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

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, taking their nuclear missiles with them. The Soviet Union was changing in ways that went far, far beyond any of the "thaws" of the past. A rambunctious press wasn't just criticizing "errors" and "excesses"; it was lampooning the very idea of the "vanguard party" and historical materialism itself. "Doctor Zhivago," serialized in literary journals, was being devoured by millions; even more wondrously, so were "Darkness at Noon" and "Animal Farm" and "1984." Within a year, the Berlin Wall would be rubble. A year or two after that, Leningrad would be St. Petersburg again, Boris Yeltsin would be elected President of Russia on an explicitly anti-Communist platform, and the Soviet Union, bloodlessly and without much fanfare, would simply go out of business.

The Cold War had been almost universally assumed to be a permanent condition. Someday, no doubt, it would end, as all things do. But if it ended quickly it would end catastrophically, in a nuclear conflagration that would take both sides down with it, along with untold millions of people; and if it ended slowly its end would come so far in the future as to be hardly worth thinking about. Among foreign-policy elites, American and European alike, no one doubted the imperative for the West to maintain a military machine sufficient to deter open Soviet aggression, conventional or nuclear. There was bitter contention over how much was enough, and about the wisdom or necessity of small wars on the periphery, in places like Vietnam and Central America. But every American President from Truman through Carter believed, or acted as if he believed, that through some combination of firmness and restraint, of patient negotiation and occasional sharp confrontation, time could be bought that would allow the Soviet Union to evolve in such a way as eventually to make the Manichaean East-West struggle obsolete.

The group that came in with Ronald Reagan shared many of these assumptions, but with a different twist. During the commemorations of Reagan's life that followed his death, much was made of his optimism. The Reagan Administration, we were endlessly told, understood that the Soviet system was rotting from within, that it lacked the spiritual, economic, and political vigor that only democracy and free markets can provide, that it was weak and doomed, and that all that was needed to topple it was the finger-flick of some additional arms spending and a bit of ideological boldness on the part of the United States. In truth, however, the Reaganite view of the Cold War--at least, as represented by the likes of the Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, and his deputy Richard Perle--was deeply pessimistic. That view was that the West was losing, militarily and spiritually. The Soviets had more troops, more tanks, and bigger missiles bristling with bigger warheads. And they had more will, bolstered by a militarized society and a belief in the inevitable triumph of Communism, while the West was effeminate ...