 Good afternoon, I'm John Samples, I'm Director of the Center for Representative Government here at the Cato Institute, and I'd like to welcome all of you to the Cato Institute today for our book forum on Ronald Reagan, Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins. Let me give you an overview of our event today, and then we want to get right into the event because it does promise to be, I think, one of our really good discussions. Of course, discussions here in book forums and otherwise at Cato are always good, but this one I think has particular promise on a topic that is of interest, I'm sure, to all of you and to many people here in Washington. We're going to start out today by having each of our speakers, the author and two commentators, talk for perhaps 20 minutes each on the subject, on the book and its themes. Then, at that point, we're going to take questions from you and the audience, and around about 1.30 or so, we'll go upstairs and have lunch. You'll have a chance to talk to the author, you'll have a chance to purchase a copy of his book on Ronald Reagan. So let's get right to it by introducing the author. John Patrick Diggins will be known to many of you. He's Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is indeed one of America's leading public intellectuals. His numerous works include The Lost Soul of American Politics, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, and Mox Vaber Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy, and more recently on Hollowed Ground Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History. As Kenneth Weinstein once remarked, Diggins' books use history and philosophy to diagnose what ails contemporary America. Now on the surface, an author with that interest and those themes in his book would seem to be a bit of a strange fit for a book on Ronald Reagan. After all, we have been told for some time, well before his presidency in fact, that Ronald Reagan was at best a, quote, amable dunce, unquote, in the words of Washington's most famous fixer, Clark Clifford. Now we hear, however, from George Will, the eminent columnist in reviewing this book by Professor Diggins, that in fact in 1980 political theory came down to earth in political practice. Given all of that, I think very much we want to hear today from Professor Diggins and his new book on Ronald Reagan, Fate, Freedom and the Making of History. Professor Diggins. Thank you, John, for inviting me here to give a talk and thanks to the Cato Institute, one of the few institutions in America that's dedicated to old classical virtues of civic duty and moral discipline, virtues that are very much lacking today in America. I also appreciate being here because I think it's going to be the first time I talk to an audience of most of whose members appreciate Ronald Reagan. When people ask me how this book came about, how it originated, or as my students put it, where am I coming from, what are you doing writing about Reagan? It goes back to, I was giving a talk at Borders in New York and it was on Abraham Lincoln and his sense of American history. At the end, a member of the audience said, aside from Lincoln, who are the other great presidents? And I mentioned George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. And the audience gasped. Now this is in Manhattan, the Upper West Side, which is as far to the left as you can go. And at dinner afterwards, I was berated by my friends. So I thought I was on to something important. And then Reagan's letters were published. And when you read those letters, you realize this man is far different from how he was depicted in the media and among others. There was a conference on Reagan in 1995 at Hofstra College. And Professor Whittle Johnson of University of Virginia said, Eisenhower had the military industrial complex to contend with. And Reagan had the academy media complex. Now of course what he meant was that Eisenhower had to deal with forces in American life that liked the Cold War for economic reasons. And Reagan had to deal with those same forces which did not like the Cold War for political reasons. To give you a sense of the low esteem with which Reagan was held during the 80s and afterwards, let me mention three items of evidence. One was a cartoon in The Los Angeles Time by Paul Conrad. It has the Pope sitting on one chair, Reagan and another. Reagan throws his hand down and says, OK. It's all settled. You take care of the poor and I'll take care of the rich. The other item is upon Reagan's retirement. The front page of the village voice shows him going up these stairs to Air Force One on his way back to California. Waving in the caption reads, see you later, suckers. The third item of evidence is the scandalous national history standards that came out in the early 90s, although they had their origins in the late 80s. And there's no treatment of all of Ronald Reagan in there. And the Cold War is referred to, and this is a point in history. And the reason I like this subject is the Cold War is coming to an end under the guidance of Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher. And yet that's not even discussed in the history standards. And those standards were designed to teach history in the public schools at the high school level throughout the nation. They were endorsed by the American Historical Association. And the standards depicted the whole Cold War as infiltile sword play. Now, I'm often asked also why would someone in intellectual history deal with Reagan, but when you stop to think of what was going on in the 1980s, this was the period of the coming of think tanks in American life. It was a period of the great clash of ideas. One was, of course, the theory of supply-side economics. The other was theories about the Cold War, about deterrence, containment, about totalitarianism. There are tremendous debates about the nature of totalitarianism. And then there is Jean Kirkpatrick's famous thesis in her article in commentary, Dictatorships and Double Standards, which led to the, she doesn't use this phrase, but it leads to what can be called the doctrine of irreversibility, that once a country goes communist, becomes totalitarianism, there's no turning back. And there's no going forward. It's stuck with that system. Now, what kind of a species was Ronald Reagan? Generally, he's been called a Jeffersonian, because he did believe that power should revert back to the states. And of course, he was against big government. But the way America ends at the end of the 1980s, with government bigger than ever, a huge national debt, and a powerful military establishment, this has little to do with what Reagan started out advocating, and it would have brought music to the ears of Alexander Hamilton. And if you think of the great book on conservatism by Russell Kirk, the conservative mind, in there he stipulates what conservatism stands for. It stands for deference, authority, hierarchy, skepticism about equality, about the idea of progress, belief in original sin and evil and so forth. And the heroes in the book are Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. None of those figures or ideas resonate in Reagan's outlook. And so I think he needs a new classification. He's a person who promised to do certain things, but left America pretty much the same as far as I could see. But my admiration for him was in the area of foreign affairs. And I want to say this represents a change of mind for me, because I taught school in California, and we, that is, the students and professors, thought that Governor Reagan was the enemy at that time, because it was the period of the Vietnam War. There were a lot of protests on campuses, and Reagan came down pretty hard. And it wasn't until he was president, and I was watching the way he was engaging in international relations, I thought there was something there that was unusual, something under the sun in the cold, dark night of the Cold War. Now the myth of Reagan is that he went through international life with the cross in one hand and nuclear missiles in the other, a crusader in the name of God and a militarist in the name of power. And the evidence for this is usually the evil empire speech made in March 1983. And then later the announcement to to put missiles, Pershing missiles in Germany and elsewhere. And those people say this indicates how the Cold War were won. They don't acknowledge it. That backfired. And they don't encounter what we now know was called the Able Archer Affair. Let me know how I'm doing it. OK, sure. And Able Archer Affair was the KJB chief in London, Oleg Gordiewski, concluded