Reagan between July 24, 1987 and August 12, 1988, and there may well have been more. Here are examples of Reagan calling on Gorbachev or the USSR to tear down the wall (this is not a complete list): Reagan, “Remarks to the Captive Nations Conference,” July 24, 1987; Reagan, “Remarks on Soviet-US Relations at the Town Hall of California Meeting,” Los Angeles, August 26, 1987; Reagan, “Remarks at the 40th Anniversary Conference of the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy,” September 16, 1987; Reagan, “Radio Address to the Nation Following the North Atlantic Treaty
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1. Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at the University of Virginia,” Charlottesville, Virginia, December 1988.
2. Reagan, “Remarks to the National Chamber Foundation,” November 17, 1988.
3. Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989.
4. Ibid.
5. Andrew Nagorski, “Reagan Had It Right,” Newsweek, October 21, 2002, 68.
6. Gennady Vasilyev, “A Political Portrait: Reagan’s Best Role,”
7. This information was shared with me by Zawitkowski. Interview with Chris M. Zawitkowski, November 9, 2005.
8. Reagan gave the crucifix to his friend Bill Clark, who donated it to the Villanova Prep School (Order of Saint Augustine) in Ojai, California in June 1984. Chris Woodka, “Secretary of Interior Clark honored,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 7, 1984.
9. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 273–74.
10. Gorbachev, Memoirs, 478–79. In a 1993 conference at Princeton, Sergei Tarasenko spoke of how the nation elections in Poland in June 1989—in which Solidarity emerged the big winner—convinced him and the Soviet leadership, particularly the foreign ministry, that the Soviet system would break up. Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War, 112–13.
11. Bernstein, “The Holy Alliance,” 28–35.
12. Carl Bernstein and Marco Politi say $50 million in total. Peter Schweizer says $8 million annually. Other estimates seem close to these. Bernstein and Politi, His Holiness, 357; and Schweizer, Victory, 75–76.
13. So was Voice of America (VOA). Along with sources in the Western Hemisphere like Radio Marti, which penetrated Cuba, RFE and VOA were among Reagan’s favorite projects. These forces of freedom were put under the control of Reagan’s close friend, Charles Wick, who headed USIA. Some of them—Radio Marti in particular— were considered way too provocative by the State Department. It was a continuing battle for Wick to get them up and running; only because of Reagan’s full support did Wick succeed.
14. Interview with Joseph Dudek, Radek Sikorski, March 3, 2003. “This was the only
CHAPTER 21
1. Dobrynin, In Confidence, 632.
2. In the mid-1990s the Heritage Foundation began publishing a popular Index of Economic
Freedom, which measures degrees of economic freedom. Former Communist countries like the
Czech Republic and Estonia ranked as high as eleven, far freer than Western European economies
like France, Italy, and Spain (Gorbachev’s favored model).
3. Brown, The Gorbachev Factor, 306.
4. Ibid., 91, 130, 252, 267.
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1. Morris, Dutch, 667.
2. Deaver also makes the point that Reagan himself saw his lifeguarding as a parable of
his larger life. Deaver, A Different Drummer, 14–15.
3. Interview with Olive and Savila Palmer and Marion Emmert Foster, Heritage Square
nursing home, Dixon, Illinois, June 22, 2001.
4. The authoritative Harvard University Press study, The Black Book of Communism, estimates 100 million dead. The book was published prior to the two to three million deaths that
occurred in North Korea in the late 1990s. Also, it uses a figure on the USSR that is conservative
and, judging from recent seminal works on Mao’s China, may have underestimated the death
toll in Red China by ten million. No doubt, at least 100 million were killed under Communism,
and likely many more.
5. Data was provided by Freedom House staff, April 8, 2002.
1. John Lewis Gaddis, “The Long Peace,” International Security, 10, no. 4 (Spring 1986). Reprinted in Sean M. Lynn-Jones and Steven E. Miller, eds., The Cold War and After: Prospects for Peace (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 1993), 33.
2. Clark shared this during a February 22, 1999 presentation in Washington, DC. For a transcript, see: Clark in Schweizer, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 75.
3. Marc Fisher, “The Old Warrior at the Wall,” Washington Post, September 13, 1990, D1–2.
4. Ibid.
5. Lawrence K. Altman, “Reagan’s Twilight—A special report,” New York Times, October 5, 1997.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is impossible to thank all of those who played a role in this book. Their contribution is partly reflected in the 1,200 endnotes, which comprise over a quarter of the overall text. I’m often asked how many people I interviewed in the course of researching and writing this book over the last roughly ten years. My best estimate is that I’ve done hundreds of interviews.
Those that gave their time were Reagan officials as diverse in their views as George Shultz and Cap Weinberger, both of whom frequently disagreed in the 1980s but, fortunately for me, agreed to talk with me. Weinberger shared his insights several times. He died a week before I handed in the final draft of this manuscript.
I appreciate the time of men as well-known as Lech Walesa (my special thanks to his translater, Tomasz Pompowski) as well as people as little known as Dixonites Marion Emmert Foster, the Palmer sisters, Ron Marlow (Dixon’s best kept secret), and a host of others. The latter individuals reaffirm my continuing advice to Reagan researchers: You can’t know Ronald Reagan without going to Dixon, Illinois.
I spoke to a number of Reagan speechwriters: Ben Elliott, Peter Robinson, Ken Khachigian. I talked to many Reagan friends, from Charlie Wick to the extraordinary Bill Clark, the subject of my next book. Most of those I spoke to gave more than one interview. This is especially true of Clark and is also true of Richard V. Allen, Ed Meese, Richard Pipes, Michael Reagan, and others. I commend Bill and Michael Reagan for their commitment to telling the truth about Ronald Reagan’s commitment to human life, from the gulag to the womb.
