American History Hit - Ronald Reagan: The Hollywood President

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Think what you like about him, Ronald Reagan was a big hitter and his presidency changed America. This ex-Hollywood actor's eight years in office set the political agenda in ways we live with today.To discuss this most charismatic of Presidents, Don is joined by Jeremi Suri host of the 'This Is Democracy' podcast & author of 'The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office'.Edited by Sophie Gee. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Greetings all. When last on our march through the U.S. presidents, we covered number 38, Gerald Ford, which means by rights, Jimmy Carter should be next. Well, we haven't forgotten, President Carter. Not at all.

Indeed, we released a full episode about Carter's legacy at the end of last year just following the man's sad passing. If you haven't heard this episode and you're curious about the life and times of our 39th president, please go to our homepage wherever you get your pods and check out episode. Episode 240, I highly recommend it. So that lands us today at our 40th president, Ronald Reagan. Reagan was an inveterate diarist, one of the few who kept one every day consistently. So if you want to understand what it was like to be Ronald Reagan in office, consider the following entry from August 12, 1986. An ordinary day, if there ever is such a thing for a president, with a packed agenda ending with a punchline, classic Reagan.

Here we go. 7.45 a.m. breakfast with Nancy at the White House. Then it's on to Marine One, quick hop to Andrews Air Force Base, then Air Force One, bound for Springfield, Illinois. In the air, Reagan phones two senators. 10 a.m. he lands, leaps into a.m. He leaps into a motorcade headed for the Illinois State Fair. There he tours the livestock pens, hands out awards,

and speaks to a crowd of concerned farmers, assuring them that he understands their struggles. The Queen of the Fair presents him with a peach pie. Noon, it's back on Air Force One headed for Chicago and a fundraising luncheon, meet and greet's in his hotel suite, and he heads to the Rosemont Ballroom and a press conference, his 38th press conference, but who's county? Remarks will be broadcast live nationwide. Reagan looks immaculate, not a hair out of place after this full day of speeches, smiles, glad hands, and constant conversation.

Taking his place at the podium, Reagan smiles sheepishly, delivering one of his most iconic lines. The nine most terrifying words in the English language, he says, are, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help. Hi there, it's Don Wildman, and you're listening to American History Hit. The whirlwind of the 1980s America, the empire striking back and Indiana Jones cracking his whip, Michael Jackson vying with Prince who vied with Whitney and Madonna. There was the hair, all that hair. From rat tails to Mohawk to heaven help us the mullet, it was a decade of shoulder-patted poses and junk-bond billionaires, running man dancing with the worm and the drum machines beating the rhythm.

The cultural earthquakes still echo today. Politically in the 80s, we arrived at a pivot point in presidential politics, a complete reconsideration of the role the federal government should play in American life. Ronald Reagan, silver screen movie star, turned to, TV spokes guy, two-term governor of California, leader of the conservative wing of the Republican Party was elected over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter and immediately set off an era of deep spending and tax cuts coupled with increased military spending, all designed to retool American might and influence, primarily over our Soviet adversary. Once again, to quote Reagan's famous

campaign ad, it would be mourning in America as he brought us back from the dark days of Democratic leadership. Under Reagan, the sun would rise on a resumption of Republican political power we still live with today. Yes, our episode today is the Reagan presidency, and we discuss the life and legacy of our 40th president with Jeremy Surrey, Professor of Public Affairs and History at the University of Texas, author of critically acclaimed books, including The Impossible Presidency, the rise and fall of America's highest office. Jeremy, hi, we've been on this presidential series for more than two years now. Turns out it takes a while. But I think with Reagan, we finally enter the age we now live in, so to speak, where the issues of his presidency are directly or indirectly contemporary to us today.

National politics bending toward a divided state and so forth. I mean, it heats up later for real. But this is the Reagan presidency that kicks it off. Agreed? Absolutely. I think this is the moment when many of the issues which challenge traditional governance, which challenge what we might call the post-war order. Those issues are now debated in ways they had not been debated before. Exactly. Reagan is a midwesterner, born in Tampico, Illinois, February 6, 1911. Poor family, dad, an alcoholic salesman.

It was Reagan's mother who shaped him, according to the values of fairness and empathy. I think this is really important. He was known as Dutch, good-looking, strapping kid, good at sports, not particularly at academics, had a pension for dramatics, lands in radio, after his. attending Eureka College in Davenport, Iowa. His broadcasting success eventually leads to a Hollywood audition at Warner Brothers. He's a film star for the next 20 years. He was a Roosevelt Democrat until he turned 50 in 1961.

