My tour of presidential biographies has reached Ronald Reagan, #40 (I am stopping at Bush 41 at the entirely arbitrary boundary of "latest dead president"). Reagan was a sincere, charismatic ideologue who gets both more hate and more love than his actions really justified.

As I expected, the biography of such a recent president suffers because so much of what he did is still classified. This is especially relevant because he did a lot of stuff that was definitely illegal! I reserve the right to come back and update this assessment.

Most notably, he probably stole the election from Jimmy Carter in 1980 by running a back-channel to the Iranians telling them not to free the hostages. This is a straight-up violation of the Logan act, currently in the news after Rudy Giuliani also enthusiastically violated it.

Carter's own biographer treats the Iran interference as hearsay, a possibility, there's not enough evidence, we'll find out eventually. Reagan's biographer, who otherwise goes out of his way to paint Reagan in the best light, treats Reagan's election theft as almost certain fact.

Reagan got his career start in radio literally by walking into a radio station looking for a job and having somebody hear his voice; they hired him on the spot. He had an excellent voice for radio, and translated his success there into roles in B-movies.

In the early day of radio sportscasting it was sometimes too expensive to actually send a sports announcer to the game, so instead they received live updates by telegraph and then called the game as if they were really there. This was Reagan's speciality.

Fun fact: sometimes the telegraph connection to the game would fail, and to maintain the illusion of being there Reagan would just make up random plays and events, add color about what kids in the crowd were doing, until the line came back up and he could catch up to reality.

Reagan is called the Great Communicator but that's really only half of it; he was the great persuader. Reagan was excellent at choosing words, a gifted speech writer. He was great at delivering the words, too. He persuaded people with sincerity and conviction in every word.

Lots of people attribute his ability to persuade to his ability as an actor, but that's not it, if only because Reagan wasn't actually a very good actor. He simply wasn't very convincing. By age 44 he was washed-up as a movie star and was reduced to a long-running TV host role.

Instead, he was so persuasive because he was both an idealist and an ideologue. He believed in good and evil, and saw the world in the same simple, broad brush strokes he used when talking about it. He really believed what he said; he wasn't a good enough actor to be faking it.

A common criticism of Reagan is that he was a idiot cowboy, all style and no substance. I don't think this is fair. He had firm principles, unlike Nixon, and a clear and coherent ideology, unlike Ford or Truman. He had plenty of substance; what he lacked was detail.

It seems when he addressed himself to a subject he was smart and easily grasped the details; he just didn't usually care to do so. A big job of the American presidency is using it as a platform to persuade. Reagan's presidency answers the question: what if that was *all* you did?

An example, and fun fact: the first time Reagan met Fed Chair Paul Volcker, he asked him to explain what the Fed does. This wasn't a rhetorical question or political trap. He literally didn't know, and once a stunned Volcker recovered and explained, he understood it no problem.

Another way you can tell Reagan was smart is he was great, *really* great at one liners and snappy comebacks. When his age became an issue in the 1984 campaign (he was at 73 the oldest president ever), he had this amazing (this time prepared) comeback:

West Wing fans: the phrase "let Bartlet be Bartlet" is from Nancy Reagan's phrase "Let Ronnie be Ronnie" in the 1984 debate. West Wing also modeled Bartlet's shooting closely after Reagan's 1981 assassination attempt, down to the chief of staff putting himself in charge.

Fun fact: after the assassination attempt, Nancy Reagan started consulting an astrologer, Joan Quigley, who said she had predicted it would happen. On Quigley's advice Nancy regularly re-scheduled major political summits and presidential travel. It was pretty wild.

Reagan's ideology drove him to do shitty things: the Iran contra affair (broke the law to support right-wing Contras), invaded Grenada (basically because he couldn't do anything about Cuba), supported apartheid in South Africa (because he thought the alternative was communists).

His ideology also held that nuclear war was terrible, and that trumped his anti-communist principle. He worked with Gorbachev to achieve arms reduction, but probably somebody like Carter with better grasp of details and nuance would have got further.

Reagan is given credit for ending the cold war. This is overblown. The USSR imploded under the costs of the arms race, and that would have happened no matter who was president at the time. Reagan didn't really do anything to actively make this go faster or slower.

To many Reagan's primary sin was ignoring AIDS. He definitely should have done much more about it. But I don't think he callously let people die because he disapproved of gay people; he just wasn't paying attention. An epidemic just didn't fit Reagan's ideologically-driven world.

Reagan knew the AIDS epidemic was happening and, contrary to myth, he talked about it in public prior to 1987. Funding for AIDS research doubled every year for Reagan's entire presidency. But HIV wasn't a communist, so he mostly ignored it, just like everything else.

Overall, Reagan gets a C. He did a bunch of illegal shit following his dumb ideology while taking credit for a bunch of historic events that he didn't have much to do with. But unlike many presidents he was driven and sincere about his motivations, and didn't commit genocide.