Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday February 15, 2011
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MY FATHER AT 100: A Memoir
Ron Reagan
Viking
ISBN 978-0670022595
228 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Doug Wead
Two Reagan books, by two Reagan sons, arriving in bookstores at the same time? You just had to know there would be fireworks.
"My Father at 100," written by Ron Reagan, may be the most intimate and revealing work yet about the former president. Second only to the former first lady in his nearness to the subject, son Ron playfully relives his impish, childish provocations of his famous father: "Nobody can muddy a hero's cape as casually as an insolent teenager." The resulting reactions are lively, driving the guileless, calm father to the verge of fisticuffs. Elsewhere Ron Reagan captures his father's hapless intellectual attempt to justify the early American war against the Indians.
Ron Reagan's narrative, focusing mainly on the president's early years in life, starts slow and is sometimes cumbersome. But the book grows on you, page by page, or I should say that Ron's sarcasm and ability to invoke nostalgia grow on you, and they eventually seduce. You'll want to stay with this story because it finishes with a flourish, offering a first-person view of some of the most dramatic moments in the life of our 40th president. Here is information that historians will find nowhere else.
The chaotic scene at George Washington University Hospital, just after the 1981 assassination attempt, is an example. At the time, carefully crafted White House stories, replete with one-liners, reassured the public, but the view from a son is altogether different. At one point a panicky President Reagan writes a short note: "I CAN'T BREATHE!" Ron leans over the bed. "It's OK, Dad. You're going to be OK. You've got a tube in your throat. It's like scuba diving. Just let the machine breathe for you."
Ideologues who have been angered by potshots coming from his adopted half brother, Michael, will be surprised by the deep love the liberal son had for his conservative father. And even now, he respects the late president's political views and decides, in this book, at least, to let old arguments lie. "I argued plenty with my father while he was alive. I have no intention of picking a fight with him now that he is gone and can't defend himself."
Meanwhile, "The New Reagan Revolution," by Michael Reagan, is the quintessential version of "what would Reagan do." It offers a behind-the-scenes, first-person account of Ronald Reagan's dramatic rise to power, loaded with personal vignettes.
Michael Reagan attempts, rather successfully, to fit today's issues into the political template of yesterday's conservative leader, but his greater focus is on the basics, the principles that guided the president, like fixed stars in the firmament.
Michael writes that no new issues or events make those basics any less true or relevant today.
Grief counselors warn that survivors of the death of a parent will often turn on each other during the grieving process. And the arrival of these two books, from a liberal Reagan and a conservative one, both on book tours at the same time, has led to a public spat. Michael is appalled at Ron's suggestion that their father's Alzheimer's may have been affecting him even while he served as president. He has been wondering aloud what Nancy, Ron's mother, is thinking. This attempt to pit the mother against the son reveals the fragility in this family; one doubts that it would have happened if the father's image as a capable leader were not at stake.
Ron, for his part, flaunts his intimacy with his dad. "Unlike my siblings -- taking their memoirs at face value -- I never felt particularly deprived of my father's company," he writes. Michael counters with a story of a family dinner, when the president put his hand on Michael's and said that he hoped someday Ron would become a Christian "like you and me."
Michael tells of being thrown by his father into a swimming pool to learn how to swim -- or sink -- on his own. Great tactic, Michael concludes, but one has to wonder. And Ron constantly tries to bridge the gulf between his father and the left by describing gently how his father had "difficulty extending his sympathies to abstract classes of people. An obliviousness that was, understandably, taken for callousness."
Most sons are on a lifelong journey in search of the approval of their father. Long after those fathers are gone, the journey continues. And sometimes that process becomes more creative when the father is not there to contradict the conclusions. The only thing different about the process in this family is that the father is a national icon. A process that is normally dignified by privacy is now open to the world. The result? Two books, two views, with much more in common than either author might imagine.
Doug Wead is an author and historian who served in the White House of George H. W. Bush. He is currently writing the last volume in his trilogy about the American presidency.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE NEW REAGAN REVOLUTION: How Ronald Reagan's Principles Can Restore America's Greatness 
Michael Reagan with Jim Denney
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's
ISBN 978-0312644543
369 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Doug Wead
Two Reagan books, by two Reagan sons, arriving in bookstores at the same time? You just had to know there would be fireworks.
"My Father at 100," written by Ron Reagan, may be the most intimate and revealing work yet about the former president. Second only to the former first lady in his nearness to the subject, son Ron playfully relives his impish, childish provocations of his famous father: "Nobody can muddy a hero's cape as casually as an insolent teenager." The resulting reactions are lively, driving the guileless, calm father to the verge of fisticuffs. Elsewhere Ron Reagan captures his father's hapless intellectual attempt to justify the early American war against the Indians.