By the time of that time, he'd gotten rich and hated taxes, like all rich people do. He'd also believed that communism had to be stopped, and this led him towards conservative politics. Registered as a Republican in 1962, becomes spokesman for conservatives everywhere. finally runs for governor, as I say, in 66 and wins a second term in 1970. That's the background on what brings him to the presidency, or at least his runs to the presidency. How does Ronald Reagan typify American conservatism in that time? Well, I think in two ways. You've given a really excellent overview. I think the first element of Reagan conservatism is that it emphasizes the importance of individualism. It's a belief in the frontier. And Reagan himself enacts the frontier in his life, going from the middle. West to California, to find a new position in this new industry called Hollywood. So the individualism, the faith in the individual, and the critical view of what conservatives

would call communitarian, regulation, government overreach, things of that sort. So that's number one, the individualism. And number two, I think, is this also belief in economic growth, that there's always a possibility for the pie to grow larger and that you don't have to worry about redistributing research. You just want to create more resources for more people. So it's the politics of growth as well as the politics of individualism. It's important to realize, I mean, I went through all that bio to really nail down the fact that Reagan makes a journey. He comes from that whole world of federal government solves problems of FDR to the 1960s when things have changed for him personally, but also things are changing in America.

And you have Barry Goldwater running against Lyndon Johnson. That's the real big tipping point here. And because Reagan has, as I explained, become this spokes guy. He's central to this articulation of these ideas and becomes hardcore, doesn't he? Absolutely. And in fact, he comes of age as a national figure during the Barry Goldwater campaign. It's in 1964 that Reagan gives a famous speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. And people listen to the speech and say, wow, we like this guy more than we like Barry Goldwater.

Because what Reagan's doing is he's attaching these conservative ideas to a kind of cool, He makes them feel modern. He makes them feel exciting and entertaining. And this is one of his secrets to take the traditional ideas and attach them to modern media and modern entertainment. I got to say, he's a very appealing movie star. I mean, for the longest time, when I was younger, I rolled my eyes about this guy. But as an older man, I respect his presentation skills.

He's really good. And he's very appealing at that time, especially in the Cold War. Nuclear Armageddon is in the air, and the whole thing is going to be. the whole thing is going on. But he's looking at Johnson's Great Society as a kind of evolution of FDR and saying enough is enough at this point. Right. He sees the Great Society is going too far.

Reagan never renounces FDR. This is really important. In fact, the second to last speech that Reagan gives at the end of his second term as an older man, he insists on going to the FDR presidential library in Hyde Park, New York, and talking about how important FDR was to him. He says it's at the end of his career. So he never gives up on FDR. But he sees FDR's successors as being far lesser and also being distortions of what FDR was about.

And for him, the great society goes too far because of the high taxation, but also because of the role government is now playing in the United States in telling industry, universities, and other institutions who they should admit, what procedures they should use, who they should include. He's in many ways reacting against civil rights, government interventions in institutions. Yeah. I mean, when you get to Reagan, ideals really matter. I mean, this guy has been speaking out for decades now, quite articulately, as I've been saying, and somehow it comes through him very authentically. And this is a difference for America. He is very good at talking about freedom, liberty, individualism, all of that. And those of us who were, you know, on one side of the other, were always judging whether it was real or not. Well, I think Reagan's secret and Luke Cannon, who wrote about him as a news reporter throughout his career made this point, Reagan believed what he said. He was an actor who was an honest actor in his own eyes. And that doesn't mean he wasn't wrong or naive or misguided at times and perhaps he believed what he wanted to believe. But he was authentic in the sense that when he

spoke from the heart about freedom, when he spoke from the heart about the evils of communism, when he spoke from the heart about the challenges of overreaching government, he was being sincere and that resonated with people, and it was combined with a very kind, personal touch. You know, I love the stories of Reagan sitting in the White House, Don, and writing personal checks to people. He would read a story of someone. You know, you would send a letter to the White House,

and it would get to Reagan somehow, and it would say, you know, my child is sick and I can't afford health care, and Reagan would write a personal check and send it to you. And that was authentic. He wasn't doing that for media attention. In fact, the media often didn't know about it. He combined these big ideas, as you said so well, Don, with an authentic personality and with a kind personal touch.

Yeah. He's close to Nixon as a friend, I mean, as an ally for sure. And in a way, he predates the silent majority. He is speaking out for suburbanites, right? He's taking on these problems of America in terms like ordinary people need to see them. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, and he is.

I'm glad you mentioned suburbanization. This is one of the dynamics that really becomes important in American social history in the 1960s and 70s, and Reagan is in some ways the first suburban politician. What is he appealing to? He's appealing to people who see themselves as moderate, who moved from, as he did, moved from the Middle West to places like Orange County, California. They're living in suburbs where they have to drive to work and they send their kids to school close to home. They're not living in a city. They want to be left alone. They don't want government interfering in their lives, even though they rely on government subsidies for their mortgages and government subsidies for their roads. They want to be left alone.

