Did America's fortieth president lead a conservative counterrevolution
that left liberalism gasping for air? The answer, for both his admirers
and his detractors, is often "yes." In Morning in America, Gil Troy
argues that the Great Communicator was also the Great Conciliator. His
pioneering and lively reassessment of Ronald Reagan's legacy takes us
through the 1980s in ten year-by-year chapters, integrating the story of
the Reagan presidency with stories of the decade's cultural icons and
watershed moments-from personalities to popular television shows.
One such watershed moment was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. With the
trauma of Vietnam fading, the triumph of America's 1983 invasion of tiny
Grenada still fresh, and a reviving economy, Americans geared up for a
festival of international harmony that-spurred on by an
entertainment-focused news media, corporate sponsors, and the President
himself-became a celebration of the good old U.S.A. At the Games'
opening, Reagan presided over a thousand-voice choir, a 750-member
marching band, and a 90,000-strong teary-eyed audience singing "America
the Beautiful!" while waving thousands of flags.
Reagan emerges more as happy warrior than angry ideologue, as a
big-picture man better at setting America's mood than implementing his
program. With a vigorous Democratic opposition, Reagan's own affability,
and other limiting factors, the eighties were less counterrevolutionary
than many believe. Many sixties' innovations went mainstream, from civil
rights to feminism. Reagan fostered a political culture centered on
individualism and consumption-finding common ground between the right
and the left.
Written with verve, Morning in America is both a major new look at one
of America's most influential modern-day presidents and the definitive
story of a decade that continues to shape our times.