the way the Reagan administration was talking about evil and talking about escalating missiles, concluded that the Soviet Union faced an immediate threat of a nuclear attack. And Able Archer was the name that he gave for the secret NATO wargames. And when Reagan realized that Able Archer had come to the terrifying conclusion of unleashing that America is about to unleash nuclear Holocaust, he was horrified that the Soviets would think that the U.S. was planning a preemptive attack. In his memoir, as this is what he writes, well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no aggressive designs on the Soviet Union and Russia had nothing to fear from us. The key in that that line is get someone in a room alone. And that's what Reagan loved to do. And later, it didn't go anywhere with Brezhnev. But with Gorbachev, we would say to Gorbachev, leave our governments, leave the bureaucracy behind. You and I walk down the hill, go into this little cottage and talk things out. And his advisors, the National Security Council, the dean of diplomacy, Henry Kissinger thought this was just absurd. And they dismiss it as personal diplomacy. The idea that history could turn on what Kissinger ridiculed as conversation. He thought that was absurd. And in my book, I try to suggest, well, the Greeks thought so. The Herodotus thought so. Thucydides, Homer, they thought the way to avoid war is the key politics going. And politics was about the art of conversation. The first thing Reagan does when he's recovering from an assassination attack in spring 1983, just after being sworn in a couple of months, he's in the hospital. He asks for a notepad. He writes this long letter to Brezhnev. And he wants to start a dialogue in the Cold War and how the two superpowers came to this situation they find themselves in. His advisors looked at it, and they didn't want him to send it. And they started to revise it. And he shows the revision to his assistant chief of staff, Michael Deaver. And he's in the hospital. And he gives it back to Deaver. And Deaver says, Mr. President, he said, just send the letter. Now this word is going to bother you. He said, these assholes have been in the Soviet business for 20 years and they haven't solved anything. And they haven't been elected. You have, go ahead and send the letter and tell them to stick it. And he does send the letter. And he gets what he called an IC reply from Brezhnev. But when he acts the same way when Gorbachev comes into office, things begin to mellow. And with the help of Margaret Thatcher and some other European leaders, the whole Cold War begins to move from military threats to diplomatic discourse. And by the time he's leaving office, the Cold War has come to an end. And the Berlin Wall falls in 1989. And this is really unprecedented history. There's never been anything like that. That a deadly international confrontation can be brought to a peaceful conclusion without a shot being fired. And that a system such as Communists to Toletarianism can come to an end that no one predicted. There's only three people who predicted it. And one was a French lady, Elin Dokos, who wrote a book, Le Clat, which translates as the Fragmentation. And there's a Russian leader named Almarek and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There are the three people who said the Soviet Union is already collapsing and even before Reagan came into office. Now, as a domestic affairs about the welfare system, which Reagan did scrutinize and he did revise and reform. And but he does end his administration with big government, bigger than ever in a national debt and so forth. I have an explanation of that and I'm running out of time. I don't look into it. I think I would bore you and but it goes something like this. If you combine Mox Weber with Ralph Walder Emerson, you get big government by that. I mean, Emerson said, there's no such thing as evil. Everyone is good and innocent, no matter what they do. And Weber said, it doesn't matter what people think they do, how good they are. It's the consequences of their action that good intentions you bring about bad consequences. And Weber was the authority on bureaucracy and he knew that that what leads to the enlargement of government is is not it's not government itself, which it was Reagan's position, but the forces of democracy that put pressures on government. Now, just in by this note that I read on the radio and interviews all week long and it ends by some people saying, what about big government was Reagan responsible for it? And I want to say that. But I don't because the conversation gone forever. I say, no, he's not responsible for it. And then they'd say, who? And I'd say, you are not not in this room, but thanks very much. I've always wanted to hear someone say that in public. And now that moment has come. Our first commentator will be Steve Hayward. Steve is FK Warhuisler fellow at an American Enterprise Institute. He studies there the environment, law, political economy and the presidency. He's the author of the annual Index of Leading Economic Indicators, which is published jointly by AEI and the Pacific Research Institute. Steve, as many of you will know, is also the author of The Age of Reagan, the fall of the old liberal order in 1964 to 1980. And Steve tells me that he is at work now in the second volume of that. And so I'm going to get him to agree right now that when that appears that he will return and I'll get all of you to agree. When the second volume appears, you'll return to hear about that. And we'll certainly have a book for him on that. Steve holds a PhD from Claremont. But, you know, let's face facts, folks. Steve is best known as the husband of Allison Hayward, the renowned campaign finance expert and who runs the blog, TheSkepticsEye.com. So if you're interested in campaign finance issues and who isn't, simply go to skepticseye.com. And you will find an amazing thing, which is someone who makes those issues amusing. Steve? Thank you, John. Yes, believe it or not, we do discuss campaign finance over dinner sometime. Well, boring home life, that might be. Well, Professor Diggins noted that Reagan had to cope with the academic media complex upon leaving office. And it was always the great fear of conservatives when Reagan left office that the liberal professoriate, the academic media complex, would succeed in colonizing him. Indeed, starting with, I think, Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992, conservatives had a feeling of deja vu all over again, as Clinton and a lot of liberal intellectuals demonized the Republican 80s in much the same way that Arthur Schlesinger and John Hicks and others denigrated the Republican 20s. So, when a board certified liberal intellectual like John Diggins comes along and ranks Reagan among the four greatest American presidents, Reaganites like me are tempted to spike the ball, do an end zone dance, and declare game over. But not so fast. If you look closely at Professor Diggins' approach to Reagan, there may be some mischief afoot. And in fact, at the end of his preface, Professor Diggins says that part of his purpose is to, quote, rescue Reagan from many of today's so-called Reaganites, close quote. Well, hey, wait a minute, I think I resemble that remark. Is he trying to pull a brink's job on us or cause some dissension in the ranks? In Diggins' hands, Reagan emerges as a person who made America safe for big government again. And the comparison of Reagan and Lincoln is obviously problematic, since, as Professor Diggins well knows, significant factions on the right intensely dislike Lincoln. There'd be few better ways to undermine Reagan subtly with some conservatives and libertarians than to link Reagan and Lincoln in a fundamental way. Well, anyone who's read any of Professor Diggins' other fine books will know that he's not a man given to mischievous errands. And in this very highly original and provocative approach to Reagan, I think it deserves very careful consideration and reflection, and I think indeed it breaks new ground in understanding American political culture. And I think it's a major contribution to the mushrooming Reagan literature and one that I think will take its place as one of the three or four most important books about Reagan. There, Professor, is your dust jacket blurb if someone wants it. That said, I think there are a number of aspects of Professor Diggins' portrait that are arguable or in several cases where he's right about Reagan, he doesn't actually carry the analysis far enough or appreciate the full implication of his insights. He gets several