They see themselves living on a new frontier. And Reagan appeals to that and contrasts himself to the urban machines that were the Democratic Party. Right. Reagan's campaign for president is not the first one. He, like so many, he's gone through a process in this regard. He thinks about being president back in the 60s. He skips 72 because Nixon is going to landslide there. But he comes back against Ford in 76, and this in so many ways begins to reshape his party. He pulls everything to the right, which is a hint of what's to come. That primary season is really memorable and really important. Yes, absolutely. I mean, he's challenging a sitting president. Now, it's a sitting president in Gerald Ford, who was not elected president, who replaced Nixon when Nixon resigned. And he

pulls the party to the right doing two things that are really important. First of all, he challenges many of the establishment figures within the Republican Party, people who go back to Eisenhower. And Nixon himself went back to Eisenhower. And what Reagan says is we've had an establishment that has basically gone along with too many things the Democrats agreed to. And it's time that we stake out a new position.

And then secondly, he criticizes some of the government policies, government welfare-related policies that had been supported by both Johnson and Nixon. Nixon actually expands the welfare state. And he criticizes, this is the key point, he criticizes the welfare state for American stagflation in the 1970s. He says the American growth has slowed. We have gas lines. We have high inflation.

And it's because of government, not because government did too little, but because government has done too much. Yeah. Boy, he's got a backdrop for all this stuff in those days. I mean, folks today don't realize. The gas lines were abhorrent to Americans who were used to flying down the highway. You know, suddenly we were being, you know, the puppet strings were being pulled by people overseas. It was really, really intense in the 70s. So he has a great platform for his political campaign.

One of the policies he follows in pursuit of this vision. So there are a number of them. First of all, he argues for lowering taxes. He makes the case, which had been an old argument Republicans had made, but he now attaches this argument of lower taxes to economic growth. It's supply-side economics, as it was called, at the time, right? which no one really believes anymore, and very few people believe, then at least very few economists.

But the supply side argument is that if you give people more money, put more money in their pockets, they will buy more things. And if they buy more things, the economy will grow. And then those who are poor, they'll get better jobs because there'll be more need for them to make more stuff. Right. So the supply side economics, that if we lower taxes, it's not going to be a problem of debt,

it's actually going to increase government revenue and increase things. It's a magical argument. But it's so nice. Americans love it. Yes, we can spend more, and we'll be better off. The second argument he makes is that the reason we are being controlled

by foreign entities, including those from the Middle East, the reason we have an oil crisis is because we haven't been tough enough. We have to be tougher internationally, right? And he calls for a major military buildup. It's one of the paradoxes of conservative politics in the U.S.

It includes Trump in this as well, that we want to reduce government but increase defense. And of course, there's no more quintessential part of government than the military and the defense establishment. Reagan wants to increase the defense establishment. And then the third thing he wants to do is he wants to appeal to cultural conservatives. He makes the argument that the federal government will actually now get out of the way of restricting some of the things that were restricted because of separation of church and state.

So he's in favor of prayer in schools. He's in favor of public funding for religious schools. He was not a religious man, but Reagan understood that particularly in a decade when we were going through lots of conflict at home over the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, lots of economic challenges. Religious groups wanted to feel that they had more of an opportunity to voice their views, and he was trying to give them more of a place in politics. So he brings conservative evangelicals into the Republican Party more deeply than they had been brought in before. Yeah. I should be clear, the primary season I was talking about before was against Gerald Ford, 76 election. The 1980 election is when he's finally elected, and that becomes a problem for him

only because George Bush calls him out on what you just cited, which is voodoo economics, the only time that term has ever been floated, and it was by his future vice president. That's correct. And George H.W. Bush, running out of Texas, who had a long experience in Congress, at the U.N. in the CIA, he was not a believer in this made-up economics. He was a serious guy about this. He was a businessman. Yeah.

And his challenge to Reagan in the primaries was that Reagan was a little crazy. And that's why when he said voodoo economics, he was criticizing not just the economics, he was criticizing Reagan's approach to policy in general. Yeah. Yeah. I remember my mom's thinking, what is this movie start? You know, coming on the scene, pretending he's going to be president, telling these grand stories about America.

It's all that when you were on the other side looking at it. But if you were favoring those, you know, what he was recommending to straighten out America, boy, did it sound good. If I might not, it's one of my favorite movies, back to the future. and if one remembers in the movie, the scientist says to Michael J. Fox, after Michael J. Fox comes back from the future, what, Ronald Reagan is president?

Who, the actor? It was really funny in those days. It was a big tongue-and-cheek thing. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter, we should be looking at, send us an email at ah-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h we'd love to hear from you.

