American History Hit - Ronald Reagan: The Peacemaker

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, he was initially written off by many as a reckless B movie cowboy who would lead the US to nuclear war.However, as William Inboden tells Don, Reagan would go on to defy the odds on the international stage. Navigating complex foreign policy challenges, from Grenada to Lebanon and of course the Cold War. Taking the Soviets and the World to the brink of the unthinkable, while charting an unpredictable path to peace.Produced by Benjie Guy. Edited & Mixed by Thomas Ntinas. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! 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. It is March 30th, 1981, in the nation's capital. We are outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where President Ronald Reagan has just delivered a speech.

Leaving the hotel, Reagan, along with his advisors and security detail, waves to bystanders as he makes his way along the pavement to awaiting limousine. About 15 feet from the president, standing amidst a small crowd behind a rope, is John Hinkley, Jr. As Reagan approaches, Hinkley, who is carrying a... small pistol, suddenly crouches down and fires six shots in the direction of the president. Special agent Jerry Parr bundles Reagan into the car, speeding off as Hinkley is pounced upon and subdued. Three people on the scene have been hit. All will survive, though press secretary James Brady

is left permanently brain damaged. Initially thinking himself uninjured, Reagan begins coughing up blood and suddenly realizes he's been shot. A bullet had Rickett. cached off the limousine door, then against the president's rib, lodging itself an inch from his heart. It's a very close call. Barely two months into office, incredibly, Ronald Reagan survives an assassination attempt. But the challenges for the 40th president of the United States are far from over. Initially dismissed by many as a reckless movie star cowboy ready to lead the U.S. to nuclear conflict, the former actor would defy the odds on the international state.

age, navigating complex foreign policy challenges with the Soviet Union, playing a double role of aggressor and statesmen, taking the world to the brink of the unthinkable, while charting an unpredictable path to peace. Hello, everybody, I'm Don Wilden. Welcome to American History Hit. Any one of us who lived through the 1970s remembers a time largely defined by national malaise. The economic recession, persistent inflation, Watergate, the collapse of American efforts in Vietnam, the rise of OPEC with gas lines at the pumps, a precipitous loss of manufacturing jobs,

and a president, Jimmy Carter, who, while a brilliant man and patriotic American, seemed to be asking of Americans to scale down, ineffective messaging for a superpower citizenry. However appropriate it may have been at the time, capping it all off, 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens were seized in Tehran in the midst of the Iranian Revolution and held for 444 days. More than a year. It was like America itself was being held hostage, which of course was precisely the point.

All in all, the lights seemed to be fading on an America, still playing the lead on the world stage, but with far less panache. Until in 1980, a new actor made his grand entrance, an ex-movie star, no less, who would act his role to the hilt in his own telling of the tale. It was Ronald Reagan, and he had come to restage the pretext the pretext, production rather dramatically.

Professor William in Bolden has authored a detailed account of the Reagan presidency entitled The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. And it is just about to be released. Thank you, Will, for joining us on American History Hit. Honored to have you. Thank you, Don. It's great to be with you. Congratulations on the book's release.

This is no small affair, more than 600 pages, but neither is the subject it covers. Ronald Reagan in so many ways was the 1980s and an awful lot happened. But the peacemaker focuses primarily on Reagan's foreign policies, which is interesting to me because he'd never really been focused on that so much earlier in his life and career. Yes, you know, previously, of course, his political career had largely consisted of two terms as the governor of California, you know, which of course is a domestic policy position. But it's as I found in the course of the book, starting even in the early 1960s when he first first, started speaking out on political issues. He was concerned about the Cold War. He was concerned about the threat from the Soviet Union.

And we see even then some early threads of his ideas and strategies that he would later bring into the White House two decades later of believing that Soviet communism, the system itself was the problem, that it was not something we could just coexist with, but an idea that needed to be defeated. And that the Soviet system had some real economic vulnerabilities that over time it just could not sustain itself in an arms race and a battle of ideas with the United States. And so in the early 60s, Reagan gave a few speeches mentioning some of these ideas. Then, of course, in the 1976 presidential campaign, when he had first challenged incumbent

President Gerald Ford for the nomination, a lot of Reagan's campaign was about foreign policy and especially the need to take a harder line against the Soviets to do more to support Jewish and Christian dissidents and political dissidents inside the Soviet Union to move away from the detente framework. Nixon and Ford and Kissinger had adopted of trying to reduce tensions with the Soviets, but rather to increase our confrontation with them because Reagan believes that they were vulnerable. So we can see some earlier ideas he had about foreign policy, but not until he became president, did he actually have a chance to implement those and to become a foreign policy leader? The title threw me at first. You probably didn't intend the wordplay, but I

immediately thought of the peacekeeper missile. The ICBMs deployed against the Russians. Back in the 1980s, many would have taken exception to the idea of Ronald Reagan being called a peacemaker. Yes, and I was aware of the parallel with the title of the book, Peacemaker, and of course, the connection with the peacekeeper missile. And folks knowledgeable about Cold War history and the arms race such as yourself will pick that up. But I'll tell you why I picked this title for the book. It is not meant with any irony, although I was aware that it might play against some of the stereotypes of Reagan. as a more belligerent warmonger or more aggressive. But the title actually primarily comes from Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader. When Reagan died in 2004, Gorbachev came to his memorial services in Washington