things I think absolutely right about Reagan that have escaped the gaze of other liberals who have approached Reagan with increasing respect, such as, for example, Richard Reeves. Above all, he grasps Reagan's largeness of soul or greatness of soul as he puts it. And even going beyond language I've attempted to use about Reagan's Homeric qualities. The typical line on Reagan from most liberal writers has been that he was right on the Cold War but that his domestic policy was a train wreck or worse. One of the things Professor Diggins does well, I think, is that he perceives the fundamental unity between Reagan's domestic and foreign policy principles which are based on Reagan's idiosyncratic or Professor Diggins rightly says his romantic imagination. I always like to say that great statesmen have a central idea. This is actually a variation of Lincoln's line that all nations have a central idea. Statesmen have a central idea. Reagan's, the way I put it, and Professor Diggins puts it similarly, I think, is that Reagan had the view that unlimited government is inimicable to liberty both in its vicious forms like socialism and communism but also in its supposedly benign forms like American bureaucracy. In other words, statism for Reagan was a continuum rather than a dichotomous problem between the capitalist West and the communist East. In that famous speech he gave to Parliament in 1982 that Professor Diggins quotes from, there appears a passage that I think he skips over where Reagan says this, there is a threat posed to human freedom by the enormous power of the modern state. History teaches the dangers of government that overreaches political control taking precedence over free economic growth. Secret police, mindless bureaucracy, all combining the stifle individual excellence and personal freedom, close quote. Note there the conflation of secret police, the principal tool of dictatorship, and mindless bureaucracy, the principal tool of modern American government. Reagan goes on to say, this very interesting passage, immediately following. Now I'm aware that among us here and throughout Europe there is legitimate disagreement over the extent to which the public sector should play a role in a nation's economy and life. Here I'll insert the editorial comment. In other words what he's saying is, I know you're not all as freedom loving as me and Maggie but to continue he says, but on one point all of us are united, our abhorrence of dictatorship in all its forms. As I say most people miss that unity of Reagan's thought and Professor Diggins captures it well. And so I guess my summary comment would be something like this. If I find aspects of Professor Diggins case to be mistaken in some particulars, not necessarily because he's wrong. Now that formula is not an affectation of politeness or my fondness for so much of his other works but rather reflects the problem that there are certain aspects of Reagan's character and his political outlook that are simply unsolvable. Diggins here calls Reagan our Emersonian president and this is apt because Reagan lives up to everyone's favorite Emerson aphorism that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Reagan was often a bundle of contradictions and most attempts at trying to resolve this in the four corners of formal logic fall apart and are always vulnerable to a contrary case. I remember that back in 1991 when Reagan's memoirs came out, a midgedector wrote, quote, it will one day take a truly gifted writer, perhaps a novelist to solve the puzzle of such a man. Well, the novelist Edmund Morris did attempt it and went insane. Let me give you an example of the problem of unraveling Reagan's thought. In one of his diary entries in 1982 and he's in the middle of the fight with Democrats over a prospective tax increase and further budget cuts, Reagan writes this, the press is trying to paint me as now trying to undo the new deal. I remind them that I voted for FDR four times. I'm trying to undo the great society. It was LBJ's war on poverty that led us to our present mess. Now, while it's largely true that with the partial exception of social security in one or two other little places, Reagan did not seek to undo most new deal programs, but this account is clearly wrong. I mean, after all, Reagan was complaining about big government in fairly ferocious terms long before the great society, quote, led us into our present mess. I mean, was he being clairvoyant in the 1950s when he started complaining about these things? Well, one of the things that, one of the many Professor Diggins' formulations on this goes as follows, quote, now, far from being a conservative, Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo. Reagan's relation to liberalism may illuminate modern America more than his relation to conservatism. What Reagan sought to do for America has been the goal of liberalism since the 18th century Enlightenment to get rid of authority, the meddlesome intrusions of controlling institutions, whether of church or state, close quote. Well, hold it right there, as Reagan might have said in one of his westerns. This is certainly correct in the sense that we are all of us, Kato Institute included. Liberals in the 18th century meaning of the term he uses here. The trouble is, I think, is that we are gliding over here what can be described as the intellectual civil war on the left, which I won't outline here, but suffice it to say between sort of the ideas of authority and the ideas of individual autonomy, do that briefly, but suffice it to say that there are few more accurate descriptive phrases for operative liberalism today than, quote, meddlesome intrusions of controlling institutions. And Reagan, I think, understood these to be a betrayal of classical liberal principles. To this extent, Reagan was trying to revive or reform the one embattled or attenuated branch of liberalism which the right, the most part, finds allegiance. Now, Reagan portrays, sorry, Professor Diggins portrays Reagan as being at odds with the founders' understanding of mankind's sinfulness and need for authority. Now, he's on to something here, but I think presses this case a little too far. I think Reagan understood contemporary politics in a way rather closer to the founders' constitutionalism than Professor Diggins gives him credit for, my right page here. For example, Reagan made some criticisms of government today that I very seldom hear from other conservatives. The concerns I sometimes summarize as the administrative state or, you know, premises of modern progressivism. But for example, in one of his radio addresses in the 70s, Reagan said, quote, we are governed more and more by people we never elected and who can't be turned out of office by our votes and who want more power than they already have. Or in another letter later in the 70s, he said, the permanent structure of our government with its power to pass regulations has eroded, if not in fact, if not in effect repealed portions of our constitution. Cato's Roger Pallon could hardly put that matter more directly. And so I think there is a sense and there's other aspects of Reagan I can point to where Reagan is more in tune with a founders' understanding of limited government than we recognize. However, all this needs to be understood in what I think Professor Diggins is absolutely right about, that Reagan is an American original. He's an American conservative, or you might even say American conservative slash liberal, a hybrid, not given to the European traditionalism that we often associate with what we call traditional or cultural conservatism. And this really comes to sight as Professor Diggins notes with Reagan's fascination with Tom Paine. You know, it used to drive conservatives nuts when they'd hear Reagan quote Tom Paine's phrase that we can begin the world, we have it in our power to begin the world over again. Russell Kerr complained about it in a national review. George Will wrote in a column, quote, Reagan is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable. A statement from an anti-conservative, Tom Paine, we have it in our power to begin the world over again. Will concludes, anytime, any place, that is nonsense. But that was also vintage Reagan. Reagan explained this in his first memoir, which I actually think is better than his last one, the one titled, Where's the Rest of Me? He says, the classic liberal used to be the man who believed the individual was and should be forever the master of his destiny. That is now the conservative position. The liberal used to believe in freedom under law. He now takes the ancient feudal