Another element of his, and you've mentioned, already, his tilting towards the religious element, not personally, but he changes that landscape in America, doesn't it? He is the one that really pulls in the evangelical vote, again, against the backdrop of this frayed America that he was describing to everyone. Yes, absolutely. And it's both a substantive and a stylistic element. Substantively, many religious communities in the United States feel that the great society and the things that Lyndon Johnson and others have done for civil rights, for women's access to sports for things of that sort, they have cut into their religious beliefs. They have made it harder

for them to raise their children as they want to raise them with the religious beliefs they have about men and women and who does what. And so Reagan, in criticizing those government policies, creates an opening for those religious figures, many of whom were skeptical about him because he was a divorced man. He's the first divorced man elected president, right? That was a big deal for religious leaders at the time. But they see him as criticizing the restrictions on religious practice and religious politics that they want. So he's a useful vehicle for them. And this is a long trend of religious leaders using imperfect profits as their pathways for influence. So that's the substantive element. And then stylistically, as we talked about before, you said this so well, Don,

Reagan is such an appealing person that he goes to these religious communities. And even though they know he himself is not a church-going religious man, he's a divorced man, et cetera, he shows them a kind of respect, he connects with them. In a way, Democrats had trouble. Democrats were often coming to these communities and lecturing them about civil rights, about equality, about justice. Reagan wasn't lecturing them. Reagan made them feel that he was a friendly face and a friendly person for them. And he was, that was real. That style mattered substantively. Yeah, exactly. I mean, he believed it. He's also, it's important to realize with Reagan, Before we get into the policies of his presidency, his demeanor, his kindly demeanor, belied his political acumen.

There is no way you get to where this man got to in life, never mind politics, without being a smart fellow politically. And he was more so, I remember that SNL skit with Phil Hartman. Yes, I was just thinking about it. He was in the second term, and we all thought he was just a doddering old man at this point, and he probably was. But Phil Hartman would hold these like, high kindly little meetings with little people who would come, the little children who would come in. And then he'd pull down the map and say, okay, get going. He was charging for over the Iran-Contra and all that stuff. It was really a funny thing.

And one of those aspects was the war on drugs, which he will use politically just as Nixon did. You know, it's a same kind of lever. You know, let's get this society back to law and order. And it's drugs and the people who are using them, that other problem. Yeah. Well, I mean, Reagan, as a holiday. would star, he understood the power of a story. And as we said before, he also understood the power of an easy adversary. And drugs did both of those things for him, right? Because drugs symbolized the

problems of drug usage in the United States, crack usage in the early 1980s. I grew up in New York was a big problem, right? It to him symbolized the problems of moral depravity, that people who had lost their moral way because they weren't going to church and they weren't going to school, they were getting corrupted by what my mom used to call bums on the street who were selling them drugs, right? And so we had to step in, not for government to take over their lives, but for government to enforce order so that the drug dealers couldn't operate. It connected to his foreign policy because he blamed communist regimes, radical regimes, for supporting the drug trade. And it also played to his desire to emphasize the role of force rather than the role of redistribution of

resources. What he argued against was that the argument Democrats made that drug usage was a function of inequality and economic struggle. He argued, no, it was moral depravity and international intervention. And he was going to take strong action against both, hence the war on drugs. So domestically, we're talking about lower spending, cutting taxes, increased military spending. Politically, he's bringing in the evangelical right. He is telling the great story of the resurgence of America, which, you know, echoes right through to Trump and make America great again, all that. The war on drugs is going to take care of the inner city. It's all going to fix itself. And off we go. I remember that 1980. It was a stark slap in the face for anybody who was depending on the old FDR, you know, federal government fixing things.

Suddenly Reagan was telling a whole different story. And he was right. He changed the whole tenor of this country. And off we went. It was all against the backdrop. I mean, you can kind of look at it this way. There's two terms to Reagan. And part one is this domestic, certainly the first half of his first term, is all about domestic. The second term is kind of more international and all about dealing with the Soviet Union. Broadstrokes, I know, but is that generally how it looks? Well, I mean, there's a lot of foreign policy in the first term, too, and there's the evil empire speech in 1983, strategic defense initiative. But I do think you're spot on in that when Reagan comes into office, like FDR, he sees his hundred days in his first years as immediately,

making big changes at home. And so I do think that's important. And I do think much of the controversy around him, people saying he was senile and an extremist were around these domestic issues. That said, it also is important to say that he, from the beginning, wanted to work with Democrats. He wanted to work with them on his terms. But he establishes actually a better relationship with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Thomas Tip O'Neill than Jimmy Carter ever had. If I might tell one Tip O'Neill story, Tip was this big Boston politician. Everyone can imagine. Big Irish Boston politician weighed 400 pounds.

And when Jimmy Carter was trying to cut spending, he decided when he invited members of Congress to the White House, they would no longer serve these big breakfasts. They would just get little Danish. And Tip O'Neill went crazy. He said, I come to the White House. I expect a proper breakfast. Reagan understood this.

