The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980

by Steven F. Hayward

The Age of Reagan brings to life the tumultuous decade and a half that preceded Ronald Reagan's ascent to the White House. Based on scores of interviews and years of research, Steven F. Hayward takes us on an engrossing journey through the most politically divisive years the United States has had to endure since the decade before the Civil War. Overseas, we were embroiled in a war we couldn't win; at home our streets had become battlefields; and in Washington, the old liberal order was collapsing under the weight of a long string of failed policies. "It seemed that an era of American optimism and progress had come to a close," Hayward writes. "The concatenation of Vietnam, Watergate, the recurrent energy crisis, the swooning economy, the increasingly disorderly world scene, and the failed presidencies associated with these events robbed Americans of their native optimism for the future."
Meanwhile, from out of the West arose a new conservative movement led by Ronald Reagan, a one-time Hollywood actor whose speech in 1964 in support of the doomed candidacy of Barry Goldwater not only electrified a national television audience but also created a political star who would change the course of history.
With meticulous detail, Hayward captures an America at war with itself—and an era whose reverberations we feel to this very day. He brings new insight into the profound failure of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the oddly liberal nature of Richard Nixon's administration, the significance of Reagan's years as California's governor, and the sudden-death drama of his near defeat of Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primary, the listlessness of Jimmy Carter's leadership, and the political earthquake that was Reagan's victorious presidential campaign in 1980.
Provocative, authoritative, and majestic in scope, The Age of Reagan is an unforgettable account of the rebirth and triumph of the American spirit.

Genres: History, Politics, Biography, Presidents, American History, Nonfiction, American

811 pages, Hardcover

Published August 23, 2001

Reviews

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read The Age of Reagan, the first volume of a massive two-volume biography, because I wanted to learn more about Ronald Reagan. I knew something about Reagan’s presidency, having been an adult for part of it, and that Reagan had been Governor of California, a popular speaker and commentator, head of the Screen Actors Guild, and an actor himself. But I knew very little about how Reagan came to be President. This book filled in many of the gaps. However, as the author, Steven Hayward, makes clear up front, it is a book not about Reagan, but the Age of Reagan. That is, it covers American political life from 1964 to 1980, with Reagan as a key character, but it is not really a biography of Reagan, at least in the traditional sense.

What I took most of all from this book is that everything old is new again. Or rather, much of what is old is new again. The same political behaviors we often treat as new developments are on full display, as are divisions in American society perhaps exceeding what we have today (although arguably different in quality). That doesn’t necessarily mean we should have a false sense of confidence that everything is hunky-dory with us today, but it does mean we should not reflexively assume that things now are the worst they’ve ever been.

Hayward is a Reagan partisan, as he freely admits in his introduction, though this book is not a polemic and it strives to be even-handed. The book is straightforward and chronological in structure. It opens with Lyndon Johnson’s defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and with Reagan’s classic speech in support of Goldwater, A Time for Choosing. Hayward then follows the development of the Johnson administration, in its enormous expansion of domestic spending and legislation at the same time Johnson expanded the Vietnam War. It is hard for us to conceive this time, a time when Americans largely trusted government; when no problem, domestic or military seemed beyond the reach of social engineering and scientific application of supposed newly discovered principles of human action; and when American wealth and power seemed certain to expand far into the distant future. But, of course, the resulting semi-consensus (which, perhaps, should not be overstated) quickly fractured.

Thus, Hayward identifies 1964 as the apogee of liberalism. In 2001, when this book was published, that was a plausible argument, but after eight years of Barack Obama, and then Hillary Clinton coming close to winning the White House, the argument is at least more complex. But back to The Age of Reagan. As Johnson’s first elected term came to a close, campuses and cities descended into violence (even though only a tiny minority of citizens supported unrest in either place, and the anti-war movement was always very unpopular, a fact ignored by today’s aged hippies reliving their supposed glory days). Meanwhile, Reagan began his rise by winning the race for California governor in 1966. He was quite successful as governor, but the country continued to spin in a centrifuge, with Vietnam, economic decay, civil unrest, and rising crime dominating the thoughts of Americans. The book traces all this, month by month, through the election of Nixon in 1968.

