TEAR DOWN THIS MYTH: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. By Will Bunch. Free Press. 288 pages. $25.
I should like this book more than I actually do. It is about Ronald Reagan the myth, as opposed to Ronald Reagan the politician. The thesis of this work is that because of the myth, politicians as opposed as Sen. John McCain, Gov. Mitt Romney, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Gov. Mike Huckabee -- respectively an old-school warrior, a patrician Mormon, an urban opportunist and a faux-rural fundamentalist -- can all clutch for the mantle of an actor cast in his greatest role. Will Bunch poses this contention below Reagan's Air Force One, where they debated for the 2008 Republican nomination. He uses that airplane as a unifying metaphor throughout this book.
The fact that Reagan the man had enjoyed the high life in Hollywood, been divorced, was estranged from most of his children and rarely attended any church were all inconvenient truths ignored by the iconographers of the GOP and the media.
Reagan's personal conversion, his Road to Damascus, if you will, came when he finally made serious money as an actor, and found most of it taken by the IRS. From being the genial head of a left-leaning trade union, he morphed into a fire-breathing anti-government demigod. Reagan found his political entrée with a famous speech he gave at the Goldwater Convention and rode that fame and conservative disgust with "dirty communist hippies" at Berkley into the governorship of fermenting California in the turbulent 1960s.
Eventually, that confluence of events led to the presidency and a lasting movement to name at least one school, road or building in every county in America for "The Great Communicator." That effort seems to irritate the author more than the corruption and misgovernment that, fostered under the hands-off president, led directly to the financial meltdown of last year.
The crux is this: "…Reagan was a transformative figure in American history, but his real revolution was one of public-relations-meets-politics, and not one of policy." Sizzle, not steak. And while the media basked in the warm glow of "Morning In America," the backroom wise guys made free with whatever took their fancy.
A large part of this book is about the famous "Tear Down This Wall" speech, the one that supposedly collapsed the Soviet Union with just a few sentences. Nonsense, of course; one can see what happens to even democratic states once the rulers spend all their effort on looting the populace, nothing on maintaining the public weal. Illusion, no matter how attractive, is not nourishing in the long run.
The facts are easily ignored: The federal government grew every year, taxes were raised six of the eight years, Marines were pulled out of Lebanon in the face of a single terrorist attack. America went from a creditor to a debtor nation on his watch.
But who's counting? Reagan was The Great Communicator, even if the communication went only one way. So be it. Amen.
Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.
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