Ron Reagan's narrative, focusing mainly on the president's early years in life, starts slow and is sometimes cumbersome. But the book grows on you, page by page, or I should say that Ron's sarcasm and ability to invoke nostalgia grow on you, and they eventually seduce. You'll want to stay with this story because it finishes with a flourish, offering a first-person view of some of the most dramatic moments in the life of our 40th president. Here is information that historians will find nowhere else.
The chaotic scene at George Washington University Hospital, just after the 1981 assassination attempt, is an example. At the time, carefully crafted White House stories, replete with one-liners, reassured the public, but the view from a son is altogether different. At one point a panicky President Reagan writes a short note: "I CAN'T BREATHE!" Ron leans over the bed. "It's OK, Dad. You're going to be OK. You've got a tube in your throat. It's like scuba diving. Just let the machine breathe for you."
Ideologues who have been angered by potshots coming from his adopted half brother, Michael, will be surprised by the deep love the liberal son had for his conservative father. And even now, he respects the late president's political views and decides, in this book, at least, to let old arguments lie. "I argued plenty with my father while he was alive. I have no intention of picking a fight with him now that he is gone and can't defend himself."
Meanwhile, "The New Reagan Revolution," by Michael Reagan, is the quintessential version of "what would Reagan do." It offers a behind-the-scenes, first-person account of Ronald Reagan's dramatic rise to power, loaded with personal vignettes.
Michael Reagan attempts, rather successfully, to fit today's issues into the political template of yesterday's conservative leader, but his greater focus is on the basics, the principles that guided the president, like fixed stars in the firmament.
Michael writes that no new issues or events make those basics any less true or relevant today.
Grief counselors warn that survivors of the death of a parent will often turn on each other during the grieving process. And the arrival of these two books, from a liberal Reagan and a conservative one, both on book tours at the same time, has led to a public spat. Michael is appalled at Ron's suggestion that their father's Alzheimer's may have been affecting him even while he served as president. He has been wondering aloud what Nancy, Ron's mother, is thinking. This attempt to pit the mother against the son reveals the fragility in this family; one doubts that it would have happened if the father's image as a capable leader were not at stake.
Ron, for his part, flaunts his intimacy with his dad. "Unlike my siblings -- taking their memoirs at face value -- I never felt particularly deprived of my father's company," he writes. Michael counters with a story of a family dinner, when the president put his hand on Michael's and said that he hoped someday Ron would become a Christian "like you and me."
Michael tells of being thrown by his father into a swimming pool to learn how to swim -- or sink -- on his own. Great tactic, Michael concludes, but one has to wonder. And Ron constantly tries to bridge the gulf between his father and the left by describing gently how his father had "difficulty extending his sympathies to abstract classes of people. An obliviousness that was, understandably, taken for callousness."
Most sons are on a lifelong journey in search of the approval of their father. Long after those fathers are gone, the journey continues. And sometimes that process becomes more creative when the father is not there to contradict the conclusions. The only thing different about the process in this family is that the father is a national icon. A process that is normally dignified by privacy is now open to the world. The result? Two books, two views, with much more in common than either author might imagine.
Doug Wead is an author and historian who served in the White House of George H. W. Bush. He is currently writing the last volume in his trilogy about the American presidency.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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PROPHETS OF WAR: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex
William D. Hartung
Nation
ISBN 978-1568584201
296 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Josiah Bunting III
The history of the Victorian age, wrote Lytton Strachey, can never be written: We know too much about it. The wise historian ought rather to examine specimens characteristic of an age and its culture. For example, if a 22nd-century citizen were to puzzle over the phrase "military-industrial complex," which recurs in virtually all political and military histories of the 20th and early 21st centuries, he would be well-advised to examine one of the largest and most powerful participants in this "complex," Lockheed Martin, subject of William Hartung's careful, meticulously documented book "Prophets of War."
President Dwight Eisenhower, not one celebrated for memorable phrases, coined this one. It refers, of course, to the production of armaments -- missiles, drones, submarines, etc. -- regardless of whether they may be needed. Those who favor their production are likely to do so for reasons that may or may not have anything to do with their efficacy. And, as Eisenhower recognized, challenging any of these new weapons systems is guaranteed to stir rancorous debate. No subject lends itself more easily to demagoguery.
In "Prophets of War," Hartung examines several of Lockheed Martin's major projects and how the company has -- usually -- succeeded in persuading various agencies to fund them. Only rarely has the company been thwarted in getting what it wants, most recently in its failure to persuade the Senate to continue support of the F-22 Raptor fighter. In 1999 the "plan was to buy 339 planes for a projected cost of over $62 billion -- up from an initial proposal to buy 750 planes for a total price of $25 billion."
