For months now, I’ve been urged to review Max Boot’s Reagan: His Life and Legend. I’ve resisted for many reasons. The first and overwhelming reason is that the book has so many distortions based on Boot’s highly selective rendering of Reagan that I couldn’t fathom addressing even a portion of them in a single review. More than that, reading the book was downright agonizing.

Yes, agonizing. Have you ever been in a situation where someone is misleading an audience by not giving them all the facts and you’re the one person in the room who knows it? I felt that way throughout my intermittent reading of Boot’s biography.
My reading was intermittent because I could handle the book only in small doses. I had to take breaks of not mere hours or days between readings but weeks and months. Worse, when I took on such ordeals during weekends, while taking my sons to the football field or basketball court, it put me in a bad mood, which I tried not to take out on my kids.
Boot had to ignore my Reagan material in order to concoct the narrative he desired.
“What’s wrong, dad? What are you angry about?”
Friends and colleagues will acknowledge that I’m not an angry person. I’m happy and easy to get along with. But when you know an author is misleading his audience, and for the purpose of assassinating the character of an honorable individual, it makes you surly.
For Boot, the character assassination of Ronald Reagan is wielded most sharply on the matter of race. And he effectuates that outcome by leaving out crucial details. Boot does this to a degree that is so outrageous that it’s almost surely intentional, as I will demonstrate below.
Boot's Flawed Methodology
Readers of this review might be surprised that my focus is not on Boot’s rendering of Reagan on communism and the Cold War. As some readers know, that’s my particular area of strength. I’ve published eight books on Ronald Reagan, more than any other historian or biographer, plus several on communism, the Cold War, Karl Marx...