 Good evening. As you all know, I'm Mark Uptegrove, the Director of the LBJ Presidential Library, and I want to welcome you here tonight for an evening with Ken Adelman and H.W. Brands, who will talk about our 40th President, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Ken Adelman has served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, an Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and Director of the U.S. Arms Control Agency. It was in that last capacity that he served for President Ronald Reagan during the 1986 Reykjavik Summit between Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev. Tonight, we'll talk to Ambassador Adelman about his acclaimed book, Reagan at Reykjavik, 48 Hours that Ended the Cold War, which deals with that pivotal meeting. It was meant simply to lay the groundwork for a future meeting between the superpowers, but the face-to-face encounter turned into something far more significant and proved to be a turning point in the Cold War. With Reagan and Gorbachev at the height of their power, they had a rare opportunity to move toward peace and disarmament, leading to positive outcomes neither anticipated. As a participant in Reykjavik and as an historian, Ken wove the story using now declassified notes of Reagan's secret bargaining with Gorbachev. His book will soon be adapted for the screen, and Ken is executive producer of the film called Reykjavik, which will star Michael Douglas as Ronald Reagan and Christopher Waltz as Mikhail Gorbachev. Tonight, we're also glad to welcome our friend UT professor Bill Brands, author of Reagan The Life. Bill holds the Jack S. Planton senior chair in history at the University of Texas here on our campus and has written prolifically on American history and politics. His subjects have included, among others, American icons like Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and now Ronald Reagan. His book, published earlier this year, tells the story of how Reagan came to power and ultimately transformed American politics. Bill takes us on a complete journey through Reagan's life, from his childhood in Illinois as the son of an alcoholic salesman, to his acting career, on to his political ambitions, and finally, to two terms in the White House. Bill's Reagan is a pragmatic leader, underestimated politician, and a man of steadfast principles who engineered the modern conservative movement. The books of both of these gentlemen, which were being sold before the program, will also be sold after the program and after this evening in the gift shop at the LBJ Presidential Library. Also, it is my duty to remind friends of the LBJ Library that there will be a reception in the great hall after this event. I have the great privilege of moderating tonight's conversation and welcoming my two friends, and I hope you all join me in welcoming both Dr. Bill Brands and Ambassador Ken Edelman. Thank you. You guys beat me to the punch. You're very nice. You came out early. Let me just say, first of all, I'm truly honored to have these gentlemen at the LBJ Library, but I'm further honored that Bill Brands, for the first time since I've known him, is wearing a coat and tie. It's a special occasion, Mark. And as he looks sensational, a round of applause for Bill Brands. Mark, you're just going to have to get me up on stage more often. It's a pleasure. Let me start off with you, Ken, and talk about how you came to work for our 40th President. Well, thank you for doing this and thank you for being here. I read Bill's book and I loved it. I thought it was just a great book. It's the best one-volume book I've ever seen to include everything about Ronald Reagan. And so I think really everybody in the audience should read Bill Brands' book. I concur. I think everybody should buy my book, Barbara. It's great for Halloween. Imagine Trick or Treat coming up. Instead of doing a snicker bar, you give them Reagan a record. But Bill's book, you can bar it from the library. You can get it from a friend. I mean, there are places to get it. Bill's book is too heavy for Trick or Treat. It would break the back, I think. Mine is just perfect. And for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Should I go on? Yeah, please. Tell you the occasions you could have. The Bill your book is wonderful, so well done. I came to work for Ronald Reagan, like most things in life, by chance. I had been a deputy for Gene Kropatrick, an ambassador to the United Nations, for Gene. And Gene, for some reason, really didn't like attending national security council meetings on arms or arms control. So she asked me to always go down for that. And it must have been something that I said, or probably that I didn't say much at all, that when Ronald Reagan wanted to change in the arms control director in 1982, the beginning of 83, he came up with me. And it was very, very surprising. I mean, I was at a breakfast with James Chase, a great historian that you know, a good friend. In January of 83. And it was very leisurely, because the General Assembly wasn't meeting then, the Security Council wasn't meeting then. And I came back to the office at about 10 o'clock in the morning at the UN. And I had four phone messages from the National Security Advisor, Bill Clark. No, he didn't call me every day, let me say, and leave four messages. So I called him right away. And he said, Ken, I want to talk to you about arms control. And I said, you know, I had been offered the deputy director up there before. And I was very happy at the UN. He said, No, I'm not talking about deputy director. I'm talking about the main director on that. And I said, Well, I don't know about that. I'm happy here. And kids are going to school and everything. And he said, Ken, the question is not whether you want to take the job or not. The question is, will you take the job? The President wants you. And I said, Well, in that case, the answer is yes. He says, Good, it's going to be announced in one hour time. So it was announced in one hour. My wife, I think, heard about it on the radio. Jean Kropacic heard about it and she was mighty ticked off about that. But there I was. And so after a long confirmation process, I was in the office. Yeah. Bill, talk about why you decided after covering folks like Franklin and Jackson and FDR, you decided to take on Ronald Reagan. I had been writing a history of the United States in the form of a series of linked biographies. And I conceived this about now, almost 20 years ago, I guess. And I had written about Benjamin Franklin. I'd written about Andrew Jackson. I'd written about, actually, Ulysses Grant was the last one of the first five to be written. And then Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. So I had a gap to fill at the end. I conceived this as six volumes. So I had five written and I needed somebody who could carry the story forward from 1945 to as close to the president as I could get, close to the president. And I had not originally thought that the subject of these biographies would be mostly presidents. It turned out that they were. And the reason that they were is that because I thought of this as American history through biography, a president is a very convenient biographical subject to hang the history of his time on. If I'd written about a writer, about an industrialist, about an artist, I would have had a lot of explaining to do to cover the big issues of war and peace. But if it's a president, the president's right in the middle of this stuff. So basically it was going to be a president after 1945. Because Franklin Roosevelt dies in 1945. So I had made this decision that I needed somebody who was, first of all, an adult at the time of the death of my previous subject. In part because I don't do childhoods very well. And I just wanted to sort of plop them down on the adult stage. So the presidents that presented themselves were, Linda Johnson was one, Richard Nixon was another, and Ronald Reagan was the third. And I ruled out Johnson in part because Robert Caro has pretty well claimed that ground for the foreseeable future. And I can imagine- How about Mark? I thought Mark did a sensational job. Yeah, but I could imagine, you know, writing 650 pages on Linda Johnson and have Robert Caro drop down 1100 pages of volume five or something like that. But the other reason, actually there was a bigger reason. And