Since his death on June 5, 2004, Ronald Reagan has been hailed by many on the Right, credited for winning the Cold War and restoring prestige to a nation rattled after the humiliations and scandals of Vietnam, Watergate and the Iran hostage crisis. In the light of such hagiographic historical revisionism, this new edition of Haynes Johnson’s celebrated study is a welcome corrective. A highly readable and journalistic study, with research based largely on interviews with a wide range of figures from the period, Sleepwalking Through History explores the reasons for Reagan’s victory, and the many scandals and cultural changes that marked his Presidency.  

Haynes memorably describes Reagan as a “consumer instead of a preserver, a raider instead of a protector” and the “vehicle around which conservative forces could and did rally.” Particularly astute at understanding Reagan’s mastery of electronic media, he shows how the President used his natural charisma and the oratorical skills developed during his career as an actor to charm and, to a certain extent, to cheat the American public. He was the benevolent front man for a wide range of socially destructive policies. Describing his Presidency as one of “pictures, symbols, and staging” with every public act “planned by his media experts for its maximum impact through television” Haynes shows a sophisticated understanding of how mass media, public relations and political policy were brought together by the Reagan administration as a formidable means of image-control. Although the Reagan administration positioned itself as anti-tax, anti-communist and anti-government, Haynes argues that in fact nepotism, corruption and self-aggrandizement at the expense of public interest are the defining motifs of many of Reagan’s key players. Particularly astute in his exploration of Reagan’s economic policies, Haynes traces the boom of the early eighties through the bogus theorising of supply side economics all the way to the slump that ended the decade. He shows how Reagan’s economic policies, which strongly favoured the wealthy over the poor and slashed spending at all levels of government except defence, had the net effect of transforming the United States from being the world’s largest international creditor to the world’s largest debtor nation. Equally thorough in his critique of Reagan’s foreign policy, Haynes astutely dissects the complexity of the Iran-Contra scandal and the depth of the administration’s involvement with Noriega.

For this new edition, Haynes has added an afterword in which he considers the implications of the war on terror and asks how far 9-11 represented “the inevitable consequences of actions taken – or, perhaps more accurately, of actions not taken by American leaders and their institutions.” Written in an accessible manner, thorough in its coverage of detail, unsparing in its criticism, Sleepwalking Through America is a fine example of political-investigative journalism. It is worth reading for all students of contemporary American politics and history, as well as those looking for a better understanding of the present situation.