It’s not so easy, nearly a half-century later, to recall the shock felt in political Washington when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

Since 1930, with the exception of two very brief interludes, Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress, often with prohibitive majorities. In two generations, the New Deal and Great Society had not only revolutionized the role of government in American life, but magnified the size of the federal establishment beyond imagining, at routine costs not of billions but trillions. The national press corps and political culture of the capital was not just reliably Democratic in tone and sentiment, but comfortably settled in a thin-skinned sense of entitlement.

And of course, the affable, ever-optimistic but resolute Reagan was something of a novelty as well—a sometime movie actor and TV personality whose first campaign for public office had been undertaken at an age (55) when most men are beginning to adjust their thoughts toward retirement. In 1980, moreover, Reagan was not just any Republican, but a Southern California byproduct of a nationwide right-wing insurgency that, as recently as 1964, had been decisively crushed by comparable margins to the landslide that elected him.

In the whole life of the GOP, only two Republican presidents (Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower) had successfully served two full terms in office—and Reagan, for all his virtues, had neither saved the Union nor defeated Nazi Germany. How did he do it?

Frank Lavin, a onetime presidential aide, senior public official, banker, and diplomat, is now approximately the same age as Reagan when his subject entered the White House, and in this charming, disarming, sometimes comic but always discerning memoir of the Reagan presidency, he has assigned himself the task of parachuting backward into the 1980s to understand what made Reagan tick, what energies fueled the machinery of his presidency, and how Reagan’s successes (and occasional failures) may help to define leadership in our fractious age and, in the words of his subtitle, offer "lessons for today."

A fool’s errand, in all likelihood, but Lavin is no fool and approaches the challenge with a shrewd combination of perception, humor, and strategic self-deprecation. It’s a blessing to the reader that the writer was, by any measure, a modest gear in a mammoth engine with a sharp eye and civil tongue. If he had been a more senior player or an occupant of one of the great offices of state, the instinct to defend his record or set posterity straight would have warped his judgment and left us poorer for the experience.

His tenure in the Reagan White House began as a twentysomething volunteer in the 1980-81 "transition" and the Office of White House Personnel—in effect, dealing with the standard avalanche of job-seekers and president-whisperers—and moved to official assignments in the PR apparatus, the madcap organization of public and private events, the rarefied realm of national security and foreign entanglements and, ultimately, national political campaigns.

This is an impressively upward trajectory and a tribute to Lavin’s skills, diplomacy, energy, and uncommon horse sense, which were duly noted and rewarded with increasing power and responsibility. To be sure, no one for whom Karl Rove served as best man at his wedding starts precisely from scratch. But Lavin’s eight years in Reagan’s service sharpened not only his confidence but his understanding of how things work and don’t work in the executive branch, and how public service at certain elevated levels is both an honor and privilege of the highest order as well as a sentence to a snake pit of ambition and bureaucratic psychosis.

That Lavin succeeded is both a tribute to the author and, at a comfortable distance, the president who made it happen.

In that sense, three things may be said. First, Lavin’s admiration for Reagan’s qualities of leadership—and its "lessons for today"—is fully justified, which is no small matter. The president’s famous distance from the minor distractions and details of office was sometimes harmful in the short term but, on the whole, advantageous. He concentrated on the basic principles that mattered to him, and by extension to the country, and was faithful to those principles. He chose his battles with care, was eager to attend to the less glamorous but essential tasks of smart politics, and had a genuine gift for expressing himself in terms both stirring and accessible.

Second, his subordinates were a mixed bunch (as such hasty assemblages tend to be), but Reagan not only supplied his staff with an overriding sense of purpose but seemed also to possess a sixth sense about the latitude he accorded the most senior among them. The famous "troika" of James Baker, Edwin Meese, and Michael Deaver worked well in tandem, approached their assignments with complementary skills, and, above all, were faithful to the higher calling issued by their boss. All prospered, in their own way, but Reagan deserves the credit. Loyalty was earned, if not always rewarded.

Finally, Inside the Reagan White House offers as entertaining a description of the mysterious, slightly anxious, comic-operatic, and at times bewildering routine of the executive quarters as any reader can hope to encounter. The Reagan White House was unusual and unprecedented, in some ways, but also typical. What this reader found disconcerting was the familiar evidence of the quadrennial chaos and prolonged period of adjustment that attends every new presidency. But what’s the solution? There’s not much appetite in America for the kind of senior civil service personified by Mr. Humphrey in the BBC’s Yes, Prime Minister, and perhaps it’s just as well.

Like all successful presidents, Ronald Reagan seemed not to grow into the job so much as to have been born for it. Lavin accepts, with some reluctance, Nancy Reagan’s assertion that "the secret to Ronald Reagan is that there really is no secret." In the end, however, as with all great politician-presidents, we learn once again that Reagan’s impenetrable personal armor protected the harmony of his inner life and surely nourished his success. That, too, may be a lesson for today.

Inside the Reagan White House: A Front-Row Seat to Presidential Leadership with Lessons for Today
by Frank Lavin
Post Hill Press, 320 pp., $30

Philip Terzian was literary editor and senior writer at the Weekly Standard and author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.