By N. Stephen Kane (PhDHist’70)
(Lexington Books, 316 pages; 2018)
In N. Stephen Kane’s (PhDHist’70) new book, Selling Reagan’s Foreign Policy: Going Public vs. Executive Bargaining, he examines President Reagan’s and his administration’s efforts to mobilize public and congressional support for seven of the president’s controversial foreign policy initiatives. Each chapter outlines a distinct foreign policy issue, but each is related in one way or another to alleged threats to U.S. national security interests by the Soviet Union and its allies. When taken together these case studies clearly illustrate the book’s larger thrust: a challenge to the conventional wisdom that Reagan was the indisputable “Great Communicator.” This book contests the accepted wisdom that Reagan was an exemplary and highly effective practitioner of the going public model of presidential communication and leadership, that the bargaining model was relatively unimportant during his administration, and that the so-called public diplomacy regime was a high-value addition to the administration’s public communication assets. The author employs an analytical approach to the historical record, draws on several academic disciplines and grounds his arguments in extensive archival and empirical research.
The book concludes that the public communication efforts of the Reagan administration in the field of foreign policy were neither exceptionally skillful nor notably successful, that the public diplomacy regime had more negative than positive impacts, that the going public model had minimal utility in the president’s efforts to sell his foreign policy initiatives, and that the executive bargaining model played a central role in Reagan’s governing strategy and essentially defined his presidential leadership role in the area of foreign policy making. This study vividly demonstrates the enormous gap between the real-word Reagan and the one that often exists in public mythology.
