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Reagan's Mythical America: Storytelling as Political Leadership. By Jan Hanska. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 256 pp.
Ronald Reagan once remarked, "I think now and then to use an anecdote saves a lot of words" and even "illustrates what it is we're trying to do" ("Interview With Paul Duke of WETA-TV on the President's Relations With Congress," July 16, 1982, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1982, Book II [Washington, DC: GPO, 1983], 951). Reagan, the master storyteller, dramatized, personified, evangelized, and mythologized America with Scheherazadian skill. But was he acting or arguing for policy based on authentic American values? Did his anecdotes constitute truths or falsehoods? What precisely were his storytelling politics trying to accomplish? Jan Hanska's exhaustively researched and erudite book shines profound light on these mys- teries. Reagan braided threads of smaller stories into a compelling metanarrative web. Hanska explicates how Reagan constructed stories using re-created, "Americanonized" (p. 146) myths such as the "American way of life" and "the American dream" (p. 123). These myths blurred the factual and fictional, conflated the sacred and the profane, constituted the American dream as an object of belief, and blended the mythical and religious into the political.
One tends to think of anecdotes as simple notices of human events. However, Hanska's work demonstrates that political narratives are an exceedingly complex form of action....