Max Boot — Why Ronald Reagan Wanted to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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From best-selling biographer Max Boot comes this revelatory portrait, a decade in the making, of the actor-turned-politician whose telegenic leadership ushered in a transformative conservative era in American politics. Despite his fame as a Hollywood star and television host, Reagan remained a man of profound contradictions, even to those closest to him. Never resorting to either hagiography or hit job, Reagan: His Life and Legend charts his epic journey from Depression-era America to “Morning in America.” Providing fresh insight into “trickle-down economics,” the Cold War’s end, the Iran-Contra affair, and so much more, this definitive biography is as compelling a presidential biography as any in recent decades.

Max Boot is a Russia-born naturalized American historian and foreign-policy analyst and a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has worked as a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, and the Christian Science Monitor, and is now a regular columnist for the Washington Post. His New York Times bestseller, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. He is also the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today, Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, and, controversially, of The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right. His new book is Reagan: His Life and Legend.

Shermer and Boot discuss:

• What led him to undertake this biography
• How to write a biography—with sources, and which to consider as reliable
• Early influences on Reagan’s life: family, Midwestern upbringing, education, teachers, mentors, experiences.
• Relative influence of genes, environment, and luck.
• The Lifeguard
• Depression economics influences
• Reagan’s attitudes and beliefs on social issues reflecting those of his generation
• Radio and Acting
• President of the Screen Actor’s Guild and his purported role in preventing a Communist takeover of Hollywood.
• GE pitch man
• A groundbreaking look at why Reagan left the Democratic Party, showing his reliance on conspiracy-mongering tracts, fake quotes, and statistics—and the influence of both the FBI and General Electric.
• Revelations about the role of “white backlash” politics in Reagan’s rise.
• California governor
• 1968 Presidential campaign
• 1976 Presidential campaign
• Goldwater and the state of the Republican Party when Reagan entered politics
• New evidence about the “October Surprise” and the involvement of Reagan’s aides in political skullduggery prior to the 1980 election
• Arthur Laffer and Trickledown economics
• Budget deficit
• AIDS epidemic
• Iran-Contra
• Abortion
• “Evil Empire”
• Gorbachev Geneva summit
• Gorbachev Reykjavik summit
• Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI/Star Wars)
• Reagan on nuclear weapons
• Rancho del Cielo
• An examination of how Reagan was both different from—and similar to—Donald Trump
• Hotspots: N Korea, Iran, Israel, China.

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