Reagan wrote (in his unedited draft): “Maybe in 1973 there was some excuse for interpreting Brezhnev’s remarks as a form of campaign rhetoric for in house consumption. But now we can look back over the four years since the speech was made and see how consistent with his words Soviet policy has been.” Reagan then chronicled the Soviet advantage: He said that
CHAPTER 6
1. Otto Kreisher, “Desert One,” Air Force Magazine, January 1999, 82, no. 1.
2. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (University of Arkansas Press, 1995).
3. Jim Greeley, “Desert One,” Airman, April 2001; and Kreisher, “Desert One.”
4. Greeley, “Desert One.”
5. Ibid.
6. “Transcript of President’s Interview on Soviet Reply,” The New York Times, January 1, 1980, 4.
7. Reagan wrote this January 1980 letter to a Professor Nikolaev, in Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters, 400.
8. Ibid., 433–34. Reagan wrote this January 1980 letter to a man named Edward Langley.
9. Carter responded with a series of actions: On January 3, 1980, he asked the U.S. Senate to suspend approval of the SALT II treaty he had signed with Brezhnev in Vienna the previous June. The next day he announced a sanctions package highlighted by an American boycott of the coming Olympic Games in Moscow as well as an embargo on U.S. grain exports to Russia. If the Soviets did not withdraw “within the next month,” said Carter, the Olympic boycott would remain. The Soviets did not pull out.
Importantly, this sparked a major shift within the Carter administration, which embarked upon a tougher foreign policy and initiated notable increases in military spending. President Carter now sided with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s more hawkish National Security Council, as opposed to Cy Vance’s dovish State Department, which had previously won over the president.
10. Martin Schram, “Reagan Urges U.S. Mideast Presence,” Washington Post, January 10, 1980, A3.
11. Morris in Wilson, ed., Power and the Presidency (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), 125–26.
12. For an extended analysis of this, see Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan. 13. Reagan, “Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference,” Washington, DC, February 6, 1977, in James C. Roberts, ed., A City Upon a Hill: Speeches by Ronald Reagan Before the Conservative Political Action Conference (Washington, DC: The American Studies Center, 1989), 31–33.
14. Ibid., 34.
15. All of Reagan’s first four CPAC speeches in the 1970s featured Shining City imagery. Reagan, “Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference,” Washington, DC, February 6, 1977. Text appears in Roberts, ed., A City Upon a Hill, 31, 37.
16. Kissinger interviewed for CNN documentary, “The Reagan Years: The Great Communicator,” Pt. II of series, CNN, February 2001.
17. Greenfield speaking on CNN documentary, “The Reagan Years.”
18. Reagan, An American Life, 219.
19. For the text of these Reagan remarks, see Peter Hannaford, The Reagans: A Political Portrait (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), 214–18.
20. “Ronnie’s Romp,” Time, March 10, 1980. See Reagan September 9, 1980 speech, “A
CHAPTER 7
1. A complete handwritten text of the inaugural address is on file at the Reagan Library.
2. On this meeting, see Schweizer, Victory, 5–8.
3. Part of this plan was to “intentionally,” “deliberately,” “initially take us into a confrontation with the Soviet Union.” Allen pointed to Reagan’s confidence and perseverance in pursuing such a strategy in the face of criticism all around him from observers like George F. Kennan and Strobe Talbott: “Reagan was confident his strategy would work.” Allen added: “Eventually, though, he put no timeline on it and certainly did not see it as something to be exploited politically….Rather, Reagan thought of the eventual demise of the Soviet Union as a good to be pursued in its own right.” Interview with Richard V. Allen, December 7, 2001. See: Richard V. Allen, “The Man Who Changed the Game Plan,” National Interest, Summer 1996, 60, 62, 65.
4. Interview with NSC staff member Norman A. Bailey, May 24, 2005. Bailey recalled these exact words from Allen to the NSC staff.
5. I have spoken to Schweizer about the document, which indeed appears authentic.
CHAPTER 8
1. Steven Strasser, Theodore Stanger, and Douglas Stanglin, “Crackdown on Solidarity,” Newsweek, December 21, 1981, 28.
2. David Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” London Times, December 16, 1981.
3. Ibid.
4. Interview with Joseph Dudek, conducted by Margie Dudek, November 2004.
5. Strasser et al., “Crackdown on Solidarity,” December 21, 1981; and Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland,” December 16, 1981.
6. Richard Owen, “How Army has filled vacuum left by party,” London Times, December 14, 1981.
The last time martial law was introduced in Eastern Europe was during the uprising in Hungary in 1956. The difference in this case twenty-five years later was that the armed forces took over the reins of government. In any other context, wrote Richard Owen in the London Times the next day, these actions would be classified as a military coup. Instead, Poland implemented a sort of hybrid government between the military and Communist politicians.
7. Transcript was published in major newspapers around the world on December 14 and 15, 1981.
8. Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” December 16, 1981.
9. “Ex-Prime Minister among those held,” London Times, December 14, 1981; and Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” December 16, 1981.
10. It was the kind of prudent religious sensitivity by Polish Communists that the brute Lenin and Soviet Communists never countenanced.
11. Official Soviet TASS statement, published in the London Times, December 14, 1981, 6.
12. Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” December 16, 1981.
13. Schweizer, Victory, 29, 31.
14. Agostino Bono, “Officials say pope, Reagan shared Cold War data, but lacked alliance,” Catholic News Service, November 17, 2004.
15. Bill Clark, “President Reagan and the Wall,” Address to the Council of National Policy, San Francisco, California, March 2000, 7–8.
16. This is fact easily and immediately confirmable by speaking to Poles from the era. One scholar who demonstrates it nicely is Timothy Garton Ash in The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 3, 7.
17. Interview with Bill Clark, August 24, 2001.
18. Among them was a compelling November 2, 1976 piece about the Katyn Forest massacre.
19. Gerhard Simon, “The Catholic Church and the Communist State in the Soviet Union and Eastern