and paid a great tribute to him and said he was a peacemaker. And then as I looked over the course of Reagan's life, a number of his speeches as his president and his diary entries, he had really seen himself or aspired to be a peacemaker. He wanted to win the Cold War, absolutely. But he wanted to win it peacefully. His two goals were to bring down Soviet communism, but also avoid a hot war, avoid, you know, the nuclear destruction of the entire world. And so that was a very difficult balancing act. You know, the degree of difficulty on this is just off the charts. But he really did have a vision of eventually bringing

the Cold War to a peaceful end. And that's why he, you know, talks about his defense buildup as the principle of being peace through strength. And we think about the strength part, which is very important. But the goal really was peace. Many of us back then, I mentioned in the intro there, we'd gotten used to things, I want to say for better or worse, it was for worse. We'd become enured to the Cold War. I remember my sisters and I, we were born into this. It was how the world was arranged, this endless, infinite standoff and arms race with this evil empire behind an iron curtain.

You just sort of accepted it when you were my age in the 1970s as the norm, which had to make someone like Ronald Reagan, I know it probably made my parents feel this way, furious because the world was not like that when they were born, and suddenly this whole confrontation became the defining element for existence on Earth, quite literally. Your book argues that Ronald Reagan felt completely otherwise, and that was his vision. He saw a world without the Soviets and without nuclear weapons. I mean, quite literally. Yes, exactly. And I'm a child of the 1970s and 80s myself, and I'm going to have very vivid memories of growing up with, you know, the fears of the Soviet Union,

fears of the Cold War, fears of nuclear destruction. And as you rightly point out, both average ordinary Americans, ordinary Europeans, and also most elite foreign policy experts and scholars all believed that the Soviet Union was stable, strong, durable, was a permanent fixture on the geopolitical landscape. And so for the West, for the United States and our European, our NATO allies, the challenge was how do you manage relations with the Soviet Union? How do you stop them from advancing any further. There was no notion that the Soviet Union might actually be vulnerable to being defeated, that it might potentially be able to, made to go away. And so when Reagan envisioned that possibility and was much more perceptive than almost all

expert opinion about the vulnerability of the Soviet Union, about the weaknesses and rot and decrepitude of this system, in hindsight, we see that he was absolutely right, but at the time was very radical. And he was ridiculed for being delusional and reckless. And he was ridiculed for being delusional and reckless and trying to destabilize this, you know, terrifying but still relatively stable situation. And one point you mentioned about his earlier growing up years, him being more of a child of the Depression and then World War II, is really key to understanding him, where he had taken, I think, two big lessons away from that era. The first from the era of the Great Depression was how American isolationism, the United States, trying to isolate ourselves and stay out of the affairs

of the world, just doesn't work. That when we step away from global leadership, tyrannies such as Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany will step in and will take advantage of that. And so the protectionism and the political isolations of the 1930s, that was the first big lesson that Reagan took. But the second lesson he took from World War II itself is that totalitarianism is evil and needs to be defeated. And he saw a direct continuity between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Even though Nazism and communism are different systems, they both are predicated on a personality

cult, on maintaining total control over people, on setting up death camps against any dissenters, and on expanding your control as far as you can go. And so Reagan, with his formative years there in the 30s and 40s, he brought a lot of that historical understanding into his anti-Soviet Cold War policies, seeing the Cold War is in some ways analogous to World War II. And so that's another key to understanding how he was able to envision a path to actually defeating the Soviet Union rather than just managing it and coexisting with it. quote you have early in the book, I think it's from Colin Powell, who says Reagan's administration was solidly the World War II generation in power. And they had arrived at sort of ruling the earth.

Yeah. And it's remarkable if you look through pretty much almost all of the senior people in Reagan's administration had served in some meaningful capacity in World War II. So vice president George Bush had been one of the youngest naval aviators in the war. It had been, you know, shot down on a bombing campaign in the Pacific and then, you know, been at sea until dramatically rescued. George Sultz, the Secretary of State, had served two years in combat as a Marine in the Pacific Theater. Cap Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, had served two years as an Army officer in the Pacific Theater. General Jack Vesey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had a battlefield commission at Anzio and fought at Anzio in the European Theater. Don Regan, the chief of staff and Secretary of Treasury, was a Marine who'd fought in the Pacific.

Bill Casey, the CIA director, had been an OSS officer in Europe. And, of course, Reagan himself, because a very poor eyesight, had been 4F, was not able to serve. on active duty, but he had made training films for the Army Air Corps during the war. And that had been formative for him as well as far as seeing the importance, again, of a strong American military, receiving raw film footage from the front lines of seeing what our troops were doing. It actually is very formative for him on his support for Jewish rights, too, because he saw very early film footage of liberated concentration camps from the Holocaust. And that's one reason why he was horrified by that. He kept a copy of that and why he was so strong in

advocating for the rights of Jews and Christians behind the Iron Curtain because he knew that totalitarian systems, whether Nazi Germany or Soviet communism, are often defined by how they treat religious minorities. So much of Reagan's legacy, really, the work he was doing at the time was about storytelling. He was a natural-born storyteller. But for a good story, you need a strong antagonist. And those are the times when we had one. We had the Soviet Union, which was the big wall to push against. And we'll get to his storytelling about that in a moment. When Reagan is first inaugurated in his first term in January, 1981, his main agenda was to address the domestic malaise, I spoke of earlier.

And his main tool becomes an Economic Recovery Act, literally that, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, where he drops rates across the board. And part of this sweeping new concept was eventually came to be known as Reganomics, very controversial, mixed results. But in general, the economy improves. Dropping taxes always boosts spending and gets those kinds of results. But I was surprised how much Reagan was focused on foreign policy, even in that first term, when so much was going wrong in the country itself. He saw them as interlinked, didn't he? He certainly did, yeah.

And so for Reagan, you know, when he comes into office, he inherits a tremendous array of challenges as you laid out in your introduction. The 1970s have been a really bad decade for the United States. But he pursues a pretty integrated strategy of trying to restore American strength across multiple dimensions, and he sees all these as mutually reinforcing. So, for example, he knew that the United States was just a very discouraged, dispirited nation. So he wanted to restore our country's belief in itself. He wanted to restore our national morale.

He knew that unless we believed in ourselves, we wouldn't be able as a country to turn the economy around, to turn our defense policy around, you know, everything else follows from that. But he definitely wanted to return the economy around. You know, he inherited this awful situation of runaway inflation and high unemployment, the stagflation that had really bedeviled the Ford administration, especially the Carter administration. And so he focused politically during his first year on Reaganomics, as he said, on turning the economy around. But meanwhile, he was certainly behind the scenes starting to put the pieces in place of his foreign policy strategy. He immediately increases the Pentagon budget by a very substantial amount, one of the largest increases in history,

with broad bipartisan support. I think it gets like one no vote in the House and Senate. It's almost unanimously passed by the Democrats and Republicans because everyone agrees we need to restore the Pentagon. And he also wanted to restore American leadership globally. You know, he's very focused on rebuilding ties with our allies. Many of them had lost faith in the United States during the Carter presidency, and Carter had not had very good relations with them. And so he wanted to restore America's economic and military strength, but also our political alliances, all as a precursor to his more confrontational posture towards the Soviet Union. I think many who are listening, I hope so anyway, came along after the Reagan presidency.

I hope the young demo is out there listening. So let's try to give these guys some perspective on how utterly unlikely many considered Ronald Reagan to be as commander-in-chief. I mean, this was unusual casting, for sure. Yes, even though he had had his two terms as governor of California, for most of his career, he'd been a Hollywood actor. And, you know, largely dismissed or regarded as a B-movie Hollywood actor. So this was not a Carrie Grant or Spencer Tracy or Humphrey Bogart or Sir Lawrence Olivier when we think of the really iconic leading men of Hollywood's Golden Years. Reagan was not a terrible actor, but he was not doing the movies that were winning the Academy Awards and was not an intellectual and did not have tremendous accomplishments in the business world or anything. But because he was a good communicator and had a certain set of ideas and was well-liked there in California, he'd been able to run and win two terms as governor of California.

pretty successful in that respect. But again, it's a very different thing to be the governor of a state, even a significant state like California, and to be the president of the United States and the leader of the free world. And so even though he had a lot of enthusiastic backers when he was elected in 1980, even Reagan would admit that a lot of the reason why he was elected were people voting more against Carter than necessarily voting for Reagan. So there were still some real questions. He was a fairly unknown quantity for a lot of the country when they was elected in 1980. They felt like they're taking a little bit of a chance on this guy, a little bit of a risk, but they just felt like the old way of doing things, you know, with Carter, we know what we are getting with that, and we don't

want any more of that. He had, of course, a very strong base out here in California where he'd been elected governor twice, and they knew him as a politician and a serious guy. But we were back east, you know, and Bonzo was the joke. At the time for Bonzo movie. The monkey movie that he made. I mean, those are the kinds of movies he was, they were joking about at that point. How much of that reputation extended overseas? Was he perceived that way in the Soviet Union? So I'll talk about his perception among American allies and then from the Soviet Union. Many American allies were initially fairly skeptical of him when he was elected. So Helmut Schmidt was the chancellor of West Germany at the time, a very important NATO ally, and he wasn't sure what to make of this Reagan guy.

Mitterrand was the president of France. He was pretty skeptical of this Reagan guy as well. Margaret Thatcher had recently been elected prime minister of the UK, and she had met Reagan once or twice before when he was out of office. And she was more excited about him. She felt like he would be a kindred spirit, but she was a bit of an outlier. The Soviets, when he was elected, were furious because he had on the campaign trail, and throughout the 1970s when he was a radio broadcaster and writing op-eds had been fiercely critical of the Soviet Union. You know, he detested Soviet communism and had, of course, for several years, been calling for a much harder line against the Soviet Union. And so, you know, the Kremlin was outraged and was somewhat fearful as well. From where

the Kremlin sat, they'd had a pretty good run through the 1970s. You know, as a senior KGB officer put it, the world was going our way. They had seen the United States, their fierce archrival, humiliated in Vietnam, you know, our first lost war in our nation's history. The Soviets had successfully sponsored the takeover of communist regimes across much of the third world, you know, in Ethiopia, in Angola, in Nicaragua, in Cambodia. So it seemed to them that communism was on the march. They knew that the American economy was in the tank, that the American military was weakened. Of course, they had just, you know, the year before invaded Afghanistan, which initially seemed to be a success for them. It, you know, soon turned into a disaster. So the Soviets were feeling pretty

strong and confident. And then all of a sudden, this Reagan guy gets elected who's taken a much harder line towards them, challenging them rhetorically and then, you know, policy-wise in ways they had not been challenged before. It was very threatening. So they took him seriously as a threat, although they also were skeptical that he'd be able to pull it off. So they did not see him as a brilliant strategist. They underestimated him. And that was part of Reagan's own strategies. He enjoyed being underestimated.

That's good. And indeed he was. I mean, I think this goes all the way back to his origins, really. I mean, as a sort of middle-class kid from Illinois. But certainly, by the time he gets to Hollywood, the man was this amazing physical specimen, but he slipped into that B-roll project stuff. And then ends up on television, you know, being a mere spokes guy after sort of fallen off the A-list. after he finally got up there.

But we're used to seeing anybody do anything nowadays, but he was the first of that kind of fading star who was sort of trying different things. One thing that was truly undeniable about the man, he could speak. Oh, boy, could he speak. He could write too. He was amazing at a microphone,

particularly when he was younger. I mean, I have seen recently, thanks to YouTube and all the rest, these sort of clips of him in various situations at Congress. I mean, putting politics aside of the time, anti-communist or whatever, that man is poised. he is incredibly well-spoken. And I assume he wrote a lot of what he was saying, right? I mean,

certainly in those days as a union president and so forth, the guy could just communicate. And you hear that a lot about Reagan nowadays, the great communicator and all that. That's sort of about his presidential years, which I found to be a little too folksy for my taste. It was not really speaking to the time for me. When you watch him as a younger man, oh boy, you see where he's coming from. The guy was, you use word poised, which I think is great. Yeah. And these were, you know, some tremendous assets, of course, he brought into the presidency. And again, while he was not an intellectual, he was not interested in being a, you know, professor somewhere. And as a professor myself, I applaud him on that, right? That's not a criticism. He was very sharp. He had a near

photographic memory. He would often write his own speeches from a very young age. And even during his time as president, he was very involved in the crafting of his most important speeches. You know, when I was researching this book, I could read multiple drafts of the speeches. His speech writers would produce a draft. And then Reagan would, you know, for the most important speeches, rewrite almost the entire one's, you know, the entire script himself. I mean, so these were, so he had a very careful attention to the connection between ideas and words and the delivery and communication of those words. And that was, he saw it as, you know, one of the key instruments in his Cold War arsenal. And so when you think about some of his most iconic speeches as

president, the Westminster speech in 1982 where he says Marxism, Leninism will end up on the ash heap of history, evil empire in 1983. The boys of the boys of the, boys of the war, Point Dohawk in 1984, tear down this wall in 1987. You know, these are still very iconic lines for us. I encourage all of our younger listeners to pull these up on YouTube. They're really remarkable to watch. But the key thing is these were not just a Hollywood guy

spinning some nice rhetorical lines. For Reagan, they were part of his battle of ideas against Soviet communism. And he wanted to do a sustained rhetorical assault to show the illegitimacy, the malevolence Soviet communism and also to reach out to people living behind the Iron Curtain, living under Soviet communism, and let them know that they had a friend and ally in the United States who would speak the truth about their oppressive system, who would speak the words that they felt and lived

under but couldn't say that themselves. And it drove the Kremlin crazy, but it really emboldened and heartened so many of the people behind the Iron Curtain. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. So let's go to the great plot of the the movie that was his presidency. It's incredible within the two terms what really takes place. How much did he know that the system of the Soviet Union was sclerotic, to use your word, was rotting from within when he took power? He believed it as a conviction, but he also wanted to look carefully for more evidence to back that up. And so here's what I mean is he believed as a matter of conviction that communism over time just could not work, that a system,

that was predicated on taking away people's political freedoms, on not allowing them to choose their own government, on not allow them to speak freely, on being atheistic, not allowing them to worship or believe in God. That was very important to him. And that was predicated on a command economy of not allowing people to choose where they were going to work or how much they were going to produce or what they were going to sell it for. All those principles, he just believed that just is not sustainable. And so because he took those ideas seriously, he was much more open to looking for signs of vulnerability in the Soviet Union. But he knew they were on their heels. I mean, I was in Moscow in 1983 by sheer dumb luck. I ended up going there. And I saw those lines of people

waiting for anything. You know, goods and the stores were not on those shelves. It was literally bread lines in the winter that I was there, which was the Christmas of 1983. So I saw how bad it really was with my own eyes. He was certainly getting that intelligence, you know, through his means, through his channels. Yeah, and one key indicator of this, of course, was the need for the United States to sell grain to the Soviet Union. When he realized that this is the largest country in the world, acres-wise, right? I mean, they've got, you know, millions and millions of acres of farmland. And because communism is such a broken, corrupt, inefficient system, they can't even grow enough wheat to feed their people.

And so he lifted the grain embargo that Carter had imposed on the Soviets so that American farmers could sell wheat to them. As a humanitarian gesture, it's helpful to American farmers. it wasn't going to, you know, risk enriching the Red Army or anything like that. There's no security threat. But for Reagan, that was one of the key indicators of, like, a country with those vast natural resources that can't even feed its own people just cannot continue. But that said, he was getting, I would say, mixed assessments from the CIA. You know, the CIA was still trying to figure out, they knew the Soviet economy wasn't good,

but they didn't know just how bad it was. And they couldn't get reliable economic figures because all the economic figures and statistics and growth indicators coming out of the Kremlin were all just made up. up because the Kremlin didn't even know what its own economic figures were. And so the CIA was struggling to figure out what the actual Soviet economic figures were and would sometimes err on the side of a little bit rosier projections. They're like, well, they're not doing too well, but they can keep limping along at, you know, one or two percent growth per year. But meanwhile, there was a group of Soviet dissidents who had been exiled from the Soviet Union who had grown up under the system and then

set up a little economic think tank in Maryland as, you know, refugees in the United States, these dissident Soviet economists. And they kept on sending Reagan studies and others at the Pentagon studies saying, the Soviet economy is a mess. You can't believe any of the numbers are coming out with. We lived there. We lived under that system. It is decrepit and rotten and it is going to fall apart. And Reagan was very eager to hear these takes as well. And of course, to meet with anyone who had been in the Soviet Union who could tell them, as you saw, you know, about those breadlines. And so even though a lot of the expert opinions still wanted to trust Soviet economic figures and think, well, they'll keep limping along. Reagan looking at quality of life and conditions for normal human beings living there thought, there's something wrong. This system cannot sustain itself.

When one senses that kind of weakness in your enemy, this is the time to attack. The brinkmanship that he was famous for in that first term, the installation of missiles in Europe and all of this, how much of that was his idea, how much was he getting information from the military about how to do this? This is a man who has never fought a war as a commander. This is new territory. for him. Yeah. No, it's a very important point there. And to take a step back and talk about the strategic picture, Reagan saw the Soviet Union as a unique combination of strong and weak. Okay, so he knew that militarily, the Red Army, the Soviet military was still formidable. They had the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. They had the largest, you know, conventional forces, massive

tank arsenal. They had one of the largest, I think the largest Navy in the world, right? So they're still very capable militarily, but otherwise politically and economically and ideologically, it's a very weak system. And that is dangerous. That's a dangerous combination where you have a weak and fragile system that still wields a very powerful military, capped off with 40,000 nuclear warheads. And so for Reagan, the challenge was how do you escalate the confrontation, how do you put more pressure on that system to try to weaken it and crack it apart while not pushing it over the edge that they lash out and attack you and you have a nuclear war. It's almost like a weak in declining Soviet Union is more dangerous. It's a wounded cornered bear, right? You know,

that's the image we'd use as a Soviet bear. And so that's why Reagan did a, his strategy was combining that military pressure with still some diplomatic outreach and regularly, you know, writing letters or other outreach to Soviet leaders saying, we don't want to attack you. We don't want a war with you. We want this to have a peaceful outcome. But we are also going to build up our military to deter you and make sure that you don't attack us. Some of these ideas he had developed himself. You know, in the 1970s, after his time as California governor, he spent quite a bit of time meeting with military leaders studying defense policy. He becomes a fan of the MX missile and the B-1 bomber and other new weapons systems that he really sees as key to deterring the threat from the

Soviets and putting more pressure on them. But he also, you know, had some very good advisors. Cap Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, was extremely capable. I'd worked for Reagan for years. Jack Vessy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, like I said, very distinguished four-star, who's given him some great advice. And again, you know, capable staff down to the mid-levels in the Pentagon. And so he had some really good advisors who understood his strategic vision of modernizing and expanding the military to pressure the Soviets and were able to help fill in the details for him.

This was a new theory of how to win the Cold War. I mean, this war had been being fought for decades at the war. point by brilliant people, the likes of which are John F. Kennedy and such. But not unlike Reagan turning the economy around with a new idea, Reaganomics, this is a new way of fighting the Cold War. Fair to say? Absolutely. Yeah. The way I would summarize it is every previous American Cold War president, going back to Harry Truman, had conceived of the Cold War as primarily a great power contest. So Soviet Union is one large power. The United States is another large power. And we're in a standoff. happened to be a battle of ideas between different political systems. And Reagan reverses that.

He sees the Cold War as primarily this battle of ideas between the free world and Soviet communism, which happens to be between two powerful countries, the United States and Soviet Union. And that's not just a rhetorical sleight of hand. From that followed this whole new strategy he had. Previous Cold War strategies had been about managing the conflict, about containing the Soviet Union, about letting it exist but not letting it expand its power too much further. And he pursued more of a rollback strategy. He thought that the Soviet Union could actually be defeated. He thought that the Cold War could be won, that it could be ended, and yet it could be done on peaceful terms. And so this was a revolutionary and very risky, frankly, new way of conceiving the Cold War. It's kind of to really

broad stroke the thing, it's kind of an act one and two. Act one being in the sort of early 80s, where you have the death of all these premieres in Soviet Union. Quite literally, people are dying, Andropov, and Chernenko. Finally, you get Gorbachev. Gorbachev brings in the new age, Glasnos, this loosening up of all the restrictions in the Soviet Union. Clearly, the Soviet Union is finally getting it. This can't go on forever, this kind of old-school Soviet style of governing.

And that's when he sees his opportunity. And that begins the second act, which becomes, in his second term, the grand moments of the wall coming down. I mean, it's quite a story that unfolds. I wonder how much he was aware of it happening as it went. Yeah, it's a great question. And, you know, no one could really knew exactly what was inside Reagan's mind. And so I can't answer it definitively of exactly what his understanding was. But I will say from, you know, I read every word of every page of his diaries, which are quite massive and certainly most of his private correspondence and the transcripts of his meetings during this time. And I think Reagan was more aware than was certainly appreciated

at the time and more hopeful of a peaceful victory being possible in the Cold War. And let me give you a few particulars that I think help illustrate this. First, from the moment he took office, part in January of 1981, part of Reagan's strategy of pressuring the Soviet Union was to pressure it to produce a reformist leader who he could negotiate with. And that's really important to understand because you can't understand how and why he recognizes Gorbachev and embraces Gorbachev so quickly without knowing, appreciating that over four years, Reagan had been looking for a Soviet reformer. And this is why even during his first term, when he's increasing the military pressure, when he's deploying the nuclear missiles in Europe, when he's doing the defense buildup, when he's

calling them the evil empire, you know, when he's putting more economic pressure on them and restricting exports to them. He still was reaching out to previous Soviet leaders. He's writing letters to Brezhnev, who then dies. He's writing letters to Andropov, who then dies. He's writing letters to Trinienko, who then dies. You know, Reagan jokes, I want to negotiate with these guys, but they keep dying on me, which was, you know, symbolic of the decay of the Soviet system. But all along, his strategy is to put such pressure on the Kremlin that the Politburo, you know, the ruling council of Soviet communists would have no choice but to finally select a new leader who would be more reform-minded, who would want to meet with the American leader, who would be committed to

looking for ways to reduce the threat of nuclear war. And, of course, in March of 1985, the Kremlin does select Mikhail Gorbachev, this younger generation, this reform-minded leader. Now, I'm not saying that Reagan gets all the credit for Gorbachev coming to power. That's not true. You know, Gorbachev was very capable in his own right. He's kind of a product of internal changes within the Soviet system. But I think Reagan's pressure at least played some role in accelerating those conditions for Gorbachev to come to power. And the key part, this goes back to your comments, is because Reagan had been looking for a Soviet reformer, when one comes along, he recognizes him. You're often more inclined to find something if you're actually looking for it.

Again, a number of other foreign policy experts in the United States and the West were a little more skeptical of Gorbachev initially. I thought, all right, he may have a nicer smile. He may be younger. He may have a little bit more of a winsome personality, but he's still your same old-line communist dictator. But Reagan thought, no, I think there's something more genuine with this guy. And when they first meet in Geneva in the fall of 1985, they really hit it off. They forge a pretty important personal connection. And that continues through their next several summit meetings over the next four years. They still have different goals ultimately. Gorbachev's goal is to reform and preserve Soviet communism. Reagan's goal is to end Soviet communism. But they find some commonalities on wanting to

reduced nuclear weapons, reduced tensions in the Cold War. And along the way, they forge a pretty meaningful friendship. That's why, you know, I mentioned at the outset, Gorbachev paid tribute to Reagan as the peacemaker. There's a wonderful anecdotal history about the arrival of Suzanne Massey on the scene. The writer Suzanne Massey, who was with her husband, wrote Nicholas and Alexandra, was an expert on, is an expert on Soviet history. And she is brought in, literally, to sort of school Reagan on the subtleties of the Russian ways, the Russian people, the culture for sure, and he really listens. And this speaks to the way that he was, to his sophistication, his capability to shift gears and understand that he may have been coming at something in the wrong way or perhaps in a too

strong a fashion or whatever. He was just willing to change things up if he got the right information. Suzanne Massey meets him in the Oval Office and they talk about what it means to be Russian. Yeah, she's a fascinating figure and plays a very important role in my book. and I'm so glad that you brought her up. And it highlights a really important factor to understand about Reagan is he detested Soviet communism as a system,

but he never saw the Soviet people, the ordinary Russian people, as the enemy. He actually saw them more as victims of Soviet communism, which they were. And he was always fascinated with what are the Russian people thinking? What do they think of America? What do they think of democracy and capitalism?

What do they think of their own system? What do they think of me? He knew that they were historically very religious people. He wondered what do they think of this state-sponsored atheism being enforced on them. And for as much as the CIA was very capable in so many ways and provided him good analyses of the Soviet military strength and internal workings of the Politburo, the CIA wasn't able to tell him what ordinary Russians thought.

And that's understandable, right? CIA officers working deep undercover in Moscow couldn't walk around through markets just asking ordinary Russians, hey, I'm from the CIA. Tell me what you think, right? So instead, to learn about what ordinary Russians thought, Reagan is in a lot of introduced to this remarkable American author, Suzanne Massey, who, because of her scholarship and her writing on 19th century Russian history, was still welcome to visit the Soviet Union pretty regularly. And so she would go over there for a couple months. She'd meet with so many ordinary Russians. And every time she came back, she would meet with Reagan in the Oval Office and just give him an extensive debrief on what the Russian people were thinking. And he was fascinated by that

because part of his strategy was reaching out directly to the Russian people and letting and know that America is your friend. America is not your enemy, and we want to support you, the Russian people and your own desire for a better life. And among other things, Suzanne Massey is the one who gives Reagan that wonderful old Russian proverb trust but verify. She teaches him how to say it in Russian. And so when he then next meets with Gorbachev and Reykivik in 1986, and Gorbachev is starting

to make some promises about, you know, reducing nuclear weapons and doing an arms control agreement with the United States. And Reagan says, well, we want to do that. but, and then he trots out in Russian this is phrased, but we're going to trust but verify. I want to trust you, but we're going to need to verify that you're actually doing this. And Gorbachev kind of laughs, then drives him crazy that Reagan keeps on bringing up over the next few years as proverb. And Reagan says, look, that's what my principle is, similar to we believe in peace through strength. We believe in trust but verify.

And he got that from Suzanne Massey as well. So she's a very important figure in the story. They meet Gorbachev and Reagan meet four times, four different summits. That surprised me. I'd forgotten that that happened. they really became friends in a way, sort of appropriately as leaders. How much did Reagan know that wall was coming down when he made his famous proclamation? Yeah, great question. Here's where I think we can say, so in June of 1987, Reagan stands at the Brandenburg Gate, you know, separating

communist East Berlin from Free West Berlin, divided, of course, by that awful Berlin wall, which the Soviets had put up to prevent the people of East Berlin from, you know, escaping to freedom. And he doesn't just say tear down this wall. He says, Mr. Gorbara. Gorbachev tear down this wall. And again, I encourage our listeners to view a YouTube clip of this. It's electrifying to watch it. And Reagan made that challenge to Gorbachev even after they'd met a couple times, they'd build a deep friendship. And, you know, many of Reagan's advisors say, don't say that phrase. It's too provocative. It'll upset Gorbachev. But Reagan thought, no, even though I've built a friendship with this Soviet leader, I'm not abandoning my convictions. And this is going to be a test of

how committed is he to reform? Because there is no justification for keeping that awful wall. up, imprisoning the people of East Germany. Now, when Reagan called for that, there's no evidence that he was actually predicting that two and a half years later in November of 89 it actually would come down. So I don't want to give him that sort of foresight credit. But he believed that the wall had to come down at some point. And he believed that it was going to come down sooner rather than later. I think that's pretty clear.

And it also bears noting that he didn't just say it once. He says it in that famous speech. But then he repeated different demands to tear down this wall, at least. another 14 times over his remaining time in office. And he also brought it up with Gorbachev in private a few times saying you've got to bring that wall down. Of course, Gorbachev himself never did tear down the wall. It's the people of Berlin who tore down the wall in November of 1989. But Gorbachev had made the decision not to send in the tanks, not to crush them the way that the Soviets had previously crushed any uprisings for freedom in Eastern Europe.

So I think people of Berlin heard Reagan's call and they took it to heart and then they carried it out two years later. I mean, he spoke those words on the very same spot where John of Kennedy had spoken, Iq bin Berliner, you know, back in the early days of the blockade and all that sort of thing. I mean, it was a very staged moment, but I agree with you, anybody who hasn't seen it needs to see it if for no other reason to understand the power of the American presidency when taken abroad and used for good purpose. I mean, extraordinary forcefulness in that moment. There are so many incredible events during this period of time. Talk to me well about the Korean airliner being shot down. First of all, how did it happen? What did it really mean

and how did Reagan react to it? How much of it was a prompt for what follows afterwards? Yeah, so the fall of 1983 is an absolutely terrifying time. I think it's the most dangerous time in world history, certainly since the Cuban Missile Crisis 21 years earlier. And you have a series of very close moments to the world almost coming to complete nuclear destruction, a number of military actions, and U.S. Soviet relations coming really to the brink. And it starts at the beginning of September 1983 with the Soviets shooting down Korean Airlines flight 007. And how and why that came about. It's a fascinating and also a very traumatic story to retell, but it exemplifies Cold War suspicion. So briefly, Korean Airlines, with, you know,

civilian airline flight from New York to Seoul, carrying 269 civilians, most of them South Koreans, but about 40 or so. I can't remember the exact number, were American citizens, including a Democratic member of Congress. And the flight accidentally, inadvertently, strays a little bit off course, whereas it's on its way to South Korea, it drifts into Soviet airspace. And the Soviets launch a number of interceptors, Soviet Air Force jets to go up and intercept it. There's evidence that they think it might be an American spy plane, all right, because the United States did have spy planes operating in that territory. So they may have thought that it was an American spy plane, but they follow it for a couple of hours. By that point, by any rational evidence, they should have realized this is just

a civilian airliner. It is no threat to us. But because of Soviet brutality and suspicion, they shoot it down and it massacres. It kills, you know, the 269 civilians. Of course, the civilized world, the United States is outraged at this. The Soviets then try to cover it up. They don't apologize. You know, they blame it on the airline. They blame it on the Americans. They make things worse. Then in the midst of this, the United States is deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles, Pershing 2s, and ground-launch cruise missiles throughout our Western European allies to counter Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles that were already targeted European cities. And so there's massive protests across Western Europe by European publics

didn't want these missiles there. We now know the KGB was fueling and stirring up at least some of these protests. And then there are two different nuclear scares. I won't go on the details you can see in the book, but one, the Soviet radar seems to detect a launch of a number of American nuclear missiles targeting Moscow. It looks like 50 American nuclear missiles have been launched against Moscow. Soviet doctrine called for them to immediately launch their retaliatory strike, and this would have been the end of the world. Fortunately, the Soviet Red Army colonel in charge of the radar had a hunch that it may have been accurate. And so with just about a 60-second warning time, he decides, I'm going to take a chance that our radar's broken and the United States is not

actually attacking us. And so we're not going to counterfire. And he was correct. It was a Soviet radar mistake. But this is against the backdrop of the Americans putting nuclear missiles in Europe, of the Soviets having shot down that civilian airliner. And then right after that, NATO does the able archer exercise, which also terrifies the Soviets. They think this might be precursor to an American attack on us. So they put their nuclear forces again on high alert. And in the midst of all this, the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon blow up the Marine barracks there and kill 241 American Marines. And that same weekend, the United States invades Grenada, the Caribbean Island, which had been taken over in a communist coup. Okay. This all happens in about a two-month period, right? And any one of

these could have precipitated an all-out nuclear war in the destruction of the planet. And so for how Reagan and his team had to manage these crises, some of which were their own fault, some of which they were innocent of. The pressure is just unfathomable to manage these different crises, knowing that any day could be your last day on earth. Some of them, they managed very well, others less well. But what my book tries to do is just give the reader of a sense of what it felt like to be managing all these crises at the time when you don't know how the story is going to end. You know, we now look back in hindsight and can see that we got through these things and, you know, some of them were tragic. There certainly was some some loss of life, but it didn't lead to the end of the world.

They didn't know that at the time. And that's what I think makes history such interesting reading. Inventful days. I mean, it brings to mind the phrase, great times, great men, and all that sort of thing. A remarkable fact of the American presidency is staying ahead of events. But when they're tumbling out like they did in those days, it speaks to cool under pressure is an easy way of saying it. But you have to be a sort of big, big-minded person to be able to have a perspective

when things get so subjective like that. It all speaks to the leadership qualities. There's a structure in place politically to take care of things, but it all has to be filled by somebody who understands how to get the job done. Yeah, this is one of the themes that really came out in my research and I hope readers will see in the book is we look back in hindsight and we see that the Cold War ended peacefully. The Berlin Wall came down.

The Soviet Union collapsed. These different nuclear crises or brinksmanship moments didn't turn into all-out nuclear war. And we can be lulled into something of a sense of complacency or inevitability. Like, well, of course, the Soviet Union wasn't going to work out. There were different structural factors with the world economy and geopolitics that were in play. And Reagan just kind of happened to arrive at the right time and got kind of lucky that he happened to be in the Oval Office when these bigger world events were happening. He just kind of watched them happen. And what I really came out in my research is how much individual leadership and frankly, great leaders really matter and make a difference.

I don't think these good outcomes were foreordained. There were some structural forces in play that were helpful to Reagan, but at key moments, I think he spotted these trends. He exerted decisive leadership. He followed his instincts and his strategic vision, sometimes in taking a harder line towards the Soviet Union and pressuring it, other times in reaching out to it, especially with Gorbachev and trying to take some risks for peace and for a peaceful outcome, but for a peaceful outcome on favorable terms for the United States and the free world. And that's the important part of the story. are so many incredible events during this period of time, all covered in your book in great detail.

I was thrilled with this book because it accounted for so much that served as the backdrop to my life, but which was so dark and mysterious in those days before the internet, you really didn't know what you were getting. You know, the information certainly out of the Soviet Union was to be not trusted. And certainly there was a cynicism in America that we didn't understand and what we were knowing from our own government. So to look back and read the clarity of it all through your book is really terrific. And congratulations, I encourage everyone to look for this.

It's called The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. William in Bowden, I really am grateful for your time today, and I hope we speak again. Thanks. Thank you so much, Don. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. I'll see you next time.

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