The truly remarkable public mourning that followed the death of Ronald Reagan in 2004 remains a largely unexamined phenomenon. The level and spontaneity of the grieving, together with the adulatory, week-long media coverage by a press corps that was famously either skeptical of or hostile toward his policies, was especially notable, inasmuch as Reagan had been out of the public eye for years.

Even the careful stage-management of the spectacle by his formidable widow, eerily reminiscent of the stagecraft employed by Jacqueline Kennedy 40-some years earlier, cannot begin to explain the emotional charge of this particular long goodbye.

Richard Reeves doesn’t really address Mr. Reagan’s mysterious connection with the American people in “President Reagan: The Triumph of the Imagination” (Simon & Schuster, 592 pages, $30), his highly detailed, reasonably fair-minded, but ultimately clueless assessment of the Reagan presidency.Like so many veteran journalists before him, he cannot seem to identify Reagan’s “rosebud,” that buried key to his subject’s character and life. With 900 books already written and still counting, it is safe to say that Reagan still has not found his Boswell.

Mr. Reeves offers a measured narrative analysis of the ups and downs of eight years in the White House. He appears to have known the late President fairly well, and he is nobody’s fool, so his book is blessedly free of the usual tripe regarding Reagan’s alleged detachment and over-reliance on staff. There is no “amiable dunce” rhetoric to read around and precious little hand-wringing about the effects of his policies on the poor.

Mr. Reeves is also refreshingly frank about his own politics. While he obviously liked the President, he is a self-described liberal with little or no enthusiasm for the Reagan political themes. That said, Mr. Reeves is enough of a pro to realize that something big happened when the Reagans arrived in Washington:

In contrast to Carter, Reagan was the voice of optimism and national destiny, saying, as he always had, Americans were God’s chosen, the world’s last best hope. He defeated Carter with just over 50 percent of the popular vote. Through good times and bad for eight years, according to Gallup polls, he was the most admired man in America. He had a 63 percent approval rating when he left the White House, higher than the other popular Presidents in the last half of the century – Dwight Eisenhower (59 percent and John F. Kennedy (58 percent). Among Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine, Reagan’s approval rate was 87 percent. There are debates about whether he realigned the country’s political structure in the manner of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there is no doubt that he established the Republicans as the country’s governing party.

Even if Mr. Reeves, in the end, fails to “get” Reagan or the Reagan Revolution, he is a shrewd observer of the secondary characters in the tale. It’s fair to say he probably won’t be dining out with Al Haig anytime soon:

The retired general had developed into a parody of his mercurial mentor, Henry Kissinger. Like Kissinger, he could not stop himself from raging against his colleagues and bosses in private. Of [National Security Adviser William] Clark, Haig said: “He doesn’t know his ass from third base.” Of [Chief of Staff Jim] Baker: “That son-of-a-bitch is the worst influence I have ever seen in the federal government.” And of the President: “His staying power is zilch. He isn’t a mean man. He’s just stupid.”

And there is this revealing exchange with Don Regan, the fired and bitter-about-it successor to Jim Baker as chief of staff:

“What was the biggest problem in the White House when you were there?” I asked Don Regan.
“Everyone there thought he was smarter than the President,” he said.
“Including you?”
“Especially me.”

And, finally, this exact, albeit entirely camp, snapshot of Nancy Reagan observing one of the by-then-disgraced Ollie North’s inimitable television performances:

That night she saw Oliver North on television, being asked if he planned to seek immunity from prosecution. “Immunity,” he said. “If I had immunity, I wouldn’t have this bad cold.” “Not funny, sonny!” she said to the set.

The substance of history can also be found in this book, although there is, predictably, far too much on Iran-Contra and far too little on National Security Decision Directive (NSDD32), the secret position paper drafted by Harvard’s Richard Pipes that put the United States on offense to bring down the Soviet Union. And only a secularist par excellence could offer so reductive a view of Mr. Reagan’s historic dealings with the Vatican:

Off-camera, the Pope and the President had agreed to consult and support each other in taking every opportunity to aggravate the obvious cracks in relations between Poland and the Soviet Union. A week after his visit to the Vatican, the President wrote a letter to a friend, John Koehler, saying, “I had a feeling, particularly in the Pope’s visit to Poland, that religion may turn out to be the Soviets’ Achilles heel.”

As President, Ronald Reagan was both celebrated and ridiculed as “The Great Communicator.” The truth, which Mr. Reeves only occasionally intuits, is that he had several important ideas about the nature of man and the world. These included a healthy respect for the free market, a prudent skepticism regarding big government, and an instinctive conviction that totalitarian evil must be challenged and defeated. That he communicated those ideas successfully is something for which the nation will be eternally grateful.

Mr. Willcox last wrote in these pages on Peter Schweizer.