Category: Areas of Research

Thanks again to an introduction provided by Tom Campbell, a former U.S. representative himself (and my uncle-in-law), I also interviewed Jim McDermott, a nine-term representative from the seventh congressional district of Washington.  McDermott is a leading Democrat and a professional psychotherapist, so I hoped he could provide some thoughts about the idealism of the “American Dream” from a liberal perspective.  We spoke by phone on November 5, 2007, the same day I talked with Martin Anderson.

As with Anderson, McDermott’s initial response to my questions was both surprising and intriguing.  I expected he would discuss the American Dream in terms of a liberal optimism about progress and the hope of a better society in the future.  Instead, he took a decidedly negative approach and associated it with a deceptive promise made to immigrants coming to this country—a promise more often broken than kept.  McDermott spoke of the painful struggles of his immigrant ancestors when they first came to America, people who were filled with unrealistic hopes and then exploited by powerful others.  The dream “was not always what it was cracked up to be.  Many Americans found it a false dream.”  He asked, “What about people who don’t make it?”

McDermott’s compassion for those who have been left behind clearly underlies his political ideals, especially the cause of expanding health care to include all Americans, and it defines his opposition to Republican policies that neglect the human wreckage caused by the selfish “dreaming” of the economically powerful.

McDermott was understandably reluctant to discuss his personal dreams, or anyone else’s actual dreams.  He recalled losing the 1980 governor’s race due in part to getting “clobbered as a liberal Seattle psychologist,” and ever since he’s been reluctant to offer easy ammunition for his political opponents.

I was sorry to hear that.

Even though I agree almost entirely with McDermott’s political priorities, I felt something was fundamentally missing from his perspective—something that, ironically, I found in abundance in Martin Anderson’s portrait of Ronald Reagan.  It’s a sense of connection with the creative power of dreaming, which I believe is the psychological truth at the core of the national ideal of the American Dream.  McDermott’s skepticism about that dream reflects the liberal virtues of rational clarity and empathy for the suffering of others, but it seems to depreciate the equally liberal virtue of courage to imagine and envision new possibilities and new hopes for the future.

Jim McDermott is the Democratic Representative from Washington

A conversation about the American Dream with Martin Anderson, biographer of Ronald Reagan

Thanks to the kind intercession of Tom Campbell, then Dean of the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, I had the opportunity to interview Martin Anderson by telephone on November 5, 2007.  Anderson was an administration official during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and has written and edited several books about Reagan, including Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (2001).  Reagan’s presidency is often associated with a particularly sunny, Westernized vision of the American Dream, and I hoped Anderson could provide a well-informed description of his politically conservative ideals.

Our conversation got off to a difficult start.  I must not have been very clear in my initial description of what I wanted to discuss (it’s a hard project to describe in a few words), and Anderson reacted as if I were taking a critical approach to Reagan’s reputation as a napper.  It’s true, I was curious about that and planned to ask about it eventually, but Anderson immediately declared that Reagan “never napped,” and he dismissed any suggestion that Reagan was ever less than fully fit and alert both mentally and physically while President.  Anderson said he challenged anyone to find a photograph that showed Reagan napping (I made a quick check of Google images and found nothing).  I expressed surprise at this, since the legend that Reagan enjoyed a daily siesta is widespread and even a point of pride among conservatives, who regard his regular afternoon naps as endearing expressions of equanimity and good sense.  The most Anderson would allow is that there may have been “brief closings of his eyes” during meetings, but nothing that would count as a full nap.

Of much greater interest to Anderson, and to me as well, was the nature of Reagan’s political idealism.  According to Anderson, Reagan’s boldest political initiatives were inspired by “dreams” and “visions” that gave him a profound sense of meaning, purpose, and direction throughout his political career.  It’s not clear to what extent these inspirations were related to actual dreams during sleep, but in Anderson’s view they reflected an admirable openness to sudden intuitions and calls to action.  The greatest of these dreams was that of a nuclear-free world.  Reagan was a pacifist in his 20’s, and Anderson said he never lost his idealistic vision of a world beyond the horrors of war.  At the 1976 Republican National Convention, where he narrowly lost the nomination to Gerald Ford, Reagan gave a final speech in which he surprised everyone by calling for an elimination of nuclear weapons, a very un-Republican proposal. “It was always Ronnie’s dream that the world would be free of nuclear weapons.”  Anderson also pointed to the “Star Wars” anti-missile defense system as an instance where Reagan made a sudden decision, unanticipated by even his closest aides, to pursue a highly idealistic effort to end the threat of nuclear war.

As someone who cast his first two presidential votes against Reagan, I found it hard to reconcile Anderson’s glowing portrait with the Reagan I perceived from 1980 to 1988.  At the time, his visionary idealism made less of an impression on me than his administration’s unwillingness to deal with growing problems with the environment, civil rights, poverty, etc.  Yet Anderson persuaded me to recognize in Reagan an authentic visionary quality, a reliance on deep personal intuitions of purpose and truth.  I may disagree fundamentally with the purposes to which Reagan directed his intuitions, but I can still respect him as a dreamer whose political success derived in large part from his ability to communicate his dreams to others.  His mojo just didn’t work on me.