Reagan provided a lavish buffet for Tip O'Neill. And what I always tell students, Don, is, you know, these little things matter. Actually, they seem trivial, but they make a big difference. Again, for anyone younger, it's hard to imagine the world as it was then where the Soviet Union loomed so large in our lives as a direct threat. And when a president came in, we had just gone through about 10 years of daint, building this sort of carefully massaging Brezhnev in those days and Nixon was sort of reaching out and all that was going on in the 70s. Suddenly Reagan comes in with a whole different idea. This is going to be stand up strong to the Soviet Union. Little did we understand that there was probably a larger strategy at hand here.

We were going to spend them off the table, right? Well, I'm not sure that, you know, historians have looked for that strategy. We haven't quite found it. I don't think Reagan expected the Soviet Union to disappear in his lifetime. But he believed, and many people, many Americans believed, including some former Democrats, that the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War in the 1970. and both the revolution in Iran, which was not pro-Soviet, but was certainly anti-American, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were two signs for many Americans that the world was going the

Soviet way. This is what the KGB was telling Leonid Brezhnev and others. And Reagan wanted to reverse that. His strategy was to be tougher with the Soviets, and he believed that by being tougher with them, we would get better deals, better negotiations. He thought Kissinger was giving away too much of the store, Secretary of State Kissinger in the 1970s. It is important to say, Don, that Reagan was a negotiator. This was something people forgot. He had spent a lot of time as the head of this Green Actors Guild in the 1950s as a negotiator for Hollywood contracts. So he actually had a lot of negotiating experience, and he did want to negotiate, but he wanted to negotiate in his terms from strength. Yeah. When was the evil empire speech? And under what circumstances did

you make that? It's so nicely connects to all the wonderful questions you've asked. So it's March 1983, and it's to the Florida Evangelicals. And Reagan gives this speech. It's a beautifully written horrific speech, but it's beautiful. It's built around

C.S. Lewis. And the argument that it's very important in politics and in life to call out evil when we see it and to take action against evil. And he refers to the Soviet Union as an evil empire and our obligation as a society to stand up to evil, not just because it's in our interest, but because it's our role in the world.

It's a very ideological speech. But it never calls for war. It does call for morally challenging the Soviet Union. What he's arguing against are those particularly on the left who say, well, you know, these two big systems, they're converging. There's a kind of Scandinavian middle. He's arguing against the Scandinavian middle. He's arguing to stand up strong for liberal capitalism and to denounce communism and socialism in all forms. There you go. But at the same time, a few years earlier, we have the Solidarity Movement in Poland.

We're hearing about this thing fraying a bit as far as the iron curtain's going. And Dayton has had its own part to play in that thing. Then the Korean airliner gets shot down. When is September 1983, I believe that is? And that's just a horror show. You know, it really is. But, I mean, we've seen worse since then. But, I mean, it's just an incredible thing that no Americans could ever imagine that a civilian airliner would get shot down by a fighter pilot in the Soviet Union.

This is the run-up to the installation of cruise missiles in England, which was also, you know, think about Cuba. This is a direct affront to the Soviet Union. We are going to put tactical nuclear weapons very near your border. So we're often running by Christmas time of 1983, and we're only two years into his presidency. The world had not been to that, you know, DefCon whatever for a very long time. And this was really scary to Americans. I went to Russia in the Christmas of 1983. The Russian diplomats were not attending the American diplomatic events that year.

That's how bad it had gotten on the ground in Moscow. So things were really high. And he had brought that. Did he intend things to be that heightened? No. You laid out very well what historians call the war. scare of 1983. And many of us have written about how that period is probably the most dangerous period since the Cuban Missile Crisis in the Cold War. And it's all the things you put together. It's also

evidence that the Soviets themselves think Reagan might be preparing to go to war. There's a so-called able-archer exercise where the United States and its NATO allies prepares for what to do if there were a nuclear war. The Soviets see that is actual preparation for a nuclear war. And so it's this very scary moment, and we know that Reagan's national security advisor, Robert McFarland and others, brief him in late 1983, in the fall of 1983. And he's shaken. This comes up in a number of the memoirs to realize that the Soviets thought he might be trying to start a war, because that is not what he wanted to do. In fact, Reagan was opposed to nuclear weapons. He wanted to reduce nuclear weapons in the long run. And that creates a shift. It also creates a shift because he's

running for re-election in 1984, and he's told by his pollsters that the one issue he's weak on is that some Americans don't trust him with foreign policy. They see him as being too belligerent because of the evil empire speech. And so he starts to tack back. And in January of 84, when he speaks to Congress, he writes into his speech in Penn. You can see this at the Reagan library, a little story about Yvonne and Anya and John and Sally. It's a classic Reagan story. He talks about, you know, these two farmers from Iowa and these two Russians and says, if they met each other, they would get along and we need to get along. He softens his message, but it's not just style. He actually was rethinking some of his hardline rhetoric. To give Reagan the credit he deserves,