that is that for each of my subjects I tried to pin them to some critical development in American history. So Franklin Roosevelt is the president who is the father of the modern welfare state. And if you want a president who summarizes the first half of the 20th century, he's your guy. So for a president who summarizes the second half of the 20th century, Linda Johnson was important. But Linda Johnson took things in the same direction they were already going under Franklin Roosevelt. It's with Ronald Reagan that things take the turn. So that's why I chose Reagan. Mm-hmm. You begin your book with what is known in Reaganland as the speech. Any historian who knows Ronald Reagan knows the speech, talk about its speech, the speech as the prelude to Ronald Reagan's spectacular political rise. Well, this speech, a speech that Ronald Reagan gave on behalf of Barry Goldwater, a week from the election of 1964, and it was really clear that Goldwater was going to lose very badly to Lyndon Johnson. And the Goldwater people were looking for something, not really to revive the chances of their candidate, but to cover some of the expenses of the campaign. They were deeply in debt. And so they'd heard that this guy in Southern California had been giving some speeches around and was generating some buzz. So they allowed Reagan's California friends to put up the money to record this 30-minute speech that was then aired in various television markets around the country. Nobody expected very much of it. It was advertised, for example, in the New York Times on page 47 or something like that. It was really stuffed at the back. And he gave this speech, and I show this speech to my students. And it's interesting because in these days of YouTube, you can see nearly all of Reagan's speeches. But this one is peculiar because it's a speech that is not only on behalf of Barry Goldwater, but it's not a real speech. It's not a real honest campaign rally. They've trotted all these people and sat them down in an auditorium much like this. And every third paid them a dollar or two. Yes. And every third person, every third person had a Goldwater sign. And apparently, the instructions were when Mr. Reagan mentions the name Barry Goldwater, raise your Goldwater sign, you know, jump up and down. But Reagan is deep into the speech. And he still hasn't mentioned Goldwater. And the camera pans out. And the audience are like kind of sitting on their hands wondering what they're supposed to do. And it gradually dawned on them that this speech was not really about Goldwater. This speech was, this speech was introducing Ronald Reagan as the spokesman for modern American conservatism. It did nothing for the fortunes of Barry Goldwater, but it did everything to give Ronald Reagan a new career. Until this speech, almost nobody outside of California thought of Ronald Reagan and politics in the same breath, in the same thought. And after this speech, there were Reagan for president committees that were being formed in various states around the country. It's remarkable what what one speech can do for a political guy could really give a speech. Ken, your book revolves around the 48 hours that you spent in Reykjavik, Iceland. You pronounced it beautifully. Thank you. Thank you. I was working on that. This was meant to be a minor little meeting that was to lead to a much bigger meeting between the superpowers. And it ended up being momentous. Talk about what led to the meeting in of all places, Reykjavik. Well, Gorbachev led to the meeting actually. What happened was we were doing our arms control and they were like most things in government, especially arms control, just plotting along painfully. And in the summer, July of 1986, Gorbachev writes a letter to Reagan, you know, this stuff is getting nowhere. And it was getting almost nowhere. And why don't we have a meeting with the two of us. And it can be halfway between us. That's what was the idea. And halfway between Moscow and Washington is either either London or Reykjavik. And Reagan thought about it. And he said, Well, in London, I have to meet with the Queen. I have to meet with Maggie Thatcher. I have to go to the parliament. You know, there are all kinds of stuff. In Reykjavik, there's nothing. There's absolutely nothing. And then after that, there's really nothing. And, you know, it's it's there are no trees. There's no, but he, you know, the government is six people or something like that. And the day before, as you saw from that photo, in the book, they have the Prime Minister of Iceland, giving an interview with Tom Brokaw in his speedo in his little tidy whitey for. And the reason that came up is that someone called his office said, you know, we'd like an interview with the Prime Minister. When can the Prime Minister do it? And the Prime Minister says, any time, basically, it's fine. I'm not that busy. And they said, Well, Tom Brokaw can do it at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. And he said, fine. But that was the time that the Prime Minister always took his morning baths in the bubbling water at Reykjavik. So the camera crew went there and he gave the whole interview in his little bikini, you know, with his flab hanging down and, you know, and just looking like a mess. But anyway, so was a surprise. And it was a come as you are summit. And mark, that is what made Reykjavik so special. What made it special was not just the outcome, and not just the discussion. But what really made it special was these two men were raw. They were personal. They were themselves. President of the United States now is so scripted. A general secretary of the Soviet Union is so scripted. They just go through life, you know, reading these points and doing what they're told and saying what's in the memo. Here they had no points. We had no memo. We had nothing. Why was that? Because this was supposed to be a meeting to prepare for real summit. And so it was just come as you are. It was a situation that's unbelievable. The two of them spent 10 and a half hours talking to each other with almost no one else speaking. The foreign minister or secretary of state were there, but they didn't say anything. Basically, they made a few little interventions, but nothing much. Now, I don't know about you guys, but if you spoke the, you know, if I spoke to my wife for 10 and a half hours over two days, she's gone crazy. I mean, you know, it kicked me out of the house. But they were 10 and a half hours together without script, as I say. And so I think the conclusion is that when you see what they did, this was Reagan was more like himself than at any time in his presidency. Borbachev was more like himself than at any time in office. These are the real people. And you hit on a word that's operative. Raw. You just mentioned the Icelandic Prime Minister who was raw. The landscape, the landscape is raw in Iceland. The two leaders themselves were were raw in a way. Let's go back to the middle one. Iceland, this unlikely place for a summit. And I would urge you, I not only urge you to read Bill's book, but but Ken's as well. And you'll see that Iceland. I thought you're going to urge him to buy my book. Buy both books, buy both of them and read them. But Iceland is almost a character in this book. Oh, it's fabulous. Talk a little bit about Iceland itself and Icelanders, the Icelandic people and how they played a role in this. You have a house there. That's the Hockney House, one of the few wooden houses in the whole city. The city is 125,000 people. The country is 250,000 people. Alright, that's it. The house itself is a beautiful wooden house that is thought to be haunted. The British ambassador lived there. He heard ghosts. The pictures fell down in the middle of the night. He saw ghosts. All kinds of things happened with ghosts. And so the British government sold the place. All right. And it was a creaky old house that, you know, the whole episode reminds you of an Agatha Christie film or a book actually. There for one weekend are two characters, both of which are big personalities meeting in a house that's thought to be haunted with rain slashing at the windowsill undergoing unbelievable things during that time and unexpected things. So in this house, it is just a fantastic kind of environment. It's a very small place. The upstairs we had the upper right, we had the Soviet