What do you think?
Rate this book
Reagan's War Stories: A Cold War Presidency
Reagan’s War Stories examines the relationship between Ronald Reagan, the public and popular culture. From an overview of Reagan’s youth and the pulp fiction he consumed, we get a sense of the future president’s good/evil outlook. Carrying that over into Reagan’s reading and choices as president, Griffin situates narrative at the center of Reagan’s political formation and leadership providing a compelling account of both Reagan’s life, his presidency, and a lens into non-traditional strategy formulation.
Author Ben Griffin tells three stories about an American president who ushered in the end of the Cold War. A survey of Reagan’s youth and the fiction he consumed and created as an announcer and actor, reveals how the future president’s worldview developed. A look at the rise of fiction and popular culture rife with pro-Americanism in the 1980s details a uniquely symbiotic relationship between the chief executive and popular culture in framing the Cold War as a struggle with an “Evil Empire” in the Soviet Union. Finally, Griffin outlines how presidential personality and reading preferences shaped President Reagan’s pursuit of the “Star Wars” initiative and belief in the transformative combination of freedom and technology.
Griffin demonstrates that novels by Tom Clancy, Louis L’Amour, and science fiction influenced Reagan’s view of 1980s geopolitics. His identification with fiction led Ronald Reagan to view European Cold War issues with more empathy but harmed the president's policymaking when the narrowness of his reading led him to apply a white-hat/black-hat framework that did not match the reality of conflict in Latin America.
Reagan treated fictional portrayals seriously, believing they shaped public views and offered valid ways to think through geo-political issues. Seeking to shape the reading habits of the public, his administration sought to highlight authors who shared his worldview like Tom Clancy, Louis L’Amour, and Allen Drury over other popular writers like Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre who portrayed the Cold War in less stark moral terms. The administration’s favored popular authors in turn intentionally incorporated Reagan-era policies into their work to advocate for them through fiction, thus reaching a broader audience than via official government releases and speeches.
Showing how Reagan used narrative as both a consumer and a communicator, Griffin notes that Reagan identified with certain stories and they shaped him as a political leader and later and influenced his approach to complex issues. When handled deftly, incorporating fiction created a common language across the administration and provided a way to convey messages to the masses in a memorable fashion.
Author Ben Griffin tells three stories about an American president who ushered in the end of the Cold War. A survey of Reagan’s youth and the fiction he consumed and created as an announcer and actor, reveals how the future president’s worldview developed. A look at the rise of fiction and popular culture rife with pro-Americanism in the 1980s details a uniquely symbiotic relationship between the chief executive and popular culture in framing the Cold War as a struggle with an “Evil Empire” in the Soviet Union. Finally, Griffin outlines how presidential personality and reading preferences shaped President Reagan’s pursuit of the “Star Wars” initiative and belief in the transformative combination of freedom and technology.
Griffin demonstrates that novels by Tom Clancy, Louis L’Amour, and science fiction influenced Reagan’s view of 1980s geopolitics. His identification with fiction led Ronald Reagan to view European Cold War issues with more empathy but harmed the president's policymaking when the narrowness of his reading led him to apply a white-hat/black-hat framework that did not match the reality of conflict in Latin America.
Reagan treated fictional portrayals seriously, believing they shaped public views and offered valid ways to think through geo-political issues. Seeking to shape the reading habits of the public, his administration sought to highlight authors who shared his worldview like Tom Clancy, Louis L’Amour, and Allen Drury over other popular writers like Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre who portrayed the Cold War in less stark moral terms. The administration’s favored popular authors in turn intentionally incorporated Reagan-era policies into their work to advocate for them through fiction, thus reaching a broader audience than via official government releases and speeches.
Showing how Reagan used narrative as both a consumer and a communicator, Griffin notes that Reagan identified with certain stories and they shaped him as a political leader and later and influenced his approach to complex issues. When handled deftly, incorporating fiction created a common language across the administration and provided a way to convey messages to the masses in a memorable fashion.
- GenresHistoryLeadership
235 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 15, 2022
7 people are currently reading
38 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 19, 2022
Stories are essential to how humans process reality; Griffin’s book examines Ronald Reagan as consumer, creator, and re-seller of stories. Reagan’s strengths and weaknesses are both illuminated by this approach.