he was not a deep thinker, but he was someone who was willing to rethink what he had thought over time. Yeah. But his speechmaking, as you've already mentioned, was his greatest strength. Yes. And how much did he write? those or how much was it written for him? Great question. So he had speechwriters like Peggy Noonan and others around him, but what you find in the Reagan Library is he went through his speeches very carefully, often with a felt tip pen and made lots and lots of changes, often at the last minute, often on the plane as he was flying. He treated them as scripts. And as a good actor, you're given a script and then you adjust the script to the circumstances in which you are performing. And so

the speeches really do reflect him, not always the precise words, but they definitely have reflected his thought and his reaction to these words before he delivers them. Sure. And there is no greater Reagan speech moment than Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. I mean, that's an actor. That's a guy who knows how to build a speech and then deliver a line like it really matters. And if you step back and think, oh, he's just performing, you're missing the point is that in the role of the presidency, you have to play that role. And that's why he was so effective at those moments. It's a really interesting story. It's 1987. He's going to Berlin. And many of his speechwriters

wanted to take that line out. George Schultz, Secretary of State, wanted to take that line out because they saw it as too aggressive. The concern that many Americans had, some had that, you know, was Gorbachev really the, you know, the wolf and sheep's clothing, was this all alive? But on the other side, there was the notion that if you push Gorbachev too hard, the hard liners might take over, might have a Khrushchev situation where he's thrown out. And so they didn't, wanted to push too hard. Reagan was trying to walk that middle position too. But just as you said, Dodd, as an actor, he understood how important that line was. So the line was taken out. He put it back in. Yeah. So his second term, he is elected magnanimously by the American people. Forty-nine states,

he wins, big landslide. Things start to turn. I mean, where's the economy at this point? How's America feeling in 1984? Well, one of the big things that happens in 1984 are the Olympics. The Olympics are held. The summer Olympics are in long. Los Angeles. And the Soviet Union does not come to the Olympics. We boycotted. The United States boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And so the Soviets in the tit-for-tat world of communism say, well, we're not coming to your Olympics. So they don't come to Los Angeles. And the United States just scoops up all the goal because there are our main rivals. And this is mana from heaven for Reagan because he shows

up and he speaks about a rejuvenated America. We're stronger. We're on top. Look, we have twice as many gold medals as everybody else. We're even winning in things we normally didn't win in. And so there is this sense that we're on the comeback, that in 1980 we were at a low point, high inflation, low economic growth, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And now in 84, our economy's growing slowly, but it's still growing. Employment looks better, and we're winning again.

Yes, exactly. And there's nothing Americans love more. A Hollywood moment, the man is taking a victory lap right there at the Trojan Stadium. There's a transformation in his second term in Reagan, certainly having to do with the Cold War, having to do with the USSR, and big things are afoot. Yes. So this is not something Reagan plans. He's honest when he's asked in a debate with Walter Mondale, who he ran against in 1984,

he's asked, you know, why haven't you had any negotiations with the Soviet Union? And Reagan says, I would, but they keep dying on me. There were three Soviet older men who died during his presidency in the first term. Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernchenko. And Reagan doesn't have anyone really to negotiate with. Then comes along this guy, Mikhail Gorbachev, in March of 85. So soon after the election, after Reagan's re-inogural in January of 85, and Gorbachev is a totally new character.

And the biggest change that starts with Gorbachev is a desire, a clear desire to work with the United States and European allies to deal with some common problems. Initially, Gorbachev looks like another communist, but he looks like someone who, as Margaret Thatcher said, and she's the first one to say this, to Reagan and to the world, this is someone we can do business with. He's younger, he's substantive, and he wants to negotiate. Yeah. One of the big stains on his presidency is what was called the Iran-Contra affair. This straddled both terms, I suppose, in terms of it, you know, working this whole thing out and the hearings and so forth.

Can we drill down on this a little bit? And what was it and how did it affect Reagan personally and politically? I'm so glad you asked. I think this is super important. And I don't want us to jump to the present, but I think the Iran-Contra affair actually is a precursor to a lot of the misuses of presidential power we see today. Ronald Reagan was very committed to getting American hostages, Americans who had been taken hostage by terrorists in the Middle East, getting them released.

He had a strong policy, which was the policy of the prior administrations, not to negotiate with terrorists. But he really wanted these hostages, some of whom were released. religious figures in Lebanon and elsewhere. He wanted them released. He also, Reagan was very committed to supporting the Contras, which were a anti-communist rebel force in Nicaragua, that were fighting a newly installed communist regime under the Sandinistas. So he wanted to support the Contras in Nicaragua, and he wanted to get American hostages released. Congress, however, in both cases, was stymying him. Congress was reinforcing what was American policy and law that you don't negotiate with

terrorists, and Congress passed laws that said we could not fund the contras because there was so much evidence that this anti-communist militia was violating all kinds of human rights laws. Reagan decided that nonetheless he was going to try on the side to get the hostages released. He charged his National Security Council to do this, not the State Department, which would be more seen by Congress, but the National Security Council, the NSC advisor, is not a congressionally confirmed figure. And so the National Security Council for the basement of the White House began a process of trying to get hostages released from the Middle East by negotiating with Iran, which was our sworn enemy.