position that power is everything. He believes in a stronger and stronger central government and the philosophy that control is better than freedom. The conservative now quotes Tom Paine, a longtime refuge of liberals. And quoting Paine, government is a necessary evil. Let us have as little of it as possible. And then I'm also reminded, because Professor Diggins dwells on Reagan's interest in Whitaker Chambers' book, Witness. And here I've got to read this more carefully because at one point I think Professor, you refer to Reagan's miseducation this period in the 50s. I'm not quite sure I understand exactly what you mean but I think I want to quarrel with it. But at Reagan's ranch house, one of the books on his shelves is the collection of letters from Whitaker Chambers to William F. Buckley. Odyssey of a Friend. And there's one letter in there that's always struck me because Professor Diggins is absolutely right that Chambers' fatalism and pessimism didn't fit Ronald Reagan at all, either substantively or temperamentally. And one of those letters from Chambers to Buckley, Chambers goes off on Russell Kirk's book, The Conservative Mind, saying, well, it was a worthy effort, very impressive in its way. But as he put it to Buckley, would you charge the beach at Tarawa for that conservative position? And neither would I. And I think that captures Reagan's outlook precisely. So finally, I'll sort of close with a little bit more on Professor Diggins worrying about Reagan not taking sort of the ideas of duty and responsibility seriously enough. And to be sure, if you've seen Reagan's gravestone at the library, the first thing it says on it is, I know in my heart that man is good. Well, that is a little problematic in certain ways of saying it or like that. On the other hand, I think I had to take up this kind of quarrel with Professor Diggins who's fine-booked the Lost Soul of American Politics I regard as one of the classics of the last 30 years. But I've long been transfixed by this passage from Federalist 55 from Madison. It's often overlooked in the commentaries on the Federalists. Madison said this, as there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, men are not angels, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Close quote. See, I think the counter argument to Professor Diggins on this point is that Reagan saw big government as eroding people's sense of responsibility and duty. And I can say more about that, but I will stop it there at the three or four other points I can make. I think I'll just close with this. I've said somewhat merthfully and not entirely seriously that perhaps Professor Diggins is out to perform and brings job on our hero Ronald Reagan. But you know, Reagan tried to return the favor by trying to steal FDR from the liberals. And every once in a while, I know I'll never get away with this at the Cato Institute, but once in a while I suggested we ought to try that on the right. I mean, Reagan drove people nuts when he would quote FDR on a balanced budget on the innervating effects of the welfare state and even some criticisms of bureaucracy that Roosevelt made now and then in fairly forceful terms. One of the persons who complained about this most ferociously in 1980 was Arkansas's young governor Bill Clinton, interestingly enough. But maybe I'll retaliate, it's too strong a word, but maybe I'll respond to Professor Diggins by as Conrad Black has already started by writing the book claiming that FDR is much more conservative than we think. Thank you. Thanks very much, Steve. I was wondering with Emerson how long before we could get James Madison into the room and indeed I would hope he's always in this room here at the Hayek Auditorium at the Cato Institute. Madison does seem to be the other person that's sort of the other side or at least partially of the Emersonian good side of human nature. Our second commentator today will be our old friend, Jonathan Clark, who is a former career diplomat in the British Diplomatic Service. He's also a former fellow at the Cato Institute. He's currently serving at the Carnegie Council as a senior fellow where he is focusing on religion and politics and some aspects of Islam. You might want to chat with him about, at launch, very interesting work. His foreign assignments when he was in the Diplomatic Service included Germany, Zimbabwe, and the United States. In London, he worked on issues related to China, South Africa, and Central America. His particular areas of expertise are political, economic, and development issues related to Europe and other aspects of the world. He's also been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Affairs here in Washington. He's published in all the main foreign policy, foreign affairs journals, and has appeared as a commentator in many radio and television networks, all the major ones. Perhaps he is best known to book readers at least as the author of three books. Most recently, a book co-authored with Stephen Halper entitled Silence of the Rational Center Why American Foreign Policy is Failing, which appeared with basic books just now. It's out just currently. And then three years ago, again with Halper, he co-authored America Alone, the Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, which attracted a great deal of attention at the time, and it's been much discussed, which appeared with Cambridge University Press. And then sometime earlier with Jim Clad, he wrote After the Crusade American Foreign Policy for the post-superpower age. Please welcome Jonathan Clark. Thank you so much, John. It's great to be back here at the Cato Institute. Can I just say right away that we in the British government never regarded Ronald Reagan as an enemy? We had a tremendous time in terms of British diplomacy in during the 1980s. And it wasn't just the synergy between him and Margaret Thatcher. I think it was a genuine projection that Ronald Reagan did to the British people. He was always extremely welcomed there. And interesting to take up a point about Oleg Gordievsky. When Gordievsky's defection from the KGB became known, and Bill Casey, the CIA chief, hastened over to London to interview him. He said, can we do anything for you, Mr. Gordievsky? Gordievsky said, yes, I want to meet Ronald Reagan, and that eventually was able to take place. Now I thought this was an extremely fine book, and really for one particular reason, which portrayed Ronald Reagan as a complex man, a nuanced man, and more than anything else, a flexible man. And I think the book rescues Ronald Reagan from being imprisoned in history in a way which is very unhelpful for present purposes. And this read what I want to concentrate my remarks on. Because it seems to me that modern ideologues, the people who have been behind the foreign policy adventures that the United States has been currently embarked on, have in fact, I mean, many of these people are former draw on the leftist past. And so they know their Marxist theory. And they know that in order to dominate the future, you need to capture the past. And that's exactly what they've done with Ronald Reagan. These are people who have really, you see, there's only one event in European history in the 20th century worth while mentioning, and that is Munich. Now I would just suggest that for those who really believe that there's only room for one event in European history, it's much more sensible to look at, in fact, at Versailles. But there you see what was really the cause of the unfolding of the rest of the tragedy of European 20th century history. And almost what the lesson is, get your peacemaking right, not get your war making right. And that was particularly the case in the end game in Afghanistan, where having had the triumph of kicking the Soviets out of Afghanistan, we dropped the ball on the peacemaking and therefore opened the way to the rise of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Now I think that the people who claim the Reagan legacy for their present purposes, I once reviewed a book by Bill Cristobal and Bob Kagan, and by my calculation was that according to their recommendations of what Ronald Reagan would be doing today, he would be fighting wars on five fronts. So I suppose we're getting away quite cheaply when we're only doing it on two. Now what their argument, and I think Professor Dickens really unpacks this, is that Ronald Reagan was a sort of combination of unbending ideology, expeditionary militarism, and sort of the great man in history, the use of will in history to affect events. Now I'm going to look at all those things which I regard as simplification, which