parlor, which was basically a bedroom. Upper left was the American bedroom, basically with four chairs there. There was between them the hallway that we referred to as the DMZ, the demotorized zone that was like north between North and South Korea and Germany at that time. And then the meeting room, which was a very small little place on the first floor, then the basement. The basement was one of the great sights I've ever seen in my life. The basement was kind of below ceiling crammed in. One half of the basement was the KGB with equipment up to the ceiling. One half of the basement was the CIA and White House correspondence, White House Communications Office. And they were there with all their equipment that you spend millions of dollars taking pictures of this stuff if you could get a spy to ever get it. And there they were crammed in together. The basement only had one major bathroom, which was a big problem. They had two bathrooms, but one bigger and one very small. It's a big problem because these guys down in the basement lived on coffee for basically 48 hours or 50 hours. And by the time they set up three days. And there was an argument before on who got the nicer bed. And so the caretaker, basically the janitor, was kind of not accustomed to negotiating between the nuclear superpowers. Something as delicate as the rights to the loo or anything. So they finally, the head of the KGB very graciously said, you know, we'll just see what happens and just leave it. And we don't have to designate that. So what I like to think about is that while intelligence agencies around the world operate on a need to know basis. On that weekend, the two main, the only really important, the two main intelligence agencies around the world operated on a need to go basis. It was a great, but you're actually right. One of the great characters of the weekend was the Hopkins House and recommend. That is the exalted world of foreign diplomacy. High-minded. Bill, you write in your book of what happened two months and 10 days into Reagan's presidency, the assassination attempt on his life by John Hinckley Jr. And how that changed Reagan and his presidency. Talk a little bit about that. Well, Reagan was nearly killed. He didn't realize it at first. He heard the gunshots. He didn't think he'd been hit. He was thrown into the back of his limousine. And he felt a sharp pain in his rib. He thought he had broken a rib when he'd been pushed down on the floor of the limousine. But he began coughing up blood and he realized he'd been hit. He insisted on walking into the hospital and he managed to just get inside the door when he collapsed. And it was at that point that people realized that his life was in jeopardy. He was operated on. The surgeons had a hard time finding the slug, which kept moving around as they were probing for it. There was a moment when they thought they might actually have to leave it inside him. But the chief surgeon decided, you know, it's probably not such a good idea coming out of that operating room saying, yeah, well, the bullet is still inside the leader of the free world. So they were able to find it. They got it out. Reagan survived his health returned. The largest effect on Reagan seemed to be that he, well, as one would in circumstances like this, he was reminded of the fleetingness of life and that he could die any day. It could be a bullet. He could drop dead of a heart attack the next day. And he said in his diary that he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to the really important issues. Now, Reagan was one who always did focus on the big stuff. He was not a detailed guy. And he always focused on the big issues of his administration. But this caused him to refocus on that big stuff, to pay less attention to the political things that can absorb a lot of a president's time. The larger impact probably was on Nancy Reagan. And in fact, Nancy was understandably quite distraught at this. And she understood that her husband had been surrounded by the best security people in the world who had not prevented him from nearly being killed. And she also understood that he was going to have to go back out there. And there might very well be another John Hinckley. And in her distress, she found that she couldn't eat, she couldn't drink, she couldn't sleep, she lost weight, she was a slim woman to begin with. She appeared gaunt and a lot of people wondered if maybe she had some illness that was going to carry her off. And in her distress, she turned to whoever she could. Merv Griffin, one of her old friends from Hollywood, suggested that she get in touch with a woman, Joan Quigley was her name, who was, well, who built herself as the astrologer to the stars. In some ways, she was as much a counselor and a listening ear as she was an astrologer. Well, Nancy started talking to the astrologer. And she, well, she took some comfort in this because the astrologer would say that certain days are inauspicious for the president, for example, to travel. And so he should be better off staying close to home. Now, Nancy, from then on, would do what she could to run the president's projected schedule by the astrologer and to put what influence she could into making sure that the president was as protected as he could be. Now, as far as I can tell, Ronald Reagan himself put no stock in the astrology. But he did put stock in Nancy's well-being. And this is one, to me, one of the most striking things about that I discovered in doing the book is the nature of the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Nancy Ronnie, as she always called it. And that was, well, it was in some respects one of the great love stories of American public life. They were utterly devoted to each other. When Nancy was gone, Reagan would write in his diary. It is 36 hours till mommy, as he always called her, gets back. I hated when she's gone. It was clear that he was sometimes having a hard time concentrating on the affairs of state, you know, waiting for Nancy to get back. And so this is very touching. And the fact that Reagan would court the embarrassment that would occur if word ever got out, that Reagan's schedule was being influenced by this astrologer, you know, the fact that he was willing to take that risk, I think speaks very well for his concern for Nancy. But there does come a moment when you say, wait, this is the president of the United States. And he's allowing his schedule to be shaped by an astrologer. In fact, the story did come out. After Nancy engineered the firing of Don Regan, the second chief of staff who knew all about this and gnashed his teeth every time he thought about this. And it was embarrassing. But the love that Reagan had for Nancy and vice versa was really clear even through the embarrassment. And this was one of those other, this wasn't even, this didn't even rise the level of scandal, but an embarrassment that Reagan was able to shrug off. Right. Ken, Nancy Reagan was not at Reykjavik, right? He's a Gorbachev was, we talked about that in a moment. But she had a profound effect on Reagan and his relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev. Talk about how she catalyzed that relationship. Well, I think that I think Bill is very good at capturing what happened. I myself didn't see that the astrologers made any difference to tell you the truth. And it was great gossip and it was kind of weird and wacko, if you ask me. But anyway, you know, wacko and weird things have happened in White House. This is, as you know, and others know. So it was but not very harmful. But I think that Nancy Reagan wanted the President Reagan, you know, to be the peace kind of candidate and everything like that. I think that he had this great love for her. I don't think he paid much attention to her policies. And that was fine because her policies were a little light, if I may say so. But she was very great at one, one thing that he really needed. And that was evaluating people more accurately than he was. He got, you know, very reluctant to let anybody go. He was attached to people in a certain sense. And she would have to engineer to get rid of people that he should have gotten rid of. And so it's just a funny characteristic. I know it's it's true of Reagan. It's probably true of Johnson. I think it was true of Nixon. These guys who are very tough in there, they