As the United States again turns down the path of bigger government, it is important for us to look back. Not in nostalgia, but carefully to the lessons of the last time conservatives were able to roll back the frontiers of the state and challenge the enemies of freedom.
Reagan’s anti-Communism, Mann notes, was “personal and moralistic in nature, driven by his experiences with people he considered sophisticated and devious” — specifically the party members and sympathizers he met as president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s and ’50s. He skipped the funeral of the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1984, telling an adviser that he didn’t want to honor the man.
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At Reykjavik in 1986, he would contemplate doing away with them altogether. Henry Kissinger complained that Reagan “stigmatized nuclear weapons with arguments all but indistinguishable from the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament.”
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Reagan believed that the Soviet economy would eventually collapse of its own inefficiency and imperial overstretch. This analysis put him at odds with Nixon and Kissinger, the C.I.A., the right wing of his party and the Nixonians in his immediate circle, led by Brent Scowcroft, Alexander Haig and Vice President George H. W. Bush. It also led, Mann shows, to a divergence when Gorbachev came to power. “Anyone who reaches the top in the Soviet hierarchy is bound to be a dedicated Communist,” Nixon warned, and Bush was bothered by Reagan’s “sentimentality” about Gorbachev. But Reagan saw a man responding to a predictable economic emergency that Communism was predictably inadequate to handle.
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