The Man Who Sold the World

William Kleinknecht
February 2009     ISBN: 1568584105

So much that has gone wrong in America—including the subprime mortgage crisis and the meltdown of the financial sector—can be traced directly to Reagan's policies. The financial deregulation launched in the 1980s freed banks and securities firms to squander hundreds of billions of dollars and make a shambles of the economy. Boom-and-bust cycles, obscene CEO salaries, blackouts, drug-company scandals, collapsing bridges, plummeting wages for working people, the flight of U.S. manufacturing abroad—these are all products of Reagan's free-market zealotry and his gutting of the public sector. Reagan pioneered the use of wedge issues like race and the war on drugs to distract America while his administration empowered corporations to lay waste to our traditional ways of life.

In the spirit of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, Kleinknecht takes us to Reagan's hometown of Dixon, Illinois, to show that he was anything but a friend to Main Street America. Relying on detailed factual analysis rather than opinion, The Man Who Sold the World is the first major work to explode the Reagan myth.

"A seasoned crime reporter of the old school, William Kleinknecht has penetrated the showbiz curtain to expose the venality and cynicism of the Reagan era—and tells us why the crimes of that time still matter so much today."
—Joe Conason, best-selling author, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush

"Finally, a fact-filled, eminently readable book that punctures the hot air balloon that has buoyed the Reagan presidency for far too long. Kleinknecht strips the emperor's clothes from Ronald Reagan to finally reveal him for what he was, a dim bulb conservative who set the country on the road that led us to the sorry state in which we find ourselves today. A must read."
—Peter Biskind, best-selling author, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll Generation Revolutionized Hollywood

William Kleinknecht is a veteran reporter and crime correspondent for the Newark Star-Ledger. He has previously covered the crime beat for the New York Daily News. He has won awards from the Associated Press and the American Society of Professional Journalists, and has contributed to American Journalism Review, National Law Journal and the Boston Phoenix. The author of New Ethnic Mobs: The Changing Face of Organized Crime in America, he lives in Glen Rock, New Jersey.