seem to have a great inability to fire anybody, no matter how incompetent they are, just to call them men, say, you know, it's over. Goodbye. Right. And Ronald Reagan found it impossible to do. Nancy did not find it impossible to do. She was a bad guy. He he hated doing it. She kind of enjoyed doing it. She was she had lots of she had lots of opportunities in the Reagan administration to do that. Bill, you quote Nancy Reagan in your book who wrote in her memoir all wrote of her husband in her memoir, although he loves people, he often seems remote and he doesn't let anyone get too close. There's a wall around him. He lets me closer than anyone else. But there are times when even I feel a barrier that remoteness in some ways defines Reagan despite his ostensible gregariousness. So why couldn't Nancy Reagan tear down that wall? Good phrase there, Mark. Thank you. That will catch. Thank you for your pity laugh. They were being generous, giving you a pitiful laugh. You didn't enjoy it. You didn't really merit such a laugh. Merit at all. But there is a barrier and it's amazing as close as they were. Even Nancy Reagan couldn't get that close to her husband. So what is behind that barrier? When I was doing a book tour for an earlier book about Ulysses Grant, I was speaking to a radio host. It was a radio interview. And toward the end of the interview, he asked a question that comes up at the end of these interviews. He said, so what are you working on? What's your next project? I said I was working on Ronald Reagan and he put his hand over the microphone and he said, when we get off the air there's something I want to tell you. So I was intrigued. You know, this was Reagan was recent enough that I thought maybe this is in the Midwest. I think I've been in Chicago and I thought, well maybe Reagan dated his grandmother or something like that and there's some letters. Well we get off the air. Great grandmother. Could be. Great grandmother. So the radio host says, if you want to understand Ronald Reagan there's one thing you need to keep foremost in mind. Ronald Reagan was the son of an alcoholic father and I didn't know exactly how to respond to this because I couldn't tell whether the guy who was telling me this thought that this was news to me. Now it wasn't news to me. It wasn't news to anybody who had written, who had read either of Reagan's two memoirs where he talks about the fact that his father was an alcoholic. So I did what the Abel interviewer does in a case like this. I just sat there waiting to see if he was going to say any more and he did. And he went on to say, I speak as the son of an alcoholic father. And he says, when you grow up in a situation like that, you develop a characteristic emotional reserve because one day your father is your best friend and you're tossing the baseball around and he's telling you funny stories and he takes you out for ice cream. You think he's the greatest guy in the world. And the next day, this is what the radio host said. And the next day he's beating the living daylights out of you. And when you wake up on any given morning you don't know which father you're going to be dealing with. And this one person in your life, the one that you want to rely on most, your emotional model, the one that is going to show you how to develop emotional trust relationships with other people, is one on whom you cannot rely. So I took this in as well, descriptive of this man's background. And I thought, okay, well, I'm going to keep my eye out for this as I'm going back over the Reagan stuff. And there's a moment in Reagan's own memoir where he has been talking about his father's, well, the way he puts in his memoir is his mother explained to Reagan and his brother that their father had this illness, a weakness for alcohol. And they should sympathize with their father rather than be angry and bitter at their father. And for the most part Reagan is able to maintain this attitude. But there's a moment in the memoir where Reagan perhaps reveals more than he intended. He's talking about coming home from school one day. It's in Illinois. It's in the middle of winter. It's getting dark. There's snow on the ground. The temperature is well below zero. And he turns into the walkway of the house and he encounters his father face down in the snow. And the young boy is, and this is Reagan telling the story in his memoir. This is 60 years later. He remembers it and he's saying, I thought for a moment, what should I do? Should I wake up my dad and bring him inside, warm him up? Or should I just walk on by leave him there in the snow? Now the implication of leaving him in the snow is he might freeze to death. And the fact that this 10 or 11 year old kid could have this thought that, you know, my life might be better if my father were not in it is a very heavy thing, I think, to weigh on a kid. And I think it was largely because this that Reagan was very reluctant to go to that sort of emotional place to make himself emotionally vulnerable to people. He was quite happy with people at the distance of an audience like this, especially beyond a camera. He seemed like the friendliest guy in the world. He seemed like the kind of person you'd want to have a beer with. You want to slap on the shoulder and say, hey, you know, let's go do something. But the closer you got, the more you realize, as Nancy said in that piece you quoted, the more you realize that there was this reserve. And Nancy got beyond that reserve more often than anyone else. But even she acknowledged that sometimes she didn't know what was going through his head and she would just have to wait till the curtain would rise. And yet, Ken, he was a very appealing character. He's a great storyteller. He drew people close. And that was certainly true with Mikhail Gorbachev, despite the anti-Soviet rhetoric, the evil empire rhetoric that Reagan would throw out. There was a genuine closeness between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Nancy Reagan called it plain and simply chemistry. There was a great chemistry. What was behind that? I think that they realized that each other had some outstanding traits. And I think that what is amazing about reading, we don't have the transcripts of Reykjavik because there are no transcripts. So we have notetakers. We have the Soviet notetaker and we have the American notetaker. And they're surprisingly similar. The Soviet notetaker leaves out some comments that Gorbachev makes that are pretty mean about Reagan. Those are conveniently left out because he wanted a future as a notetaker in life. But what's amazing is that even though they had what you call this chemistry, and I think that's deserved, the fact is that Reagan was very frank. I mean, he told Gorbachev that the system was bankrupt, that it was cruel, that it should end up on the ash heap of history. And at one point, and I'm sure that Gorbachev was shocked out of his mind because the President of the United States never, never talked that way. I mean, Richard Nixon and Kissinger met with Mao at the height of the Cultural Revolution, never mentioned the insanity that was going on. They had all these conversations as did Jimmy Carter with Brezhnev, never mentioned anything domestically. But the fact is that Reagan went, and one time he said to Gorbachev, he was making some point, he said, a lot of people are opposed to me and they have all these, you know, op-eds and radio shows and everything. And when that happens to you, you throw them in jail. And then he goes on talking like that. And he, Gorbachev throughout the weekend, when Reagan is assaulting their system and saying how cruel it is and how inhuman. And it has to end because of, that it really doesn't recognize the wonderful traits of human nature that can only flourish under freedom, can only flourish with liberty and choice that people have. You know, the idea that these are self-evident, you know, that we are born with life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And we're given by our creator, these things. Those arguments Gorbachev is the weakest at. So after 10 and a half hours, I'm concluding that Gorbachev got the idea there are no good arguments against him on this. And his arguments on Gorbachev on the system, the big stuff that is so important, I think we're fantastic arguments. And aside from the arms control