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From my colleague, Lexington Green at Chicago Boyz:

Best Books About Reagan

ChicagoBoyz will be hosting a roundtable discussion to celebrate the centenary of the birth of President Reagan, the week of February 6th 2011.

In the meantime I would like to get the views of our contributors and readers on what are the best books about Reagan, the Reagan presidency, the Reagan era. Please leave comments with your favorites.

I note that President Obama was recently reading Lou Cannon’s book The Role of a Lifetime, which is supposed to be very good.

I have read and enjoyed several books about Mr. Reagan, his presidency and his era. I will restrict myself to one favorite. If I had to pick one, I would give the palm to Peggy Noonan’s book What I Saw at the Revolution. Used copies are available for a penny. This book captures the impact Mr. Reagan had on our national morale, which is not always captured in other writings about him. I say this despite still being mad at Ms. Noonan about her unforgivably uncritical response to Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

I am currently reading John O’Sullivan’s book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. I am about one third done with it and it is excellent.

As I said in the comments section at Chicago Boyz, I concur that Cannon’s The Role of A Lifetime and Noonan are the place to start.

There was a prolific outpouring of memoirs by former members of the Reagan administration in the years during and after his time as president. I think we can even divide the lit into books about (or by, at least nominally) Ronald Reagan and those about his administration.

Here are some of my recs….

On Ronald Reagan:

An American Life: The Autobiography

Reagan: In His Own Hand

The Reagan Diaries

I like starting a subject by looking closely at what they had to say for themselves. Reagan’s diaries and private correspondence put the lie to the “amiable dunce” smear made by Clark Clifford (a decidedly nasty-edged, lawyer-courtier of Democratic presidents who ended his own long public career exposed as a corrupt dotard, thus proving George C. Marshall’s ability to size up a man’s character was inerrant).

On the Reagan Administration:

Inside The National Security Council by Constantine Menges

Unfortunately, I believe this one is out of print. Dr. “Constant Menace” details the intrigue at the NSC and State by officials who were less than committed to Reagan’s foreign policy initiatives, in particular the Contras and SDI. Menges, the late brilliant, often insufferable, old-style neoconservative gets a thumbs up from me for his capacity to infuriate State Department officials and his geostrategically incompetent and socially inept boss, NSC Adviser Col. Bud McFarlane.

Casey by Joseph Persico

Liberal biographer Joe Persico paints a complicated but at times hagiographic picture of his close friend, CIA spymaster and Reagan political adviser, William Casey. Strong emphasis on Casey’s crusade against the USSR, his unprecedented role for a CIA chief in foreign policy and the ideological struggle over the control over Reagan’s foreign policy. I have a great deal of admiration for Bill Casey and wish someone like him were running the IC today. We’d all be a lot better off.

The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed by David Stockman

The mendacious, arrogant and disloyal ex-Congressman David Stockman nevertheless manages to have an array of interesting, insightful, amusing, if unflattering, anecdotes and opinions about key domestic policy players in the early Reagan White House and in the Democratic leadership in Congress, whom Stockman called “the politburo of the welfare state”. While it was Stockman who failed Reagan rather than the reverse, this book is the most interesting memoir by far of the “dissenters” who left the administration under a cloud.

Turmoil & Triumph by George Schultz

This is not an interesting memoir. It is a ponderous, dull tome, which is surprising given Shultz’s critically acclaimed intellect and forceful persona. The reason for inclusion here is that Schultz obviously felt a duty to “set the record straight” about his battles over foreign policy with Cap Weinberger, Bill Casey and several NSC advisers and his memoir contains a wealth of minute detail about US foreign policy and national security. An invaluable resource.

What books on or about Ronald Reagan would you suggest?

Saw a number of interesting posts on this “best book”  theme, starting with Cameron Schaefer and Lexington Green and Cameron challenged me to make a comment in this regard.

I am reading two excellent books right now, The Human Face of War by Col. Jim Storr and The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire by Edward Luttwak, but as these are unfinished, they are out of the running. So are any books that are fiction, as I am poorly qualified to evaluate books purely upon their literary merit alone. I leave that to the English majors.

As my criteria for “best” will be the book with “most profound idea” then….the winner is…..The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. As I wrote recently:

A superb academic book, previously featured and reviewed in the blogosphere by John Robb and Joseph Fouche, The Collapse of Complex Societies embarks upon a critical examination and partial de-bunking of theories that purport to explain the “sudden” fall of great empires, such as Rome or the vanishing of the Mayans. With caveats, Tainter settles on declining marginal returns from increasing societal investment in complexity as a rough proximate cause capable of subsuming a ” significant range of human behavior, and a number of social theories” under it’s rubric. Highly recommended.

What was your favorite book?

After an extended hiatus, Summer Series 2010: Reviewing the Books! re-starts……

Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism by Michael Burleigh

British historian Michael Burleigh brings the same kind of unsparingly brutal prose to the history of terrorism that he previously delivered on National Socialism in his acclaimed, The Third Reich: A New History. There is a wealth of detail about terrorists, their casual atrocities and the warped morality that terrorists habitually employ to rationalize their crimes; a nihilistic mentalite shared with their intellectual groupies in universities and political law firms that will shock and inform the reader. The scattered nature of the case studies that comprise modern terrorism though, makes Blood and Rage more of a kaleidescope than microscope.