Hayward is clear-eyed about Nixon’s good and bad traits, but he notes (shades of current events) “Quite aside from the personal animosity Nixon generated, there was also an undercurrent that Nixon’s election was a fluke, that his administration was somehow illegitimate, because, after all, the Democrats are the natural ruling party.” Nixon, of course, was no conservative, as Hayward also covers. Among other sins, he hugely expanded government spending on dubious programs such as the “Family Assistance Plan,” which, when opposed by conservatives, one Nixon aide suggested (presumably tongue-in-cheek) be renamed the “Christian Working Man’s Anti-Communist National Defense Rivers and Harbors Act of 1969”—though given such more recent acronym abominations as the “PATRIOT” Act, we shouldn’t laugh too hard. Hayward proceeds to cover Nixon in detail, both domestically and with respect to foreign policy.

The Age of Reagan brings home how divided the late 1960s and 1970s were, with such low points as Supreme Court Justice Douglas, in 1970, endorsing violence “when grievances pile high” as “the only effective response.” He was attacked at length for this on the House floor by Republican Minority Leader Gerald Ford, as well as by many others not seduced by the era’s frequent flavor of morally justified leftist violence. It is a fair question whether our differences are really greater today, where, yes, the Left is again using violence to try to impose its will, but with much less organization and rigor. The young men, white and black, who organized violence on the Left fifty years ago were hard men, willing to take real risks, and clear-eyed, even if seduced by bogus ideologies. Today’s violence is driven by soft campus leftists, effeminate men and masculine women, children of incredible privilege, mostly given unearned rewards all their lives. If smacked in the face, as they should be, they would run screaming back to their mommies—but they never risk that, because they confine their violence to safe zones and rely on the knowledge that not only do all their teachers and school administrators support them, but that there will be no penalty if they riot, shut down opposition speech, or otherwise behave badly. And they are the opposite of clear-eyed, for they lack all coherent thinking, since never in their lives have they been required to think or debate other than by chanting idiocies. They lack even a coherent ideology, being seduced not by Communism or its variants but by whatever the latest identity politics or denial of reality du jour is. Such people are not really comparable to the Left of the late 1960s; they would dissipate like mist in the sun in any real conflict. Nor is their power growing; they are simply not relevant, except as a distraction, and with any luck, at a near-future campus riot against conservative speech, a bunch of Trump-supporting ironworkers with baseball bats will break some bones, thus solving the problem.

Hayward then turns back to Reagan as California governor. Various problems confronted Reagan, including student unrest fomented by small groups of radicals. Reagan’s attitude toward violent and disruptive campus protests was exemplified by his comment about New Left campus tactics in 1970: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” (He would have supported the baseball bats.) Of the student radicals, Reagan followed the course suggested by Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, “A confident administration bent on defending intellectual values, and consequently determined to destroy the power of its essentially anti-intellectual adversary, can generally win.” This is what happened, and with these and other successes under his belt, Reagan was easily re-elected as governor in 1970.

The book then follows Nixon’s 1972 re-election, Watergate and its aftermath. This discussion contains interesting facts conveniently thrown down the memory hole by the Left, including that George Wallace ran as a Democrat for President and might well have won the 1972 nomination, if he had not been shot. Hayward notes how Nixon was frustrated by the bureaucracy, which by 1972 was already wholly a partisan instrument of the Democratic Party, a situation infinitely worse today, due to the massively greater power and reach of the federal administrative state, and one which Trump may very well be unable to overcome any more than Nixon did. The book also covers the various troubles of the 1970s; détente (with much discussion of Henry Kissinger); the brief and ineffective administration of Gerald Ford; the rise of Jimmy Carter (more ruthless than he is given credit for); Carter’s even-more-ineffective Presidency; and Reagan’s unsuccessful attempt to obtain the 1976 Republican nomination.

Finally, Hayward covers Reagan’s successful run for the 1980 Republican nomination, and his defeat of Jimmy Carter. As with his earlier run against Jerry Brown, Reagan’s opponents both underestimated him and preferred to run against him rather than more “moderate” candidates, thinking they could paint Reagan as an extremist. And they did their best to so paint him—as a Newsweek writer said after the 1980 Republican convention, “The Reaganites on the floor were exactly those who in Germany gave the Nazis their main strength and who in France collaborated with them and sustained Vichy.” Some things never change, as we can see in 2017. But, as they say, if everybody is Hitler, nobody is Hitler, so such attacks have lost much of their impact. And, of course, they did not prevent Reagan from being (narrowly) elected in 1980, nor are they likely to have much impact nowadays, other than further marginalizing the Democratic Party.

