From KERA in Dallas, this is Think.

I'm John McKay in for Chris Boyd.

As the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan promised to bring change to Washington,

reduce the size and influence of government, give voice to conservative ideas champion for decades by those

on the right like Barry Goldwater. But a generation after he left office, a new book asks if the

former president's practices really were as ideologically right of center, as many of its supporters

claim. The award-winning essay as writer and historian Max Boot is the Jean Kirkpatrick Senior

Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as the

columnist for the Washington Post. He spent more than a decade writing his new book, Reagan, his life and legend.

He joins us, this hour, Max.

Welcome back to think.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

You know, this was no quick turnaround for you.

You started this in 2013.

What prompted that? Well, when I was

launching this in 2013 and thinking about what book I would write next, I observed that Ronald

Reagan was a very consequential president, one of the most important presidents of the 20th century.

And while there were a lot of books written about Ronald Reagan, there was no

great biography. There was no definitive work that really encapsulated his life and his presidency

in kind of a definitive and objective manner. And so that's what I set out to do more than a decade

ago to write a book that was neither a hagiography nor a hit job, but something that was actually

much more balanced and neutral and objective. And that looked at both Reagan's strengths as well as

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