Books in Brief: Revolution

Revolution, by Martin Anderson (Harcourt, Brace, 486 pp., $19.95)

In March 1981—a transitional month when goober shells, moon-pie wrappers, and the detritus of Jimmy Carter’s policies and programs were still being swept from the West Wing crannies—four members of the Reagan White House were featured on the cover of Fortune magazine. Labeled “the Team,” they were the new President’s chief economic advisors, charged with giving shape and meaning to what would come to be called “the Reagan revolution.” Now, nearly eight years later, the four “revolutionaries” have long since gone their separate ways, their contributions to the history of the Reagan era duly noted. Well, not quite. Murray Weidenbaum, Reagan’s first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has yet to weigh in with his obligatory White House insider’s book; though his erstwhile Teammates David Stockman and Donald Regan certainly have, the former with the opportunistic zeal of a hand-biting main-chancer, the latter with an egoistic back-alley assault not simply on the President he served but on the First Lady as well. Kiss-and-tell, kick-and-tell. The genre having become an accepted form of American political/ literary expression, is there any way the White House memoir can be handled fairly, honorably, even constructively? Martin Anderson, the fourth Reaganaut featured on that distant Fortune cover, has done that and more with a political memoir that deals not only with the people and events but with the ideas that served as the motivating pistons of the revolution that he, more than any of his cover-boy colleagues, helped create. Not that Revolution is a bloodless ideological tract. On the contrary, Anderson’s inside story of the Reagan years, from the rise of the supply-siders to the fall of the Iran-Contra conspirators, is as full-bodied and provocative as any other account written to date. The difference is that this author has no ego problem to work out. Recommended to those interested in a scholar’s view of history-in-the-making; as well as to Murray Weidenbaum, as a model, when he gets around to doing his insider’s book.

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Victor Gold

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Revolution, by Martin Anderson (Harcourt, Brace, 486 pp., $19.95)

In March 1981—a transitional month when goober shells, moon-pie wrappers, and the detritus of Jimmy Carter’s policies and programs were still being swept from the West Wing crannies—four members of the Reagan White House were featured on the cover of Fortune magazine. Labeled “the Team,” they were the new President’s chief economic advisors, charged with giving shape and meaning to what would come to be called “the Reagan revolution.” Now, nearly eight years later, the four “revolutionaries” have long since gone their separate ways, their contributions to the history of the Reagan era duly noted. Well, not quite. Murray Weidenbaum, Reagan’s first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has yet to weigh in with his obligatory White House insider’s book; though his erstwhile Teammates David Stockman and Donald Regan certainly have, the former with the opportunistic zeal of a hand-biting main-chancer, the latter with an egoistic back-alley assault not simply on the President he served but on the First Lady as well. Kiss-and-tell, kick-and-tell. The genre having become an accepted form of American political/ literary expression, is there any way the White House memoir can be handled fairly, honorably, even constructively? Martin Anderson, the fourth Reaganaut featured on that distant Fortune cover, has done that and more with a political memoir that deals not only with the people and events but with the ideas that served as the motivating pistons of the revolution that he, more than any of his cover-boy colleagues, helped create. Not that Revolution is a bloodless ideological tract. On the contrary, Anderson’s inside story of the Reagan years, from the rise of the supply-siders to the fall of the Iran-Contra conspirators, is as full-bodied and provocative as any other account written to date. The difference is that this author has no ego problem to work out. Recommended to those interested in a scholar’s view of history-in-the-making; as well as to Murray Weidenbaum, as a model, when he gets around to doing his insider’s book.