Presidential chronicler

James Mann got interested in writing about Ronald Reagan when he discovered that, while Reagan was president, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld used to sneak off to undisclosed locations to prepare for Armageddon.

A longtime Los Angeles Times reporter, Mann left the paper in 2001 to write books full-time.

First up was Rise of the Vulcans, a historical portrait of president George W. Bush's foreign policy team.

Mann spent a couple of years asking Washington notables what they knew about Cheney, Rumsfeld and his other subjects.

It turned out, as Mann revealed in Vulcans, that Cheney and Rumsfeld were part of a highly classified programme “nowhere authorised in the United States constitution or federal law''.

It was designed “to keep the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union''.

Brink of conflict

Reagan's first term had featured harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric, a massive arms buildup and a terrifying episode involving a 1983 Nato exercise that nervous Soviet leaders feared might presage a real attack.

In this context, Mann's discovery made him wonder: “How close did it come? And was Reagan really thinking about nuclear war?''

As soon as Reagan left office he began transitioning from his old role as partisan Rorschach test to the more exalted status of Major Historical Figure.

Mann's new book, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, joins Princeton historian Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan, published last year, as a notable artefact of this evolution.

Wilentz wrote a broader history, while Mann focused on Reagan's role in the end of the Cold War.

Each had to deal with competing myths that have obscured the historical record. One myth painted Reagan as a heroic man of simple virtues, triumphing gloriously on all counts.

The other dismissed the president as an ill-informed, B-movie actor who served as the pawn of economic interests and had nothing to do with the end of the Cold War.

At 62, Mann is still in transition. He retains the reporter's instincts built up over a three-decade career. But he is now writing “what you'd call the near history'', and he relies as much on documents as interviews.

Mann grew up in Albany, New York. He came from a family of doctors and “went as far as getting into medical school'' before deciding to try something else.

Med school leave of absence in hand — he had not yet enrolled — he got a job at the New Haven Journal-Courier and never looked back.

After tours at The Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore Sun, he signed on with the Times' Washington bureau.

In the great tradition of newspaper generalists, he went straight from the Supreme Court beat to Beijing.

Returning to Washington, he wrote a book called Beijing Jeep and persuaded his bosses to let him cover foreign policy as an Asia specialist.

One day, Mann found himself in a Government Printing Office bookstore where he picked up a little monograph called Chinese Negotiating Behaviour.

An attempt to explain why China did so well in negotiations with the US, it was based on a more detailed intelligence document that Mann obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

About Face, a 30-year history of US relations with China, was one result. Another was the realisation that he was ready to give up daily journalism.

“You do daily newspaper stories and you know that you're catching just a little piece of it,'' he says. “I was better at trying to tell the whole story.''

Of all the documents Mann dug up while working on The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, his favourite by far — obtained from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California — is “Memorandum to the File, Meeting with president Reagan at the White House, 5pm, April 28, 1987.

The disgraced former president had been smuggled into his old residence for a private talk. The press never sniffed out the meeting but Nixon, as was his wont, wrote it up for the historical record.

The meeting had no importance in itself. Reagan did not get what he wanted, Mann writes, which was Nixon's support for efforts to ease “the nuclear standoff of the Cold War''.

But Mann chose to highlight the encounter because it evokes an important difference in the way the two staunch, Republican anti-communists viewed the Soviet Union.

Nixon assumed that the Soviet system was “a permanent if unpleasant fact of life''. Reagan believed — despite decades of evidence to the contrary — that it could be transformed.

Mann never answered the question of how close we came to nuclear disaster in 1983. He thinks the near miss “probably helped to produce in Reagan'' the strong anti-nuclear sentiment he voiced in his second term.

To turn that sentiment into action, he had to buck both his Rightwing base and national security “realists'' such as Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Hence the “rebellion'' of Mann's title.

Understanding Reagan, he came to realise, required a kind of interpretive triangulation: “You've got to take this guy's action, and what you can reconstruct of the bureaucratic battles underneath him, and his rhetoric, and realise that the rhetoric and the actions sometimes go in opposite directions.''

Mann bends over backward to acknowledge that while Reagan was an important actor, he played only a supporting role.

But Mann also thinks that the supporting actor deserves a Cold War Oscar of his own.