As a framework for examining Reagan, this concept has a great deal to offer. I ended up a bit disappointed that Griffin makes less of a distinction between stories as a source of information vs. as a means of persuasion. Reagan’s great strength was in the latter, since he excelled at offering up stories that confirmed his worldview, or sold the outcome he wanted, and Griffin suggests that Reagan’s true moments of leadership came in offering up a convincing story.
But reliance on narrative as a means of assimilating information, without critical thinking, is dangerous, and in a leader, culpable. At a basic level, prejudices operate in narrative space, as we tell stories that satisfy our pre-existing worldview, and reject facts inconvenient for the narratives we find emotionally satisfying, protecting our comfortable ignorance. To be so is human; to persist so may be innocent enough in the powerless, but in the powerful, the distinctions between ignorance and malice, and between false statements made in wilful ignorance and conscious lies, become moot.
The prominence of Tom Clancy is one of the most interesting parts of this book, since it shows much of how narrative power creates the feeling of truth. That Clancy got much of his technology seemingly right made his politics plausible, even when they were deeply biased. (His take on the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales in Patriot Games suggests that he was capable of misreading human beings, just a little.)
What I think Griffin misses is that Reagan’s greatest success was against a regime that was even more intellectually dishonest that the John Birch conservatism that shaped Reagan. If his stories were better than Gorbachev’s it was that they were less false, which is not quite the same thing as true.
The poison of John Birch/movement conservatism, as Rick Perlstein has shown, lies in significant part in the preference for emotionally satisfying narrative over truth, and in political leaders’ explicit choice to appeal to the lowest motives of their base. Griffin’s work doesn’t dispute this, but I think he underestimates it, allowing him to claim a crucial difference between Reagan and his heirs, when he suggests in his conclusion that Reagan didn’t intend divisiveness. But the distinction of not intending a consquence (while wilfully blind to its inevitability) is not really a defense, certainly not for the powerful.
The contrast with the first Republican president is profound: Lincoln’s preference for the use of narrative as a tool for leading (and, it must be said, manipulating others) never seems to have crowded out his own relentless pursuit of true understanding. The same cannot be said for Reagan.
As a framework for examining Reagan, this concept has a great deal to offer. I ended up a bit disappointed that Griffin makes less of a distinction between stories as a source of information vs. as a means of persuasion. Reagan’s great strength was in the latter, since he excelled at offering up stories that confirmed his worldview, or sold the outcome he wanted, and Griffin suggests that Reagan’s true moments of leadership came in offering up a convincing story.
But reliance on narrative as a means of assimilating information, without critical thinking, is dangerous, and in a leader, culpable. At a basic level, prejudices operate in narrative space, as we tell stories that satisfy our pre-existing worldview, and reject facts inconvenient for the narratives we find emotionally satisfying, protecting our comfortable ignorance. To be so is human; to persist so may be innocent enough in the powerless, but in the powerful, the distinctions between ignorance and malice, and between false statements made in wilful ignorance and conscious lies, become moot.
The prominence of Tom Clancy is one of the most interesting parts of this book, since it shows much of how narrative power creates the feeling of truth. That Clancy got much of his technology seemingly right made his politics plausible, even when they were deeply biased. (His take on the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales in Patriot Games suggests that he was capable of misreading human beings, just a little.)
What I think Griffin misses is that Reagan’s greatest success was against a regime that was even more intellectually dishonest that the John Birch conservatism that shaped Reagan. If his stories were better than Gorbachev’s it was that they were less false, which is not quite the same thing as true.
The poison of John Birch/movement conservatism, as Rick Perlstein has shown, lies in significant part in the preference for emotionally satisfying narrative over truth, and in political leaders’ explicit choice to appeal to the lowest motives of their base. Griffin’s work doesn’t dispute this, but I think he underestimates it, allowing him to claim a crucial difference between Reagan and his heirs, when he suggests in his conclusion that Reagan didn’t intend divisiveness. But the distinction of not intending a consquence (while wilfully blind to its inevitability) is not really a defense, certainly not for the powerful.
The contrast with the first Republican president is profound: Lincoln’s preference for the use of narrative as a tool for leading (and, it must be said, manipulating others) never seems to have crowded out his own relentless pursuit of true understanding. The same cannot be said for Reagan.
