Reagan's America: Innocents at Home

Why Mr. Wills wants to leave the reader with this provable and false impression one can only guess, but in the name of fairness, one should give someone credit where it is due, and this Mr. Wills fails to do. Another false impression, Mr. Wills leaves the reader with is that Mr. Reagan was not a man of faith. Recently there have been a number of books showing otherwise, as well has Ronald Prescott Reagan's moving tribute to his father's faith at his funeral.

For these reasons and many, others this is a bad book.


Valuable treatment of the meaning of Reagan the man   June 28, 2004
 3 out of 7 found this review helpful

Those who criticize Wills for "sloppy work" are off base and clearly have an ax to grind. On the other hand, this book is not a "consummate" piece of work, either. The task of writing a Reagan biography is virtually impossible. Edmund Morris tried to do it and wound up with a botched, absurd, fictionalized mess.

Wills doesn't pretend that this book is a biography. It's actually an essay in book-length form (41 short chapters, perhaps a botched attempt at writing 40 chapters to match Reagan's status as 40th president) meditating on specific episodes from Reagan's life, particularly his childhood, adolescence, and initial career as sportscaster, movie star, and Screen Actors Guild president, and the relation of Reagan's life and self-image, and his construction of that image, with the perceptions of America, particularly in connection with the mythmaking of Americans -- their propensity to willfully forget the reality of the American past in order to build a version of the past that serves as a comforting and communal illusion in a time of unprecedented chaos and change. Reagan, Wills explains, is the perfect emblem of that illusion: "The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute."

Wills' book is not the hatchet job that some make it out to be. He clearly has a respect for Reagan's story, his communicating magic, and his ability as a public figure to unite the American people behind a common purpose, even if that purpose is largely mythical. Nor is the book the testimony to sainthood that many of Reagan's admirers would want. It is clearly critical of Reagan's forgetfulness, his willingness to simplify, his urge to blur distinctions and to make up details of his own life and of American history out of thin air.

It is for the most part a balanced book, although it does not, unfortunately, do any justice to the man's time as President, which is the most significant part of Reagan's legacy. The book was published in 1987, but it really ends with the war against Grenada in 1983, saying virtually nothing about Reagan's presidency and life beyond that point other than a very brief mention of the 1984 campaign and several (too many) mentions of the movie "Back to the Future" (at one point Wills confuses the movie's date of release, saying that Reagan mentioned it in his 1982 State of the Union address; the movie was released in 1985). Wills also touches on some events of Reagan's first term, but only sketchily.

Anyone expecting this to be a thorough treatment of Reagan's presidency will be severely disappointed. However, it has a great deal of value as an exposition of the reasons why Reagan was a success, or was perceived as a success, as a president. Its final two chapters, two essays on the relation of Reagan to America and its relation to him, are breathtaking.


Best authority on Reagan's early life   March 16, 2004
 10 out of 13 found this review helpful

COvering much of the same ground as Edmund Morris in his authorized biography, "Dutch," Garry Wills' "Reagan's America: Innocents at Home" is a much more successful look at the institutions and country that shaped the 40th President.

With his usual incisive analysis and beautiful use of the English language, Wills does what Morris found impossible: the discovery of Reagan's soul.

To Wills, Reagan is the logical product of the American heartland and of the institutions of the heartland: community service (he was a lifeguard first), small town media (he was a Des Moines, IA, radio announcer). Reagan is also shaped by the institutions of coastal America that are marketed to the heartland: movies and big business (when Reagan made the final turn toward conservatism, he was the national spokesman for General Electric). Finally, Reagan is also the product of a dysfunctional family, with some of the same logical results: a withholding from others, a love of the abstract and of fantasy.

At the end of Wills' study, the reader gains a clear impression of the forces that created Ronald Reagan and bonded him to the American people. It is true that Reagan, as Morris argues, is enigmatic. But he is not impossible to begin to understand. Wills is the essential guide to the Reagan who was fully formed long before he reached the White House.