RONALD REAGAN AND MARGARET THATCHER: A Political Marriage
By Nicholas Wapshott
336 pp. Sentinel, $25.95
What a disappointment! Here was a book I was looking forward to reading, for both professional and personal reasons. Ronald Reagan is one of the twelve presidents I am chronicling in a modern version of the Suetonius classic, The Twelve Caesars; Mrs. Thatcher I met and talked to some years ago at the Imperial War Museum in London, when she gave a riveting account of directing the Falkland Islands war as prime minister. I was impressed by her clarity of recall&emdash;and even more awed by her personality, when talking with her afterwards about command in modern war. I was unable to interject a single coherent sentence while she ranted about World War II, about which she knew very little&emdash;an ignorance that did not stop her making her point about leadership: her leadership.
I was reminded of that conversation when reading Nicholas Wapshott’s account of the Reagan-Thatcher relationship during the Falkland crisis, which the BBC’s Timewatch unearthed in 1992, and was published that spring in the Sunday Times of London:
‘Yes ... ’ said Reagan. But Thatcher cut in again. A verbal broadside from Downing Street followed. His contribution to the debate became piecemeal.’Margaret, but I thought that part of this proposal ... ’
‘Margaret, I ...’
‘Yes, well ... ’Defeated, Reagan resorted to charm again. ‘Well, Margaret, I know that I’ve intruded and I know how ... ’
’You’ve not intruded at all, and I’m glad you telephoned,’ replied Thatcher.
Sadly, that well-worn, fifteen year-old story is the only moment in Nicholas Wapshott’s new book when the story of the two iconic leaders of the 1980s comes alive. For the most part the book is a travesty both of biography and of political history. Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles, provides a puff on the book’s jacket, extolling it as ”a nuanced and immensely readable” portrait which leaves ”the reader wishing the two leaders had stuck around a lot longer.” I beg to differ. The portrait is appallingly ill-conceived and ill-written, in a lush, celebrity-gossip style that trivializes the importance of political leadership, and certainly won’t arouse nostalgia, let alone a wishing that the pair had ”stuck around.” Cliché upon cliché, trite simplification upon simplification, literally litter this dual-chronicle. In order to persuade the reader that the subject is worth a book rather than a newspaper article for the proudly right-wing New York Sun, where the author is an editor, Wapshott feels driven to subtitle his book and endlessly describe the relationship between Reagan and Thatcher in his text as a marriage&emdash;”a beautiful intellectual romance.” Of the first meeting between the two leaders on American soil, Wapshott writes, Thatcher is, for once, ”as apprehensive as a young bride as her wedding night approaches.” Their wives watch on, acknowledging that ”the political marriage just consummated was of a quite different order from the rock-solid marriages” that the two ”enjoyed when the bedroom doors were closed and the cameras stopped flashing.” The British ambassador to the U.S. is ”caught in the middle, as in a tiff between two lovers.”
Worse than the constant overblown marital analogy, perhaps, is the completely unquestioning acceptance of the political views of the two leaders. It takes almost half the book to get them to meet each other&emdash;by which time we have been treated to a sort of revolving door farce, in which for two pages we read a summary of one hero’s progress, then for several pages an equally superficial rendering of the other’s. Nuance? Never is there a hint of critical awareness, or anything close to an original thought or fresh insight. Reagan helps the ”FBI’s investigations into subversive and traitorous activities” during McCarthyism, sends in ”the National Guard to campuses to restore order” as Governor of California, promotes the teaching of ”Creationism,” hates the ”debilitating effect of high taxes” and ”dearly wanted the presidency,” while voters are willing to ”take some risk with the unknown in order to escape the wearisome gloom of the status quo.”
The account of Mrs. Thatcher’s rise to power is equally superficial and unquestioned. Hyperbole saturates the undertaking, from beginning to end, making the book useless to historians, and an insult to those who love real biography. ”One of the strongest and most effective political partnerships America and Britain have ever enjoyed,” the ”marriage” between Reagan and Thatcher is billed as ”a fearsome alliance between the two of them, which would come to shape and dominate international forums and NATO for the next eight years.” Reagan’s first meeting with Thatcher becomes, in Wapshott’s mushy prose, an ”historic milestone almost as significant, in its way, as the rendez-vous aboard the American cruiser Augusta in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on August 9, 1941.” ”Few world leaders,” Wapshott comments, ”even Roosevelt and Churchill in the dark days of World War II, have enjoyed such a solid and intimate friendship.”
Can this be a serious life study? For whom is it aimed? ”Wearing a dark blue suit over a white shirt, his suspiciously dark hair immaculately groomed, and imbued with the scent of his favorite cologne, Royal Brian, he cut a romantic figure,” Wapshott writes of Reagan paying his first ”dues to Thatcher” - who was ”way behind Reagan in terms of presentation,” having failed to dye her hair. (Though later, she did.) By the time they are both at the political helm of their respective countries on page 126, of course, the courtship-and-wedding analogy has worn very thin. Unsurprisingly it cannot sustain the continuous hype the author has employed to prepare us for the ”beautiful intellectual” marriage (especially when they disagree profoundly over the Falklands, Granada, and trade embargoes on Russia). In the end the book falls apart, though, for two simple reasons.
First, in the entire work there is only one claim to originality - the opening of the official and demi-official Reagan-Thatcher correspondence at the Reagan Library and Churchill Archives. The quality of this material, however&emdash;in contrast to the fascinating Reagan diaries which Douglas Brinkley published several months ago&emdash;is utterly disappointing, being a succession of platitudes, and government-parlance.
Second, the author appears to have done but two interviews for this book. That really stunned me. An experienced journalist, editor of the New York Sun, living in New York City, a former bureau chief for the Times of London, first editor of the Times Magazine&emdash;and he has done only two interviews for a new book on Reagan and Thatcher, when there are many hundreds of potential interviewees alive and able to help ”nuance” our understanding of the recent past?
I must end this review as saddened as I was when starting. In his acknowledgements Wapshott apologizes to his wife and two sons, ”with whom I should have spent more time.” I think so, too.
Nigel Hamilton is a Fellow of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, Umass Boston. The second volume of his life of Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency, was published in July (PublicAffairs). The sequel to his Biography: A Brief History, to be titled How To Do Biography: A Primer, will be published next spring (Harvard).