A life well lived need not follow a single storyline. Lew Lehrman’s life has been well lived in many fields of endeavor, as he acknowledges by entitling his memoir The Sum of It All. 

It’s a title of many meanings. Lehrman is consumed with sums, both in business and in advocating balanced budgets and sound money. Yet, he takes his inspiration from Winston Churchill’s view of the primacy of history. As Lehrman writes, “whatever the merits of science and religion—though we justly revere the arts and humanities—history is the sum of it all.” 

There is much to summarize in Lehrman’s 86 years. He has lived four distinct and consequential public lives. He co-founded the Rite Aid drug store chain. Since the 1970s, he has joined the lists of policy debates as a champion and friend for a who’s who of conservative, free market, and pro-life institutions. He ran for governor of New York against Mario Cuomo in 1982, losing narrowly. As a historian, he’s written volumes on Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, championed the legacy of French economist Jacques Rueff (after whom he named one of his sons), and endowed an influential collection of primary-source documents on American history. He credits the Gilder Lehrman collection with helping revive interest in Alexander Hamilton and promote scholarship on Lincoln and slavery. 

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Along the way, he served in the army, raised a family, ran a farm, converted from Judaism to Catholicism, ran marathons, and helped popularize red suspenders on Wall Street. He crossed paths and sometimes words with a sweeping array of important and notable figures: among others, William F. Buckley, Jr., Milton Friedman, Harry V. Jaffa, Malcolm X, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Jack Kemp, Jack Abramoff, Donald Regan, Bob Novak, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Sidney Blumenthal, and even a thirty-something Donald Trump. The book is scattered with photos of Lehrman with, among others, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Steven Spielberg, Cardinals Terence Cooke and John O’Connor, Justice Samuel Alito, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. 

A political boss from the 1920s told him as a boy, “Lew, never touch cigarettes, whiskey, or women—until you reach your twelfth birthday.” It’s a good line, but Lehrman’s life took a more conventional path. A fortune in business paved the way for his other endeavors. Lehrman is unsentimental about what made Rite Aid a success from its launch as a chain in 1964: 

We didn’t invent the discount health and beauty business, but we took an idea, and with more determination, energy, and system made it into a very large enterprise. We engineered the most efficient store…. Strategy counts, but sometimes it is not the origination of the idea itself, nor is it any complicated and systematic planning which gives rise to the success of an enterprise. Just as often, it is the relentless will to organize things more efficiently, to apply oneself with a certain discipline and commitment to one’s goals. We had those virtues. 

“Every penny counted, especially when you came from the grocery field where a penny’s profit on a dollar’s sale was considered a success,” Lehrman writes, quoting his grandfather’s dictum that “all the money is made between the cracks in the floor.” The Rite Aid name, originally attached to some of the store’s products, was forced on the business in 1965 by New York State Pharmacy Board bureaucrats who balked at approving a pharmacy in the chain’s New Rochelle store on the grounds that the prior “Thrif-D” name was “unprofessional.” 

Another financial success followed in 1998 after one of Lehrman’s analysts persuaded him to invest in RIM, which created the Blackberry. It’s a cautionary tale about tech-based business: in spite of a recent trip through bankruptcy, Rite Aid has outlived the Blackberry empire, which rose and fell years ago. 

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The heart of Lehrman’s memoir is political advocacy, especially in the early Reagan years. He describes himself as “a small-c conservative, not in the English or Burkean tradition, but in the classical liberal tradition of Cobden, Bright, Acton, Hamilton, and Lincoln.” He isn’t shy about his clashes with other Republicans and conservatives. 

One topic that feels newly relevant is Lehrman’s first run-in with government in 1971, when the Nixon Administration imposed wage and price controls. No bad idea ever dies, especially when the government is involved. Lehrman blames Donald Rumsfeld and his chief aide Dick Cheney for this harebrained policy. Rumsfeld, in his own memoir, insisted that he disagreed with the policy and administered it with the practiced eye of a Washington knife-fighter, trying to undermine it by controlling it. At the time, controls were especially alarming to a discount business such as Rite Aid, which got a federal court injunction that Lehrman credits with helping persuade Nixon to abandon the policy. Vindication only whetted Lehrman’s appetite. 

