WINNER.(The Talk of the Town)(why Ronald Reagan was a rather poor President in many ways)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

From 1995, Edmund Morris on Reagan's handwritten farewell to public life

Edmund Morris on the late President's many roles

On January 20, 1981, the day a sixty-nine-year-old ex-movie star, ex-TV host, ex-liberal Democrat, ex-radio commentator, and ex-California governor named Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as the fortieth President of the United States, some eighty-five thousand Soviet soldiers and airmen, armed with tanks and helicopter gunships, were laying waste to Afghanistan--the first time Moscow had invaded a country outside the line established by the furthest advance of the Red Army at the end of the Second World War. In the Soviet Union proper, Leonid Brezhnev's bureaucratic apparatus maintained a corrupt, often cruel, and apparently impregnable stagnation. There was anti-American turmoil in Iran and Central America, among other places. To many people, it appeared that Soviet power was on the march, America in retreat.

Eight years later, as President Reagan prepared to hand over the White House to his Vice-President and designated successor, George H. W. Bush, astonishing things were happening on the other side of the world. Moscow's empire was shrivelling. The Soviet troops had almost all pulled out of Afghanistan, and not just Afghanistan: fifty thousand were going home from Eastern Europe,...

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