I say Professor Dickens, I think, successfully illuminates in the book. The one thing I'm going to stay away from is this liberal conservative division. In fact, as from my observation as a British diplomat, I've always been struck by how, in fact, how tightly, on the foreign policy at least, how tightly the spectrum is, how frighteningly close it is with both liberals and conservatives, having really very broadly similar approaches to international relations. I think you saw in the run-up to the Iraq war that liberals were on board for that just as much as conservatives. Now let me just start with the first simplification, which I think Professor Dickens addresses in the book, which I think is something you really have to focus on for today's purpose. This is the simplification of Reagan as an ideologue. Now obviously there's something in that. The evil empire's speech was a very striking use of language and certainly electrified the chanceries in Europe that you saw an American president speaking like that. Of course, I think he only said it once and it was said in a particular venue talking to evangelical Christians. But nonetheless, you could see that there was a commitment by Ronald Reagan to turn away from the peaceful coexistence theory that had predominated in American foreign policy towards the Soviet Union up until that time, when we were allowed to talk about the common European home. That was a big change. And I think obviously ideology was very important to Ronald Reagan in explaining certain actions he took around the world. And I don't think that he would have been able to explain why it was necessary to support the contras in Nicaragua, but to oppose the FMLN in El Salvador, both of whom were actually doing rather similar things to their populations without reference to ideology. I don't think he would have been able to explain why it was necessary to ally the United States with somebody like Gulbadan Hekmatya in Afghanistan, had it not been for that driving anti-Soviet, anti-communist ideology. So there's something in that. But let us take away the main point about how Reagan used his ideology, which was to set a direction, not tactics. Professor Diggins has already explained that note to Debrezhnev. And let us see what he did in terms of his approach to the Soviet Union. Time and time again, he was sitting down with Brezhnev. He was trying to, as Professor Diggins said, trying to initiate and sustain conversations with them. So what he was actually trying to do with the other side was not to use ideology as a reason to shun them, to turn away from them, to put them in perder, quite the opposite. It was actually being used to build confidence. Now, this was an exceptionally valuable contribution to the end of the Cold War, because as the Soviet Union was unraveling, and Gorbachev was aware that this was happening, what he had to take away from his conversations with Ronald Reagan was that the United States was not going to use that opportunity somehow to invade the Soviet Union and to overthrow everything that Russia stood for. And that confidence that Ronald Reagan imparted by his face-to-face, constant face-to-face meetings with Gorbachev was something which stood in a tremendously good stead as the Cold War endgame was entered. Look at other parts around the world. Namibia, for example. Here, as it was really a Marxist liberation movement, Swapo that was trying to take over the country. And the South Africans were completely opposed to that. Ronald Reagan didn't stand in the way of his assistant secretary for Africa, Czech Crocker, in bringing about a settlement in Namibia. Taiwan, he didn't rearrange the balance of power vis-a-vis Taiwan. So I think there you see that ideology is something that is used to point a direction not to determine day-to-day tactics. I think very different from today's state of affairs. And it's nowhere more important than this served Ronald Reagan well was in the reunification of Germany after he left office. But the fact that he had set up this basis of confidence with the Soviets enabled George Bush to pull off what I think is the most unsung triumph in recent US diplomatic history. Something which could have gone very, very badly wrong, would have gone very badly wrong, had ideology been allowed to predominate. But with the example that Ronald Reagan had set with the Russians, something that he went through rather smoothly. Now, second simplification, which is used today by today's neo-Raganites. And this is all to do with the military. The idea that the military, the use of military power is the sort of comparative advantages that the United States enjoys. And that is something that Ronald Reagan was particularly prone to use. Now, of course, Ronald Reagan did build up defense spending, absolutely. There's no doubt about that. It had already started to increase under Carter, but he took this to a very considerable new height. But where did Ronald Reagan intervene? Well, Libya was one case when he responded to the bombing in Berlin, and he tried to kill Gaddafi. And Grenada was another, a small Caribbean island. Why he invaded there, the Brits are actually still quite unsure about that. But I'm sure they were grateful that Grenada today is not another Cuba. So I think the end result there was quite good, although I can tell you that it did cause quite a few transatlantic moments of ardor between himself and Margaret Thatcher. Because Margaret Thatcher actually thought that Grenada was still a British colony, and that the United States should have asked for permission to invade. Incorrect, of course, but there we are. Now, so I think what we see with Ronald Reagan is a much more subtle use of proxies. I've already talked about the Contra in Nicaragua. Afghanistan is obviously the case where of a tremendously successful use of proxies. And what other military actions he did, I think the most striking one, of course, is the withdrawal from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks. He didn't retaliate there. He actually left the area rather quickly. So I think it's possible to see that Ronald Reagan was absolutely quite the opposite of a person like Kennedy. If you want to talk about somebody who's trying to get America into battles, I mean, Kennedy's a much better example for today's near Reaganites than Ronald Reagan. Now, coming to the achievement that most characterized his term in office, which was the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI. Now, the key here, I think, about SDI is that today it is used as an example of the need to build up an American strength so you can bring about regime change overseas. Now, it was completely foreign to what Ronald Reagan was actually trying to do. He saw the horrors of nuclear weapon, nuclear war, as really the prime horror overlooking mankind and wanted to try and make that impossible. That is what was driving his thinking about SDI. Not that it was therefore enabled the US first strike against anybody, but actually it stripped out the logic of nuclear war. I think that had it been appropriate, that technology he would have shared with the Soviet Union. The drive he was under in terms of nuclear weapons was, in fact, disarmament. And once again, that is another thing that actually really chilled our blood in Britain at one stage. It was the Reykjavik conference where we suddenly woke up in the morning in London and found that Mr. Reagan was actually bargaining away the British nuclear deterrent, going for three zeros, something which Mrs. Thatcher was not at all happy about. I mean, it didn't happen like that, but I said that the drive here is completely opposite to the near-Raganite interpretation of it, is that nuclear weapons arms are there for defensive purposes, not for first strike purposes. And the Cold War, the triumph of Reagan policies, Cold War ended without a single hostile sortie by NATO. That's quite an achievement. Now, the third simplification. The simplification here is that all it needs in the White House is for a person to have the will to undertake a certain mission. And if you have the will, then the mission will be accomplished. Now, of course, Ronald Reagan, I think you can make a very good argument that he was a pivot in the Cold War. This was somebody who took an existing policy and certainly gave it new energy. However, I think the continuities of American and European policies in the Cold War are really the key to seeing how you undertake a massive undertaking over several generations of this sort. Start with George Cannon. I mean, George Cannon, in fact, was right