Reagan's America: innocents at home.

Reagan's America: Innocents at Home

Wills is working here in themanner of a jazz musician who can improve brilliantly for hours on a simple, schmaltzy show tune; this book is really a series of riffs on various aspects of Ronald Reagan's life. Wills has done a certain amount of first-hand research, especially around the midwestern towns where Reagan spent his early years, and a great deal of library work. This doesn't amount to a Robert Caro-like feat of biographical legwork, but it's enough to get Willis's mind into high gear. The result is, along with Lou Cannon's 1982 biography, one of the two best books on Reagan to date.

It's hard to tell whether Wills isintellectually courageous or just undisciplined; anyway, he does not feel at all constrained from the kind of freewheeling speculation that can sometimes lead to piercing insight and sometimes to mere digression. He spends pages arguing that George Gipp never asked Knute Rockne to win one for the Gipper and that Jeanne Kirkpatrick didn't invent the distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. He goes into great detail about turn-of-the-century midwestern religious history and Hollywood makeup techniques of the thirties and argues, in one especially fascinating but not too relevant chapter, that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was an integral part of the New Deal. One has the feeling that Wills would be world champion at the kind of conversation that takes place after the dishes have been cleared away and the empty bottles have started to pile up.

Wills's last book, on the Kennedys,had a bitterly debunking tone. This book's is much sweeter. Even though Wills has minimal respect for Reagan as president, he can't help liking him for having leapt to life out of the pages of Mark Twain. (Typically, Reagan wildly misreads Twain, and in the process reinvents his own troubled early life, describing his boyhood as a "Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn idyll.") What Reagan's America and the Kennedy book have in common is that Wills is onto a central truth about his subject. Better than any writer, Wills captured John F. Kennedy's urge not to play by the rules; in the case of Reagan, he builds his portrait around his subject's skills as a performer and mythologizer. Reagan's ability to seize on stories that illustrate his world view and then to believe them with all his heart whether or not they're actually true is the quality around which everything else about him revolves. To cite just one of many possible examples, Wills is hilarious in recounting Reagan's heartrending sentiments about the pain of being away at war when he was only just on the other side of Mulholland Drive, making training films. Reagan's long career as a front man for business interests, Wills argues convincingly, has to be seen as completely uncynical, though somewhat self-deluding.

Our grandchildren will want toknow most of all two things about Reagan: why he was so popular, and how he could have followed that patently irrational course of tax and spending policies in 1981 that will cause the country problems for decades to come. This book will be a good place to direct them for the answers.