One theme of Hayward’s book is how often people, opponents as well as friends, underestimated Reagan. Famously opaque and with extremely few close friends, though friendly to nearly everyone, people often thought Reagan lacked depth or subtlety. Hayward repeatedly demonstrates the opposite, from Reagan’s outstanding extemporaneous speaking ability to his deliberate mispronunciation of the word “government” as “guv-mint,” meant to show contempt but often interpreted as simplemindedness. When considering his first run for California governor, for example, rather than traveling the state giving set speeches, Reagan “chose to give short speeches [more than 150 of them], followed by questions and answers from the audience. This helped dispel the view that he was ‘merely an actor’ reciting lines.” This is nearly unimaginable in the modern day, where Obama was incapable of coherent speech without a teleprompter and Trump is just incapable of coherent speech. Neither could have survived even one freeform question-and-answer session where questions where not pre-screened and pre-selected—although Trump might at least force his way through it without stammering and saying something that revealed his true thoughts he was trying to conceal, as Obama so often did. Not to mention that as governor, Reagan held 409 press conferences, where he similarly answered unscripted and unscreened questions. But, of course, Reagan used false perceptions of himself to his own advantage.

Hayward also often notes that Reagan frequently told stories that were apocryphal or distorted. Of course, all politicians do that (witness Hillary Clinton’s serial lies, from being shot at in Bosnia to only using her illegal email server for personal email), so it’s not like Reagan is exceptional (although the usual suspects tried to paint him that way at the time). But as Hayward says, the difference with Reagan was that, unlike most politicians, his “whoppers were never about himself, but always about the deeper meaning of America, both what was right with America and what was wrong with America. That’s why he accuracy of his whoppers was always secondary to their teaching, which resonated deeply with Americans who had grown disaffected with the leadership of the nation.”

One conclusion that comes through clearly in this book is that every time one political party or faction is in power in America, they always make the mistake of concluding that their dominance is permanent, or at least likely to last for decades. In fairness, there is some precedent for this, in the dominance of the Republicans until Roosevelt, and of the Democrats from Roosevelt to Nixon. But for the past fifty years, not only has this been proven false, but it has extremely rapidly been proven false. Witness James Carville, in 2009, predicting forty years of nationwide Democratic dominance. By the same token, Republicans who think that recent Republican triumphs presage permanent re-alignment are unlikely to be correct. For confirmation, in fact, we have only to look at this book, written in 2001 and containing various statements that suggest the author believes conservatism will be ascendant in the United States for the foreseeable future.

Another fact that comes through clearly in the book is that the bitter hatred of the Left and the elites in general directed at conservatives hasn’t changed. For example, Jerry Brown (again now, governor of California), running against Reagan (and losing), proclaimed “[Reagan] is the spokesman for a harsh philosophy of doom and darkness.” Brown said Reagan was “an agent of white backlash” (to which Reagan wittily replied, “I’m the agent of a Brown backlash.” Brown further said that conservatives “are the shock troops of bigotry, echoes of Nazi Germany, echoes of another hate binge that began more than 30 years ago in a Munich beer hall.” This tactic of hyperbolic smears, and this type of phrasing, hasn’t changed in fifty years. Similarly, just as Trump was attacked because he was supposedly endorsed by the KKK, Reagan was attacked by the media and the Left (but I repeat myself) because he was endorsed by the John Birch Society. More skillful than Trump, Reagan merely said he welcomed support from anyone, but that their endorsement was simply proof that he had “persuaded them to accept my philosophy, not my accepting theirs.” While I think Reagan nostalgia among conservatives is a distraction and a waste of time, it certainly would be nice to have politicians who could spar as well and cleverly as Reagan could, rather than the ones we have now.

In any case, this book expanded my knowledge about the Age of Reagan, although as I say it didn’t tell me as much about Reagan himself as I would have liked. I’ll read the next volume, which presumably is all Reagan, all the time. But I certainly learned a lot from this volume, and it’s well-written and easy to read, despite its length—so if you have an interest in the period, I highly recommend it.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://bestpresidentialbios.com/2018...

