At a Washington bookstore look that 12 months, the writer stated that Reagan deserved credit score for serving to to win the Chilly Conflict, howev
At a Washington bookstore look that 12 months, the writer stated that Reagan deserved credit score for serving to to win the Chilly Conflict, however he added that “he made us pay a really, very excessive value for his triumphs” by neglecting some home points and by creating “a brand new populism” through which authorities was the enemy.
Mr. Reeves thought of Nixon temperamentally unsuited for politics at any stage, as he wrote in his 2001 ebook, “President Nixon: Alone within the White Home.”
“The facility and alternative of the presidency generally introduced out the most effective in him, however it introduced out extra of the worst as a result of he trusted nearly nobody,” Mr. Reeves wrote. “He assumed the worst in folks, and he introduced out the worst in them.”
But, as Mr. Reeves acknowledged in an interview for this obituary in 2017, he voted for Nixon when he ran towards Kennedy in 1960, earlier than his personal politics had moved “left greater than a tad.” He was a Democratic-leaning impartial for a time, he stated, and have become a Democrat when his spouse, Catherine O’Neill, ran unsuccessfully for the California State Senate within the 1970s. (Ms. O’Neill, a co-founder of the Ladies’s Refugee Fee, an advocacy group for displaced girls and households, died in 2012.)
Mr. Reeves discovered a lot to criticize in Kennedy, not least Kennedy’s determination to dip the American toe into the Vietnam quagmire, and far to admire, like his summoning of younger Individuals to public service. And Mr. Reeves understood the charisma that reworked Kennedy from man to martyr to fantasy.
“It was nearly as if these round him had been figures in tableaux, who got here alive solely when John Kennedy was in place on the middle,” he wrote in “President Kennedy: Profile of Energy,” a ebook, printed in 1993, that many think about his greatest. “He was an artist who painted with different folks’s lives. He squeezed folks like tubes of paint, gently or brutally, and the folks round him — household, writers, drivers, ladies-in-waiting — had been the indentured inhabitants serving his wants and needs.”
Richard Furman Reeves was born in New York Metropolis on Nov. 28, 1936, and grew up in Jersey Metropolis. His father, Furman W. Reeves, a Republican, was a choose in Hudson County, N.J.; his mom, Dorothy (Forshay) Reeves, had been an actress in early motion pictures.