arguments, aside from the SDI Strategic Defense Initiative that Reagan loved and Gorbachev hated, that was almost mythical at that point. But aside from that, the discussions that geo strategic geopolitical discussions were to me some of the most fantastic because I think Reagan was extremely courageous. And that was a thing that I think Bill did a wonderful job in his book, everything about his book is wonderful. But really, Reagan's courage. I mean, he just wanted to make a difference. Maybe it was because of the shooting, maybe because he had spent his life, adult life, at least in 76 or since the speech in 66 or 64, you know, thinking about public policy. But he just thought every day was precious and we should go as far as we possibly can to make a difference here. So he really wanted to be a consequential president. He did not want to be, you know, there's a big in leadership, there's the big transactional leader and transformational leader. And he was did not wasn't interested in being a transactional leader. He was interested in big stuff. He didn't even like the kind of day to day thing of government. I remember I came in with Bill Clark one time. Bill Clark was the National Security Advisor and walked into the Oval Office and Bill Clark and Reagan's there looking out over the South Lawn. And on the South Lawn are a bunch of forest ranger guys who are doing the shrubbery and the trees and everything like that. And Bill Clark says, Mr. President, Ken Edelman is here. We're going to go to the Situation Room, talk about the arms control negotiations. Reagan's looking out the window and looking out the window and all that. And he says, Mr. President, you know, like he didn't, and he repeats it and Reagan says, Bill, I hear you. I hear you. I wish I was out there doing what those fellows are doing. Instead of going all these stupid meetings I have to go to all the time. Now I've known some forest ranger guys who were thinking about being President of the United States or dreaming. I've never known a President of the United States dreaming of being a forest ranger guy and being out there on the lawn on that. At times his schedule was like somebody an actor in a movie, basically. There's times where you're real busy because they're shooting. Most of the time you're not very busy because, you know, not much is happening. And there's a story that someone went to Reagan and said, Mr. President, your schedule is so funny now because you come in the office at 9.30, you fed the squirrels and stuff like that. And then he took a lunch and knocked off at four o'clock and did his weights and then had dinner with Nancy who got on his TV trays. And Reagan says, yeah, yeah. And apparently this guy said to him, Mr. President, you know, hard work never killed anybody. Reagan looked at him and he says, I know, but why take a chance? He was a genuinely, that's another thing, Bill's book is good. He was a genuinely very funny person. Yeah. Yeah. Which led to his appeal. It's part of his appeal. It was part of his appeal. It was not because of his cards or anything like that. He was just funny, you know, and spontaneously. So it was really fun to, you know, it was fun to work with him because there was always kind of something sparkling there. It was not just a meeting, but, you know, there was a joke or there was a comment that was just funny. Yeah. Bill, there are certain things we hear in American history that we take as an article of faith. Columbus discovered America. George Washington never told a lie. And one of the things that we hear more and more often and Ken alludes to it in his in the subtitle of his book is Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. So Ronald Reagan won the Cold War true or false? You're speaking to a historian here. There's no such thing as I don't get true or false. Yes, Mark. I will put it this way. So you won't pin me down to a true or false. I will say this, that the United States won the Cold War. That's more or less undebatable at this point. It involved the actions of lots of people. If there was one presidency that was most consequential in pushing the United States to victory in the Cold War, it was probably Ronald Reagan's, although advocates of the Elder George Bush, I know they get annoyed at this all the time because what I think we were doing between 1989 and 1991, the end of the Cold War didn't just happen. The other thing is that no honest president, I think no honest world leader would claim that I did it all myself and Reagan himself would not have. I would say that Reagan was a necessary condition to the American victory in the Cold War. He wasn't a sufficient condition. It almost certainly required Mikhail Gorbachev or somebody like him. Reagan had been reaching out to Soviet leaders since lead in Brezhnev. Reagan came into office with his reputation as the guy who was going to build up the American nuclear arsenal. And there was this general notion around that sometime toward the end of his first term, the beginning of his second term, he had this sudden change of heart and that he became this pursuer of peace. In fact, it was all part of one strategy. For Reagan, the whole idea of building up the American arsenal was not to use those weapons, but to use those weapons to bring the Soviets to the negotiating table so that they would realize that they could not win the arms race simply because the United States would sit on the sidelines. So Reagan believed that he was getting the attention of Soviet leadership. Lead in Brezhnev died on him. Brezhnev's two short term successors died on him as Reagan said. I was trying to talk to him, but they kept dying on me. And that along comes Mikhail Gorbachev, who clearly has reform in mind. Now, not the kind of reform that eventually turned out, but he understood that there was something broken in the Soviet system. And finally, Reagan had somebody to talk to. Now, it's entirely possible that if Lenin Brezhnev, for example, had lived another six years, then Reagan would not have had that positive effect in pushing the world to the brink the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Communism to the brink of dissolution that he would have been talking up against a stone wall. So he required somebody listening on the other side, but it wouldn't have happened without Reagan or somebody doing pretty much what Reagan did. I agree with Bill on this, but I love when Bill told about Brezhnev dying and then Chair Nienco. I mean, and drop off dying and then Chair Nienco. We were very good friends at that time with the Italian ambassador and he told me when Chair Nienco died, he was going back to Moscow for the state funeral. And I said, why would you do that? And he said, don't you understand, Ken? I bought tickets to the entire series. You're thinking of it like Italian opera or something, you know, that he had already paid for it. So why didn't he do that? But Ken, was the collapse of the Soviet Union an inevitability? I agree with Bill. I think he said it very nicely. Reagan did things that were unusual for a president to do. He did four things that I don't believe any other president. I know now where the president has done, but no other president could do. And they were all Ronald Reagan. They weren't staff driven at all. Number one was SDI, this idea of protecting the country from incoming ballistic missiles that had been discounted in previous administrations and really was an idea that Reagan thought was an enormous, big idea. Number two, he wanted real reductions of nuclear weapons, not topping or capping the increase of nuclear weapons. It's salt one and salt two did that, you know, you keep going up and we'll cap the amount you go up. But Reagan said, that's not good. He wanted to change salt, strategic arms limitation treaty to start strategic reductions on that and arms reduction talks. And so he wanted real reductions. As Bill says, he wanted an expansion of the military for a, protection of the country. B, could negotiating leverage. But C, also that it could bankrupt them basically and that's what he believed. So it was the SDI, the real reductions of nuclear weapons, the real buildup and fourthly, and I think probably the most important was a constant barrage to de-legitimize the Soviet Union. This started in the first press conference he gave. He's asked about Detente. He