Published in 2001, “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order (1964-1980)” is the first book in a two-volume series authored by Steven Hayward. Currently a senior resident scholar at UC Berkeley, Hayward was previously a Fellow at Ashland University’s Ashbrook Center and a Ronald Reagan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University. He is the author of six books including “Greatness: Reagan, Churchill, and the Making of Extraordinary Leaders.”

Describing itself as part biography, part narrative chronicle and part political analysis, this 717 page book is organized in an accessible and almost strictly chronological manner. Despite its intimidating size it quickly proves a fast-paced and often engrossing exploration of America’s cultural, economic and political currents from 1964 through Reagan’s election in 1980.

Reviewing the Vietnam war, LBJ’s “Great Society,” the civil rights movement, campus activism, Watergate and various economic crises, Hayward studies the decline of liberalism and the rise of the conservative movement which swept Reagan into national office. More broadly, the book serves as a refreshingly readable review of American history during the late 1960s and 1970s (though from a decidedly right-of-center perspective).

Given the author’s conservative bent, Reagan partisans will find much to like in this book…but during most of the narrative Reagan only appears intermittently. Not until the 1980 presidential campaign is underway does Reagan become the central focus of the book…at which point only about 100 pages remain. In a real sense, this book is as much about LBJ, Nixon, Ford and Carter as it is about Reagan. But there is never any doubt as to the intended star of the show.

Reagan’s relatively brief appearances during the first part of the book (involving, for example, his famous speech on Barry Goldwater’s behalf, his most consequential moments as governor of California and his efforts to secure the Republican nomination in 1968 and 1976) are well told but relatively unexceptional. Readers are likely to find more value in Hayward’s unique examination of Reagan’s actions and ascent against the backdrop of the social and political currents of the era.

But readers expecting a modern-day reconstruction of Arthur Schlesinger’s “The Age of Roosevelt” series will be disappointed. For better and for worse, Hayward is not in the same literary league as the stodgy Schlesinger. But if Hayward’s narrative is less nuanced and complex, it is also far more accessible – and, arguably, engaging. And where Schlesinger was an unabashed liberal, of course, Hayward’s politics lean decidedly in the opposite direction.

Overall, Steven Hayward’s “The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order” is a fast-paced and interesting review of the decade-and-a-half preceding Reagan’s election to the presidency. Fans of the 40th president are likely to appreciate the author’s perspectives and conclusions; others may find the analysis too asymmetric. But anyone seeking a comprehensive account of Ronald Reagan’s pre-presidency will need to look elsewhere, for however you choose to define this book…it is not a presidential biography.

Overall rating: “Unrated”as a biography

[Jacob Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most comprehensive works about the conditions of America that led to the election of Ronald Reagan. Places insight into the fact that the election of Reagan was a direct result of the blindness of government worship, and the failure of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford to respond to the desires of people to begin limiting the government. The character of Ronald Reagan and his optimism contrasts well to the background of the pervasive pessimism of the 60s-70s and helps us to understand why the nation would turn to Reagan for guidance.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tremendous amount of information was covered in 800 pages. I learned more from this book than from all previous books about the period. I would definitely recommend. The author has an excellent grasp of the subject matter.

[Dave Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980” is Steven Hayward’s first book in a two-volume study of Ronald Reagan. A west coast Straussian, Hayward is a Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University.

Hayward has produced a compelling account of the political, cultural, and economic currents that coalesced in the 1960s and 1970s, leading liberalism to its apogee and its eventual self-destruction. Thorough, yet fast-paced, Hayward’s tome performs a great service. The author regularly gives voice to several Johnson and Nixon’s functionaries who anticipated the multifarious crises yielded by haste and hubris.

Hayward deftly analyzes the deluded government decision making which deepened our involvement in Vietnam, Johnson’s assumptions for the “Great Society” along with his pusillanimous response to civil rights leaders and campus activists, the paranoia that enveloped the Nixon White House, the fecklessness of Ford and Carter, and the inexorable economic crises, produced by the exhausted Keynesian conventional wisdom, that accompanied each of these administration’s forays into macroeconomics.

As the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott averred, “To try to do something which is inherently impossible is always a corrupting enterprise.” In this light, the decline of the liberal project and the rise of Reagan seems nearly inevitable. While the author’s treatment of Reagan as a Goldwater factotum and as California governor is cursory, the contextual setting is clear. By 1980, America found itself enervated by sermons about limits and malaise. In short, the electorate was ready for Reagan—both the man and his ideas.