The late 1970s ushered in a deep economic crisis that called into question the nation’s prior two decades of monetary and fiscal profligacy. Many options were on the table for the first time since the Great Depression, but that window of opportunity for a major course correction did not stay open forever. In President Reagan’s administration, his mix of policies was a huge success: inflation and interest rates came down, the economy boomed, and we spent the Soviet Union into its grave. But all has not been well since. Deficit spending grew, and so did trade deficits. The Federal Reserve came back under fire after the 2008 credit crisis. Inflation, dormant since the 1980s, re-afflicted the economy following massive federal spending to counteract the dislocations caused by the COVID pandemic. 

Partly, Lehrman’s is a story of the road not taken. He wanted to be Reagan’s treasury secretary, and alternately blames monetarists such as Friedman and moderates such as George H.W. Bush and James Baker for blocking him from policymaking posts. Although Reagan listened to his advice, he was willing to follow it only so far. 

Thwarted, Lehrman took his case directly to New York voters, running as an unapologetic conservative in a bad year for Republicans during the 1982 recession. Both he and Cuomo were upset winners of their primaries, and the resulting campaign presented a polarizing alternative to Cuomo’s recrudescent New Deal liberalism. It would prove New York’s last chance to turn away from that path. Blanketing the state with TV ads—I saw many of them as an 11-year-old suburbanite—Lehrman lost by just 3.4 points, running 14 points ahead of the Republican candidate who challenged incumbent Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Lehrman recounts an eventful campaign with verve. 

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Even though Lehrman showed great promise in 1982, he never ran for office again. When Richard Viguerie and other disaffected conservatives wooed him to launch a primary challenge to Reagan from the right in 1984, Reagan’s team effectively neutralized him by dangling opportunities—which never materialized—to have a say in the second term. 

Lehrman still argues two interrelated cases he lost then: for balanced budgets and the gold standard. The problem of monetary policy is not so different from the problem of constitutional government. The money supply should, ideally, grow or contract at the same rate as the economy, so that money retains a stable value relative to commerce. A static money supply in a growing economy produces deflation, not stability. But that raises two problems: who decides when and how to grow the money supply, and how are those decisions constrained? These are questions still contested in an age when some want cryptocurrency to take the place once held by gold. 

The gold standard is an external constraint on money, just as a written constitution is an external constraint on government. The growth of the gold supply derives from mining discoveries, not banking decisions. But these haven’t always tracked the economy: until the 19th-century gold rushes in California and Australia flooded the world market, liquidity lagged behind productivity for decades, starving technological progress of capital. Indeed, national decisions about gold and silver as monetary standards in the 18th and 19th centuries often turned not on economic theory but on assessments of minting technology and geopolitical control of mines. 

Moreover, as with a written constitution, any form of sound money is only as good as the discipline of the political system to abide by its constraints. Lehrman’s desire for a balanced federal budget is fiscally prudent but utopian in the absence of political will. Ever since the First World War, U.S. governments have found it necessary to break the limits of the gold standard. 

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Lehrman argues that the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency—a role it has assumed in the absence of a gold standard—artificially strengthens the dollar against foreign currencies, weakening the competitiveness of American exports. He has a point, but reserve currency also expands our power to borrow at lower interest rates (a useful thing, so long as we lack the will to resist deficit spending) and yields us extensive leverage and even surveillance over global financial transactions. The Chinese and the Russians would gladly take our place. Monetary policy, like every other kind of policy, involves trade-offs that are not so neatly resolved.

Lehrman’s perspective on the monetary, fiscal, and trade policy compromises of the Reagan years speaks to controversies that continue to challenge the republic. Readers who wish that The Sum of It All had been longer can find supplementary archival materials, culled from the original manuscript, posted on Lehrman’s personal website. Those who wish it had been shorter are likely to skim the extensive quotes from Lehrman’s previous writings, or detailed material about his family. Readers of all sorts will benefit by coming to know an American life lived with purpose and recounted with vigor.