said, Detente is a one way street. They'll do anything, lie, cheat, steal to further communism around the world. The next year when everybody says, oh my God, no president says something like that. That's so un-diplomatic, you're gonna tick off the Kremlin like mad. Next year, what does he do? He gives a speech in parliament and he says, communism is gonna end up on the ash heap of history. It's final chapters even being, now everybody goes crazy again. And the next year, what does he do in 83? He goes and gives a speech to a bunch of evangelists in Florida and says, this is the evil empire. The focus of evil in the modern world. I mean, he just kept it every single year, had something, and it was relentless to de-legitimize the Soviet Union. Now, everybody from, you know, Kennedy on had said, well, there are two superpowers. We have to be careful, we could blow up the world. You had to treat them as a superpower. And therefore, when any big issue came up in the world, you had to, you know, talk to Moscow and involve them. And the fact is that wasn't Reagan's view at all. Reagan's view was, we are legitimate, why? Because of we the people. First words of the constitution, we the people. We're elected, our people have choice. They are illegitimate, why? Because the people live for the state instead of the state living for the people because the state oppresses the people. They are illegitimate and they should be just ended. So that's a very different mindset that gives you the mindset of the succession of de-legitimization. And as Bill was saying before he came here tonight, that was very empowering to the people of Eastern Europe in Poland and they were the real, among the real heroes of the end of the Cold War. But they got this idea, this guy understands us. This guy goes and he realizes this system is illegitimate. And it's wonderful, I'll tell you one quick story, I'm sorry. Please, no, please. 1987 for some odd reason. We were in Moscow and it wasn't an odd reason, we were going back and forth trying to finish before the summit came in December. And Schultz and I and the whole group were in Moscow and it happened to be Seder, the Passover. And the ambassador at the time was having a little Seder in the embassy for Jewish mostly dissidents, to tell you the truth. Anyway, Schultz and I went around and we greeted people and one fellow there was kind of shaking and sweating and we said hello to him and I said, what's wrong? And he said, I'm on a hunger strike. My wife got fired, we applied to leave for Israel. My kids got kicked out of their school. I'm on a hunger strike and I've been for two days to try to get some pressure on the government. And I said, oh God. And he said, I have a little letter for Ronald Reagan, will you give it to him? I said, sure, I'll give it to him. And he said, and will you tell him something? And I said, okay, sure. And he says, you're about the only thing we have going for us in the world. Now he didn't mean George Schultz, he certainly didn't mean Ken Adelman. He probably didn't mean Ronald Reagan. He meant the United States of America. And what Ronald Reagan was doing was betraying and broadcasting and emphasizing, underlining and highlighting American values and that people should be free. And that was, I think his great historic contribution and that led to the end of the Cold War. But this dissident, this guy who is shaking all over and his family a mess because of what the pharaohs are doing to him that will not let his people go at this time says, you're just about all we have going for us. That's what Ronald Reagan brought out and that's beautiful, it's beautiful. Bill, you wrote about Franklin Roosevelt in a trailer to his class and he clearly is one of the great communicators in American history. Ronald Reagan, as you suggest, Ken is another one of the great communicators. I unfortunately bastardized one of his best lines earlier tonight, but when Reagan stood at the Brandenburg gate and said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, I asked Mikhail Gorbachev about his reaction to that line. And he said, and I quote, on this stage about four years ago tonight, and he said, and I quote, we didn't attach a lot of importance to that statement, not at all. We were well aware that the president had another profession as an actor. Do you believe that Gorbachev did not respond in any way to that line that it didn't have any great effect on him and his policy toward the United States? I think by this time Gorbachev had learned to discount much of what Reagan said. But the effect of Reagan's words were much less important on Gorbachev than on the audience behind the Berlin Wall that Reagan was speaking to. You know, Reagan, it was in 1987 that Reagan said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. And when Reagan left office at the beginning of 1989, the wall still stood. But a year later, it had effectively fallen. And the reason it had fallen was that those people in East Germany, those people in Poland, those people in Hungary who heard Reagan's words were bolstered by, what you've described essentially as the moral force of the United States, of what the United States stood for, to take a chance. And so when they came up against the East Berlin guards at the Berlin Wall and had essentially put their lives on the line, they could hear those words of Reagan echoing. And it gave them courage. And many of them afterwards said, yeah, it was very inspiring to hear the leader of the free world say that at that particular place. And the wall did come down, almost against the will of Mikhail Gorbachev. But because of the actions of people who had been inspired by the words of Ronald Reagan. But what Gorbachev told you, Mark, with all due deference, it was palpably untrue. Sure. Okay. Oh, sure. Why don't you say sure? No, no, I agree. I don't disagree. Because he says, no, we paid no attention to it. But the fact is in October of 89, he is in Germany for that celebration, celebration, the saddest celebration in the world of East German, the birth of East Germany with Hanukkah. He gives a speech there. And the first half of the speech, Gorbachev's speech, is about what this fellow, he doesn't even name him, said on the other side of that wall about tearing down the wall and how freedom is on the, it should not be ever on the run, but it should always be on the march. So I'm not saying that it was festering for all this time, but Gorbachev wouldn't want to leave it go. So he gives a speech that is a direct rebuttal to Reagan's speech. So when he tells you, Mark, that, oh no, it had nothing to do and he didn't give it a moment's thought. Well, a year and a half later, he's quoting the speech and saying some fellow said that. Right. There's a universal appeal, Bill, that Ronald Reagan has. Both of the president's Bush emulated him. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have expressed admiration for him. What is at the core of Reagan's appeal? Reagan understood that the power of any president rests in his ability to channel the hopes and dreams of the American people. And those presidents who transform American life are ones who come along when the opportunity exists to do that. Franklin Roosevelt did this during the Great Depression. Americans were desperate for somebody to tell them that there was somebody in charge who cared about them. When Franklin Roosevelt gave his first fireside chat, when he gave his first narglow dress, he didn't end the Depression. But he did end the feeling that a lot of people had that things were out of control and nobody in Washington was looking out for them. Ronald Reagan came along at a time after the 1960s and 1970s when a whole lot of Americans thought that America's best days were behind. That there had been this glory period during the 1940s and 1950s. But then along come the riots of the 60s, the Vietnam War, the turmoil, the stagflation of the 1970s. And it was almost conventional wisdom by the late 70s to think that we're gonna have to get used to a different America, that things are not gonna be as good as they had been before. And along comes Ronald Reagan who said, because he believed implicitly that America remained the shining city on the hill, that America's best days were ahead. If you have a credible candidate who can say that, who can make Americans