Hayward cogently sketches the differences in moral premises that contrasted Carter and Reagan's approach to arms control. Carter was informed by a Kantian outlook, one in which the purity of intention defines the validity of moral reasoning. Contrariwise, Reagan, like Hutcheson or Anscombe, was a consequentialist. Kant and Carter's deontology derive the basis of moral reasoning from the rightness or wrongness that inheres in the character of a behavior, rather than the outcomes of the conduct. Hence, for Carter practically all arms control measures were virtuous, for Reagan, empirical evidence was critical for policy validation.

Overall, Steven Hayward’s “The Age of Reagan” is an interesting retrospective of the period preceding Reagan’s election to the presidency. Many readers will appreciate the author’s sympathetic perspectives and conclusions about Reagan as candidate; others may find the analysis at variance with the largely negative contemporaneous accounts produced by media outlets. That said, readers seeking a comprehensive account of Ronald Reagan’s life in full will need to peruse other sources.

[Peter Horton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this one up in a free library after the election, where it seemed like perhaps another “order” had fallen (minorities like Team Blue) and I was intrigued by this book’s title.

Overall I enjoyed the book and it’s summary of a key period in American history. The author is definitely on the conservative side, so it was interesting to get that perspective on the 60s and 70s. My only gripe would be that the pace of the book felt slow towards its chronological end and its coverage of Reagan’s Presidential campaigns and Carter’s presidency.

Random takeaways:
- The author is a big fan of New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan of train hall fame and quotes him throughout, including this stumper: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
- A better understanding of Nixon, who Noam Chomsky had called the “last liberal president”
- How infrequent presidential debates were, including a 16 year break at one point
- Quaintness of some past political gaffes, including George Romney basically having to drop out in 1967 after saying he was “brainwashed” and Carter saying “Hubert Horatio Hornblower Humphrey”
- Jimmy Carter’s jogging habit while President, including a collapse in a 10k in Catocin, MD
- How close the 1980 election was, particularly down ballot despite Reagan’s massive EV win
- That Jimmy Carter had massive Evangelical support in 1976
- Parallels between Hubert Humphrey and Harris, who both ran on “politics of joy” as a slogan
- Amazement at old Dem House and Senate majorities

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating and in-depth look at the rise of conservatism in the United States from the defeat of Goldwater to the rise of Reagan. Hayward covers the political and social history of the country from roughly 1964 with Goldwater’s defeat at the hand of Johnson to Reagan’s victory in 1980. Everything is covered at a readable pace: Lyndon Johnson, The Great Society, the Civil Rights movement, the 60s, The United States in Vietnam, the antiwar movement, Nixon’s election and administration, Watergate and the Ford and Carter administrations. Although Hayward clearly approaches the subject matter from a conservative point of view (Bill Clinton comes up a few times) - it is not distracting and the history is solid. Having read several other books on the time period, it covers the same material without much bias. Hayward goes a bit easy on Reagan, but is about as critical of LBJ, the Great Society Nixon, Kissinger, and Carter as the more left-leaning Rick Perlstein was in his books on this time period: Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland. If you want a more comprehensive look at this time period, including much more on the social history (more on the women’s liberation movement, ERA, LGBTQ movement and rise of the evangelicals) you’ll find more in Perlstein’s three volumes, although they are a bit more of a slog as he goes into much more detail.

Published in 2001, this book approaches the time period from an old-school Republican POV that no longer exists (as of 2025). As long as you are fine with that, the book is quite interesting for someone interested in the time period, not a difficult read for the layman, and the history is solid.

[Philip Schaffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful and engaging history of American political history from the 1960's-1980. Heyward, while he is sympathetic to Reagan, provides a human picture of Ronald Reagan.