ahead of the game. He was the one in his long telegram who said that communism contains the seeds of its own destruction. So he was there way ahead of the people in the 70s who were talking about the collapse of the Soviet system. He saw that it was going to collapse one of these days. And this is where the containment policy of his came from. This was something, of course, he walked away from a little earlier, a little later. Truman built up the security institutions of NATO. Had NATO not been a cooperative organization maintained over many, many years, bringing in the allies in Europe, I think Ronald Reagan would have been really would have inherited a very different world from the one that he didn't inherit. Kennedy Johnson, people who took the fight to communism in Vietnam. Whatever you think about Vietnam, this was certainly something that was operationalized, the challenge to Soviet and Chinese communism. Nixon's rapprochement with China. Professor Dickens raises this in his book was absolutely key for the fact that Reagan then had the freedom of maneuver vis-a-vis the Soviet Union without having to worry about a Sino-Soviet friendship. And he was able, therefore, to carry out policies which focused on the Soviet Union and were designed to meet the Soviet Union. And he didn't have to worry about China drawing on the Nixon legacy absolutely for that. I just remember at the same time when the United States was wishing to deploy cruise missiles, Pershing missiles into Europe, there were considerable opposition to those deployments by student populations in Europe. I saw them at the time when I was in Germany. Now who were the ones who were actually defending these deployments? They were the socialist governments of France or Mitterrand in France and Helmut Schmidt in Germany. There was a tremendous buy-in to this whole idea of opposition to the Soviet Union. Going on to Ford. Ford was the one who brought about the Helsinki Accords. Helsinki Accords were enormously important in the later stages of the Cold War of putting the Soviet Union on the spot for its human rights violations. I think Carter was used the Helsinki Accords rather effectively. As a young diplomat, I was rather impressed by Carter's Notre Dame speech on human rights. It turned out to be rather counterproductive in its application because Carter turned it around and used it on America's friends rather than on America's enemies. But I think it certainly laid the intellectual base that was then used by Jean-Claude Patrick for her article, which I think was extremely successful, operationalization, if that's a word, of the human rights agenda. So the point I'm making here is that near Reaganites tend to feel that the end of the Cold War was, in a sense, owed to the willpower of a certain individual acting at a certain time. Professor Diggins, I think, successfully explains that that was certainly a tremendous achievement of Ronald Reagan. But it owed a lot to people who had gone before him. Now, where does this leave us in terms of conclusions to draw from a more realistic and getting rid of the mythologies about Ronald Reagan? I think that we need to see that these mythologies have actually led us into a misreading of the end of the Cold War because of these myths that we ascribe to Ronald Reagan. We've concluded that the Cold War was a sort of black and white victory based upon a successful ideological fight based upon the deployment of superior military force and centered around the willpower of the chief executive. I think this has led to a falsely unitary interpretation of the Cold War and concluded in books like The End of History and Concepts like the Unipolar Moment, both of which, I think, have shown their flaws over time. Because I think the end of the Cold War was seen very, very differently around the world in places like Tallinn and Kiev. We had extremely different interpretations of the departure of the Soviet Union. In Riad and Kabul, once again, very different interpretations of what it meant for to see the end of the struggle between East and West, places like Central Asia, Tashkent and Beijing, once again, very different concepts. And I think the simplification that we have had imposed upon us by near Reaganite reinterpreting false interpretations of the Reagan legacy has caused us, I say, to go off in false interpretations of the Cold War. And we've come to believe that if you disagree that with the onward rush of history towards small liberal nirvana, you were somehow deviating from a gold standard. Whereas, in fact, actual fact of what is happening is that the wheels of history are turning and turning again. I spent a lot of my time trying to get Danny Ortega out of Managua, out of the presidential palace in Managua. Where is he today? Right back in there. I spent a fair amount of my time trying to get the Soviets to sign up to the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty where what's happening today, they're just about to back out. I think this is the thought I would like to leave you with, which I think has encapsulated extremely successfully in Professor Dickens's book, that that history is a very complex affair. If you go back into it and try and oversimplify it for present day purposes, you're likely to end up being led astray. Thank you. I expect you'll agree with me that this forum has fulfilled its promise that I mentioned at the first. We've had very interesting presentation of the book and very interesting comments from both of our participants on the book and on the larger issues it raises. Now we would like to go to questions and answers and questions from the floor. What I would ask is that you, A, wait for the microphone. I'll designate the questioner. Wait for the microphone, and please identify yourself before asking your question. And as always, please have it in the form of a question. The gentleman right here, please. My name is David Rogers, independent historian. I'd like to ask Dr. Dickens or anyone else on the panel for that matter. A number of commentators over the years have made reference to Reagan's millennialist thinking, Christian millennialist thinking, which he mindset that he is supposedly inherited from his pious mother. Would any of you, the idea somehow connected with end time and Armageddon and all of this idea, would any gentleman comment on the accuracy of this idea as a factor in Reagan's thinking? I think Stephen probably knows more about this. Do you want to answer that, Stephen? Well, I can try. I mean, you say some things about this in your book. You mentioned, for instance, his letter to Peter Hannaford, you quote in his book, where he says, gosh, I look at things in the Middle East, and I sometimes wonder if this isn't a description of the end times of Armageddon from the Bible. And then he adds, quickly, don't quote me on this. I mean, Reagan knows that this is a dangerous thing to be speculating about, even to a friend in a letter. And he did provoke a number of concern, you might say, with his comments about the end times and various public comments in the 80 campaign and so forth. I don't know. John's right in his book that Reagan's religion is somewhat impenetrable and generic in certain ways. The one speculation a lot, and this is pure speculation. I have no way to get to the bottom of this. John has mentioned the alarm over the Soviet perception of able archer as a possible harbinger of an American nuclear attack. And then there's Reagan had already expressed his distaste for nuclear weapons and his desire for nuclear disarmament. And he overlayed that with his talk about the end times. And I sometimes wonder if in Reagan's darkest moments, if he had any dark moments, that's the other thing about him, right? He didn't have a lot of those. If he didn't wonder if, in some perverse way, he might have thought he was party to the scenario of the Antichrist destroying the world. I mean, I have no idea if he ever thought of that. Based on his flights of imagination, his romantic imagination, and his frequent recurrence to the subject, you sort of wonder if that wasn't on his mind at some level. What do you think about it? His most depressing moment was he watched this film the day after. Yeah, right. Kansas City is hit by a nuclear attack. And the people are all devastated and dying. And Jason Roebart is walking around, his skin's coming off from radiation. And Reagan said it left him depressed for a week. So he had a great horror of the idea of nuclear warfare. There's one little footnote about that movie that's worth adding. The White House was very worried about that. And it