Hartung explores the escalation of this project. He shows how 9/11 boosted military spending and was the salvation of many prospective military systems. Overnight the temper of congressional debates changed. "To give a sense of the magnitude of the shift, the increase in American military spending from 2001 through 2003 was more than the entire military budget of most countries, including major powers like the United Kingdom and China. In this new climate, no major weapon system was likely to be cut, no matter how irrelevant it may have been to fighting Al Qaeda." Jobs were paramount, particularly in congressional districts represented by powerful members, who, unhinged from their regular affiliations and ideologies, made gross arguments on behalf of weapons systems they would ordinarily have opposed.
The phrase "military-industrial complex" has stuck. Eisenhower himself remains indistinct in the public memory, framed at different times in his life by the photographer Richard Avedon as an amiable, distrait old duffer and by biographers who portray him as a clever politician. His campaigns and policies represented a form of Republicanism no longer recognizable to his successors:
There was a fierce independent streak in him, as James Ledbetter demonstrates in "Unwarranted Influence."
He had always been something of a stealth thinker, even in the army, when he kept his own counsel on opinions that his superiors might have regarded as unorthodox.
Few commentators on the 34th president's mind and methods have more rigorously considered the evolution of Eisenhower's preoccupations than Ledbetter has.
The author describes Eisenhower's unlikely relationship with Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, who passionately opposed a defense policy founded on the threat of nuclear war. "The two men maintained a serious and respectful, if occasionally contentious, correspondence," Ledbetter writes. In today's politically polarized climate, "the idea of a meaningful connection between a leftist advocate of nuclear disarmament and a Republican military president might seem preposterous," the author adds, but it was Eisenhower, after all, who told Secretary of War Henry Stimson that he feared that use of the atomic bomb could erode America's moral authority.
Yet he had agreed to the new strategic rationale of the mid 1950s: a lower-cost, more efficient military -- bolstered by the bomb -- that could withstand a $5-billion cut in the 1955 defense budget. The threat of "massive retaliation" would discourage communist military ventures that threatened American interests, and would allow a cut of half-a-million troops. Soon after Stalin's death, however, when the Soviet leadership talked of "peaceful coexistence," Eisenhower denounced the wasteful, protracted costs of the Cold War to a national audience: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." And he raged against a Defense Department culture that imputed the basest motives to anyone who disagreed with the military establishment. No one, it seemed to Eisenhower, the retired five-star general, was capable of independent, disinterested consideration of proposed weapons. In more recent days, Hartung writes, the effort to save the Raptor, which proved ultimately unsuccessful, verged, according to a former congressional staffer, on "an ugly food fight."
Eisenhower's advice to his countrymen shortly before leaving the White House in 1961 seems just as relevant today: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Josiah Bunting III is president of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in New York.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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CALL ME IRRESISTIBLE
Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Morrow
ISBN 978-0061351525
387 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Claudia Deane
Showing up for your best friend's wedding not having met her groom: awkward. Helping your best friend jilt her groom at the altar: very awkward. Particularly when the intended is the divine Ted Beaudine, flower of Wynette, Tex., boy genius, self-made millionaire and son of a legendary golfer and his TV star wife.
In "Call Me Irresistible," the prolific Susan Elizabeth Phillips brings together the offspring of three couples from her previous best-selling novels to play out a love triangle against a dusty Hill Country background. Her wedding-crusher bridesmaid is Meg Koranda, the scion of a movie star and an uber-model. Thing is, at 30, this pampered child of Hollywood has spent a decade aimlessly traveling the world, and now her parents have stopped helping with the cash-y, change-y thing.
Bottom line: Having saved her best friend from marrying the wrong guy, Meg finds herself broke and stuck in the midst of some mighty angry Texans who view her as "the Voldemort of Wynette." In particular, she's stuck in the sights of sulky Ted, who everyone else seems to think walks on water. Phillips' ongoing joke about Ted being like Jesus -- "except rich and sexy" -- inspires some of the biggest laughs in the book. At one point Meg "grabbed his hands and stared at his palms. 'Oh, my God. Stigmata.' He snatched them away. 'A marking-pen accident.'"
Why are we such suckers for romantic comedies that start with the inevitable lovers hurling barbs? You won't be surprised to hear that even though Meg and Ted ostensibly can't stand each other, they wind up sparking a passionate physical affair. Hey, a nonstop volley of one-liners and steamy action in an old Ford truck ... best of both worlds!
Even if you're not a self-proclaimed "SEPpie" -- one of Phillips' die-hard romance readers -- "Call Me Irresistible" is just a bit irresistible. It's satisfyingly mindless and mirth-inducing without being in the least moronic. Yes, you know the girl will get the guy. Yes, the happy ending overkills on the happy. But Phillips' lead female character is strong, complicated and quick to sass even as she goes about discovering her own potential. "How could Ted and I have a future?" Meg asks. "He's the Lamb of God, and I'm the town bad girl." Turns out all things are possible with Him.
Claudia Deane is a writer in Silver Spring, Md.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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