believe that the country is going to get better, all we have to do is reconnect to these traditional values, that's a very appealing candidate. That was Ronald Reagan. And yet he's very amorphous in a sense that so many people identify with Reagan. I wonder, what would Tea Partiers think of Reagan today? If Reagan were in office, what would the Tea Party, what would their critique of Ronald Reagan be? Well, a lot of people like Ronald Reagan now because he's dead, to tell you the truth, okay? And that's mostly Democrats because he's not a threat anymore. Tea Party because they take slices of what Ronald Reagan really thought and said. But Reagan had, besides his unbelievable courage, he had two other things that I think were really great in leadership. One was a set of beliefs. Now you talked about the speech of 66, 1966, no, 64, sorry about that, of what was it? September, October of 64. One time, it must have been a slow news day, I admit, I watched the speech, that speech, and the last speech he gave before leaving the presidency. His points are the same. They're there, okay. It's remarkable. It's remarkable. The reason they call it the speech is because there was only one, basically. Right, there was one speech. Same one, again and again, that's right. It worked for what, 30 years or something like that. So the core beliefs were there and they were wonderful because we who worked for them knew where he'd come out on an issue. Right. And that's very, very comforting and very important. The second thing he did was unique and I think President Obama could have learned from it. Lots of President could have learned from it. He always said, here's what I want. Very clear. Then they would, Congress would come in and give him 75% of what he wanted. He'd say, good enough to sign this bill. But here, when he's signing it, here's what I want. Let's go back for the other 25%. Some of the time he'd get it. Most of the time he wouldn't get it. Some of the time he'd get 10% of the remaining 25%. He was absolutely clear on what he wanted and absolutely clear that he'd take a lot less because he wanted to get things done. So that is the idea of not even compromising but accepting the political reality to accomplish something. Tea parties, tea partiers don't like that very much. And the idea of the staff hobbling him, but it wasn't staff hobbling him. Let Reagan be Reagan, big quote of that time. But it wasn't, Reagan was Reagan. And what Reagan wanted to do was keep his ideology, keep his views the same and get something done on that. And he was really a master of doing both in a very creative way because like I say, when he wanted, when he got the 75%, he always said, I want more, I want 25% more. There was this great incident soon after he got into office where they were sitting around in the domestic. This was after he was recovered from the shooting and all. They were in the cabinet room and they were asking, can Duberstein or Max Friedersdorf, somebody on congressional relations, what is happening with the tax bill of 82 that needs to get out of committee? And they were saying, well, we just talked to Bob Dole and the horse is out of the stables. Reagan says, the horse is out of the stables? What's that? And he says, well, the committee met and they had to have it from the subcommittee and then it had to go over to the rules committee and the finance committee had to coordinate with this committee and all this stuff. And Reagan says, oh, thank you very much. And he gets up and he leaves and everybody thinks maybe he has to go to the bathroom or something like that. Where is he going? And so they're sitting around wondering what all this is about. And he comes back in, sits down, big grin on his face. He said, the horse is back in the barn. I said, the horse is back in the barn. He says, yeah, I didn't understand what you guys were talking about. So I went into the oval. I called Bob and I got him out of something. And I said, Bob, the fellows here are telling me about that bill in the subcommittee and the rules committee and going about this and going about that. Bob, I'd like the bill on the floor next Tuesday. Can you do that? And then Dole said some stuff. He said, well, I don't know anything about that. But I'd like the bill on the, how about Wednesday? Okay, let's do it for Wednesday. And Dole eventually said, well, I'll do it, thanks. I expect the bill on the floor on Wednesday and thanks, Bob, I really appreciate it. Came back and said that was that and he was happy as can be. Now, there are not many presidents who would do that. Just go and just say, let's get it done and we need to get this done and tell the guy, leave all that mechanics that I don't understand to somebody else but you just get it on the floor. Bill, this is a very paradoxical man. I mentioned he's the archetypical conservative but at the same time he raised taxes, he increased the size of federal government and he was a pragmatic politician. He compromised. So what is the biggest misconception that we have about Ronald Reagan? Well, speaking of Republicans, they can love Ronald Reagan because if all you do is look at the words Ronald Reagan spoke, if you read the speech, any version of the speech, it is something that warms the heart of the most ardent Tea Party activists today. Ronald Reagan is 100% conservative right down the line but as Ken remarked, in actually governing, Ronald Reagan understood there's a difference between making speeches and making progress towards the goal of the speeches they're holding at and he used 75% as a word. When I was talking to James Baker in an interview, he said, if Ronald Reagan told me once, he told me 15,000 times, I would rather get 80% of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying. This was Reagan and that's the part of the Reagan legacy that would give Tea Party types real problems because there is certain mindset that says we don't compromise at all and that's clear in a certain wing of the Republican Party now. But that wasn't Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan understood that you don't get everything you want in this democracy in which we live. People on the other side have a right to their opinions and if they get votes, they have to be heard. We will put out our program, we'll get as much of our program as we can, we'll accept that, it was a good day if we get 75%, we get 80%, we always come back and try again. But one of the things about Reagan is that Reagan was this happy conservative. And this is very unusual in modern American life because, well I mean I will say this. I mean for example, the speech that Ronald Reagan gave not only on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964 was a speech that Goldwater himself could have given if all you looked at was the talking points, the philosophy behind it. But Goldwater scared people. Goldwater sort of reveled in being called an extremist and Goldwater put people off. Reagan's philosophy wasn't really any different than Goldwater's but his emotional style was entirely different. Reagan seemed to like people. Reagan believed that the country was gonna get better. You know the default setting of a lot of conservatives, first of all pessimism or the reasons they're conservatives is that they think change is usually for the worse. Reagan didn't believe that. He was a conservative but he believed that change could be for the better. And also he was this happy guy. You know he was in some ways the philosophy of Barry Goldwater married to the temperament of Hubert Humphrey, you know a happy warrior type. And he is rare almost to unique among modern American conservatives in that regard. Yeah. We're gonna take questions in one moment if you can start lining up at the microphones but I'll ask you both. What is the legacy of Ronald Reagan, Ken? I think it is a president can accomplish a lot if he really sets his mind to it, has certain principles that everybody in the administration can understand very clearly and has real courage to go after him. I don't think our system is broken. I think you know we don't have leaders who really had the vision of Ronald Reagan. It was when Reagan came on with Carter the malaise it was hopeless that the U.S. government couldn't work. You had people writing articles for foreign affairs and all saying we should have a British