“Reagan’s SDI was a very successful blackmail,” Gerasimov said in an interview. “The Soviet Union tried to keep up pace with the U.S. military buildup, but the Soviet economy couldn’t endure such competition.”
Retired General Vladimir Dvorkin, a senior Soviet arms control negotiator during the 1980s, said that trying to field a response to Reagan’s Star Wars had “certainly contributed” to the Soviet economic demise but argued it didn’t play the decisive role.16
Such sentiment was heard throughout the chain of command. “This is a guy who changed the world,” said Aleksandr Shakhnovich, fifty-seven, a former shipbuilder for the Soviet navy. “It wasn’t only his speeches—it was his actions. He cut down the economy of the USSR and it was one of the main reasons the country just shut down. He did something that not only changed my life, but changed the lives of everyone in the Soviet Union.”17
Gratitude was also displayed in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai stated: “The people of Afghanistan remember Mr. Ronald Reagan’s assistance to Afghanistan during the years of ‘jihad’ (holy war) against the Soviets.”18 Under Reagan, wrote Pakistani columnist Mohammad Ashraf Azeem, the United States “introduced the resistance strategy of the ‘Afghan Jihad’ for checking the Soviet advance in Afghanistan. As a result of this [Afghan] war, the Soviet Union was disintegrated, and its dream of expanding its influence beyond Afghanistan was shattered once and for all.”19
These voices, from Krakow to Kabul, were a glowing tribute to Reagan; they rose from precisely the freedom he sought for these once repressed peoples of the world. Collectively, they comprised his finest eulogy.
IN AUGUST 1976, RONALD REAGAN WROTE A LETTER FOR THAT time capsule he referenced in his speech that month at the Republican convention. In the letter, he spoke of the potential nuclear catastrophe looming over civilization. It occurred to him that those reading that letter a hundred years henceforth would know whether those missiles were fired, whether they had freedom, and how much that freedom had depended upon Reagan’s generation.
We now know that that generation, and leaders like Reagan, met that challenge.20 They averted nuclear catastrophe. Freedom came to a severely repressed part of the world. The challenge today, for professors and parents alike, is to adequately convey the degree to which the world had once peered into the darkness, feared nuclear annihilation, and, in much of the Soviet sphere, was deprived of the most basic rights.
With a confidence and can-do attitude that invigorated him like the waters of the Rock River, Ronald Reagan set out to right those wrongs. The extent to which eventual worldwide occurrences matched his extremely ambitious intentions is astonishing, and one of the great stories of the twentieth century and U.S. history. Those who do not see that reality need to; not simply because it is a quintessentially American story of doing the impossible, but also because, yes, the missiles were not fired and people are free.
“Wars end in victory or defeat,” Ronald Reagan once said in 1961.21 The Cold War ended in victory—or, to paraphrase Reagan from January 1977, “We won, they lost.” It was a victory for which the world was thankful, especially given the tranquil way in which it ended—without the nuclear Armageddon that everyone so deeply feared and many expected. Within a decade of Reagan coming to power, the Cold War was over and the USSR ceased to exist, and both world-shaking developments occurred without a missile launched.
And it all started not at SAG or HUAC in 1947, not with GE Theatre, or at a Crusade for Freedom rally in the 1950s, not with a speech for Goldwater in 1964, and not even at that first trip to the Berlin Wall in 1978; oddly enough, it began at a park in Dixon, Illinois, the sight of murky, splashing water, where a young lifeguard named Dutch saved seventy-seven people over seven summers, and in the process went on to change the course of more than just a winding river.
EPILOGUE
WRITING IN 1986, COLD WAR HISTORIAN JOHN LEWIS GADDIS stated, “American officials at no point during the history of the Cold War seriously contemplated, as a deliberate political objective, the elimination of the Soviet Union as a major force in world affairs.”1 At that point in time, Gaddis could be excused for not knowing Ronald Reagan’s cards; after all, the historian did not have copies of all of those classified NSDDs, nor a seat inside Bill Clark’s National Security Council.
We now know, however, that such was precisely what Reagan had intended—and then some. What he pursued was truly revolutionary. He was not content to contain Soviet Communism. He wanted to kill it. He not only said so but committed himself and his administration to that very deliberate goal—a goal that stemmed from Reagan himself, not his advisers, long before 1981.
By the mid-1990s, with the presidency and Cold War over, Ronald Reagan might have spoken at length and repeatedly about his one-time intentions with the USSR. Unfortunately, his Alzheimer’s quickly became the major obstacle that prevented a complete accounting of Reagan’s goals with the Soviet Union. This meant that neither historians nor journalists could raise the issue with Reagan, though on more than one occasion everyday Americans—those Reagan heralded as America at its best—did. Bill Clark recalls a moment when he and Reagan were together again in the early 1990s. An admirer congratulated Reagan for “your success in ending the Cold War.” Reagan smiled and replied deferentially, “No, not my success but a team effort by Divine Providence.”2 He saw God’s hand in this “team effort” to “end” the Cold War.
On September 12, 1990, Reagan returned to the Berlin Wall as a private citizen. Just three years earlier he had called on Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the structure, and was now armed only with a hammer to chisel off a chunk of the edifice as a memento of the Cold War that he had brought to a close. The ex-president that day kicked off a ten-day, four-country European trip, fittingly starting at the neutered wall. “It feels great,” said the seventynine-year-old as he stepped carefully around the mangled steel rods that now protruded from the harmless, beat up barrier. “I don’t think you can overstate the importance of it. I was trying to do everything I could for such things as this….It happened earlier than I thought it would, but I’m an optimist.”3
Only twenty months earlier, on Reagan’s last day in the Oval Office, East German dictator Erich Honecker had defiantly proclaimed that the Berlin Wall would be standing 100 years henceforth, proudly “protecting our republic from robbers.” But on that September 1990 day, Reagan was the robber, as he chopped hard at the divide with a blue-headed hammer, taking a piece home with him.4
Today, the largest chunk of the wall outside of Germany sits in Simi Valley, California, directly beyond the window at the welcome desk of the Reagan Library and Museum, a gift donated by the citizens of unified, free Berlin, again the capital of a united Germany. Inside that library sits a video cassette tucked in a box: it features footage of that May 1967 Reagan-Bobby Kennedy debate, when Ronald Reagan first publicly called for the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
Alas, in a poignant moment later; indeed an instance of weakness born of a rapacious mental disease, in the summer of 1997 Ronald Reagan, by then fully in the throes of Alzheimer’s, offered a private acknowledgment, a rare admission. It came at a time when Nancy was readying to close her husband off from the world, and when he would spend his final few years in a bewildered state. Apparently, some memories were momentarily retrievable; all was not lost—not yet:
That summer, Reagan strolled through Armand Hammer Park near his Bel Air home when he was approached by a tourist named Yakob Ravin and his twelve-year-old grandson, both Jewish Ukrainian emigres living near Toledo, Ohio. They cheered Reagan as he got near and briefly spoke to the former president, who posed for a picture with the boy, which his grandfather proudly snapped. “Mr. President,” said Ravin, “thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the Communist empire.” The slightly confused eighty-six-year-old Reagan paused and responded: “Yes, that is my job.”5
That was his job—one he had assigned to himself long ago. And then, after it all, after the task was
