or Meese in the presidential transition office, watching aides scurry about trying to set up the White House to undo the damage of the previous four years.
Any reader, regardless of persuasion, will profit from reading this fair and even handed piece, if anything to have a better (and more accurate) understanding of the president who was a game changer. | | | | Brings back many memories Nov 1, 2009 |
I read the first volume of this two volume set last month. It was excellent and refreshed my memory of the situation that we faced when Ronald Reagan was elected. I was not a big fan of his when he was governor of California. I think it was the residual of my student liberalism that was fading as I grew up but which was finished off by the presidency of Jimmy Carter. By the time Reagan was elected, I was ready for a big change and, as this book relates so enjoyably, we got it. I do have a couple of differences with the author on details. In Chapter 5, "Stay the Course, Hayward writes about the vicious 1981-82 recession. He attributes it to Fed's pressure to eliminate inflation. On page 186, he writes that the Reagan response to critics of his tax cut was "the correct but weak-sounding explanation that his plan hadn't take effect yet." He doesn't explain that the delay in implementation of the tax cut had the wholly logical effect of causing everyone to delay economic activity until the tax cut had taken effect. This response was predicted at the time by the Wall Street Journal and I remember it well. All through the book we are reminded of the baleful influence of Senator Bob Dole who did what he could to derail the Reagan Revolution from Congress. Reagan's friends in the Republican Party were almost as obstructionist as the Democrats. They were still the old "Root Canal Republicans" and would be for some time.
The sections on the rise of Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War are excellent and I note that he includes several references to Reagan's private contact Susan Massie who plays a large role in the excellent book, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War. Reagan was often depicted as remote and uninvolved in the details of governing. These books should dispel that myth. There is a good explanation of the farcical Iran-Contra scandal that seemed such a major matter at the time but which has faded from memory, as it should. Still, it reminds one that the Democratic Congress was frequently obstructionist in foreign policy matters during the Cold War. The efforts to keep the Contras alive led to some inexplicable lapses by people who should have known better. He does not mention the attempted suicide of Robert McFarlane that resulted from his role in that fiasco. McFarlane later said that the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" had an important role in his recovery from depression. At times we can forget that real people are involved in such circumstances; not everyone is a politician.
There is also an excellent discussion of the politics of the two presidential campaigns. I was disappointed that Reagan was unable to control spending during his time in office but the author points out that he at least reduced the slope of spending if not the general trend. He also had two excuses that the Bush presidencies did not have; he had the Cold War to win and he had a Democratic Congress. Both volumes of this history are excellent and fill a need that has been obvious since the failure of the Edmund Morris "biography", Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, which I do not recommend. They are big books but read well. | | | | The UnMorris Oct 23, 2009 |
The otherworldly nature of the Edmund Morris product is overcome with insight and understanding of the man and his times. A bit wordy, the book would have benefited by having an editor with more discriminating literay skills.
| | | | A book to warm the cockles of your heart... Oct 22, 2009 |
Steven Hayward is one of my favorite authors. The first volume of "The Age of Reagan" was superb, and so was his stinging book, "The Real Jimmy Carter."
In this second volume of "The Age of Reagan," a book I suspected might be boring, the insights and the memories start flowing fast. Does anyone remember Jimmy's LAST press conference, where he blamed his own ineptitude and failure on the office of the Presidency itself? Nooooo. But that was the common wisdom in the Beltway those days: that the office of President had simply grown too large for any one man to fill. Government was too complex. Let's dump the Constitution, that rickety old-fashioned thing, and start anew.
One of Ronald Wilson Reagan's many accomplishments was to stop that sort of mindless chatter.
Another thing to warm the cockles of your heart is good old Reagan Derangement Syndrome (RDS). We have all been focused on BDS for so long that we tend to forget how much Reagan was hated. One memory returns to me...around 1986 I realized something, and told friends about it: even if Reagan discovered the cure for the common cold, the Democrats would continue hating him, and begin creating stories about how some unknown stooge had done it all while the REAL Ronald Reagan was sleeping.
Don't we all remember the over-arching theory, that Reagan was merely a marionette --- a simple-minded movie star who had been thrust into power by evil Fascists --- whose only duty was to carry out their orders? It is vastly amusing --- and reassuring --- to discover that this theory was totally wrong. Reagan was a charming, personally affable man, with a will of steel --- and a large, well-read personal library. He not only read books, he wrote them himself. It is an historical fact that Reagan had to DEFEAT those entrenched Republican interests in order to gain the Presidency, and another fact that he told his Cabinet: "I hate taxes, and Communism, and inflation. Now, get to work, and remember that the person who makes decisions around here is ME."
Some marionette.
Steven Hayward recalls other facts that some journalists and historians would rather forget. Reagan's FIRST victory, over Peanut Jimmy, was a landslide! We all know that his second election campaign was a landslide, but how many remember his first? What makes Hayward's book even more enjoyable: he gives us copious citations from the Beltway Pundits before and after this Unexpected Event. These citations are, in retrospect, absolutely hilarious. Washington was TERRIFIED when Reagan came to town.
Well, I won't go on too long. Get this book and read it. You'll enjoy it immensely.
Highest possible recommendation! | | | | The Reagan Legacy Lives Oct 8, 2009 |
Ronald Reagan was one of the most popular Presidents in American history; Steven F Hayward's compelling perspective of the Reagan White House years brings to life the great legacy of our 40th President; a legacy that had been unfairly tarnished during the tail end of his administration by the Iran Contra scandal.
In retrospect, Reagan's participation in that debacle was unfairly criticized by an accusatory press, and other liberal elements of our society. That's a tragic conclusion to the end of an administration that began when America was perhaps at its lowest psychological & economic state of being. What Reagan did was bring our country out of the malaise and restore our economic & political strength to a point that was unparalleled in American history.
Hayward has captured the essence of what made Reagan one of our greatest Presidents; in the 20 years since the end of his Presidency, I think most of us have a far greater appreciation for what Ronald Reagan accomplished in his two terms in office. This is a wonderful book, and should be read by all Americans, regardless of political persuasion.
The '80s were a fun-loving time of tremendous economic growth and prosperity; not to mention a time of remarkable ideological & political influence. The Berlin Wall tumbling down didn't happen by accident; nor did the Cold War become a thing of the past simply because the Russians forgot they hated capitalism. Reagan was the driving force behind all this profound and positive change.
Let's not forget his legacy; Hayward's book has brought it back to life for a new generation of Americans to appreciate. | | | Write your own review about The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989
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