parliamentary system because ours never worked again. And by the time he left eight years later they said the presidency is too strong, is too powerful. Yeah and because he got so much done. So I think that is the big lesson of Ronald Reagan. Bill where does Reagan belong in the presidential pantheon? I would argue that Reagan is one of the two most consequential presidents of the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt pushes that pendulum that swings between the public sector and the private sector between liberalism and conservatism. He gave it a push to the left at the time and most Americans agreed that it needed a push to the left. And their agreement was signified by the 61% of the vote they gave Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. By the time Reagan came along Americans had changed their mind. The things had gone too far in the direction of liberalism too far in the direction of the public sector at the expense of the private sector. Reagan gave that pendulum a push back in the other direction. And the affirmation of Reagan's view appeared in his reelection in 1984 where he got 59% of the vote. So a president who can tap into the spirit of the time is one who can really change America. Franklin Roosevelt did it in the first half of the 20th century. Ronald Reagan did it in the second half. Let's take some questions and we'll start on the right side. The gentleman at the microphone. Thank you very much. Congratulations, I came in here not wanting to like anything about Ronald Reagan. And both of you have helped change that. Can you talk, especially Professor Brands about the parts of Ronald Reagan that have come out to me? He was the president at the start of the massive income of inequality that we see now. And he also helped with retrenchment on the civil rights push. And can you talk about either of those topics or others? The consequences of Reagan's, what shall we say, encouragement of a conservative turn in American policy in American life were things that, well first of all, Reagan could not entirely foresee. I'm not sure that Reagan should be held responsible for things that happened 35 years after he was elected. Maybe one could argue that's an implicit in that and maybe so. But Reagan believed that there needs to be a balance between conservatism and liberalism. Reagan was not a doctrinaire conservative. He wasn't someone who believed that government was always the problem. In fact, in that famous line in his first inaugural address where he says the government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem itself. He begins that with an introductory clause that says at the present moment. And so as one of the Reagan staffers told me, we were conservatives, we weren't anarchists. So Reagan believed that government had a role. He believed that the role should be smaller than it was. Would Reagan have tolerated the income inequality that exists today? That's an impossible question for me to answer because it is something that goes far beyond the Reagan years. In terms of pushing back against civil rights, Reagan, I think, gets some reasonable criticism on that grounds, but I think he gets a lot of unfair criticism. And Reagan himself was, as far as I can tell, Reagan did not have a bigoted bone in his body. He originally questioned the Civil Rights Act of 1964, believing that this was something that was better left to the states rather than the federal government. But Reagan was also somebody who understood that once something enters people's expectations of government, it's often better left alone. In fact, against Reagan's original views of social security, Reagan, like a lot of American conservatives, did not agree with the fundamental principle of social security, that Americans need government to look out for them. But in fact, Ronald Reagan became the second best friend social security ever had after Franklin Roosevelt, the founder, because in 1983, Reagan oversaw a restructuring of social security finances, significantly including increases in social security taxes. Because he believed that, first of all, Americans had come to accept this as part of the terrain of their life, but also because if we're gonna have this, it needs to be put on a sound actuarial footing. So you can blame Reagan for certain things, things that get pretty far out from when Reagan was the president, that is something that I'd stay away from. One of the things you can blame Reagan for is the ballooning of the federal debt. I won't go into the details of all this, but Reagan, Ronald Reagan, the conservative, makes Franklin Roosevelt, the liberal, look like a real deficit hawk. It's funny when in the 83 on the social security, when it was being revised and Reagan did a masterful job on that, he would often talk about going into his wallet and looking at his social security number and seeing it was number 17 on that. He always loved to joke about, you know, whenever he quoted Thomas Jefferson, he would come, some great quote that a speechwriter found about Jefferson, he'd give the quote and he looked up, he says, now I didn't hear him personally say that, but I heard about it soon afterwards. Yes, sir. Although he didn't live to see it, do you think Lyndon Johnson realized that Ronald Reagan would be a future president? Well, I think that LBJ knew how, I think he saw the great potential in Ronald Reagan. He clearly was aware of the speech in 1964. He saw his spectacular rise in the two years after, such that Reagan became the governor of California, having never held office prior to that, he had been the president of the Actors Union, so I think LBJ was a master politician and I think he recognized talent when he saw it, so I don't think it would have surprised him that Ronald Reagan would eventually succeed him in the office of a president. What do you think, Bill? I don't think LBJ would have been surprised. I think LBJ would have recognized, and Reagan himself recognized, that the path to the White House for anybody is filled with all sorts of opportunities to fall off and simple things and matters of timing. If Paul Volcker had become head of the Federal Reserve in 1977 rather than 1979, and if he had engineered the recession that rung the inflation out of the economy, then the economy might have been reviving by 1980 and Jimmy Carter might have been reelected. Paul Volcker, the two great gifts to Ronald Reagan's presidency were, Mikhail Gorbachev is one, on the foreign policy side and Paul Volcker on the domestic side. The Reagan revolution, Reaganomics, were important in the revival of the American economy, but certainly no more important than what the Federal Reserve did under Paul Volcker, and to reduce and then eliminate American expectations of inflation was a huge task, and it fell almost entirely on Volcker. He could do it because he didn't have to run for reelection. Reagan was very often critical, quietly, of Volcker's tight money policies, but he ultimately became the beneficiary of them. I will end tonight with a quick story that shows Ronald Reagan's great appeal. Cannon and Bill both alluded to the great humor of Ronald Reagan, and prior to the Reykjavik Summit, Reagan had met Gorbachev for the first time in Geneva, and I was told this by Nancy Reagan, and I read it later, Reagan let off their first meeting with a joke, and he talked about an old woman who comes into the Kremlin, has nothing to lose, and bursts into the Kremlin and goes into Ronald, excuse me, MacKell Gorbachev's office, and she pounds her fist on the desk, and she says, Mr. President, we need reform in this country. Why do you realize that I can go into the White House and go into the Oval Office? And I can say to the President of the United States, Mr. President, I don't like the way you do things. And Gorbachev says, my dear woman, you can do that here too, anytime you want. You can come into my office, you can bang your fist on my desk, and you can say, I don't like the way President Reagan does things. I think that shows the great appeal of Ronald Reagan and really soften things between him and Gorbachev, such that they could have a dialogue. And I must say, I've much enjoyed the dialogue I've had with these two gentlemen. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you all for being here as well. Thanks very much. Well done. Thank you.