Garry Wills. Reagan's America: Innocents at Home. New York: Doubleday, January 1987. Pp. 480 with photographs. $19.95.

My review of book Garry Wills' book on Ronald Reagan would be much different had not the Iran-Contra affair intervened between his composition and my reflection. Wills' biography is the story of Reagan triumphant: reelection behind him, clear sailing ahead through a second term, a destiny among the more successful and durable presidents in American history, and the enactor of a conservative program that altered the course of politics. Given Reagan's background and personality. Wills takes this to be an unlikely outcome and the purpose of the biography is to explain the largely irrational hold that Reagan has had on the American electorate. The events of recent months hardly invalidate Wills' book; indeed the biographical details and personal habits — his aversion to work, need of constant rest and reassurance and a simple unruffled schedule, along with his compulsion to simplify events and avoid details — enhance our understanding of the current situation. But the Iran-Contra affair and the ebbing of Reagan's support calls into question the larger interpretation Wills offers of Reagan's success and what that success tells us about American history and politics.

How do we account for Reagan's sucess? Twenty-three years after he made a stunning entrance into American politics with a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater, 21 years after he won the governorship of California, Reagan, for all his exposure, remains something of a mystery. Wills' answer is an artfully simple one: The mystery behind the mystery is that there is no Mystery at all. While the cliche of "Reagan the actor" has been endlessly repeated. Wills is the first to take the notion seriously and follow it out. Movies form our president's memory; acting is his talent. Reagan the president is simply an actor playing a particular part.

Reagan's America is a mythic rather than a real one; it was made in Hollywood and before that in pulp fiction. Reagan not only invokes but plays out the mythology of America and projects it onto the plane of the future. He plays it out because he believes it and he believes it because he has lived it in the movies and on radio and television and later as a spokesman for General Electric and as governor and president.

The intellectual roots of Wills' argument lie in a group of American literary critics often known as the "myth and symbol school": literary cartographers who follow the course of notions such as the virgin land, the pastoral small town, the machine in the garden, the frontier and Eden, the yeoman farmer and the rugged individualist. Mark Twain, from whom Wills begins, embodied these notions in his fiction and acted them out — the hick on the Continent — for European audiences. They represent profound national beliefs: the belief in American exceptionalism, the belief that we were to be free of the conflicts and ravages of European history, the belief that a virgin land and natural resources would allow us to have it all: power and peace, productivity and pleasure, wealth and harmony, world involvement and self-sufficiency.

The American innocent believed we were exempt from Original Sin and, therefore, from the laws of history, capital and industry. Twain played this part tongue in cheek. But Twain's famous books of life on the Mississippi contain the dark side of the idyll of pastoral America; they picture a people in flight from civilization, from industrialism, from women, from slavery. That dark side moves progressively to the fore so that by the time of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court we get a full scale anti-utopian tract.

The novel contrasts sharply with the Whitmanesque optimism of boyhood on the Mississippi. It was the innocent and idyllic aspects of the early Twain that got his often dark books into the children's section of the library and on the preferred reading lists for American youngsters, the youth of Reagan's generation.

Reagan lives the sunnyside of Twain and never notices the forbodings in the landscape. He is, in a sense, a perpetual child, the child we all want to be and living the childhood we all think can be perpetually America. Twain knew the sham of this but acted out the innocence in order to satirize it and to put on world-weary Europeans who were alternately delighted and frightened by the innocent American. Reagan doesn't catch the sham. He doesn't fabricate reality or tell lies about our past. He has no concept of the real; no notion that there is truth beyond the fable.

The point is subtle but important. In The Problem of Disbelief the great European historian, Lucien Febvre, takes up the case of Rabelais: He asks: How could a priest, a Franciscan, be the author of coarse "Rabelaisian" tales? Was he a secret atheist? Febvre's surprising answer was that the idea of disbelief had not been invented when Rabelais wrote in the 16th century. Everyone, saint or sinner, was a believer. Disbelief, atheism, was not a possibility, was not a thought anyone could entertain, until a few centuries later. Today, at the other end of a historical divide, we see the very ideas that formed the modern world dissolving — the idea that some things were real, the idea that there was such a thing as the truth. Many Americans, Reagan prominently among them, cannot entertain the possibility of truth or reality — everything is mere image.

Ronald Reagan, then, is an actor in a very special sense: an actor who doesn't know he is acting. From his earliest adulthood when he recreated baseball games from the telegraph wire in Des Moines and when his proudest moments were those occasions when the wire stopped and, without missing a beat, he invented a purely imaginative game, down to his most recent speech, Reagan is making it up as he goes along out of the shreds of American mythology. He just doesn't know what he is doing. There is nothing behind the pretense. What you see is what you get. He is our oldest president and the one least attached to the past. In Wills' lovely neology he is a somnipractor: He is always waking up the past in order to sing it back to sleep. He is our first postmodern president — all surface and no depth. For all his championing of the rugged individualist and the traditional middle class, he is the archetype of the new middle class: the class that not only manipulates words, images, statistics, financial reports but believes there is nothing behind the symbols manipulated. Reagan is like the "bubble baby" that lived throughout his life in a clear, contained but totally artificial environment, never to rub up against the real world.

If we need literary metaphors, Reagan is less the innocent at home and more the "manchurian candidate." He is not programmed by a conspiratorial class but by the entire culture of the mass media that has contained him all his adult life. It is this fictional world that obliterates the real world of experience politics and people. Wills quotes from Reagan's as-told-to autobiography:

"By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps, all I wanted to do — in common with several million other veterans — was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world."

