PREFACE
1. Vitaliy Korionov, “20th Century ‘Crusaders,’”
2. Genrikh Borovik speaking on Moscow Television Service, August 14, 1984, published as “Borovik Criticizes Statement,” in FBIS-15-AUG-84, August 15, 1984, A7. For just one colorful example, see Gennady Vasilyev, “American Zero,”
3. Among available transcript copies, see Davis Houck and Amos Kiewe, Actor, Ideologue, Politician: The Public Speeches of Ronald Reagan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 166. 4. Reagan, “Remarks at a Conservative Political Action Conference Dinner,” February 26, 1982.
5. Reagan, “Remarks to Members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London,” June 3, 1988.
6. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 328.
7. Vitaliy Korionov, “Production Line of Crimes and Hypocrisy,”
8. G. Arbatov, “The U.S.—Will There Be Changes?”
9. The author who has surpassed others in illuminating Reagan’s personal role in the Cold War is Peter Schweizer. See Schweizer, Victory (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994); and Schweizer, Reagan’s War (New York: Doubleday, 2002).
10. Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York: Random House, 1999), xiii.
11. Anthony Lewis interview on “Reagan,” The American Experience, television documentary produced by PBS, WGBH-TV Boston, 1998. Hereafter cited as “Reagan,” The American Experience, PBS.
12. Richard V. Allen, “The Man Who Changed the Game Plan,” National Interest, Summer 1996, 60.
13. Clark in Peter Schweizer, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), 76. Clark has personally told me this many times. I’ve also encountered the quote from him in a number of published statements he made in the 1980s.
14. Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, The Acting President (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), 374.
15. The point that Reagan knew only vaguely what his aides did is not necessarily inaccurate. Reagan believed that the best manner of management for an operation the size of the executive branch of the modern federal government was for the president to stay attuned to the big picture and to delegate the day-to-day details to those under him. In so doing, he delegated trust as well, and was burned more than once, likely leading to the Iran-Contra fiasco. This system of management brought both successes and failures. Sometimes it was a liability. Reagan, however, would argue that such was the nature of the beast.
16. The article attributes its authorship in this puzzling way: “By Richard Stengel. Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Barrett Seaman/Washington.” Full citation: Richard Stengel, “How Reagan Stays Out of Touch,” Time, December 8, 1986, 34.
17. Don Oberdorfer speaking at 1993 Hofstra University conference on the Reagan presidency, in Eric J. Schmertz et al., eds., President Reagan and the World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 129. Hereafter cited as “Hofstra conference (1993) proceedings.”
18. Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (New York: Doubleday, 1987), xv.
19. Among Wills’ examples, see Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, xi.
20. On these sources, see Paul Kengor, “Reagan Among the Professors,” Policy Review, December 1999/January 2000, no. 98, 15–27; and Paul Kengor, “The Legacy of Ronald Reagan: The Academic View,” Conference on the Reagan Presidency, Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, October 10, 2001.
This is not to imply that all of these sources hail Reagan across the board, but only that they have treated him with fairness and have commended him and his presidency for various reasons, and often unexpectedly. For instance, James T. Patterson, a liberal, has been quite critical of certain Reagan domestic policies. On the other hand, John Sloan, also a liberal, has praised Reagan generously and personally rates him a “near-great” president. See John W. Sloan’s book review of The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies, published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, December 2004, 909–10.
21. Hugh Heclo, “Ronald Reagan and the American Public Philosophy,” in W. Elliot Brownlee, ed., The Reagan Presidency (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003).
22. In his seminal work, The United States and the End of the Cold War, in the chapter titled, “The Unexpected Ronald Reagan,” Gaddis maintains that the president succeeded in “bringing about the most significant improvement in Soviet-American relations since the end of World War II.” While he grants much of the credit to Mikhail Gorbachev’s receptivity, Gaddis asserted, “it would be a mistake to credit him [Gorbachev] solely with the responsibility for what happened: Ronald Reagan deserves a great deal of the credit as well.” Gaddis has urged colleagues to put aside “preconceptions” in evaluating the Reagan record. See John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 130–31. Speaking of the Evil Empire, Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1994: “Now that they are free to speak—and act—the people of the former Soviet Union appear to have associated themselves more closely with President Reagan’s famous indictment of that state as an ‘evil empire’ than with more balanced academic assessments.” This comes from his well-known and aptly titled piece, “The Tragedy of Cold War History.” Gaddis, “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” Foreign Affairs, 73, no. 1 (1994): 148.
In a separate work published in January 1989, Gaddis wrote similarly: “The time has come to acknowledge an astonishing development:…Ronald Reagan has presided over the most dramatic improvement in U.S.–Soviet relations—and the most solid progress in arms control—since the Cold War began.” Gaddis pleaded: “it would be uncharitable—and historically irresponsible—to begrudge the strategic vision of an administration once thought by many of us to have had none at all.” See Gaddis, “Hanging Tough Paid Off,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 1989, 11.
23. In a 1999 poll of presidential scholars by C-SPAN, Reagan ranked as the eleventh best president. He placed fourth in the category of “public persuasion,” behind only FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lincoln. In a 2000 survey of seventy-eight professors, by the Wall Street Journal and Federalist Society, Reagan rated eighth best president in history, reaching the “near great” category.
24. It has been argued that to the extent that Ronald Reagan should be granted any credit for winning the Cold War, credit ought to go not to him but to his advisers. At its most basic level, this suggestion is ridiculous. Even if Reagan never had a single idea or made not one decision affecting the Cold War, he would still deserve at least as much credit as his staff. Reagan, after all, was the one who got elected. It goes without saying that such is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish. The United States has been filled with millions of brilliant, ambitious individuals traversing its centuries of existence, but Reagan was only the fortieth to make it to the Oval Office. With the exception of George H.W. Bush, who was the first vice president elected president in over 150 years, arguably as a stamp of approval on the Reagan presidency, no other talented person in the Reagan administration went on to capture the White House. Reagan had the charisma to get elected. His policy positions appealed to the right number of people at the right time. Richard V. Allen, Reagan’s foreignpolicy adviser in the latter 1970s, notes that Reagan’s entire 1980 platform was rooted in Reagan’s own thinking, not pollsters, aides, nor anyone else. See Allen in Schweizer, ed., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 57. Allen’s claim is well substantiated by the extensive volume of handwritten, policy-related Reagan material from the period—the lengthiest collection among modern
