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The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies. Edited by W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003. 404 pp.
Although conservatives may not succeed in getting Ronald Reagan's image on Mount Rushmore, they have secured scholarly attention in evaluating his performance as the nation's fortieth president. In March 2002, W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham organized an excellent conference on Reagan at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which resulted in the book under review and a second one, Reassessing the Reagan Presidency, edited by Richard S. Conley. The challenge for the participants in the Santa Barbara conference was to move beyond the initial polemical interpretations of the Reagan presidency and develop more scholarly evaluations.
The Reagan Presidency consists of 14 essays: three dealing with Reagan's ideas and rhetoric, three examining his foreign policy, four focusing on his economic agenda, and four probing his social policies. Due to space constraints, I look at only five of these eminently erudite papers.
Because Reagan was considered a conviction politician, the first three essays deal with his ideas and rhetoric. In the most provocative essay in the book, Hugh Heclo examines how Reagan's religious ideas influenced his style of political leadership. Heclo argues that the president was a rare political leader who competed with secular liberals to define the American public philosophy. Reagan had a "sacramental vision" of the United States; he believed that "God had chosen America as the agent of His special purposes in history" (p. 21). While many secular intellectuals might ridicule this idea as jingoistic and mythical, a significant portion of the religious public supports the notion that we are a consecrated nation. Heclo suggests that Reagan's religious beliefs were a source of inner strength for the president, but that they were also a factor that could blind him from some obvious truths. For example, one of the reasons the federal government had grown was not because of the greed of bureaucrats and politicians, but because it provided vital services. Although Reagan was always warning about the threats to individual liberty from big government, he was oblivious to the dangers emanating from private enterprise. In Reagan's mind, there were no corrupt executives running savings and loans...