And they did this by taking weapons that had been appropriated by Congress for Israel and diverting those weapons from Israel to Iran. No one would see it because they were being paid for Israel, but they were going to Iran. Iran in return used its connections to get American hostages released, and it paid cash for those weapons. And what Oliver North, the NSE official who was orchestrating this, realized is now the United States was not only getting hostages released, it was getting literally bags of cash that arms dealers were giving to the U.S. That it didn't have to report. And so to serve Reagan's interest in helping the Contras in Nicaragua, that cash was diverted to Nicaragua to the contras. So it violated the law in two regions. Reagan did not know all the details, but he certainly knew that we were doing.

doing things that were against Congress's legal limits in the Middle East. And he had some sense we were doing this in Nicaragua as well. When the scandal broke, when it was revealed in the mid-1980s, Reagan initially denied it was happening and then denied that he knew about it. It kind of came out that he definitely knew about the first part of it, right? The Iran side of it. It was whether those briefcases of cash, which is, you know, it's just such a visual, were actually being delivered to Nicaragua or to the, you know,

jungles to the contras. Right. And there were a lot of, I've simplified it a little bit. There were a lot of other steps, a lot of other middlemen. And there was probably a lot of detail he didn't know about, but Lawrence Walsh, who was empowered by Congress as an independent investigator, do we have these now all the time, right? Yeah. Lawrence Walsh came to the conclusion, published a report that Reagan had been briefed on many of the key elements. Most of what I just said, Reagan had been briefed on. Yeah. Now the question was, did Reagan remember that? He later claimed he didn't. His defense in the end, after denying it, was I don't recall. And he was probably a bit dishonest. Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor, says in his report by 1987-88, he decided not to

prosecute Reagan, not to go for impeachment because he thought Reagan was becoming an older man who had a little trouble with some of these issues. There was probably a lot of that going on. People knew more than we know, knew at the time of what, you know, we can now say, was definitely happening. He was on his way to hardcore Alzheimer's. Yeah, it comes up in his Secretary of State, George Schulz's memoir, talks about a few occasions where in meetings in 1987, 88, even with Gorbachev, Reagan would drift. He said it never undermined the meeting, but he would drift at times. And now in retrospect, it's sort of, you know, that's when you want to take the keys away from grandpa driving the car. Yeah, right. I want to point out that Reagan was interestingly flexible when he

understood things better. And there's an interesting episode with Suzanne Massey, who was the famous author of Nicholas and Alexander, where her husband, Robert Massey, and she knew a lot about the Soviet Union and what was going on. And she's brought in to talk to Reagan personally. And they have a number of conversations that steer him away from, you know, that bring him back from the brink. And I don't want to get into that too much, but I just want to point out that that's really an important factor in Reagan. He was willing to engage and willing to think. think twice. That's absolutely right. And he also was willing to think about the people on the ground. This is just building on your point. What Suzanne Massey was telling him that resonated with him

was that the Russian people are different from the Soviet leaders. And that you can appeal to the Russian people. You can believe in the Russian people. And if you have a leader like Gorbachev, who is more connected to them, you can make progress. So Reagan was changing his view of the Soviet Union, but he was coming back to his core view that people matter at least as much as leaders. Right. I mean, it's arguable that he felt the way he did about the Cold War out of empathy for the Soviet people. That's kind of what came out in his long-term story, right? Right. And I think what Suzanne Massey did, and I talked to her about this years ago, is she helped him to empathize. He had no knowledge of Russian society. He had never been there. He was not a Cold War junkie.

Sure. You know, he wasn't someone who grew up reading and studying. this sort of stuff, she helped him to understand the people on the ground who were different than the ideology and different than the leaders that he had met. Yeah, exactly. The same thing happens, I guess, with AIDS as well. I mean, basically he's got Hollywood friends. Rock Hudson dies. When Rock Hudson comes out, it's America's problem, not just, you know, a certain minority. I think that's right. It's just so late in the game at that point, right? I mean, that's three years into the crisis. And Reagan refuses to address it. He's uncomfortable with it.

It poses challenges for talking about religion for obvious reasons. And I remember, this is when I was in high school in New York City. I mean, literally hundreds and thousands of people are dying. And the president is refusing even to acknowledge. It's sort of what we went through a bit with COVID in some cases. And it's a real problem for Reagan and the Republican Party for a long time because it reinforces the stereotype of them being callous toward people who are sick and people who are not, you know, white country club attendees.

