There has long been a tendency to dismiss Ronald Reagan's years at GE as a period when he did little more than host a tv show, his movie career having washed out. One problem with this view is that it makes his famous Time for Choosing speech, on October 27th, 1964, appear as if it came out nowhere. Longtime Republican operative, Thomas W. Evans has a far more interesting story to tell about those years, one that explains how a non-politician could have emerged "overnight" as the singular political orator of the second half of the 20th Century. Mr. Evans reclaims the reputation of GE executive Lemeul Boulware and establishes him as one of the primary influences on The Gipper. Boulware was in charge of public and employee relations at GE at a time when the end of WWII had triggered new union demands and strikes throughout American industry. He believed that if working men understood how economics and government worked that they would be more inclined to work co-operatively with management, less likely to take an adversarial approach to business, and more supportive of America's Long War against the various forms of statism. He recognized in Ronald Reagan an ideal conduit for his message and hired him to visit plants and spread the word. In the process, he conducted the "education" of the book's title, although Mr. Evans makes it clear that in Reagan he had an already intellectually curious pupil, one who had already begun his drift rightwards. While it can be difficult to disambiguate the degree of credit Boulware deserves for exposing Reagan to certain conservative/capitalist writers--like Henry Hazlitt--it is unquestionably the case that the job opportunity itself prepared the future governor and president as no man had been readied before or since. Reagan got to meet and hear the concerns of GE's tens of thousands of working men and women. He got to try out ideas and lines on them, rewriting "The Speech" to weed out clunkers and add bits that scored. And, most of all, the years and years of giving such public talks made him supremely confident in his ability to get ideas across in ways that listeners would respond to. Taken together with the series of letters, diaries, speeches, etc that have been assembled by Kiron K. Skinner and Annelise and Martin Anderson, this book presents a Ronald Reagan who was far more than an amiable mouthpiece for the ideas of others. Instead we get a portrait of maybe the best prepared politician in American history, a man who had honed his craft to a sharpness that made his electoral successes seem more inevitable than surprising. Unlike other actors and celebrities, he was not just trading on his name when he entered politics, under Boulware's guidance, he had served a long apprenticeship that was to serve him, and us, well. (Reviewed:) Grade: (A) Tweet Websites:-OBIT: Thomas W. Evans, early backer of Nixon in 1968, dies at 82 (Matt Schudel June 18, 2013, Washington Post) -BOOK SITE: THe Education of Ronald Reagan (Columbia University Press) -GOOGLE BOOK : The Education of Ronald Reagan -Rendezvous with Destiny : The Ronald Reagan Centennial (General Electric) -ESSAY: The GE Years: What Made Reagan Reagan (Thomas W. Evans, 01/08/07, HNN) -ESSAY: Sue OPEC (THOMAS W. EVANS, June 19, 2008, NY Times) -LECTURE: The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism (Thomas W. Evans, Jan 19, 2007, Heritage Foundation) -ESSAY: GE Fondly Recalls Its Own 'Reagan Era': General Electric's Obama-backing CEO Jeffrey Immelt celebrates Ronald Reagan. (JOHN FUND, April 4, 2010, WSJ) -ESSAY: Enemies of State (Rick Perlstein, Winter 2011, Democracy Journal) The ambit and ambition of such thinking would grow wider and wider across the decades. Consider the career of perhaps the most important injector of such ideology into the bloodstream of Americans who were not businessmen and did not work under them in factories. He bears the obligingly Dickensian name of Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, and he is perhaps the most influential American most Americans have not heard of. Beginning in the late 1940s, he was General Electric’s “vice president for public and community relations,” a job title that spoke to his globalizing ideological ambitions. His main job was merely negotiating labor contracts, but he understood the work as political guerilla warfare: figuring out ways to speak directly to workers, over the heads of their unions, in, as Boulware’s best historian, Thomas W. Evans, explains, “a constant campaign, going on each day for years.” Boulware compared the job of his 3,000 “Employee Relations Managers” to that of General Electric salesmen “giving a turbine customer the information and guidance that would cause the latter of his own free will to want to do what we recommended as to the selection of the equipment and the signing of the order.” - - -REVIEW: of The Education of Ronald Reagan by Thomas W. Evans (Nicholas Wapshott, NY Sun) -REVIEW: of Education of Ronald Reagan (Steven F. Hayward, Claremont Review of Books) -REVIEW: of Education of Ronald Reagan (Robert A. Schadler, The American) -REVIEW: of Education of Ronald Reagan (DG Myers, Commonplace Blog) -REVIEW: of Education of Ronald Reagan (Rick Perlstein, New Republic) -REVIEW: of Education of Ronald Reagan (The Washington Times) -REVIEW: of The Education of Ronald Reagan (George Trefgarne, The Spectator) -REVIEW: of (Alan Snyder, Breitbart) -REVIEW: O Lucky Man!: The diaries of Ronald Reagan. (NICHOLAS LEMANN, The New Yorker) -REVIEW: of Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster by Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson (Conrad Black, American Spectator) -WIKIPEDIA: Boulwarism -OBIT: Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, 95; Headed Labor Relations for G.E. (JOAN COOK, November 8, 1990, NY Times) -ESSAY: Boulwarism: Ideas Have Consequences (WILLIAM H. PETERSON, 4/01/1991, The Freeman) -SPEECH: SALVATION IS NOT FREE (LEMUEL BOULWARE, JUNE 11, 1949, HARVARD UNIVERSITY) -REVIEW: of Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (Paul LeBlanc, Monthly Review) -REVIEW: of The Truth about Boulwarism by Lemuel Boulware (Emerson P. Schmidt, Intercollegiate Review) Book-related and General Links: |
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