got a huge audience. It was like Super Bowl-sized audience because of the controversy around it. But when they saw the movie at the White House, they saw it without commercial breaks. And they saw the effect of watching it for an hour and a half was very powerful. But then when it was broadcast on TV, they had commercials. And this sort of interrupted the flow. And some of them were these, it might have even contributed the morning in America idea. It was one of them was pepperage farms with their nice wheat bread. By the way, they almost gave the ads away on ABC. The only person who paid full rate was Alan Cranston, who thought it'd be useful for his presidential campaign to embrace the nuclear freeze on that movie. So the movie had much less of an effect when you saw it on broadcast TV than when you saw it uninterrupted in the White House theater. Anything on foreign policy, John? Right here on my right. Chris Grebe, I've been reading the other book out about Reagan. And I want to end it because it's called The Pope, the President, and the Prime Minister. And one of the things John O'Sullivan says in that book is that Reagan was something of a Catholic and that he and the pope got along very well for that reason, even though Reagan was very much an evangelical Protestant. And I was wondering if The Pope and Reagan apparently did a lot of things together and really put the pressure on the communist government in Poland to lead to that change. And I'd like to hear from either of you, all of you. I heard John Sullivan give a talk on that theme last week in New York City. And it seemed dubious to me. So I went back and pulled down my Reagan books and his letters and there's not one correspondence with The Pope. Reagan does mention the previous Pope, Pius, but not Pope John. And for the Catholic Church to come in late in the game and try to take credit for the end of the Cold War is a little much to me. Well, my perspective on that is I think it's I'm not persuaded that Reagan is a closet Catholic. However, although there's not correspondence with The Pope, they did have a couple of private meetings, including one very early in 1982 that John O'Sullivan talks about. And there was a lot of back and forth, including Casey, which raises some questions, but also Vernon Walters. And I think actually what you could make out if we actually knew what went on in those conversations was, and by the way, that book that The Pope later says, no, no, we weren't. The Pope just disclaimed credit for ending the Cold War. But I think what happened in those meetings was two things. One is, yes, we ought to do what we can to encourage solidarity in Poland, but two, we need to show a large amount of restraint less to go too far and blow up on everybody's face. And there's some evidence of that latter proposition in some of the documents in elsewhere. So in other words, a good practical judgment for both men, the Pope and Reagan on that point. My feeling is that Reagan got on well with people, period. And the fact that he got on well with Gorbyshoff didn't make him a communist. In fact, if he did get on with the Pope, it didn't make him a Catholic. I also think that the victory in the Cold War is a big enough event, so you can share out the merits. And I do believe that the Catholic Churches stand in Poland did, in fact, provide a certain backbone there. And so I wouldn't deny the Catholic Church a place on the podium. The gentleman on my left, second in, is first. I guess Richard Kennedy, retired CIA analyst. To me, there's a paradox about Reagan that perhaps the panel can clarify. You've emphasized his dislike of big government. And yet he was at the forefront of those to argue that government should lock you up if you engaged in practices that he disapproved of. I'm thinking of the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, which provided really draconian penalties for drug use and death penalties for drug traffickers and gave the government the power to seize your property if merely on the suspicion that it was related to drug trafficking. I'm just wondering how you reconcile that, Ronald Reagan, with the Ronald Reagan that you have been describing. Well, on certain moral issues, Reagan didn't hesitate to feel that the government had a role in enforcing the conventions of society, such as abortion and so forth. But to give you an example of how liberal he was in terms of he didn't want to see authority being imposed, a letter was written to him about prayer in school by Norman Lear, the head of the American Civil Liberties Union. He writes back and says, I think that students have a right to say prayers in school. As to what prayer they say, if they pray to Allah, to Buddha, to Christ, he didn't care. He didn't care about the content of religion. Religion was a right that people ought to be able to practice even in public schools. Then he tells the students at University of California he said, your professor should teach you not what to think, but how to think. That's the most, that could come from John Dewey. It's so liberal. And so you raised the question of drugs. I'm sure his daughter Patty disagreed about his position on it. Any thoughts over here? The gentleman next to the last speaker was then next, I think. My name is Ron Bulbel. My question relates to the three large areas of weakness that you discussed in your book and would like a panel to respond to that a little bit. One, as you mentioned before, the fiscal policies are resulted in the largest deficit in our nation's history and also they related to that, the big government. The second one is the paranoia about communism in Central America that led to the Iran-Contra scandal and also the support of the Guatemalan dictator Rios Mont, which resulted in the death of thousands of Indians. And the last one is the deregulation of the savings and loan system, which resulted in the collapse of the system because of greed on the part of some owners and a massive bailout by the American public. Well, those are three large questions out. I don't know if I can answer all of them, but the SNL loan scandal puzzled me because Reagan himself wasn't upset about it. As a person supposed to be the moral leader of the country, he seemed to be rather casual about the immorality of the times. Yet he goes after Linda Taylor, who's the so-called welfare queen, who's ripping off the system through her dishonest acts. But he doesn't go after SNL, the Lincoln Loan Company, and the man who went to jail finally. There's no criticism. So I raise in my book, is he a relativist? He criticizes one class of people with one standard and another class with no standard at all. Now, the whole anti-communist effort in Central America and the part of the United States, in some ways, I'm just speculating, that could have been bypassed in terms of becoming at the end of the Cold War. Because the evidence out now coming from the Soviet archives is that after Russia was bogged down in Afghanistan, it lost interest in any adventures in Central America. And it even told Castro to get lost in effect. But Castro wanted to support revolutions in Latin America. The KJB said he has delusions of grandeur. They noticed that Che Guevara did not recruit one peasant in his trip through all of South America. So I'm not so sure that communism was that great of a threat. This is a period when none of these countries had nuclear weapons. And the only source they had to rely upon was Fidel Castro's Cuba, which was a basket case economically. Gentlemen, any comments? I mean, I could talk about all three of those in some length. They call pass and we'll wait for more questions. I would just add about Central America. I think it's very easy today to talk about paranoia of anti-communism. But if you think back to 1975, 1980, obviously there was a Cold War going on at that time and that the Soviet Union was a formidable adversary. So I think it was a fairly simple proposition to put forward was that wherever it manifested itself, you kind of administered a certain amount of pushback. Whether it went to foreign Central America or not, I think is argued at the time, of course. But I think that it's kind of consistent with what Reagan saw, which was that communism was something which needed to be combated, was going to be combated through proxies in Afghanistan, in Central America, in Southern Africa. And yes, I think it is arguable that it went a bit over the top. But in a sense, it was all contributed to a happy end result. I'll just make one comment about just on the SNL business. The one is, it is important to keep the chronology