And so, yeah, it's very late in the game on that one. It's hard to say good things about Reagan and AIDS. It really is. Yeah. By the time he speaks publicly in 1986, 20,000 people have died. Did not offer federal support to cure it or curtail any of that stuff. I mean, and the prejudice is obvious how he feels about that. So that's a real stain on his character there.

Your book, The Impossible Presidency, which I spoke of earlier, you write about how the growing size of American power is a poisoned chalice for the office of president. Just too much is expected of one person. How much does this speak to Reagan's presidency? How much did he grapple with it? Did he fight against that power or embrace it? So he recognized that issue.

And one of the points I make in the chapter on Reagan is he is a president who, as you said, understands you can't micromanage. It's just too much to do. But he gets pulled in because there's so much the United States is responsible for. So even a president who recognizes the problem becomes a victim of it. Let me just give one example among many. I mean, the United States finds itself in places like Beirut with Marines guarding, in that case, the Palestinians, who have been massacred by our ally, the Israelis.

That's why our forces are there. And then our forces become the target and are killed in two sets of suicide terrorist attacks in Beirut in 1983, when Reagan never wanted them there in the first place. And then he has to react to that. That is a classic case of what Paul Kennedy calls imperial overstretch. And what I see as the presidency becoming an imperial office, an office designed to be for a small democracy that's now trying to run the world. And it makes it impossible for a president to actually pursue their priorities in a consistent way.

How do you defend against that? Are these new laws that need to be passed or a constitutional convention? Well, I mean, I think there are a number of things we need to do. We need to first recognize the problem and not pretend that we can find a Superman. And by the way, simply destroying the office doesn't help because those problems are still there. First of all, I think we need Congress to be more involved in policy. Congress has not as the founders intended. Congress has basically delegated all foreign policy to the president.

I mean, it is actually nonsensical that the president gets to decide in the morning when he wakes up what the tariff rate for the U.S. with China and the EU should be. That is not how it worked even in the early 20th century. The tariffs of the early 20th century were passed by Congress. So Congress needs to be more involved. I think the United States, I argue this at the end of my book, book needs to think about learning from our European allies. We might need to have a president and a prime minister. We might need to have someone who's more focused on domestic issues, prime minister,

someone who's more focused on foreign policy, a president. There's a reason why your systems in Europe have those things and our system doesn't. Yeah, but the irony is you're going to need an undivided Congress to do any of that stuff. And with the divided Congress that we seem to permanently have at this point, none of that wiggle room is there for them. That's true, but voters might think differently if they needed actually a prime minister or president. I think what happens now is someone gets elected president and then everyone who's upset and doesn't like what they did as president elects the opposite people for Congress, right? And so we would think about it differently.

I never thought about it. Isn't it so ironic that we've created a king figure out of the presidency, isn't it? Yeah. And I think it's a real problem because the office is not designed that way. That's the challenge. But they would argue. I mean, at least conservatives would argue, nor is the fact. government supposed to be that big a role in our lives? For them, the whole thing has gotten

out of hand. But perhaps, but there's a long history of the federal government being central to our lives that one has to grapple with if they make that argument, right? All of Westward settlement is managed by the federal government. The federal government is doing at least as much in the western half of the U.S. continent as the British Empire is doing in South Asia. And so in a certain way, this is a sophist's argument. Yes, exactly. Small is beautiful. In terms of carrying out the duties of the presidency, where do you rank Reagan as a leader? I rank him in the middle, maybe a little bit above the middle. I think he has some moments, especially his relationship with Gorbachev,

where he is able to leverage the presidency to make enormous progress. But he has many other areas where he gets us deep into long-term problems, such as the deals he makes with Congress, that get us to spend more and tax less. And so we have this huge debt overhang that is becoming a real issue in the 21st century. He does not manage finance very well at all. So it's middling, probably a bit above average. If I were giving him a grade on a scale of A to F and I don't believe in grade inflation, you know, he's in the B range, maybe even a B plus.

There's a bell curve there with those presidents, isn't it? Pretty serious. You know, I think I got to underscore what you just said. The debt that we deal with today begins with Reagan. I mean, that's really where the taxes come down, the spending goes up, and there's never an answer to that. And we do not trace it that way normally, you know, but it really goes right back to that time. It's actually ironic on that Republicans consistently from Reagan forward are the ones who increase the debt more. Of course.

That's just a fact. That's just a fact. Jeremy Surrey, professor of public affairs and history at University of Texas. He's the author of critically acclaimed books, including the impossible presidency, which I just can't wait to read. I'm sorry I haven't yet, but the rise and fall of America's highest office. I'm looking at you on a Zoom and there's another book over your shoulder. Civil War by any other means. By other means, yeah.

That's the book I wrote after the Impossible Presidency. Oh, they're cool. What a cool career you have, sir. We'll talk to you again about George Bush soon enough. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit.

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