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The Triumph of Imagination
Simon and Schuster
December 2005
Featuring: Ronald Reagan
592 pages
ISBN: 0743230221
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Twenty-five years after Ronald Reagan became president,
Richard Reeves has written a surprising and revealing
portrait of one of the most important leaders of the
twentieth century. As he did in his bestselling books
President Kennedy: Profile of Power and President Nixon:
Alone in the White House, Reeves has used newly
declassified documents and hundreds of interviews to show a
president at work day by day, sometimes minute by minute.
President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination is the story
of an accomplished politician, a bold, even reckless
leader, a gambler, a man who imagined an American past and
an American future -- and made them real. He is a man of
ideas who changed the world for better or worse, a man who
understands that words are often more important than deeds.
Reeves shows a man who understands how to be President, who
knows that the job is not to manage the government but to
lead the nation. In many ways, a quarter of a century
later, he is still leading. As his vice president, George
H. W. Bush, said after Reagan was shot and hospitalized in
1981: "We will act as if he were here."
He is a heroic figure if not always a hero. He did not
destroy communism, as his champions claim, but he knew it
would self-destruct and hastened the collapse. No small
thing. He believed the Soviet Union was evil and he had
contempt for the established American policies of
containment and détente. Asked about his own Cold War
strategy, he answered: "We win. They lose!"
Like one of his heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt, he has
become larger than life. As Roosevelt became an icon
central to American liberalism, Reagan became the nucleus
holding together American conservatism. He is the only
president whose name became a political creed, a noun not
an adjective: "Reaganism."
Reagan's ideas were so old they seemed new. He preached an
individualism, inspiring and cruel, that isolated and
shamed the halt and the lame. He dumbed-down America,
brilliantly blending fact and fiction, transforming
political debate into emotion-driven entertainment. He
recklessly mortgaged America with uncontrolled military
spending, less taxation, and more debt.
In focusing on the key moments of the Reagan presidency,
Reeves recounts the amazing resiliency of Ronald Reagan,
the real "comeback kid." Here is a seventy-year-old man
coming back from a near-fatal gunshot wound, from cancer,
from the worst recession in American history. Then, in
personal despair as his administration was shredded by the
lying and secrets of hidden wars and double-dealing, he was
able to forge one of history's amazing relationships with
the leader of "the Evil Empire." That story is told for the
first time using the transcripts of the Reagan-Gorbachev
meetings, the climax of an epic story -- as if he were here.
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