If you want to be the grumpy relative who befouls the holiday spirits this year, simply place Max Boot’s lengthy, expensive, flat-prosed Reagan tome under the Christmas tree: "Reagan: His Life and Legend."
It is impossible to describe his opus as a biography because the more you plow through the dense writing, the more you discover that Boot has used his public relations campaign to disguise as comprehensive history what has all the earmarks of a patched-together work of a reporter who has cobbled together years of clips, interviews, archival research, and reviews of other Reagan books (some questionable) to write a very long newspaper article.
His work fits the pattern of one who yearns to seek attention for a revisionist look at the life and presidency of Ronald Reagan – a "see-me" product – hoping a Pulitzer jury might be lulled into the fantasy of believing Boot has actually written a volume that meets its standards.
There are many errors and omissions in the book, enough to raise red flags.
But the most egregious of faults are the overarching themes that Reagan, at his core, was, in his domestic economic policy a "pragmatist," not a conservative – and in foreign and defense policy, that the Soviet collapse "was not the product of Reagan's efforts to spend more on the military and to curb Soviet expansionism abroad."
Instead, it was merely thanks to the courtesy of "the increasingly radical reforms implemented by [Mikhail] Gorbachev over the over the objections of his more conservative comrades …"
Of the former, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I have written my own book of this period – aided by actually being at Reagan's side and not reliant on intermediaries.
Had Boot awaited my memoir, "Behind Closed Doors – In the Room with Reagan and Nixon," his theories of Reagan as the economic and domestic pragmatist would have been shredded as I documented the details of Reagan being manipulated by James Baker and his staff into raising taxes in 1982.
They convinced Reagan he would get $3 of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increase to which he agreed. It was a lie, and Reagan complained to me more than once – and especially as I met with him before our collaboration on his farewell address to the 1988 GOP Convention – that it was "one of the biggest mistakes of his presidency."
As for the fantasy that it was Gorbachev, not Reagan, who ended the Cold War, Boot's work has been held up as ludicrous fantasy in the recent Dec. 4 article in The Federalist, "Yes Ronald Reagan Won the Cold War," wherein seven members of Reagan's National Security Council Staff write: "To state that Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled the Soviet Union may be analogized to contending that a bank robber acted as a Good Samaritan by falling to the ground after the police chased him."
And Francis Sempa writes brilliantly in the Sept. 9, 2024 issue of The American Spectator at the outset that Boot cannot even get his facts right about the length of the Cold War, miscalculating it as a 40-year battle – when it lasted from 1945 to 1991.
That aside, Sempa notes that is a "minor point" considering that Boot "dismisses the importance of Reagan's defense buildup, the Strategic Defense Initiative, aid to anti-communist forces in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, Reagan's speeches predicting that communism would end up on the 'ash heap of history,' and two national security directives that called for undermining Soviet economic and political power throughout its empire and within the Soviet Union itself."
Boot's theory of Reagan as pragmatist and weak partner in ending the Cold War is mere revisionism for its own sake. It is an obvious attempt to lather the foam among his colleagues in the establishment media – just are so many of his other claims in the book that suggest that Reagan was something of a closet racist in the 1980 campaign, averted taking real action in the AIDS crisis, or dodged combat in World War II by calling in Hollywood chits.
There is not space enough and time to capture all the fables and follies in this book. But where he has distastefully smeared Reagan is where I personally know Boot to be off base in his coverage of the 1980 presidential campaign. Instead of focusing on what truly lay at the core of the Reagan's landslide victory: Carter's inept handling of the economy, massive inflation and unemployment — along with the devastation of the U.S. military — Boot engages in side attacks that range from the grossly unfair to the baseless.
Reagan had no knowledge of his debate prep team having copies of Jimmy Carter's debate briefing books. Put that one on Jim Baker and his crew who had them in their possession. And worst of all is the claim that our campaign – and I was in the very center of this to the end – was in the midst of trying to stall the release of American hostages in Iran so Carter would not take credit as a victory message in the 11th hour.
The Reagan presidential campaign in 1980 was being run and operated on an hour-by-hour basis out of his Boeing 727 and by those of us traveling with the candidate. Any actions by any members outside of the traveling campaign had no role in the strategy or tactics in the final hours of the campaign.
Boot's lengthy efforts to try to prove there was a cabal led by campaign chair Bill Casey to delay the hostage release has been amply disproven in my book and accurately described as "unremitting bullsh*t" by the late Dick Allen, the campaign's national security adviser.
Reagan took me aside at Camp David in June 1981 to complain that his staff was not sufficiently spreading word of his economic mission: "We've gotten away from the effective things we talked about in the campaign. We need to get back to being crusaders – to show how we're working to get government out of our lives and to help blue-collar workers not to be taxed to death."
Those are not the words of a "pragmatist" who wanted to desert his principles. And when George Bush presided over the end of the Soviet empire, Bush could thank all the efforts of his predecessor to wear it down financially and militarily – not the charitable instincts of a communist gone soft.
Mr. Khachigian was chief speechwriter to Ronald Reagan, an aide to Richard Nixon and is author of the memoir "Behind Closed Doors: In the Room With Reagan and Nixon."