Max Boot’s Reagan Biography Boosts Communism, Trashes US

Max Boot’s biography Reagan — His Life and Legend will have an importance beyond its worth because its author, once a Republican in good standing, is now a prominent member of the anti-Trump intelligentsia. As a result, Boot, more than an average historian, betrays an agenda.

We get a hint of Boot’s ulterior motive in the front matter with a quote from Sherwood Anderson, a now obscure novelist and short story writer, “All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they have themselves built.” Tellingly, one of Anderson’s first efforts at writing was a book titled, Why I am a Socialist. He quickly destroyed the socialist manifesto he penned just after divorcing his first wife and leaving their three children behind. He would eventually marry three more times in his rebellious quest for personal freedom against a repressive system.

The “wall of misunderstanding” here is one of Boot’s own construction.

Boot works chronologically, breaking his effort into five “acts” befitting of Reagan the actor, covering childhood, Hollywood, his increasing activism leading to his time as California governor, the presidency, and the twilight years after his two terms in the White House.

Boot is at his best illuminating Reagan’s pre-political life, noting that in Reagan’s life, “one constant remained: the values he learned growing up in the Midwest. Values like do your best, work hard, follow the rules, be friendly, stay humble, tell the truth, put family first, respect your elders. It was meat-and-potatoes morality for a seemingly meat-and-potatoes guy.”

Yet, Boot notes, Reagan “resigned from the posh Lakeside Country Club in 1946 once he learned it did not admit Jews and instead joined the Hillcrest Country Club, which had many Jewish members, including Jack Warner” the Warner Bros. studio boss. Certainly, atypical behavior for a Midwestern Protestant at the time — and a glimpse of Reagan’s moral compass — but a moral compass Boot constantly devalues.

One might be forgiven if they expected a bit more from Max Aleksandrovich Boot, a refusenik son of refuseniks who emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1976, likely beneficiaries of a 1974 law, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which conditioned trade with the USSR on that nation’s allowing Jewish citizens the opportunity to freely leave.

Boot’s object — to deflate Reagan’s legacy by downplaying the threat of Soviet communism — becomes glaringly apparent in his chapter on the Hollywood blacklist of Communist Party members. Here, Boot writes, “while there were certainly Communists in Hollywood — a maximum of roughly 300 party members worked from the 1930s to the 1950s in a movie industry employing thirty thousand to forty thousand people at a time — there is no evidence that Moscow attempted to hijack the film colony.”

If this is true, then Reagan’s understanding of the threat of Soviet communism becomes, as Boot claims several times in various ways, a belief built on misunderstanding and myth — merely simple ideas “typical of the paranoid early years of the Cold War.”

Boot’s contention about Soviet intentions in Hollywood are buttressed by a strawman, that “Moscow attempted to hijack the film colony.” It’s more complicated than that.

Spiking Pro-America Movies

While Hollywood’s communists, like King Leonidas’ army, may have numbered 300, they were the intellectuals — the writers. Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s told me that Communist Party members didn’t have to make propaganda films extolling Soviet communism — films that Americans wouldn’t watch anyway, even if they could get by the studio moguls. Rather, after they were forced underground by the blacklist, the cadres spiked treatments and scripts that were pro-America, pro-family, and pro-faith, moving Hollywood past its Golden Age and plunging it into an era of grey cynicism, pornography, and deviance.

Cadre numbers are less important than the authority those members hold — after all, Communist Party membership in the USSR stood at only 6 percent of the population in 1985 and Chinese Communist Party membership is only about 7 percent today.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his Lyceum speech, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” And Hollywood’s communists, resentful and self-destructive rebels like Sherwood Anderson, were all about national suicide, and they aimed to assist it.

Lack of Strategy

Later, as Boot details President Reagan’s strategy to win the Cold War, he contends that Reagan had no strategy, that he was “no systematic thinker” and “He was too pragmatic, and too easily influenced by a changing cast of advisers, to consistently pursue any strategy laid out in any document.”

Yet Reagan was the president who summed up his strategy against the Soviet Union quite clearly as, “We win, they lose” and then presided over America’s largest peacetime military buildup in history, with defense spending climbing 47 percent in real dollars, and, as a share of GDP, rising from 4.9 percent of GDP in 1980 to 5.8 percent of GDP in 1988.

Boot and Reagan’s intellectual critics contend that he wasn’t a fox, understanding the world from many perspectives and knowing many things. True. Reagan was a hedgehog: he knew everything about one big idea — in this case, that the Soviet Union was an evil empire.

As Reagan said in his address to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983:

let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness — pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world …. So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride — the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

Nine months earlier, in his speech to the United Kingdom’s parliament, Boot admits that Reagan’s prediction that “Marxism-Leninism [would be left] in the ash-heap of history” was “astonishingly prescient.” Boot further notes that “Reagan himself wrote about 14 percent of the paragraphs and made changes on another 45 percent” with “the most memorable line — the ‘ash-heap of history’” written by Reagan himself — not bad for a hedgehog.

Revisionists

Boot enlists several Reagan alumni to his revisionist tale. These are inevitably people who, during the Reagan administration, we Reaganites understood as being, in today’s parlance, “Swamp Creatures” — the permanent D.C. establishment that, for lack of a deep conservative bench, was seen as needed to round out an administration.

Boot wheels out Frank Carlucci, Caspar Weinberger’s replacement as secretary of defense in 1987, to dismiss Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. It was there, in 1987, that Reagan issued his famous challenge, “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

In Boot’s telling, Carlucci pooh-poohed the speech as merely “a feint to keep conservatives happy.”

Carlucci, of course, was the consummate insider: ambassador, deputy director of the CIA under President Jimmy Carter, deputy secretary of defense under Reagan. Carlucci left government service to helm Sears World Trade, Inc., running it into the ground in 1986, only to return to high office — and then go off to cash in as a senior member of the defense conglomerate the Carlyle Group.

I was a 25-year-old Reagan appointee in the Office of the Secretary of Defense when Carlucci was sworn in on November 23, 1987 — and immediately set about to purge Reagan loyalists.

The 1982 Westminster address, 1983 Evil Empire speech, and the 1987 Berlin Wall speech were no outliers. I attended Reagan’s annual address to his political appointees — some 1,200 people — where he outlined his goals for the coming year. Part pep talk and part vision casting, Reagan set forth a familiar organizing principle and motivated his team to work to accomplish his vision.

But, if, as Boot claims, that that one big thing wasn’t true, then America’s Cold War triumph was either a happy accident or had nothing to do with Reagan’s policies at all.

Of course, Boot ascribes the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to Reagan — his defense buildup and his powerful rhetoric often opposed by his own State Department — but to the last ruler of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, a man “genuinely worried about the dangers of nuclear war” who was an “unusually decent and intelligent person.”

This contention sets up Boot’s latest assertion, that Reagan didn’t win the Cold War at all and that Republicans have applied the false lesson that he did to the People’s Republic of China.

Boot downgrades Reagan to an almost cartoonish bystander to history and wraps up by drawing parallels between Reagan and former President Donald Trump, damning the latter with faint praise of the former.

But politics oddly ignores the wishes of the cultured elite — Reagan knew that communism was evil, and Trump knows that America is good.