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Richard James Havis

The Reagan Diaries

by Ronald Reagan, edited by Douglas Brinkley

HarperCollins, HK$280

These diaries,  written by Ronald Reagan during his two terms as president, reveal no White House secrets, intrigues or scandals.

They don't offer much insight  into Reagan himself, either.

Written in an abbreviated style more akin to a daily planner than  a work of literature, the weighty, 700-page tome is a slog to get through. But with perseverance Diaries becomes a gripping read, due in large part to the details it provides about the period during which Reagan held office. They were interesting times, and that's what makes this book readable.

Reagan, who died in 2004, was president from 1981 to 1989. A former actor - he retired from showbiz in the early 1960s - the one-time Democrat turned Republican is best remembered for two political ideas: Reaganomics and the Reagan doctrine. The former, broadly speaking, meant lower taxes and minimal government intervention in markets. The latter was a desire

to break with  detente and fight communism wherever possible, either by nefarious means or military force.

Diaries doesn't analyse these political philosophies, but does detail Reagan's battles with the Democrat-controlled Congress to carry them out.

The Reagan administration, lest we forget, saw the winding down of the cold war. The more interesting parts of Diaries detail Reagan's dealings with three Soviet leaders: Leonid Brezhnev, Konstantin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan's break with detente in favour of intervention was  seen as warmongering, as was his SDI (Star Wars) programme. But in his diaries, he writes more about trying to bring the Soviets to the negotiating table for the Start nuclear weapons reduction treaty. He appears to respect Russia's leaders, despite his hatred of the ideology they stand  for. Reagan reserves his ire for Cuba, and he continually worries about its influence in Central America and the Caribbean.

All of this has been well documented, so what's the point of reading the book?  On one level, it's a timely reminder that the American political system wasn't always in  the sorry state it is today. The US prides itself on consensus politics - the Founding Fathers assumed  all parties would avoid partisan positions to work together to find solutions. Yet today's Bush administration is fiercely partisan.

During the years of the Reagan administration, the system appears to have worked better. Reagan had to work with Congress  because  the Democrats had a big majority  in the House and, from 1987, the Senate. His diaries show that he  also respected the constitutional division of powers.

Reagan had a working relationship with Tip O'Neill, the Democrat Speaker of the House, and dined and drank with him - even though O'Neill was a fierce opponent of his policies who  once described him as 'ignorant'. Members of the House and Senate were less partisan, intelligent debate was considered necessary rather than inconvenient, and political compromise wasn't considered a betrayal. The system seems to have been in better shape.

Conversely, the world at large appears to have been in worse shape than today. Reading through Diaries, it's striking how dangerous a place it was in the 1980s. It's common now to claim that the  world was a safer place during  the cold war, with the two super-powers keeping each other in  check. Diaries shows how fragile  that  balance really was. The  Reagan administration was in communication with its Russian counterparts, and neither side wanted war. But the possibility of military escalation was never far away. There was terrorism, too, emanating from Iran, Libya and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Diaries puts today's so-called war on terror into perspective. The cold war era appears to have been more dangerous.

Less is revealed about Reagan  the man. His writing style suggests  a practical, pragmatic individual, not one of high intellect, but a good organiser. He's not a literary man - even his ruminations on getting  shot by would-be assassin John Hinckley are perfunctory. The religious right has made much of the book's supposed revelations about his guiding Christian principles.  But this seems to be a right-wing delusion - it's not there in the text.  Reagan had Christian beliefs,  but they're never mentioned in relation to his politics. His fractious relationships with his children - who were politically opposed to him - provide comic relief, and it's  can be disconcerting when he refers to wife Nancy as 'Mommie'.

It's impossible to know what has been edited out of a book like this, what the writer purposely omitted, and whether he ever lied. There's little about the Tower Commission, which investigated the Iran-Contra weapons scandal, for instance. But Diaries still manages to give a good day-by-day account of a president and his times.

