When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Americans of every kind, ‘in rows three to five deep, thronged Pennsylvania Avenue to catch a glimpse of this melancholy but historic funeral procession’. In a note the presidential historian Richard Norton Smith wrote to Reagan’s widow, Nancy, he assured her that ‘their grief was equalled by their gratitude for a life that had become synonymous in their eyes with the nation itself’.
Max Boot, Reagan’s latest biographer, offers this as a framing anecdote for his impressive, if imperfect, account of the fortieth president (1981-89). To know Ronald Reagan is to know the United States. Boot never quite articulates the inevitable corollary – to hate Reagan is to hate America – but offers a determined rebuke to it. He succeeds and fails in compelling fashion.
Reagan: His life and legend by Max Boot
Liveright, US$45 hb, 874 pp
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