[Margo Gillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well done historical book about the tumultuous history and the state of America leading up to Reagan’s surprising election. Very detailed and thought through.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are few books greater than 700 pages in length (almost 850 with footnotes, etc.) that are real page-turners. Steven Hayward’s 2001 The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964-1980 is one of them. Age of Reagan is not entirely about Ronald Reagan. It is, instead, a political history–at the federal level–of the United States from 1964-1980. It is, as the subtitle says, about the fall of the “old liberal order” and the subsequent rise of Reagan. The story from Lyndon Johnson’s huge victory in 1964 to Reagan’s huge victory in 1980 is a story of the exposure of the failure of governmental ordering of society and economics. Johnson’s Great Society, the impact of Vietnam, the rise of the New Left, the return of Nixon, the fall of Nixon, Reagan’s insurgent 1976 campaign, and Carter’s failed presidency are all covered in fascinating detail in this book. The book really picks up steam in discussing the 1976 and 1980 elections. Hayward is a conservative, and this book is written from a conservative worldview. But Hayward does not ignore Reagan’s gaffes and, in discussing contemporary opinions, seemingly quotes from the pages of The New Republic as much as he does from National Review. Age of Reagan is, in short, fair, comprehensive, fun, and essential for those interested in recent American political history.

[Jose · Rating 5 out of 5]

While Heyward is a Conservative he lauds praises and criticisms with a fair hand. I was in my early teen years when Reagan was elected President but I still remember the sense of malaise practically all Americans felt throughout the 70's. Gas rationings, my parents complaining about incredibly high interest rates all the time (had no clue what that was at 14 but from their tone, i assumed interest rates were an evil thing, particularly high ones), and the hostages

Two things stand on my mind that I felt turned America around, at least emotionally and psychologically; The US Olympic hockey team defeating the Soviets, "DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES!!!", and the election of Ronald Reagan as President.

[Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the longest nonfiction book in which I have read every word: 717 pages. It is also the most thorough treatment I have ever seen of developments in the United States from 1964-80, and how those developments persuaded the American public to give conservative ideas a chance in the form of Ronald Reagan. The book ends with the 1980 election, so later this month I will start on the second volume of Hayward's book that covers Reagan's actual presidency.

[Tomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent history of the years between LBJ and Reagan. I am amazed at the idiots we have elected! Much of what happened in those years is happening again today...people! Study history!!! I'd like to see Hayward address the years after Reagan until today. I learned a lot from reading this (and took many pages of notes); one thing I learned is that I need to study economics. It is easy to read, understandable, and full of the tidbits that make history so interesting.

[Bill Peacock · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It is absolutely the best book describing impact Reagan had on building the conservative movement in the U.S., and is much, much better than the authorized biography. This is the first volume which covers the pre-presidential years. I haven't read volume 2 yet, but i am sure it is equally insightful.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engrossing and illuminating narrative. Liberal myths and misapprehensions are exploded on virtually every page. The first section of the book confirmed my undying detestation of the Sixties; the latter my disgust with Jimmy Carter.

[Maureen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish the powers that be in this day and age could take some lessons from the Reagan years. Not so fun doing business with the current administration and I doubt seriously we are going to see improvement. Give me a Reagan leader and I will show you prosperity.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely history written through a conservative lens (with excellent use of Pat Moynihan as the liberal intellectual foil), but a good treatment of Reagan and the US political and social landscape from 1964 up through Reagan's first election.

I'll definitely pick up volume II of this series.

[Cephas Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great narrative on the historical events that led to the election of Ronald Reagan. This is the era in which I grew up. It gave a different insight to the events that shaped our country during a turbulent period.

[Grindy Stone · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring and pedantic - just the old saw that LBJ wrecked the country and Ronnie came along to save us, though expanded to 800 pages. Go with Rick Perlstein and his Nixonland or The Invisible Bridge if you want something genuinely lively and insightful on the rise of Reagan and modern conservatism.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Other commenters hit this on the head. It's more a political history of conservatism during the period than just a Reagan history. Very easy to read. I loved this book.

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid history of the American conservative movement starting in the 1960's.

[Geert Matthys · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing, fluid writing, biased as can be off-course. this is an ode to reagan if you believe in such worship, for those who don't, still quite likeable book

[Dan Morrow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched. So many similarities between the Liberal meltdown during the Reagan years and the current meltdown of the Liberals under Trump.

[Ronnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book to lean about Reagan but instead got history from 1964 to 1980 at a deep level. Yes I learned about Reagan but nothing compared to what I learned about LBJ, nixon and carter.

[Bill Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://beingbeliefbehavior.blogspot....

[Chad Wylie · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty decent survey of events with a heavy slant.

[Adrienne Dillard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written technically, but incredibly biased.

[Anna Limarenko · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title says it all - this book is a very detailed story not about Reagan himself but about his time. Amazing read!