Burleigh set out to chronicle a comprehensive examination of the evolution of terrorism in the last two centuries. There are Feinians and radicalized Russian Narodniks, murderous FLN Algerians and their pied noir OAS blood enemies, Irgun gunmen and Black September, ETA, IRA and Baader-Meinhoff gangsters consorting with Palestinian radicals and Herbert Marcuse. Burleigh dissects the psychopathology of ultraviolent degenerates like Hugh “Lenny” Murphy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Andreas Baader. Terrorists, statistically speaking, are generally not madmen in a clinical sense, but Burleigh records a noteworthy exception regarding Germany’s Baader-Meinhoff Gang:

….With their numbers by now reduced to about a dozen people, the group was desperate for new recruits. Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. The mad. A radical psychiatrist at Heidelberg University, influenced by the anti-psychiatry of R.D. Laing and the anti-institutionalisation theories of Franco Basaglia, had formed a socialist collective among the mainly student clientele he was treating for various mental disturbances common to that age cohort including depression, paranoia and mild schizophrenia. In early 1971 Baader and Ensslin visited Heidelberg where they met some of the radicalized patients. In the following years, about twelve of the latter, including Gerhard Muller, Siegfried Hausner, Sieglinde Hofmann, Lutz Taufner and others became the second generation of RAF terrorists, initially under the slogan “Crazies to Arms”.

Blood and Rage makes for a grim read, with the recurring pattern of terrorism and counterterrorist response erupting to demoralize societies until the terrorists in question are either dead, imprisoned or mellowed by paunchy middle-age and political irrelevance as the times pass their maniacal political passions by. Only in a few instances, notably South Africa and Northern Ireland are political settlements a more feasible option than methodical police and intelligence work followed by tough-minded prosecution and a steely societal rejection of grandiose moral claims of terrorists and their fellow-travelling left-wing lawyer-advocates. Burleigh also makes clear his disdain for militarized CT and multiculturalist enablement alike.

The weakness of Blood and Rage, unlike some of Burleigh’s other works, is a lack of a strong analytical theme, focus or grand theory to explain and unite the relentless and gory march of geographically diverse case studies in terrorism, though an intelligent reader should be able to discern patterns present well enough for themselves. Given Burleigh’s stature as a scholar, one can envision him having taken the ball further down field for a deeper level of analysis of terrorism as a societal phenomena. Burleigh would probably reply that such is not the proper job of a historian, which while true enough, still leaves me wishing he had.

As a popular history, Blood and Rage makes a page turner out of rancorous destruction.

My friend, Steve Pressfield, is one high profile author unafraid to embrace the digital revolution:

THE WAR OF ART eBOOK FOR $1.99

One of the mantras of Writing Wednesdays is the ongoing effort to think like a professional, work like a professional, be a professional. But sometimes it’s not so bad to be a lucky amateur either–as long as you act like a pro and take advantage of luck.

To wit, here’s a serendipitous tale from a couple of weeks ago.

I had just received the umpteenth note–this time via Facebook–from a frustrated reader who was trying to order the Kindle eBook of The War of Art. (The Amazon page has been crashing regularly since it first went up.)  “Why,” the reader wanted to know, “does Amazon keep saying there’s no such book? And why can’t my wife get The War of Art for her iPad?”

I responded on Facebook by apologizing for the mess and explaining the various tech and contractual problems. To my surprise, I got a message right away from a third party, who happened to have spotted the exchange. His name is Michael Ashley and he wrote back: “I’ve got a new company and I can fix this whole snafu for you.”

A week later we were in business. Michael’s company is called FastPencil; he’s the Chief Technical Officer, which I guess means Main Computer Geek–although Michael clearly exceeded his job description by being a pro and reaching out to me, whom he didn’t know from Adam. It worked! We talked on the phone with his team and soon had all kinds of fresh solutions and expanded ways for readers to get The War of Art and, hopefully in the future, all my other books. 

FastPencil has set up The War of Art so the book can be ordered for Kindle or Ipad, Nook, SONY and a bunch of other eBook platforms.

The price will be $9.99 once all systems are fully up, but for two days next week–September 8th and 9th–the book can be ordered from this site for $1.99.  I’ll do a post on that Wednesday with a widget that will make it all happen with a couple of clicks.

FastPencil is an interesting company. It’s fun to work with people who are young and hungry, who are at the tech cutting edge and who have big plans and dreams.  FastPencil does hardback, paperback and on-demand publishing too; they’re in the process of corraling a stable of writers right now for a new imprint they call Premiere.  If you’re a writer and you’re struggling with the same eBook problems I was, shoot an e-mail to Michael Ashley–mashley@fastpencil.com–or Steve Wilson– swilson@fastpencilcom. Michael is the CTO, as I said, and Steve is the CEO/Prez. They’re hungry!

Read the rest here.

Outside of the obvious classics, there’s a handful of books I regularly recommend to friends and students, one of which is Steve’s  The War of Art, which should be on the shelf of every aspiring writer. $ 1.99 is a steal.

Fastpencil intrigues me.

Courtesy review copies that arrived this week from authors and publishers. Sweet!

Magic and Mayhem: The Delusions of American Foreign Policy From Korea to Afghanistan by Derek Leebaert

Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan by Anthony Shaffer

Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior by Hugh Shelton

Soft Spots: A Marine’s Memoir of Combat and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by Clint van Winkle

I really enjoyed Leebaert’s early Cold War history, The Fifty Year Wound and therefore, have high hopes for Magic and Mayhem.  By contrast, Operation Dark Heart has already been the subject of controversy when the Pentagon bought up the entire first edition in order to wheedle an idiosyncratic list of redactions from the publisher for the second edition.

A note to readers, General Shelton, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and LTC Anthony Shaffer are both associated with the new military affairs and history site, Command Posts.

In addition to review copies, I shelled out some hard-earned cash for a few other titles:

The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History  by James J. O’Donnell

Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West by Anthony Pagden

The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall by Christopher Hibbert

What new books have you just picked up?