Of course, Reagan never left Hollywood during the war; he simply moved across town to make propaganda films. He was in his own bed every night. Reagan has confused his experience with the "returning veteran" movies in which he and others played. In short, a fictional world of everyday life merges imperceptibly, without break, into a fictive world of movies and television:

"With Twain, the pretense was artful, highly conscious, used for cultural satire. With Reagan, the perfection of the pretense lies in the fact that he does not know he is pretending. He believes the individualist myths that help him play his communal role. He is the sincerest claimant to a heritage that never existed, a perfect blend of an authentic America he grew up in and of that America's own fables about its past .... Fake Huck-Finnery is the real American boyhood, one that Reagan never had to give up. And now, through him, neither do we."

This is strong and compelling stuff traced across a lifetime. It is made more compelling by Wills' detailed and thorough research into Reagan's family background and homelife, the atmosphere of the small Illinois towns that nurtured him, his days at Eureka College and early career in radio, along with a powerful account of his years in the Hollywood unions. We learn much that is surprising along the way, particularly the role that religion, specifically the Disciples of Christ, played in his formation. Moreover, Wills punctures the myths Reagan invokes by his portrait of Tampico and Dixon, Illinois, kept going by government-financed canal projects, the Reagan family kept afloat by New Deal projects and the strongly communal atmosphere of church and town. There was much government, few individualists, and not all that much private enterprise on Reagan's frontier. All this adds to the United States of Amnesia with the president as forgetter-in-chief.

But there are immense costs to be paid for this analysis, and one wonders whether they are worth it. Wills destroys one fiction only by invoking another. If we are to believe Wills, we must surrender any belief in or commitment to the American public as a potentially rational, more or less modern polity. Through this subjection to literary metaphors and "mythogogic" we end up as a primitive tribe sustained only by a bizarre belief system. Wills confuses delusion with illusion, and, therefore, destroys the strength that a modern polity derives from its own mythic memory. A delusion is an irrational belief —and there is much that is deluded in Reagan — but an illusion, though imbued with many fictive elements, represents, as Freud nointed out, the possibilities of rational human beings. We live by illusions, only gods and devils are without them, and it is our illusions that make us human. Wills' attempt to destroy Reagan is also an attempt to destroy many of the illusions that sustain a democratic polity. There is much in the collective memory, and much that Reagan exploited, of the historical role of family and religion in American life, as they were joined in the creation of a republican tradition. These memories constitute the ground conditions for a rational, democratic politics. The polity chose Reagan's vision over quite another vision of our past and future, that offered by Jimmy Carter, and whatever Reagan's inadequcies, this was not exactly a deluded choice.

The sub-text of Wills' book is often the insinuation of another past, a past more disabling than Reagan's vision. He substitutes for Reagan's happy America an image of victimized America. Both memories are Hollywood versions — the first instantly recognized because we have some distance from Frank Capra movies. But Wills' insinuated America is equally Hollywood: American history as one long succession of groups victimized by the system so that today we are all victims, even the silent majority and "middle Americans." The victimage view of American history is an unmitigated disaster because it paralyzes the polity in advance: Nothing can be done but pay reparations and, meanwhile, the future of the country, its capacity to adapt to a changing world, is abandoned.

Reagan's success cannot be explained outside the resurgence of conservatism, a resurgence that began, alas, immediately after Gold water's defeat in 1964. Reagan's success, however temporary, is the culmination of a sustained critique of liberal theory and the failure of liberal politics. To forget this is to underestimate Reagan's acumen in riding a rising wave, the rationality of the electorate and the power of conservative ideas. It also underestimates Reagan's success in enacting an essentially conservative role of the presidency.

Part of the tenacity of Reagan, part of our unwillingness to let go even as the president is wounded, is that we want some continuity in our lives and politics. Since the end of the Eisenhower term, we have not had a president complete a "normal" eight-year run of office: Kennedy was shot out of office, Johnson driven out, Nixon "impeached," Ford merely a lame duck and Carter disgraced. Unlike Nixon and Watergate, Reagan will survive the Iran-Contra affair because no one wants him gone. He will survive, disabled, but ultimately propped up by Congress and public opinion whenever his administration appears at the brink of collapse. That desire for temporal continuity is not an irrational one in a period where everything — policies, programs, presidents; families, fortunes and friendships — has the life span of a butterfly in spring.

Wills contributes to the great error we have made in dealing with Reagan: our willingness to underestimate him because he was and is an actor. Yes, Reagan is the great catechism teacher of modern politics; he brings the little boys and girls together for their weekly lesson which resembles nothing more than the reduction of history and politics to the endlessly repeated Unique Selling Proposition of his administration.

But there is a strength in his presidency that recent politicians have forgotten, namely that presidents are teachers and invokers of memory. The president is the ceremonial leader, the keeper of the myth. Reagan is the first president, since Kennedy at least, to take this role seriously, and he has been rewarded for it. Donald Regan or Howard Baker will not do. We don't need nostalgia for the past where there were no victims or nostalgia for the future where all the victims have disappeared and all conflicts ended. But we need to remember that republics are political systems based upon memory, memory of sin and virtue, triumph and defeat, but above all based on one particular memory. In the history of humankind our natural state has been that of domination. Republics have been brief, fragile interludes in what is often a sordid story. To remember the conditions of our founding, the creation of the possibilities of republican life, against all the forces that would overwhelm it, is a profound exercise in mythological memory.

The truths of the republican tradition must be taught over and over both in the schools and, more to the point, in politics. Reagan has seized the role of teacher even as he debased it. He recreated conditions of possibility even as he endangered our competence in foreign affairs and set loose an orgy of hedonism and selfishness. But there are lessons in his presidency about the role of myth and memory in politics, and we ought not let Garry Wills' brilliant effort at debunking obscure the central one: We need to secure a usable republican past against the anti-myth of corrosive skepticism so that we might have, post-Reagan, a republican future.