in mind that the botched deregulation was a collective effort, most of which was done before Reagan took office in 1980. Now to the extent regulatory oversight was dropped, that's correct. And you can be criticized for that or the whole administration can. But here's where I do want to court a little bit of Professor Diggins. He includes in this book, you know, WEDTEC, which was a murky and unpleasant affair. But on the other hand, it was the Reagan Justice Department that prosecuted, I believe, Ivan Boski and Michael Milken. And it was Reagan's, it was the US attorney in New York whose name, I believe, was Giuliani, who was arresting people and frog marching them out in handcuffs from their Wall Street offices. So it's not blankly true across the board that the Reagan administration turned a blind eye to corporate malfeasance. And I'll just sort of register that as a quarrel to be pursued. Now, let's go to the back, son. I haven't been back there on my right, gentlemen there. Hi, I'm Matthew Clocal. I have a question for all the panelists. I've noticed Reagan's reputation has waxed and waned over the last few years, but we're still pretty contemporary to his administration. It's on a high note now. But what about 30, 50, 100 years from now? Do any of you have opinions on how people will feel about Reagan then? All yours. They'll still be watching his movies. Anyone want to take a swing at that one? You know, I mean, I think the paths are now pretty much in place. We're going to argue about his domestic policy because most of the arguments about his domestic policy are still live and current today, whether it's tax cuts, social, judicial. All those quarrels that Reagan opened or accelerated are still going today. And so to the extent that those keep going, I don't see a reason why they're not going to. Then we'll still be having some of the same arguments 20, 30 years from now. The same way we fight about FDR and Woodrow Wilson and Lincoln especially. I would just say that I think from the British point of view, we've always had a relatively stable impression of Reagan as really quite right in the top echelons of president. And one thing nobody's ever going to be able to take away from him. He was in charge when the Cold War came to an end. Now, whether this was due to him or to other forces, I think it will be fought over. But nonetheless, as the person on deck at that time, I think his place in history is relatively secure. Again in the back. Maurice Silverman, American Library for Health. A simple question. Do you think we'll hear more from Mikhail Gorbachev, perhaps in his memoirs on what could it been or where the world would be or rush to be now if he had done more with Reagan and reached more signed agreements and done even more than they were able to do? Well, I'll answer that question by getting back to Stephen because Stephen said in my book, I'm trying to save Reagan from the so-called Reaganites. And I didn't have you in mind, Stephen, but I had a certain vice president who, when the Cold War was coming to an end, he then was a congressman. And he denied it was coming to an end. And he wanted to continue escalating the arms race. And he even declared that Ronald Reagan lost the Cold War. The Reagan stopped listening to this person, but now he's our vice president. And I think the spirit of Reagan was lost when he left office, and Gorbachev when he was deposed, and Margaret Thatcher also. The three great forces that were trying to red a nuclear weapons all were out of the picture. Those who took their place were the ones that were shunned during the Reagan 80s, but now they're in office and as demonic as ever. I guess, what was the question? Sorry, something you said will divert my train of thought. I think the thing about Reagan that is hard to capture in an intellectual history approach as Professor Diggins overwhelmingly does is the man's immense practical judgment. And there's a very revealing comment that Bud McFarland made one time. Bud McFarland was taking the arrows from Schultz and Weinberger, who were feuding forever, because every defense secretary thinks they should be Secretary of State, as well as Secretary of Defense. That goes on in almost every administration. And Porter McFarland wore him out as it did every other national security adviser. And one of Reagan's weaknesses is he wouldn't decisively stop that feuding and tell him to knock it off. Well, one day, Reagan says to McFarland, who's complaining he's at Whit's End with Schultz and Weinberger, is Reagan said, well, I could make Weinberger Secretary of State, but I'd get bad policy. That's an extremely revealing comment. Reagan, obviously, Weinberger was a close friend. Reagan valued his talents, wanted him at the Department of Defense. On the other hand, I think that there's other ways of going at this, too. You can see that Reagan, all along, I think the other element of this was his labor union negotiating background. I think all along, Reagan had what you might call, this doesn't really work, but sort of ying and yang. He understood from his old Hollywood negotiating days. He even said, after dealing with the studios, Gorbachev was easy. I think Reagan's sort of experience as a labor negotiator, and why, by the way, he liked George Schultz a whole lot better than Al Hay, because remember, George Schultz had been a labor negotiator, is he understood that there was a certain need for the evil empire-type rhetoric and standpoint of being tough, and there was also a need for the kind of thing Schultz could bring him to get a deal, and a lot more can be said about all that. But as to your particular question about, the way I interpret your question is, could they have done more than actually, in fact, happen? My own view is that things happen very fast in the late 80s, and it's hard to imagine happening any faster than it did. I'm still stunned, in fact, with the swiftness of it. And so, I don't know, the counterfactual, it's hard to work out, but. Al Millican, Washington independent writer, said, do any of you think that Ronald Reagan, dealing with his religious faith and belief in the supernatural, a little more, did he believe in astrology as much as his wife Nancy, obviously, did, and were those close to him disturbed when it came out about the role astrology was playing in his administration and scheduling? I don't think Reagan subscribed to it. I understand that he postponed a meeting on the base of Nancy's advice, listening to that lady in San Francisco. But, and his religion was very mysterious and almost transcendental. I was struck by what he said to his daughter, Patty, she said, father, if I reach up high enough, can I touch God? He said, you don't have to reach up. God is within you. He's everywhere, all the time. That probably came to him by way of his mother down through the new England transcendentalists. I don't know if that answers your question, but it has little to do with astrology. Yeah, apparently it's in his KGB file in the late 70s that Reagan apparently reads his horoscope every morning. But I don't think he really bought it. I think you have to remember that Nancy, who was what, 65 pounds or whatever, I mean, she lost 10 pounds after he was shot, which is a lot for someone of her size. And I think she really was frantic for every moment, waking moment after that. And I'm inclined to accept the view that, to the extent that this brought her some comfort and reassurance and helped her get through the day, he was willing to accommodate all that. But I doubt very seriously that he put any stock in it. I would just say very briefly that in diplomatic interaction with Reagan, it was not a great sense that religious faith was driving it. It was a great sense that anti-Soviet sense of mission was there, but not really that religious faith was an intrusive factor. One of the remarkable things from that period that has been somewhat forgotten is there were studies right after the 1980 election of this, because the discussion already had begun and concerns had been expressed that Reagan was fusing religion and politics and sort of had this millennial view of how to bring about political action. Public opinion studies at that time suggested in 1980 that Christian evangelicals were no more likely to support Reagan than Carter. Carter was a Southern Baptist and so on. So it was a special case, but it really doesn't look like from that period based on public opinion that the people that elected him were disproportionately or even more than you would think from what was at that time a burgeoning Christian conservative movement.