Ronald Reagan
The hands-down most controversial president in recent memory receives notably evenhanded treatment by Schaller in Oxford’s series of brief lives of the U.S. chief executives. There’s no getting around the erstwhile actor’s habit of borrowing from his screen experience for ostensibly true exempla for his inspirational speeches. But that same experience guaranteed that he could react winningly to stress, and he won the nation’s admiration for the humor and grit with which he treated the assassination attempt on him early in his first term. His political habit of campaigning for policies—tax and spending cuts, shrinking the federal government, prohibiting abortion—that he very quickly abandoned presents difficulties for his right-wing encomiasts, in particular. Reagan was much more pragmatic and prone to compromise than his reputation then and now allows, and that served him especially well in his dealings with Gorbachev’s faltering Soviet Union. A fine stepping-stone to the vast literature on Reagan, pro and con, Schaller’s summary belongs in virtually all U.S. libraries. --Ray Olson