December 12, 2023
A great idea for a book. I've been fascinated by the books great people read and how their reading impacted them and their decisions. But, in this case this is probably the wrong author for it. Which is too bad, since this edition exists it's much less likely someone else would explore the same idea better.
The author reviews some of the books young Reagan read and (like Burrough's novels, Kipling, etc) thinks they are both simple and reflect evil imperial thought about more civilized people's duty to better the lives of the less civilized. The author points out they don't pass 21st century muster for how we expect people to see and treat other cultures.
The author goes on to argue Reagan never transcended this backwards world view of seeing things like a novel with the good guys against the bad guys with Reagan seeing himself and American as the good guys vs the bad people (like communists). The author continues in this vein pointing to more modern books or entertainment Reagan enjoyed like the books of Louis L'Amour as being the same type of thing. Interestingly, he claims the L'Amour book turned into a John Wayne movie, Hondo, and others like it, merely contain "...simple depictions of morality...." (page 62). Hondo, is a cowboy that decides to protect a women and her young son living alone in hostile Apache territory, he ends up killing her husband when he attcks him, finally admitting this to the woman who he obviously has feelings for, and them agreeing not to tell the boy. There are some real struggles with when to tell the truth, and whether not telling someone something signifiant and letting them belive something positive about something that isn't true, is better than telling them the truth. Writing L'Amour off as a moral simpleton is itself overly simplistic and condescending (L'Amour wrote 100 novels, many short stories, and sold over 320 million copies of his work, many which are still in print).
“Therefore, it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.” - Owen Barfield
Reegan was one of our oldest presidents and there is no doubt having a leader than is older than most of the people he is leading means you have the influence of previous generations more at play than otherwise. In this case, the author does not respect Reagan's older generational wisdom though he begrudgingly admits it did help Reagan set and communicate a vision for victory for the Cold War that was good for America and the world.
The author reviews some of the books young Reagan read and (like Burrough's novels, Kipling, etc) thinks they are both simple and reflect evil imperial thought about more civilized people's duty to better the lives of the less civilized. The author points out they don't pass 21st century muster for how we expect people to see and treat other cultures.
The author goes on to argue Reagan never transcended this backwards world view of seeing things like a novel with the good guys against the bad guys with Reagan seeing himself and American as the good guys vs the bad people (like communists). The author continues in this vein pointing to more modern books or entertainment Reagan enjoyed like the books of Louis L'Amour as being the same type of thing. Interestingly, he claims the L'Amour book turned into a John Wayne movie, Hondo, and others like it, merely contain "...simple depictions of morality...." (page 62). Hondo, is a cowboy that decides to protect a women and her young son living alone in hostile Apache territory, he ends up killing her husband when he attcks him, finally admitting this to the woman who he obviously has feelings for, and them agreeing not to tell the boy. There are some real struggles with when to tell the truth, and whether not telling someone something signifiant and letting them belive something positive about something that isn't true, is better than telling them the truth. Writing L'Amour off as a moral simpleton is itself overly simplistic and condescending (L'Amour wrote 100 novels, many short stories, and sold over 320 million copies of his work, many which are still in print).
“Therefore, it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.” - Owen Barfield
Reegan was one of our oldest presidents and there is no doubt having a leader than is older than most of the people he is leading means you have the influence of previous generations more at play than otherwise. In this case, the author does not respect Reagan's older generational wisdom though he begrudgingly admits it did help Reagan set and communicate a vision for victory for the Cold War that was good for America and the world.
March 23, 2023
Initially excited to dive into a fresh perspective on Reagan, the highly effective Storyteller in Chief. It turned out more of a shallow walk though many of the well-worn gripes of his opponents and critics, then and yet today. A portion of the single review on the book back cover by a university history chair sums it up well - "The enduring mystery of Ronald Reagan is how he got so far knowing as comparatively little as he did." It is precisely because Reagan was not a part of a so-called knowledge class of academic and other self-anointed intelligentsia experts, that he was able to marshal his extraordinary communication skills, keen strategic insights, common sense and bold actions into an extraordinary Cold War win for the United States and freedom lovers everywhere.
September 24, 2022
Interesting insight and angle in an attempt to understand what motivated Reagan, what shaped his policies, and what determined his word choices for speeches. It is worth a read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews