H.W. Brands on Reagan, Gorbachev, and the Cold War

good evening I would like to welcome you to our lecture series the United States and world affairs the Cold War and beyond our speaker today is one of the nation's most eminent and most well-known historians professor H W Brans of the University of Texas at Austin thank you for coming today I'm Claus Lis and I'm the Richard M creser distinguished professor in history and international Affairs here at the University of North Carolina in chapelhill I would like to thank the generous sponsors the many generous sponsors behind the cesno distinguished professorship for making possible this lecture series on the US in world affairs as you know we have had a great number of interesting talks this semester in our lecture series the US in world affairs and also in our ambassador's forum is there are many more exciting events coming up next semester by now I'm sure you're wondering what you can do to enable us to put on further lectures and talks in the future please don't hesitate to talk to me afterwards if you're interested in a little while the lecture today will be available on our YouTube channel all our previous talks and also the talks in our ambassadors Forum can be viewed there the address is as you will know youtube.com/ crno UNC and as you know all these talks and lectures are extremely good and you you ought to watch them as often as you possibly can it is a great pleasure today to welcome Professor Bill brand to UNC today Professor brand is among America's most distinguished and well-known historians most of uh much of his scholarship is focused on American political and social history and on Penning very readable biographies Henry William brand was born in Oregon he went to college in California and he earned graduate degrees in Oregon and Texas but Bill BR did not only get a graduate degree in history but also one in mathematics which is kind of unusual for a historian and in between I understand Bill sold Cuttery across the American West Bill brand taught at vanderbild University and Texas A&M University before joining The Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin he now holds the Jack as Spanton senior chair in history at UT bill has written numerous books 25 in total I understand plus a few Co B at once for good measure as well as a huge number of articles I have no idea when Bill BR finds time to get any sleep Bill mostly writes on American history and politics and his books have been translated into many foreign languages including Chinese Japanese Korean and Ukrainian his many books include for example the man who saved the union traitor to his class on Franklin ruselt Andrew Jackson the age of gold the first American and a book on Teddy ruselt TR several of his books have been bestsellers both in hardback and paperback and two of Bill's books traed to his class and the first American were finalists for the pulit Sur prise Bill also lectures frequently on historical and current events and he can be seen and heard on National and international TV and radio and also most importantly of course today he can be heard and seen at un at UNC Chapel Hill Professor br's talk today is entitled who was the Cold War rean gorbachov and the world they destroyed there will be time for questions afterwards ladies and gentlemen it is a great pleasure and honor to present to you Professor Henry William Grans thank you class for that kind introduction thank you all for coming out on this chilly evening I'm delighted to be here I teach at the University of Texas at Austin and I have large classes of undergraduates this semester and I sort of flatter myself that my classes are relatively interesting but I know perfectly well that if my students weren't going to be examined on the material if they didn't have to come to class they wouldn't come I'm always flattered to speak to groups of people who don't have to be here now some of you look like you might be students so maybe there is a little bit of incentive from your teachers I hope so but anyway the rest of you I'm gathering are not students so as I say I'm I know full well that you could be at home you could be having dinner you could be doing all sorts of other things but you chose to come and I find that very flattering I'm going to be speaking on well the title Reagan gorbachov and the world they destroyed uh who won the Cold War yeah that's what I'm going to be talking about but I'm going to set it in the context of some larger issues the longer I teach history the more I become convinced that the basic questions of History are almost matters of philosophy matters of psychology matters of human nature so I'm going to be talking about Reagan especially and gorbachov I'm going to be talking about the end of the Cold War but I'm also going to be talking about the question of causation in history how do big events like the Cold War end are they dependent on individuals did it really make any difference that Ronald Reagan was president during the 1980s did it make any difference that Mel gorbachov was this opposite number in the Soviet Union would the Cold War have ended the way it did would it have ended about the time it did if not for these two individuals I have been as CLA suggested I've been writing history in fact I started writing history in the realm of Foreign Affairs so my first couple of books were on American foreign policy during the 1940s and 1950s from there I segwayed into writing sort of broader history I found myself falling into I'll call it the historians trap or the tendency of historian since we are inclined to look to the past to explain the present well once you've looked to the past to explain the present then at least I have this tendency to look farther to the past to explain that part of the past and farther back and farther back I started writing about the 1950s my dissertation my first book was on the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy and I found myself doing the research in the obvious sources at the Eisenhower Library the National Archives and one of the things that you discover when you write about post po War American foreign policy actually most issues of postwar politics and the like is that you will never be able to get your arms around all of the material the material is simply too vast the presidency the American government has become well so multi there's so many people who work for it they're all generating paper there's no way you can see it all so the farther I went back into the past the more I was drawn to the idea that a person could actually get his hands around more and more of the extant record until I finally got all the way back to the 18th century I wrote a book about Benjamin Franklin and while the Eisenhower Library in fact I'll just tell you now that my current project the reason I'm talking about what I'm talking about is that I've my latest book is going to be the I just proof read it it's off to production it's biography of Ronald Reagan in which Reagan's foreign policy end of the Cold War plays a very large part well there are something like 60 million documents at the Reagan library and there's no way one historian in a lifetime is going to be able to cover all of that contrast that and so there's this giant how many of you been to the Reagan Library Southern California any you okay it's like all presidential libraries it's this fast Warehouse with a museum and a reading room in the front and there's no way that anybody's going to be able to cover all this stuff compare that with I wrote a book as I was regressing on Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Franklin the entire Corpus of Benjamin Franklin's works are actually Encompass in about this much space there is a great edited collection of Franklin's papers it's been under production since the 1950s by the American philosophical Society in Yale University press and it is about this much it's something like 35 volumes they're not quite to the end but there it is and the idea that I could actually read everything that still exists that Franklin wrote was very intriguing so I wrote about Franklin and then I had this idea that I was actually going to write a history of the United States in the form of biographies and this speak for two reasons number one is that there's something about me that likes to find the individuals in history and maybe it's just maybe it's just a literary thing I've written what sort of is social history I've written sort of broad gauged economic history but it's really hard to make that into a story stories have to have actors stories have to have characters so I was going to I decided I was going to tell American history through the lens of biography and this So Reagan is the sixth of six volumes in this and to just make a plug for the previous volumes the first one and cl mentioned a couple the first one is the first American on Benjamin Frank Andrew Jackson is volume two ulses Grant the man who saved the union is volume three TR on Teddy Roosevelt's volume four trador to his class on Franklin Roosevelt this Volume 5 when I got to volume six I had to figure out who I should write about now I was one of the things about these biographies for my purposes first of all is that the reason they passed for history is that I believe that every biography is a life and times and so with my design that this would be a history I was going to focus on the individual but broad that to include the times I needed somebody um Franklin Rosevelt died in 1945 so I needed somebody to pick the story up from there and I wanted somebody to carry the story through pretty much to as close to the 20 close to the present as possible I was thinking about particular individuals I was drawn very much to writing about Richard Nixon I thought Nixon would be good ex well and for the biographer for the historian Nixon is really appealing because there is this dark streak in Richard Nixon's character and as Tolstoy among other people said it's a lot more interesting to read about unhappy people and complicated people and people with dark streams than to just write about happy people and at least at first the last person I thought I would write about was Ronald reag and this is where and I look out here and I see that many of you share a characteristic that I do regarding Reagan is we lived through his presidency not all of you and I teach undergraduates and these are I have to think about I have to remind myself of this that Ronald Reagan is as far from their lives as almost woodro Wilson was from my life when I was in college and so for them it's history for me for many of you it's my life and one can say sort of current events but now it's receding into the past and one and I will ask you to consider this because I had to deal with it in many ways it's a lot harder to write about events that you lived through than it is to write about events in the distant past that you had no personal experience of and I'm going to tell you the conclusion that I drew and this is based on my own experience but it's also on my experience of interviewing people with respect to this project and other projects and that is that everybody thinks he or she is an expert on the times that they live through and they're all wrong and this is this becomes especially obvious when you interview people for example who have participated in wars and I have interviewed people who were at war I've used oral histories the recorded Recollections of people who lived through Wars and the reason that they think they're experts on the subject is they were there and they knew what it was like to hear the bullet zinging past them and and what their sector on the front was all this and so yes they are experts on that particular moment but it is a human tendency to extrapolate from the personal to the general and think that the war was like what I saw of the war well Wars are much bigger than that anyway I really didn't want to write about Ronald Reagan and the reason I didn't want to write about Ronald Reagan was that I lived through Reagan's presidency and I guess I won't be giving anything particularly interesting away to say that I had two chances to vote for Ronald Reagan and I didn't vote for Reagan either time I shared a view common among shall I say intellectual types academic types that look and just a whole lot of people that thought that Reagan was essentially shallow and that he had no particular expertise especially in foreign policy he had been governor of California the nation's largest state so it gave him some executive experience but what did he know about foreign policy what did he know about dealing for example with the Soviet Union and so of course he had been an actor and the easy conclusion there is that he was simply mouthing lines that were written by other people so for the longest time I thought Reagan would not be sufficiently interesting oh and the other thing was that he did seem to be this boringly happy guy and what can you make out of that there is president for not a president no there's a particular reason that I thought the way I did are any of you familiar with a book that Edmund Morris wrote on Ronald Reagan called Dutch okay Edmund Morris a brief story here Edmund Morris is um I guess he was born in what's now Zimbabwe and he was a journalist he wrote a book about theater Roosevelt it was published in 1979 or 1980 a really good book on the young theater Roosevelt it ends with Roosevelt getting the news that William McKinley has died he's going to be president of the United States it was a surprise bestseller at won the Pitzer prize and it it came to the attention of Nancy Reagan just after her husband was elected president of the United States and so Nancy Reagan was thinking what historian can do justice to my Ronnie and that's what she always called him Ronnie what is story can do justice to my Ronnie why this this new guy who is interestingly enough not infected with the liberal bias of a lot of American historians intellectuals cuz he's from Africa and he obviously is on a role and he can really write so let's bring him in so Edmund Morris was brought into the White House and I mean I was just sort of I was in graduate school at the time so I was vaguely aware that Morris had this unprecedented access to a sitting president historians as a graduate student I was studying Eisen at the time I would have killed to have this kind of access to eisenh been in the white house because there are plenty of moments when I'm reading through the written record and I'm trying to figure out what for example Eisenhower makes of this and if I could just ask him a few questions well by then Eisenhower was long dead and there was no way to ask him the questions but to be able to sit in on meetings with the president to interview the president at length to have the approval of the president and the White House staff and the first lady so that everybody else would talk to you it had the makings of perhaps the best biography of a president ever written and Morris had this access he had the writing chops to be able to do it but a strange thing happened because everybody knew that the book was going to await Reagan's departure from the White House that was that went without saying and it was probably going to await Reagan's Memoir cuz you're going to clear the field and let the president presid make money on his Memoir and then we're going to see the book but the book just didn't come out and years passed and people wondered what's going on with this book and when it finally came out if you know the book you will remember it was horribly controversial because it was horrible and it was horrible because it was if you can believe this it was a fictionalized biography of the president of the United States nobody had ever done such a thing now one imagines what must have been going through Edmund Morris's head and I I can piece this together because I've encountered Morris on a few occasions and I've heard him give interviews and I will give you my best reconstruction of what happened Morris signed this really big contract for this book on Ronald Reagan and the number that was quoted was $3 million and back in 1980 that was a lot of money it's still a lot of money for a book like this but it was really a lot of money then and he got into the story and he discovered that unlike Theodore Roosevelt who was an intrinsically interesting person Ronald Reagan is an intrinsic was an intrinsically dull person and if you if if any of you read any the works by Morris he wrote this Trilogy on the Roosevelt one volume pre-residency one volume volume of the presidency one volume post presidency and I bet Morris would be the first to admit that the presidential volume is the least interesting of the three because there's something very predictable about the presidency the presidency I wrote a book about theer Ros and I'll tell you that the years of his presidency were the least interesting years of his life the presidency really made him calm down in a way that he didn't like to be calmed down which is to say that theater Roosevelt is an apt subject for a riveting biography even if he had never been president of the United States Ronald Reagan was just the opposite if Ronald Reagan had not been president of the United States no one would have been interested in his life because it just was not interesting he was a little bit better than beist movie actor he had been a politician in Hollywood he was president of the streen Actors Guild he was governor of California and that's that was on his career path the white house but in terms of what he was himself the kind of stuff that he did the thoughts that he had the material for a biography I'm pretty sure that Morris who I actually have heard him say is bored by politics had nothing to work with well with Reagan it's all about politics and if not for the politics there's no reason to write about Reagan so Morris decided decided how am I going to tell this story how am I going to you know spice the story up a little bit so Morris creates this alter ego and it's told Through The Eyes of this fictional alter ego and people who had been waiting especially Reagan loyalists Reagan fans who thought okay this is going to be the Great Book on Reagan and members of the administration members of the family were simply insulted when the book came out because what you didn't take this guy this President of the United States seriously enough to write an honest straightforward account of his presidency the book created a big splash when it came out precisely because it was so unusual and then it sank without a trace the one thing that I sometimes worry about is I have graduate students who do they read for their comprehensive exams and they often make up their own reading lri and they go through the library and they pick out these books and and I can imagine because I know that the book is shelves in book St actually it's not a book stores anymore but in libraries it's sheld with straightforward biographies and I can imagine poor graduate student who is quizzed on Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and refers to this biography of Ronald Reagan Dutch by Edmund Morris and I imagine that the members of the committee are sort of looking at each other uncomfortably doesn't he know that this is fiction anyway so I thought so what is there to write a biography about Ronald Reagan well the more I thought about it the more I became convinced that I probably ought to do it uh one reason is that I had written about uh let's call it sort of the heroes of American liberalism the two previous biographies were of theer Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and I probably owed it to myself to write about a hero of American conservatism but the other thing was the more I thought about rean the more I became convinced that there was a fundamental puzzle at the heart of this guy's story and the puzzle is this now first of all I'm going to have to see if I can get you to agree with me that Reagan is worthy of attention but I'm going to I will and the way I'm going to say this is that I'll just State my thesis straight out Ronald Reagan was one of the handful of greatest presidents in American history and by greatest I don't necessarily mean best or worst but I mean one who had the greatest impact on the way America worked the way Americans lived the way the world worked and in fact I came to the conclusion that Ronald Reagan was with Franklin Roosevelt one of sort of two bookends of the 20th century or two bookends of the second half of the of the 20th century the American Century Franklin Roosevelt is the one in foreign policy who launches the United States on the path of globalism on which the United States has remained ever since but Franklin roselt was also the father of the American welfare state Social Security the various other programs that would give rise to Medicare and the idea that government is there to support people when the private economy when individual effort fails some of you will know that Ronald Reagan as a Young Man considered Franklin Roosevelt his here Ronald Reagan was a new deal Democrat in college and as a young man as an actor in Hollywood Ronald Reagan voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times what you might not know is that Ronald Reagan through the end of his presidency still considered Franklin Roosevelt his model for presidential leadership and this was this kind of took me a little bit by surprise I by this time i' had been reading lots of Reagan speeches and about the time I started in on the book Reagan's diary became available now this is really interesting um but it also shows sort of what Reagan was thinking Ronald Reagan never kept a diary except when he was president and the diary begins with an entry for January 20th 1981 and the last entry January 20th 1989 he kept the diary so I asked myself why did he keep the diary why did he start the diary why did he end the diary the conclusion that I drew is that this was going to be an aid to writing his Memoir he had actually already written one Memoir when he first went into politics in the 1960s so he didn't really have to go over that ground much more but it was a way of remembering what he did on given days so that when he wrote his presidential Memoir there it would be and in fact if you've read his presidential Memoir in American Life he quotes extensively from his diary but as is often the case with Diaries he sort of forgot why he was writing in the early going you can see that he realizes that posterity is looking over his shoulder and so he's writing for that future audience but is often the case in this sort of thing he gradually forgot about the audience and the diary takes on a life of its own so when I started thinking about writing about Reagan this diary all of a sudden became available and it gave me a chance to get inside this guy's head now this is the goal of every biographer you want to find out what your subject is thinking and I discovered something that I hadn't guess that he was thinking a lot more than I had thought before and that he was thinking more interesting and now I'm not exactly going to say deeper thoughts because Ronald Reagan was I say this with no pejorative intent Ronald Reagan was an intellectually shallow person but I'm going to elaborate on this in a little bit because one of the things I'm going to say is that one of Reagan's great strengths was precisely his intellectual shallowness okay I'll get back to that I wanted to write about Reagan because I became convinced that Reagan's presidency was one of the greatest in America history in the sense that things changed while Reagan was President to a greater degree than can be said of probably more than three or four other presidencies in American history American politics took a sharp turn to the right in a conservative Direction during the Reagan years now I'm not going to claim in fact we can talk about this I'm not going to claim that Reagan was entirely responsible for this no big events in history are the work of any single individual but Reagan was the person who embodied this who Justified it maybe you could say rationalized it nonetheless made it part of American thinking I wrote an early a book about Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson is generally thought to be acknowledged to be the president who ushered in the age of democracy well Jackson did not do it all by himself but presidents have this ability if they they have the opportunity if they have the ability to embody a certain moment in history and Reagan did this in a way that none of the presidents before him did except for Franklin Roosevelt in the 20th century we go back to Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson like in the 18th 19th centuries and he also had a very large impact on a his on the history of the world the world changed while Reagan was President and in fact the Soviet Union was pushed on the path to disillusion now again I would never claim that Reagan was the one who did this all by himself nonetheless well in fact we can talk about this to what extent was this Reagan to what extent was this Reagan plus gorbachov to what extent was this a fundamental flaw in the Soviet model of things but I'm going to tell you that Reagan's foreign policy I'd say that Reagan was shallow yeah Reagan's for foreign policy was very simple you could even call it simple-minded he was asked what is your policy and he said referring to communism because with Reagan that was the only issue that really mattered everything else was subsidiary to that what did Reagan think about European integration H not much he left that to other people if it promoted the demise of the Soviet Union and communism great if it didn't what did he think about policy in Central America what did he think about constructive engagement with South Africa all of these things were extraneous what he really cared about was the struggle with Communism and he was asked so what's your policy on communism he said it's simple we win they lose now this was Reagan's response especially to Dayton in the 1970s because Reagan like very many American conservatives was anywhere from skeptical to fully a gast at the policy of dayon because dayon was based on well to use kev's notion peaceful coexistence you know when Nixon went to China and then to Moscow in 1972 he basically said we can get along with the Communists Communists the Soviet Union China they're simply normal great powers and this was the nixonian view this was the Nixon Kissinger view the realist view of the world in the 1970s and Reagan thought it was morally bankrupt Reagan believe that the struggle with Communism was the characteristic was the decisive struggle of the 20th century now when I Reagan wasn't thinking in quite these terms but I was the historian was that just as I said that Franklin Roosevelt was the father of the welfare state Franklin Roosevelt pushed American domestic politics in a leftward direction Reagan pushed it back in a rightward Direction but in foreign policy the parallel is actually even more striking because Franklin Roosevelt was the president who led the United States to the verge of he died before it finally happened to the verge of victory over the first mode of 20th century totalitarianism fascism Reagan picks up the struggle when he becomes president in 1980 and pushes the second mode of modern totalitarianism communism to the brink of disillusion and bankruptcy and the question in the title was who won the Cold War that's actually a bit of a red herring I cuz not going to try to tell you that Reagan won the Cold War I'm not going to try to tell you that the United States won the Cold War but I will tell you this H it should be more properly I guess phrased what won the Cold War and to the extent that the Cold War was a struggle between competing ideologies competing competing modes of social and political organization between Democratic capitalism and communist socialism the Democratic capitalists won they won decisively they won definitively so when Reagan became president in 1981 it was still plausible to think that communism might be a reasonable model for human organization the Chinese had started to abandon it but the Soviets believed in it wholeheartedly least they certainly acted as though they did within a very short time after Reagan left office nobody believed in communism anymore in fact by the 1990s there well there was a Communist party that ruled still rules in China but they're not Communists they're just that's the label they give to autocracy sort of capitalist autocracy in China and communism can you think of anybody today outside of I guess a few aging members tenured members of English departments at American universities that still believe in communism it's this is striking because because it's hard to imagine a movement that had so many followers in as many countries as it did for as long as it did that just went poof it's gone and it's hard to imagine that it's going to make a comeback you know some piy to the contrary notwithstanding um so socialism maybe but even socialism has a hard time gaining any adherence but the one party version of socialism communism you know they still pay lip service to it in Cuba and I don't even know what they pay lip service to in North Korea but that's it it's gone so notice that this happened between basically between the time Reagan became president and I won't say it was finished by the time you left office but communism Soviet commun was on the brink and there was by that time there was pretty much no coming back so this takes me to the fundamental puzzle that I have been wrestling with with Reagan I sent the page proofs back to the publisher a couple of weeks ago there's nothing I can do about it anymore so I've said what I'm going to say until I get to make revisions for the paperback so I probably shouldn't even raise this because I'm to that stage in the production book where I don't want to learn anymore but I'm going to throw it out to you because I want to see what you have to say about this but I'm going to tell you what I concluded about the secret of Reagan's success and this applies to domestic affairs but maybe especially to foreign policy and one of his Secrets was that very shallowness that I referred to earlier Reagan was focused on he was preoccupied with maybe he was even obsessed with the struggle against communism he let nothing distract him from that Reagan was one of those people who knew a couple of things and he knew them really well in fact maybe he knew them too well when I was reading Reagan's diary when I was reading Reagan's speeches one of the Striking things about Reagan's speeches how many of you have some kind of working memory of Ronald Reagan giving a speech you know either from TV or maybe can you heard him in person one of the great things about the internet age is that on YouTube as when you're you're not watching from this series you can go back and look at Reagan's speeches some of you may know or will remember that Reagan burst on to the National political scene in 1964 a week before the 64 election when the Goldwater struggling Goldwater campaign asked Reagan to give a speech because it became really apparent that gold water wasn't going anywhere the campaign had run out of money and they knew that Reagan was a pretty good speaker so they bought him half an hour of air time and this was not there was they purchased air time in various markets around the country and Reagan gave this speech those people in the Reagan world ever after they referred to it as the speech and you can watch the speech and I did several times and it's quite a remarkable speech and and for those of you who sort of like me originally thought that Reagan was a little bit slow on the uptake and not very impressive one of the things to remember is that rean was within a couple weeks of his 70th birthday when he became president of the United States now there are plenty of sharp people who are in their 70s but sharp people in their 70s would probably acknowledge they were sharper when they were in their 40s and if you go back and look at Reagan for example when he testified before the house on American Activities Committee in 1947 the Reagan there is he's very impressive here's somebody who knows his stuff who was very articulate also and this is important he wasn't president Reagan one of the secrets of Reagan's success I'm going to say is his shallowness his simple mindness I'll come back hold that thought another secret of Reagan's success was Reagan understood that being president of the United States is a performance art it's not primarily a matter of what you know it's not a matter of who you hire it's not even a matter of judgment this or that these or those although that part is important worth as much as anything else in many cases more than anything else is can you project your vision of where you want the country to go of what you think this country stands for can you do that can you make a connection with the American people and this is where Reagan's tutelage under Franklin Roosevelt is exceedingly important Reagan talks in his Memoir and he spoke many times to various people about listening to Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats now I look out on the audience and conceivably but I will I've never tried to guess people's age there might be people who remember some of Roosevelt's fireside chats I've in this internet age you can listen to those Fireside Chats and in fact I do an experiment I do a sort of a what should I call experimental history or practical history with my students now some of you may remember again I won't gu your AG but you may remember that Roosevelt's Frank rosell's first fire child chat occurred 10 days into his presidency in 1933 the country was at the worst of the depression the bank system had seized up Roosevelt had declared a bank holiday brought Congress into emergency session they signed an Emergency Banking Act and Roosevelt is explaining to the country how the banks are going to reopen and how they need popular support it's a very and so this way I set it up for my class it's a very cold March it might be the cold winter in American history in terms of how the American people felt despair was throughout the land and so just about this time and I say that this first fireside chat was an experiment Presidents had never addressed the American people like this and the fireside chat was aired on a national radio hookup uh at 10:00 eastern time of course 7 o'clock on the west coast and many people had already gone to bed and because when you were out of money you would turn out the light early it turn off the furnace early it huddle under the blanket to conserve calories so I have my lecture class and at this point I dim the lights now if I could being in Texas I'd crank up the air conditioning to make it cold so let all be shery and then and then out of well out of the speakers comes the voice of Franklin Roosevelt and it's remarkable the guy could give I don't know if how many of you studied Finance but he in 14 and half minutes he explains how banks are supposed to work how Banks had failed how Congress and the presidency had put together this rescue plan and how it was going to roll out starting the next day now when I would talk to students in various audiences I would say based on my listening to this that it would be very easy for a listener to imagine that this was the voice of a favorite uncle or a father basically because the message of Roosevelt was it's going to be okay this was a segue from his inaugural address where he says the only thing we have have nothing to fear but fear itself and so he's saying it's going to be okay and so I remember giving this talk to a class no excuse me to a group that included people perhaps even older perhaps older than some of you here and I said that it sounded like the voice of a favorite uncle or something like that and a woman came up at the end of the lecture and said I heard that chat I heard heard that fireside chat and I can tell you it wasn't the voice of a favorite uncle that I heard it wasn't the voice of my father what she said was it was the voice of God and Ronald Reagan at that very time was a radio announcer he got into the media business as a radio announcer and he listened to this and he took cues from Roosevelt and he understood something about a president's ability to to project a vision for the American people and he understood the singular importance of an emotional connection with Ordinary People a president some presidents work their will work their magic through dealing with Congress Lyndon Johnson was probably the best legislator and chief in American history but that gets you so far what Roosevelt understood and what Reagan infer and practiced on his own was if you can connect with the American people you can go over the heads of Congress you can make things happen that wouldn't happen otherwise and Reagan understood that this connection is critical there was something else he understood that if a president is going to be effective a president has to embody exude communicate optimism with Roosevelt during the Depression it was everything's going to be okay with Reagan it was it's mourning in America America is this shining City on a Hill America greatest days are ahead of it now I'm going to get back to this simplemindedness of re now that's probably a little bit too uncomplimentary to Reagan this his simple views his straightforward views I read Reagan's diary and I would read him talking about complicated issues in a simple way in which the United States is always on the side of good and Justice and the other guys are always on the side of bad and you know all the other negative qualities and I thought about this well come on can't can't you put yourself in the shoes of somebody else so there's a moment in his diary it's along about 1983 and Reagan has been railing against the Soviet Union as an evil empire and he has been funding uh the largest arms build up in American history and he's building up to a 600 ship Navy and wants to get money for the MX missile and he's introduced SDI Star Wars and all this and he says you know for the first time I realize that the Soviets might feel threatened by this buildup and when I read that I went well duh what do you think but Reagan it was a Revelation it was an epiphany for him because Reagan knew in his heart that he would never start a war and he sort of assumed that the world knew that America would never start a war the United States would not engage in a first strike and so therefore somehow the KGB ought to have inferred this and told the leaders of the Soviet Union but he realized oh well maybe it's not that way now this was really a revelation for Reagan that somebody else's point of view might actually have some validity when I was doing this book when I was doing the research of the book I did research at the Reagan library and various other libraries and archives and I also had an opportunity unlike when I wrote about Andrew Jackson or Benjamin Frankin interview people who worked with Reagan who knew Reagan in fact I I tried to interview members of the family and the only one who would agree to be interviewed was Ron Reagan his youngest son and Ron Reagan tells a story that I thought was really revealing of his father Ron was a teenager and In The Family the son is always Ron and the father is Ronnie at least to Nancy so Ron is watching a TV show this is I guess I think his I think it's between the time his dad is governor and he becomes president but anyway they're watching a TV show and it it has it was I guess on the equiv on the History Channel or something then and it showed that or maybe it was just a western a movie where it was really clear that well at least in this movie Vision the Indians are the Savages and the Cavalry the good guys and Ron says to his dad well Dad um and I guess the father I mean and Ronald Reagan liked those kind of movies and he used to watch movies he was not only a character in movies but he's a great consumer of movies and Ron being somewhat of a rebellious teenager said Dad don't you realize I mean it was more complicated than that right that the Indians were often cheated by the government and they were often massacred by the settlers and and don't you see that and when when I was talking to Ron about this he said you know I was trying to get my dad to realize that sometimes the American people the United States government could do something that was well not exactly up to his view of what America stood for and and so we had we talked a little bit more I was talking to Ron about this and and he said his father when pressed on this his father could see that his father knew for example that slavery had been legal for the United you dur the first 85 years of America's national existence and slavery was not a good thing and so he he said and Ron the conclusion that Ron Drew was my father could intellect see that the United States was not always on the side of the Angels but emotionally he simply could not get himself to believe that so there was this disconnect between what his head knew and what his heart wanted to feel now I'm going to suggest to you that the secret the Principal Secret of Regan's success was that he spoke from the heart rather than from the head and he made Americans believe told Americans again and again that this country is the greatest country in the history of humanity and that Americans stand for freedom and Justice and all sorts of good things and this is what is great about this country Reagan was a brilliant Communicator he was often called the great communicator but one of the reasons he was so brilliant one of the reasons that he had the impact that he did was he relentlessly flattered the American people Reagan believed I mean to the extent that he has this cognitive dissonance between sort of what he knows here and what he feels here Reagan believed here that this country really was the greatest country on Earth Reagan believed what Americans have always wanted to believe about ourselves and when he said it he could make Americans think that's exactly right Americans responded to Reagan like they have responded to no president since Franklin Roosevelt I'm going to stop here very shortly because I want to get reactions and questions but when I was first writing this book about Reagan I was trying to figure out what the title and what sort of the the theme would be and the working title was when I had in my head was the last hero Ronald Reagan and his America something like that the last hero and the reason that I was thinking about that title was well the hero was was actually sort of referring to the hero in mythology the the great figure who embodies the moment the the forces of his time but the critical part was the last hero and the reason I was going to say the last year was that I just ask you whether you agreed with Reagan's politics whether you like Reagan or not is there a president since Reagan who has the kind of stature in history that Reagan had and I'm going to you'll have your own thoughts on this but I'm going to suggest the answer is no and just as a quick thought experiment can you imagine any other president who might have gotten his name put in front of the national airport in Washington DC could it be well George the Elder George Bush gets an airport in Houston but that was his hometown the Clinton National Airport the George W bush National Airport the Barack Obama National Airport report Reagan democrats resisted but it just you I I wouldn't say it for a long time but eventually there it is and I'm going to suggest that one of the reasons that Reagan is this last hero was first of all he played this heroic role but and this gets back to sort of the beginning of all of this and that is by winning by ending the Cold War Reagan deprived subsequent presidents of the kind of worthy adversary that's necessary for a hero to be heroic I'm just going to say one last thing and then I really will stop and that is that there is an interesting Paradox in American political history and the Paradox is this that the greatest presidents the ones ranked highest by historians and political science presided over the worst times and consider so George Washington is usually near the top and he's the one who comes out and has to deal with the Revolution and the turbulent early years the National Republic the next one you get to is Abraham Lincoln a civil war Franklin Roosevelt the double whammy of the Great Depression World War II and if you go along with me Reagan who well we can talk about I mean Reagan's presidency isn't so bad but the time that he came out of was very difficult but anyway American Presidents can rise to Greatness when they are faced with a CR crisis when the American status quo is sufficiently shaken that there's an opportunity to make changes for the most part as much as we complain about how politics works or doesn't work if you look at American history in the context of world history the American political system is a rip roaring success there is no country that has been more successful in almost any measure than the United States or the last 250 years 225 years whenever you want to start and therefore what this suggests is that our model is working pretty well but occasionally the model breaks down and the clearest cases are during the Civil War and during the Great Depression that's when the possibility arises for a president to come along and really stamp his impress on the moment I would suggest that it is a measure of rean and I'll use the word greatness here again large impact that he didn't have that full-blown crisis that Lincoln had that Franklin Roosevelt had but nonetheless the world was different America was different after Reagan left the White House than it was before he entered the White House I'm going to stop there and hope you will ask me questions make challenges whatever you want to thank you very much for a great performance and for changing our picture about Ronald Reagan perhaps I think you learned a lot from Ronald Reagan you're being a great communicator yourself uh but let me ask you uh because you never really answered the question who who won the Cold War now okay well when I said that communism is a dead letter what I will say is that the American side won the Cold War was it an individual victory for Reagan no because individuals well as Mark said individuals make their own history but not under the circumstances of their own choosing would the Cold War have ended differently perhaps at a different time if Reagan had not been president uh maybe maybe not I will say this that if Reagan won the Cold War did not do it single-handedly and this is where I don't know if Reagan understood this perhaps the president who understood it the best was Theodor Roosevelt who understood that one secret of success in politics especially for a president is timing and the timing is often beyond your control I do say in the book that Reagan benefited enormously from having his career his presidency overlap with the time in office of two other individuals one on the domestic side the other on the foreign policy side on the domestic side Paul vulker as head of the FED it was vulker who rang the inflation out of the American economy and who was willing and able to inflict pain on the economy to bring the inflation rates of the 1970s down to the rates where they basically have been ever since and as unelected chairman unanswerable chairman of the FED he could do it interestingly Reagan was trying again and again to get vulker to loosen the Reigns but Reagan as president claimed credit and in the eyes of many people he gets credit for the Improvement in the economy but it wasn't all his doing it probably owed as much to Paul vulker as it did to him and the timing here is critical if vulker had become chairman of fed two years earlier then the Improvement would have occurred while Jimmy Carter was still president and Carter quite likely would have been reelected and Reagan never would have been president of the United States if it had come two years later then if you'll remember the Republicans took a hammering in the 1982 mid term elections because the country was in the throws of depression if the if vulker had come in two years later the depression the recession excuse me the recession would have occurred in 1984 Reagan would have been swept out of office and one-term presidents don't get any credit on the foreign policy side gorbachov is absolutely critical Reagan tried to reach out to leard br to no effect and then to Constantin to yuran drov and constan sheno and as you like to say they kept dying on it and then Along Comes gorbachov Who is committed to reform and finally Reagan has someone he can talk to the the relationship that developed between Reagan and gorbachov is fascinating because Reagan was one who said and firmly believed that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and he was willing to impute evil to the people who ran this Empire but he discovered well it's sort of like his you know that they actually have reason to fear the United States that gorbachov was a person like he himself was and gorbachov had a vision for the Soviet Union had a vision for Humanity and one of the visions that they shared was potentially a world Beyond nuclear weapons the story of rean and SDI and nuclear weapons is a fascinating one and like very many other people when I started in on rean I assumed that Reagan had some had sort of a a turning point in his thinking about weapons and the role of weapons in diplomacy and during his first term it was all about building up but then in his second term he discovers that well okay I have to history is going to deal with me so I'm going to have to try to reach out and uh form a peaceful bond with the Soviet Union but in fact the farther I got injured the more I realized it was all part of a single policy and Reagan from the time he was governor of California certainly before he became president of the United States was opposed to the very idea of nuclear weapons he believed that there should be a world Beyond nuclear weapons Reagan thought that the strategy of mutual assured destruction was a moral Abomination the idea of holding the human raced Hostage to these nuclear weapons was utterly terrible and something ought to be done about it and his whole strategy was to get large reductions in arms but he believed that the only way to get the Soviets to come to the table was to build up America's Arsenal so that they would realize the US is serious why should the Soviets give away anything if the Americans are going to sort of not make any resistance so in I see and I think Reagan himself saw that this was all of One Piece and there is have you had Ken Edelman come speak here okay not here but a okay yeah so he's got a relatively new book out and it's called rean at rikic and it's about the rikic summ of 1986 and it's a fascinating moment and this is one where I like to tell my students that there are two kinds of History there's big history and little history little history is the history of individuals it's what biographers look at individual life and the role of a single person and it can be a president of the United States it can be an ordinary person with an ordinary life big history is a history of Nations and it's history of War and Peace and and big treaties and agreements rikic is this moment where little history intersects big history and you see Reagan and gorbachov coming to grips with this idea that there could be a world Beyond nuclear weapons there could be a world where human humans do not live any longer under the nuclear Shadow and luckily for me the American not takers and the Soviet not takers kept really good notes and everything has become available so you can follow the discussion and they go at it hammer and tongs now before Reagan went to rikic Richard Nixon who knew something about arms control policiy my God don't let Reagan get in a room alone with gorbachov he'll give away the store he doesn't know what he's talking about and Nixon was not entirely wrong but one of the really interesting things was that when you read the transcripts it's pretty clear that gorbachov didn't know what he was talking about either at least in terms of the details but they both understood that they had their detail people waiting in the wings if they could come to an agreement if they could say all right we are going to agree that over the next 10 years we are going to eliminate nuclear weapons then we can get our people to work out the details and there is this moment I try to be as disp and objective as I can when I'm sort of writing about people in history but occasionally occasionally what one of them does just makes me want to reach out and just grab them and say come on and gorbachov says we can have a deal on this elimination of nuclear weapons but all you have to do is agree to keep SDI the Strategic Defense Initiative in the laboratory for 10 years now I benefit from hindsight I know that SD I came to nothing over the next 10 years and came to precious little at all and so I know that if Reagan had just said yes then there could have been this deal now there are complications to this each one still had would have to get a treaty ratified it's not at all clear that the Senate would have gone along with this it's one thing it's worth remembering that Reagan was sorely criticized from the right in the last two years of his presidency for being too soft on the Russians Margaret Thatcher when she heard what went on at rikic almost had a heart attack because Thatcher knew as everybody on the American side in Europe knew that it was the American the American nuclear deterrent that offset the Soviet large advantage in Conventional Weapons and as I think it was Jack mattlock who said that when thater heard about this she came down like a ton of bricks and Margaret thater was about the one person who could lecture ronal R and tell him no this is crazy you can't do it not from Nancy Nancy's a very interesting story Nancy didn't lecture Reagan Nancy worked on Reagan by other means but like that we I will tell you I'm going to I I had sort of the stereotypical the character view of Nancy Reagan that she was this sort of smiling first lady who was there just being pretty on stage one of the the attractions of writing about Reagan was that this was an Administration where the various members of the administration despised one another and they all wrote about it Donald rean was the first out of the block rean got fired by Nancy because Nancy thought that rean should have prevented the Iran contct and she was probably right so she had him fire at which point he came out just 6 months later and began his Memoir with on page one with the story of ny's astrologer well this was I mean it's great sort of watching Reagan as president he's still president dealing with this at press conferences so Mr President you know have you heard from your astrologer lately and he tries you know wave it aside but this is one of the things that I will say that at times was Charmed by Reagan it's really clear that Reagan's relationship with Nancy was one of I'll call it one of the great love stories of American public life in the 70s and 80s Nancy Reagan was utterly devoted to Reagan and Reagan was utterly devoted to her but here's um you decide whether this is scary or revealing or what Reagan Ronald Reagan had essentially no friends except for Nancy now I'll tell you I got a little bit of insight on this you make of this what you will so I had done a book on uiss Grant and I was doing a radio interview and so at the end of the interview on Grant the host says what's your next project I said I'm working on Ronald Rag and he took sort of muted the the microphone and he said after we get off the air I'm going tell you something okay I'm all ears we get off the air and he says if you want to understand Ronald Reagan you need to remember that Reagan was the son of an alcoholic now this is no secret Reagan has written about it Reagan wrote about it in his Memoirs but he said and I you know I said okay I'll elaborate and he said well I'll tell you I know something about this because I'm the son of an alcoholic and he said there is a characteristic emotional reaction to people who grow up as the child but especially the son of an alcoholic father because the person in your life the role model the person that you want to depend on the one you want to look up to is a guy who one day is your best buddy and he's throwing the baseball around with you and telling you all these stories and the next day he's beating the Daylights out of you or he's lying drunk in the snow so Reagan in his Memoir Reagan tells a story of coming home from school at the age of 11 in Dixon Illinois and he sees his father passed out in the snow and as rean and Reagan said this in public in his Memoir he says I had to stand there for a minute and ask myself so what do I do do I drag him inside or I just do I just let him sit here and freeze and he gave it some serious thought and then he eventually got his dad inside but and so this this radio guy I was talking to said yeah and you grow up having this kind of emotional Reserve because you know you can't count on anybody because this this person you want to count on most emotionally you can't count on it well with rean this is really observable and Nancy I think ny's Memoir is one of the most revealing Memoirs by a first it is the most revealing Memoir by a first lady I've ever read and part because she had to deal with things like this astrologer story and it's the real deal but and you might think what a wacko but I have to and I tell the story in the book Nancy was from the time Reagan became president she was worried for his safety presidents had been assassinated presidents had been shot at and hardly a month into Reagan's presidency he is shot and nearly killed and Nancy responds to this I think oh my God you know if I lose lose him I won't be able to carry on she was so devoted to him so attached to him that she really thought that she could not live if he Di and so she's trying to figure out what can she do to prevent this happening now having spent a lot of time in Hollywood she was talking to one of her old Hollywood buddies MV Griffin who said you know there is this woman in Hollywood turns out her name was Joan quickly basically the astrologer to the stars who might be able to help you and so Nancy talks to Joan Quigley and Joan Quigley says I could have told you that March 30th was a bad day for your husband now Nancy was not stupid so it's a measure of her distress and her need to just cling to something that she didn't immediately discount this retrospective prediction you know after he knows that the guy is nearly killed he says I knew that was a bad day you know she didn't have notes and wrote her down ahead of time she's telling her but oh really and so Nancy came to believe that there were good days and there were bad days and so when Reagan was going to schedule something she would run it by Joan Quigley for example travel she was defly afraid that Air Force One was going to go down be shot down or have malfunction or something so is this day a good day or not and Don rean just went nuts about this because he's a chief of staff of the president he's trying to schedule stuff and we can't leave for rikic on Thursday because Thursday is a bad day according to this woman in San Francisco and so anyway so but anyway so what Nancy says appropo of Reagan's emotional life was there were time she said I was closer to Ronnie and she always called him Ronnie even the Memoir I was closer to Ronnie than anybody else which was quite true but there were times when even I didn't know what was going on when he would pull that curtain down and I just had to keep my distance I think that if Ronald Reagan had not been president of the United States no one would have come to his funeral there were he didn't have any friends there was Nancy Nancy would have come the kids maybe would have come the story of rean and his children is I don't know I guess it's an object lesson in don't be too busy for your kids there's a just a poignant moment in Michael Reagan's Memoir so Michael is the oldest son and Michael was adopted and so there's that complication and then he was the stepson of Nancy there's that complication and they were busy and they shipped him off to one boarding school after another where he acted out and got kicked out and this and that but finally he's about of a ton age where he's going to graduate from this boarding school in Arizona but he doesn't have the credit he doesn't have the grades but he cuts a deal with the school that if he can get his dad to come give the commencement address his dad at this point I he's governor of California if his dad will come and give the commencement address then they'll give him his diploma and out he goes so Reagan comes and he's like a politician he's working the room and he's going down the line of the graduates he says hi I'm Ronald Reagan what's your name you know John Smith jumps I'm Ronald Reagan what's your name and he comes to Michael and he says hi I'm Ronald reag what's your name Michael says Dad so you know what do you do with something like this I don't know other questions let me let me ask uh one more question let me open it up let uh let me try to be Devil's Advocate what you present to us is biography really the The History of the World by means of great man or great woman if you take Nancy is that really how we should do it there's social history there's history from below there's structural history so basically not looking at men and women as individuals but look at development look at events look at recessions look at the working class and so on and so on uh so what why is it Justified to do what you do I'll give you two or three responses there in the first place the reason I wrote this history of America through biography is that I pitched the idea of a sixth volume History of the United States to a publisher this is back in about 1992 and the Republic the publisher laughed in my face and said nobody writes that kind of stuff nobody would publish that kind of stuff nobody would read it if it was published and then and here I'll get us some sense of uh potentially the age of some people in the audience when the publisher then said by your response to this the republish the publisher then said who do you think you are anyway will Durant okay those people who know who will Durant was know that will Durant and Ariel Durant wrote this 25 volume history of the world you know the story of civilization and and I was thinking the what I wanted to say was yeah I hope to be because I I hadn't read all of them but I read a lot of them and I found something very engaging about having this one voice that guides you through this big sweep of history but the publisher said it's not going to work so I was discouraged for a time but then I thought maybe there's a way to do this covertly I would write it but I wouldn't call it a history of the United States I would instead write a series of biographies and I I'm mercenary enough to pay attention to what sells and what doesn't and if you look on the best seller list when history shows up it's very typically in the form of biographies this was just about the time that shortly after David mullock's biography of Harry Truman almost singlehandedly resurrected Harry Truman as reputation politically and sold I don't know a million and a half copies or something like that and I thought yeah but there was something else I had been a history teacher for a while at this point and I knew that all sorts of people have have had a bad experience of history in high school that they thought of history as memorizing a bunch of facts and dates and Magic the fact with the date and the name and this and that and I don't know if this is more true in Texas than it is in North Carolina but you'll catch my drift when I say that a lot of people can they have they think they they can't remember the last name of their High School history teacher but they're pretty sure that the teacher's first name was coach and and so and so a lot of people have this unfortunate experience of history and when I would talk about I'm writing this history of for a lot of people I'd get just a couple words past history of and their eyes would start to glaze over and go I don't like history but if you say you're writing about people oh we're interested in people people want to learn about people this is why people write and read novels so one of the reasons that I decided to write it this way was simply to get that literary hook to bring people in and when I talk to my students when I lectur to students they L the stories about people and having written this if you can if you can write you can write about people it's hard to write about movements it's hard to write about classes in an engaging way and I'll be quite Frank in saying that by the time I launched on this I safely had tend it so I didn't have to write for the Academy anymore I could write for a larger audience but beyond this there is sort of this question I I was I alluded to it earlier when I talk about little history and big history and the two if you want to understand history as history you have to pay attention to both now there are those people who believe that there is some kind of zeitgeist that is almost Transcendent of the individuals involved I don't happen to buy into that I happen to think that history is I'm going to go so far as to say it's no more big history is no more than the sum of a lot of little histories and if you could know all the little histories and get the people because I'm not a determinist I believe that humans can do things that they have what amounts to what looks like free will now I will say that something like the Industrial Revolution is way overdetermined take away James Watt take away any number of inventors or entrepreneurs and you still get an industrial revolution I would say that there are intermediate events so World War I okay World War I is not as overdetermined as the Industrial Revolution if France Ferdinand had taken a different turn that day there might not have been a World War One there were tensions in the world but did they have to take the form of War we were talking about this earlier I happen to think that there are moments when individuals can be absolutely decisive I'm not going to put Ronald Reagan in this category but I will say that if you will recall that between the opening of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 and the unification of Germany the following Autumn 11 months passed it wouldn't have happened on that time frame I'm not going to say it wouldn't have happened at all if not for at least on the American side the Elder George Bush because most of the other leaders of the Western Alliance said this is a very bad idea and we certainly shouldn't do it as hastily as this but Bush decided would throw in his lot with hel of coal and they were going to make it happen if not for Bush if not for his particular I'll say his I'm going to say his faith in the German people it wouldn't have happened and that's a big deal so sometimes big deals hinge on individuals with since we started with the Cold War and Reagan and gorbachov as I tried to explain there was a lot to this I happen to think that well the Reagan loyalists the Reagan they would say they would point to something like as specific as SDI and when Reagan announced SDI that was an announcement we're going to spend you guys into Oblivion and therefore gorbachov has to cry uncle and that's that it's really interesting when you read the the transcripts from rikic because gorbachov says we're not going to chase you off into outer space we're not we're going to counter SDI but not by the same means what he seems to be referring to is the fact that a lot of people said at the time you can defeat SDI just by building more offensive weapons SDI is not going to be perfect it can shoot even it can shoot down n out of 10 you know there used to be a bumper sticker back in the 70s or ' 80s that said even a single nuclear bomb can ruin your day you know so a few of these get through and the system simply doesn't work you got a question sir yeah I I I think you're on to something here uh I think first of all I'm a Ukrainian origin so I've actually had a lot of access and I can tell you that in 1988 889 uh my parents invited some Soviet Ukrainian Diplomat and what they were amazed at these I mean they they they were in shock these diplomats they couldn't believe how Gorbachev had entered into power and how he had disassembled the Kremlin and I think what you have here is two personalities who who get together and have an undue influence I think first of all I think Reagan understood at some point that that the Soviet Union was falling apart and he gave him a soft landing and he used all his Charisma all his persuasion to make it easier in that sense it could have been a very different outcome I think you're right and one of the things that Reagan did not do was to gloat as the Soviet Union was falling apart and I think this has a lot to do with the relationship he developed with gorbachov because they spoke to especially at rikic but but following that at Washington they had another Summit in Washington another one in Moscow and they both are talking about the political difficulties that they deal with and Reagan is saying I got these conservatives back in United States I have to deal with and GB was saying I got my own hardliners too and Reagan one of the Striking things about Reagan was he was really good as a negotiator uh and this kind of goes back to the time when he was Chief negotiator for this Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood and and here's something when I did interviews for the book I didn't learn a whole lot that surprised me but the way people said things I found very useful Reagan as you probably know is considered to be a saint by every registered Republican today but I'm going to tell you I'm not the first one to say this most I w't say most of them but a lot of them would be appalled at the stuff that Reagan actually did because this here's another secret of Reagan's success Reagan from that first speech in 19 64 till his farewell address in January 1989 essentially gave the same speech again and again and again and it was chapter and verse of conservatism and oratorically rhetorically Reagan was the perfect 100% conservative but as a politician as president of the United States Reagan was a practicing pragmatist and Reagan is the one who identified with cut taxes Reagan cut taxes essentially well one and a half times and he raised taxes seven times but that's the part that is forgotten but talking about these interviews I was talking to James Baker who was Reagan's chief of staff and then secretary treasur and eventually Secretary of State and he gave me a quote that it was very much in line with something I had concluded myself but coming from Jim Baker it was perfect and I have it word for word because it made such an impression on me baker said if Reagan told me once he told me 15,000 times that's the number he used 15,000 times I would rather get 80% of what I was asking for than go over the cliff with my flags flying and that was Reagan's approach Reagan understood that politics or more precisely governing is the art of the possible if you can get 80% of what you were asking for take it and run you've made a big Improvement on the status quo and you can always come back for the rest so rean was this pragmatist and that's the part and that's one of the reasons that Reagan can still be embraced by conservatives because they focus on the speeches and you can quote Reagan again and again he's saying everything that even the Tea Party likes but if you look at the the way Reagan governed well Reagan has fallen into that fallen into he's moved into that category where Barack Obama has cited Reagan favor shouldn't when we look at the end of the in a minute at the end of the Cold War shouldn't really Credit Go much more to uh Bush the older Bush senior rather than to Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan was out of office by then what I would say is that Reagan made possible what the Elder Bush followed up on by the time by the spring of 1989 and it really as you know it's only that the only by the summer of 1989 that the bush administ has conducted its review and is actually starting to embark on a policy by then the Berlin Wall was almost open the momentum had developed for the changes that swept across Eastern Europe and into the Soviet Union by the way back to the original question who won the Cold War I would say everybody won the cold war in the sense that people who lived under communist rule were certainly most of them in Hungary Ukraine a lot better off after after the Soviet Union has dissolved Vladimir Putin might dispute this today but in terms of how is the world going to be organized is it going to be organized on principles that give a greater stake to individual Freedom or in state Authority and I when I write these books I try to avoid I really try to avoid rendering value judgments on was Reagan's SDI policy wise or foolish I just say here's the policy here's what he thought it was here's what the critics said and you dear reader draw your own conclusions okay but this is one where I'd be quite willing to say that pretty much everybody came out better thank you um as at the end of the Cold War yes sir Mr you initially call Reg the shadow yeah uh it seems to me there's a tremendous contrast between Ray and Garo and Obama Putin yeah just opposite um you mean the relationship between two well and Obama you wouldn't call him sh no right and and Putin wasn't flexible I mean I mean two the four people are just so drastically different and garach can talk to each other Putin and Obama can't talk to each other yeah I'll couple of comments in that the first thing I would say is that when I said that Reagan Michelle I actually didn't follow on that sufficiently what Reagan understood was that even as president of the United States as leader of the Free World As arguably the most powerful person in the world you can only hope for Success on a few identifiable objectives if you spread yourself too thinly you get nothing so Reagan had two goals when he became president shrink government at home defeat communism abroad and everything else was detailed and he left the detail to other people and sometimes the details got out of hand and that's how the Iran Contra Scandal blew up and nearly destroyed Reagan's presidency Reagan was a terrible manager actually just the opposite of Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter was a whole lot smarter than Reagan in terms of Mastery of the details of policy but Jimmy Carter did not first of all know the value of focus and he also did not know the value the importance of Performing the presidency Carter would have been a great Chief of Staff Carter would have been a great advisor but he couldn't be president he couldn't fill the role of President and Carter insisted on telling the American people when they deserved some of the blame for the fix the country was in I think he was absolutely right but being right doesn't get you anywhere being president might get you favorable treatment from historians rean because he saw things simpler than truth he was able to get some traction on it the the gentleman V beard that yes sir you're taking me through a lot of unhappy memories I was uh I had The Misfortune to be a career Foreign Service Officer who worked the inate political interface with the career service throughout the Reagan years I knew re in I've t with rean I wrote a little bit for Reagan uh I did the same thing with George Bush when you're in career service that's what you do president president just like to make a couple comments uh I I can't I I just cannot swallow the concept that this was a great president uh I I I I say that because I don't want younger people who didn't live through his presidency uh to believe it but it's said over and over and over again and you're very much in the line of Peggy Nunan who was one of the speech writer this is the way she presents him and I'd like to go into his character just a little bit you're familiar with Berlin's Hedgehog in the fox and what Isaiah Berlin said was it the Hedgehog knows one thing right Fox knows many things sometimes the Hedgehog get way Ronald rean was a hedgehog right I think that's what you're saying this is not shallow or deep this is typing okay and and he was he was a a fierce person when it came to what he considered to be his Prin principl he was cold as ice as a person and this is where edin Morris failed in his Bo because he didn't understand it there's a peculiar type of Personality which is a mixture of an introverted and the extrovert Ronald Reagan who I I work for one of the people who could be called his friend uh so I I was very very close to this whole thing uh Ronald Reagan uh was an introvert he he was a jeal frigid ice cold person inside edin bar didn't understand that you can be that way as an introvert really reli primarily on Nancy as you said uh and still have this regious friendly Irish uh eloquence and and manner there there there are people like that Ronald Reagan's that kind of person thank you you want the speaker comment on yeah I would agree with you entirely in fact I wish I had been able to interview you because I would have used your quote about would say the gregarious exterior with the gell interior because that's exactly right as Reagan had no close friends and he was people who knew him only from what they saw on television knew him from a distance what a friendly guy but they got close and they realized they couldn't get close there was a coldness there there was an aloofness but I let me just ask you sort of press you on what you said at the beginning would you agree that there were great changes in the world during the Reagan presidency which is a slightly different thing than I'd say well it's it's hard for me as a professional uh who was involved in all these things uh in detail to look at it is I obviously I knew what re's policies were Etc and I was in charge I was charg some of uh but I did talk to rean about this once he didn't think that his military buildup was what pushed corop over the r it it was really gorbachov understanding that his his system was collapsing uh and had anybody been president the Soviet Union was in process of dissolution I just give you one little anecdote about this that is almost everybody that said Pat Mor got it wrong they didn't understand the Soviet Union could had no go anymore it was dissolving there was one other guy in Washington I deal with all the ideologues all the crazy right lers all the True Believer everybody uh but there was one guy who understood that he really was cassing it was a sociologist Nam bir fish the very fish bu had uh little indicators one of his indicators was toilet paper production and so you know store yeah go ahead and tell it well when they didn't have enough money to produce adequate stocks of toilet paper they were in deep and they didn't have that money they didn't have the toilet paper they were they were in trouble and they were they were coming down uh it was it was a total poent in Village thank you very much I think we should continue that conversation also after the question per this gentleman here to I just want to bring up the paper I actually started for students and students from Ukraine would come with toilet paper because they thought there would be no toilet paper in the United States yeah yeah um can I get some people on the fringes here the lady over there yeah so uh Obama started out as you know his his campaigning he was this great communicator he was trying to be I mean he I think he was very successful and since then I you know it's besides all the other things that's wrong with he's either different now or you know he doesn't care I don't know but what do you think happened there and also so it's a question whether Obama is as much in communicat did he really have potential to you know really start communicating American people having observed the evolution of the American political system over the last 40 years I would say that there has never been a more difficult time to be president than now and it's probably going to get worse and it uh has a lot to do with the fact that the two parties have sifted out ideologically Ronald Reagan was President at a time when there were still crossover votes Reagan benefited greatly from Democrats the Reagan democrats Democrats who bll weevils in Congress Democrats who would vote with a Republican president and it had been the case other earlier Lyndon Johnson on civil rights reform got a lot of Republicans to vote that's because as late as the 1980s there were still such a thing as moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats but largely because lynon Johnson nailed the Mast of the democratic party to civil rights reform he alienated white Southern conservatives who had been a Mainstay of the democratic party since reconstruction and that started the big migration the great track of Southerners of the south from the Democratic party to the Republican party today there is almost no middle ground if you are a liberal in the United States today you are a Democrat if you are a conservative you are a Republican and there is no incentive for any Republican to do anything for Barack Obama and it's almost sort of Vice Versa under George W bush what the the situation R first that and the perfecting or the you could call it the utter uh well the completion of Jerry mandering with computers you can make congressional seats utterly safe for your party so there is the it's almost like the days in the South under Jim Crow where the important elections were the Democratic primary elections and that's where the decisions were made this day in this day and age that's true for most seats in Congress the important election is the primary election and if you are a Republican and you're interested in keeping your seat you look only over your right shoulder because the primary elections bring out the zealots if you're a Democrat you look over your left shoulder so there is almost no middle ground anymore so that's at the heart of the problem Reagan could find some people across the aisle to deal with there's another thing was and that is that Barack Obama is was the most brilliant campaigner and the most brilliant candidate that I've seen in quite a long long time and you will remember that his slogan was yes we can which is exactly what you want people to believe when you're running for office the trouble is that as soon as you get elected and inaugurated the answer the the watch word is not anymore yes we can it's no you can't because to govern is to choose and most the people who want something have to be told no and Obama has not been able to make that transition uh in part Obama is a little bit too much like Jimmy Carter he thinks things through too much and he is I'm going to say is basically too honest whereas Reagan I'm not going to say Reagan was dishonest but this is where Reagan's and I'll use the term now Reagan's simplemindedness comes into play because Reagan would say again and again this is a great country one of the Striking things about Reagan and here's a uh a big contrast between John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan you remember inaugural address ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country Reagan never asked anything of the American people Reagan complimented the American people flattered the American people and I'll give you a a critical um bit of evidence in this Reagan I said Reagan had these two goals when he became president shrink government at home defeat communism abroad now whether it was Reagan or not communism wound up defeated so TR won for the Reagan agenda if not necessarily for Reagan himself we can still debate that on the side of shrinking government at home for Reagan shrinking government home had two aspects one cut taxes and two cut spending now until Reagan came along the mark of a conser a fiscal conservative a republican conservative was their Devotion to balanced budgets you cut taxes and spending together you don't cut taxes first cuz everybody knows that's the easy part the the hard part is to cut spending what Reagan did was to separate the two now maybe Reagan really believed if he did he was pretty naive but maybe he really believed that we can cut taxes first and then get Congress to cut spending no Congress is going to agree to cutting taxes because people don't like it just blame it on the president but people like having more money in their pockets but then cutting spending he never did get the spending cuts and so it's to Reagan that we owe the structural deficits that the country has been wrestling with for the last 30 years because with from Reagan's time forward Republican conservatives their watchword and fiscal policy is cut taxes and they pretty much given up on balancing the budget in any meaningful sense thank you yes please is there any indication of how gorbachov appraised rean yeah it's really interesting gorbachov has a revealing Memoir and he talks about how at Le at least at first he thought that Reagan was the worst of imperialist dinosaurs he thought gorbachov thought that Reagan was as simple-minded more simple-minded than even I have portrayed him that he didn't know anything he just maed the words of his capitalist betters the people who the the ruling circles in America as gorbachov got to know Reagan he came to decide that Reagan was sincere he came to and this is and since um those of you who had a career in diploma I mean you'd be much better able to speak to this than I can the role of conversations of getting to know people because it's tempting for the realist theorists to say governments are black boxes and doesn't really make any difference who's in power in the Kremlin who's in power in the White House countries Nations have interests and those interests are what determine things but at least in Reagan's case it demonstrated that in Reagan and gorbachov's case they got to know each other and Reagan came to believe that gorbachov was a sincere reformer and Reagan was it's really interesting you know Reagan would cite that Russian proverb again and again trust but verify and at the beginning the emphasis was always on verify but by the last months in office it was really much more on trust and there's a moment when he is asked during the Moscow Summit it's late in his last year where he is asked by somebody does he still believe that the Soviet Union is an evil empire and this is sort of that critical moment and he says no and well you said it was ah but those were different times things change and that's the part that the Reagan loyalists don't want to remember you know they remember Reagan beating the drums against the evil empire thank you yeah you please um you said that can you speak up you said that some of the best remembered presidents are the ones that inherited the worst situation yeah so do you think think Nixon would have been remembered as one of the great had it not been for oh boy this is this is where the question really arises how important is fundamental Integrity in a leader and there are times when I think and a president maybe not that important actually because there are so many people who constrain a president so many people who check up on a president if the president is the kind of person who might steal money out of grocery store till as a clerk well you can't do that as president so it's not going to happen but there are moments when presidents can engage in obstruction of justice and maybe think they can get away with it um Nixon is a fascinating example to me and I may actually wind up writing more about Nixon because there is that dark streak about Nixon but here's the for me the big puzzle about Nixon is why he went into politics at all because the typical political personality is one of a person who's gregarious who likes people and Nixon certainly strikes me I never knew Richard Nixon but from everything that I've observed and read about Nixon he he did not get along easily with people there's a story about when Nixon is meeting with gold my ear at the time when she was prime minister of Israel and her foreign Minister was ABA eban and you'd sort of have to know of eban's Oxbridge education and you know he spoke with a an Oxbridge accent English accent and all this at a time when Kissinger excuse me when Nixon's secretary of state was Henry Kissinger and you know Kissinger and so Nixon is trying to make small talk you know what does he say and uh so he says well Madam prime minister um you and I have something in common and was you know so what do I have in common Richard Nixon and he yes Mr President what is that and he says we both have a Jewish foreign minister and my ear says yes but mine speaks English so um I think Nick I will give Nixon credit for to my mind knowing more knowing more and having thought more about international relations than any other American president with the possible exception of theore Roseville Nixon Nixon is that rare president who wanted to become president to change the world not simply change the United States if you look at the 44 presidents we've had I could count on one hand and have a couple of fingers to spare presidents For Whom the primary goal was to change foreign policy and and or for whom whom the principal issue in the election if I count American elections there are almost no elections where the primary consideration was foreign policy we could argue 1916 maybe 1940 when there's a war going on but even 1980 when Reagan gets elected a lot of people thought that the deciding factor was the hostages in Iran well maybe but more important was the dire State the horrible state of the economy and so but Nixon's an exception to this and so Nixon really knew a lot and thought a lot about foreign policy so he's very interesting in that regard as to why Nixon went into politics I don't know it's almost as though he went into politics because it was hard if Nixon had been content merely to be rich and sort of mildly welln he could have been the most successful Wall Street lawyer in history he was he had that kind of mind he was that kind of smart but he went into politics would just kind of cut against his grain and it brought out all the insecurities and all the suspicions that finally emerged in Watergate so that might be sort of a classic example of hubis which would make him a great subject for we can take maybe two more questions the lady over here um I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Clinton and versus Reagan in terms of performance of the presidency and connectedness with people because he couldn't have that sparkly magical thing and I'm wondering did did Reagan have that sparkly magical thing in a Reagan did have that but Clinton had it to an excess and I think you can take it too far but I will say this this might sound like a really small thing but I've alluded to various of Reagan's secrets of success but one secret of Reagan's success was his ability to tell a joke and I would say that Reagan might be the best joke teller in the history of the White House with a possible exception of Abraham Lincoln who told lots of jokes but people who heard Lincoln's jokes didn't laugh they just kind of groaned oh my God one of these hairy dogs stories but people laughed at Reagan's jokes and Reagan understood a fundamental aspect of communication of human nature and that is if you can get people to laugh with you you're halfway to getting them to agree with you and so even before hostile audiences he would tell jokes and it would soften things up so there's that aspect of it with Clinton oh actually this gets back to what you were saying about Reagan the cold personality the cold reality under the apparently gregarious personality Clinton is almost the opposite to an extreme and with Reagan there's something really interesting Reagan seemed approachable but only up to a point but Reagan never seemed emotionally needy Reagan would make his pitch and various people would talk about when Reagan was trying to negotiate with members of Congress and it was he would lay out his policy and why he thought it was a good policy and say I hope you will agree with us and leave it at that with Clinton and I don't know Clinton and I you know I can't psychoanalyze Clinton any better than other people in the room but Clinton always struck me as somebody who wanted everybody maybe even now wanted everybody to love him you know wanted to I why else would you run for governor of arkans what eight times you know because when it comes right down to it elections are popularity contests and you know Clinton seemed to me to have that kind of ego that needed stroking and the other thing was Clinton might be might be the most charismatic political figure of our living generation but there is a point at which Charisma puts people off because they feel themselves sort of falling under that Sway and they don't want to be you know the nickname for Clinton slick Willie the people who use that they realize this guy had those kind of skills he really did feel your pain I shook his hand in my head almost explo yeah well that's exactly it and and and it has a kind of there's a reaction to that on on the part of people who don't want to be drawn in so people who do you know fall under the sway they're all in they're all for him and Clinton apparently still has that magic today Hillary how she is coping yeah the lady here yes I went at the hospital do you know anything about R's mother and his childhood this the mother yes okay so I told you about Reagan's father Reagan's father was a drunk and this is testified to by everybody knows he was a very Charming drunk when he was sober but he's very unreliable Reagan's mother was she was the one who held the family together and she was the one who understood that her younger son she had two sons Neil and Ronald and Ronald was known as Dutch when he was a kid because to save money she put the bowl over his head and cut the hair around it and she learned well whether she sensed this before he did or not it's hard to tell but one of the reasons that rean went into show business first in radio and then in movies was that he discovered that for an awkward child for one filled with anxiety for one who had an older brother who was a really good athlete when he himself was a lousy athlete who was very nearsighted he couldn't see a baseball getting up in front of an audience and making them laugh was as he said repeatedly was music to his ears he discovered what a lot of people who get up on stage discover that their life their real life might be unsatisfactory they might be fearful they might be worried but they get up on a stage and people respond and for the moment those anxieties go away and Reagan himself talks about this in a couple of his Memoirs where this is what he learned on the stage of his mother's church so her mom was a member of the Disciples of Christ and she used to organize theatrical Productions the song and dance kind of thing and she would put little Ronnie Little Dutch up on stage and they thought he was so cute and in fact this is back in the 1920s in the Golden Age of movies and he tells the story of there was an I think an aunt his mother's sister or somebody who came and said they were watching some movie that had kids stars and says she says to Reagan's mother why don't you take Dutch to Hollywood he could do that and Reagan himself professes to being utterly entranced by the movies and those people up on the stage they could they love they lived these Charmed lives and Fact one of the themes that I draw out in the book is and and you know when you write these things you I don't know if I could well it's a theme and I I hope it works but it's this that one of the ways of interpreting Reagan's ambition his rise in politics because when you try to account for why people become president Ordinary People don't become president of the United States there is a kind of ambition that pushes them forward and lots of people are modestly ambitious and they want to be best in their class or they want to be CEO of the corporation but to be president of the United States that's ambition of another kind and for certain individuals the ambition takes the form of they want Power they want the ability to change the world and you see that in lynon Johnson people who knew Lyndon Johnson when he was young when he was in college and they would say here's a guy who's hungry for power and the power is going to fill some empty spot in his soul or something and he's going to change the world and he is going and so he launches the guys of civil rights revolution of the 1960s with Reagan it wasn't that so much what Reagan was looking for was not power he was looking for Applause he was looking for a stage and with Reagan with each success he looks for a bigger stage so first is the stage of school plays and then the stage of the radio broadcaster the stage of Hollywood and then the stage of politics in California and then the stage of the presidency of the United States and finally when he gets together with gorbachov the stage of world history and it's talk about dramatic moments on stage Reagan and gorbachov at raik almost literally held the fate of the world in their hands and they knew it and if they could come to an agreement and if they could make the agreement stick then the future of the human race for the next 50 years might be different and you know this is and this is one of the reasons that Reagan was a pragmatist rather than this merely rhetorical ideologue because Reagan by the time he got to that stage he was now the bigger stage was a stage of history and he wanted to accomplish things he didn't want to Simply score political points that's what had gotten him to this stage but now the stage was even bigger so that's sort of the way I interpret Reagan's ambition what drove him up a lot of people saw Reagan as ambitious but it's a different kind of ambition than you see in as I say somebody like Lindon Johnson thank you when is the book coming out in May just in time in fact for Father's Day so if there's we we all want to buy it okay thank you very much indeed let me let me thank uh Professor Brans for an excellent performance for enlightening us about the weaknesses and strengths of Ronald Reagan I would like to say that next semester We are continuing with our lecture series and the first lecture will be on the 22nd of January and there will be a lecture about Nazi Germany and after that there will be a lecture about the Dirty War in Argentina and there will be many more lectures and a few ambassadors and other distinguished people will be coming to visit us so I will send all that information out on the mailing list um for today I would like to thank you for coming and wish you a Happy Thanksgiving thank you

Channel: KrasnoUNC

Views: 35,970

Keywords: Cold War (Military Conflict), H. W. Brands (Author), Ronald Reagan (US President), Mikhail Gorbachev (Politician)

Id: ExwSBuX6iw0

Length: 112min 29sec (6749 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 26 2014