Reagan’s Peace

Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by the Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Littman during World War two that a strong and balanced foreign policy is the shield of our Democratic Republic. I’m Eric Edelman. I’m a counselor at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments. A polar contributor, and a nonresident fellow at the Miller Center. And I’m joined by my strategic partner, Elliot Cohen.

The Robert Ozgood professor of Strategy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS. Elliot, how was your Thanksgiving? It was Jolly. We were overrun with kids and

grandchildren and niece and nephew. And there was leftover in Turkey but not too much. It was, you know, not one of these things where you have to worry that eventually you’re gonna get food poisoning because keep on eating the same bird after three weeks. So, all good. We had a great time, and we’re ready to have a great conversation with our mutual friend, William Boden, who’s written a terrific book.

Yep. Well, I ate my way through Thanksgiving and now looking forward to the Christmas party holiday season and an additional ten pounds that I’m gonna put on between now and the New Year before I go on like a starvation diet. But our guest is William Boden, who is The author of a brand new book, the peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the world on the brink, he is the William Power, Chair, and Executive Director, of the William Clement Center at the University of Texas and an associate professor of public policy at the LPGA School at the University of Texas. Welcome, Will.

Thanks. It’s great to be here with both of you.

Well, let me kick it off by kind of just asking you to tell us a little bit about, you know, where you feel this book fits into the historiography of Reagan. There’s been no shortage of books in the last few years about Reagan. A number of them have begun to revise the original views of Reagan, you know, as an amiable dons as Clark Clifford, famously said, I think your book certainly puts paid to to that notion, but tell us where do you find that your

book fits into the historiography? What what does it contribute to our knowledge of ranking? Yeah. Thanks, Eric. And let me first say, as I hope readers we’ll see in the book.

I pay abundant tribute to many great scholars and Reagan authors who have come before me, and I’m certainly building on and benefiting from their from their work. If we had a, you know, a no whole hour just to list those names, I I would. But but you can certainly find them in the in the bibliography. But that said, I do think it’s safe to say my book is the first of its kind. Whether, you know, readers can judge whether very good or very bad in that, but it’s the first book to do a comprehensive assessment of all aspects of Reagan’s foreign policy.

The cold war, of course, is the central theme that’s in subtitle, and we’ll talk about the contributions there, but I spent quite a bit of time in the book on Asia policy, on Middle East policy, on counterterrorism, on international economics and the other trade tensions with Japan. And I wasn’t aware of any other book that had tried to do such a a survey of all aspects of Reagan’s foreign policy. And I did that in part because I just think an interesting part of the story and some of those other policies, especially in Asia, for example, less appreciated parts of his his legacy. But also returning to this cold war theme, I wanna show how those different pieces fit together and oftentimes we’re pulling each other apart too, but how they how they related to each other because even with the cold war being the most important part of the story. You cannot appreciate or even understand what Reagan and his administration were trying to do their cold war policy without understanding all the other challenges that they were that they were dealing with.

Then the second, I think, somewhat new aspect of my book are a couple of the arguments I make specifically about the cold war, particularly Reagan’s effort to pressure the Soviet system to produce a reformist leader, and that that will get into some of what we can talk about about, you know, how much do we wait his contributions and Gorbachev’s contributions to the end of the cold war? And then the other trying to make sense of was his goal to win or to end the Cold War and arguing that it was a negotiated surrender was his was his ultimate goal there. And again, we can talk about what that means and whether it’s persuasive or not. So those would be the but I think our hope are the new contributions of this book to but it’s already a very impressive body of literature and Reagan.

Are there new documentary sources that you found yourself going through and does that related question, were

you surprised by anything that you found? Yeah. I’ll mention a couple of surprises, and this relates to the new documents. In the last two or three years of my archival research process of working on the book, quite a few of the memorandums of conversation, the transcripts of Reagan’s meetings with foreign heads of state were declassified. His government shutdown meetings had already been declassified, you know, those have been out for a few years and are still very interesting, but a lot of his other meetings with allied leaders, with third world leaders, so on were declassified, and those had some very interesting material.

Similarly, a number of documents from vice president George h w Bush were reclassified. I just one off-site is Bush’s memo to Reagan or, you know, dictated memo to Reagan right after Bush had first met Gorbatov in March of eighty five at the Chernyanka funeral. And very interesting scene Bush’s initial impressions of Gorbachev and his recommendations to to to Reagan. That gets to I think that two main surprises for me from the from the archives were one, how deeply involved in the details of policy Reagan would sometimes be. And again, emphasis sometimes.

Right? I mean, other times he is rather detached or read enough cue cards or or less a turn up to details. But on the issues that really mattered to him, especially negotiations with the Soviets, some of the arms control accounts, human rights issues, or even US Taiwan relations at our arms deal our arms builtaiwan His hand is quite literally there extensively in the archives. You know, notes he’s making on memos, line edits he’s doing, things like that. The other interesting finding that really came out is the centrality of his own religious faith to his identity to his cold war policies.

And just how much he saw the cold war as a a religious war and saw the Soviet communism’s atheism as a key vulnerability. And again, a few other scholars had done some some work on that, which I benefited from, but that those themes came out much more extensively in the archives.

You know, just one quick thing on that. And I should say, by the way, one of the things I really liked about the book was that although it’s generally a very positive view of Reagan, you don’t elide the the things that are difficult, the failures, the misunderstandings. I mean, it’s a very honest piece of history, which I think it really congratulate you for. Just to go back on the religion question, you know, it seems to me that he was often portrayed his religious sensibility was portrayed as being somewhat phony. Mhmm.

Or if if it wasn’t phony, he was kinda Hollywood religion, you know, a sort of a muscular, unitarian god, if there is such a thing, and and no more than that. But that’s not doesn’t sound like that’s what you came up with. Yeah.

I was again really struck and this this comes out in the pages of his diary, which as far as we can tell when he was writing, he wasn’t intended for publication. Right? These really were his personal thoughts. Of and some of his personal correspondence. And just a couple examples I’ll give there are when he is lying on the operating table in the spring of nineteen eighty one right after the nation attempt at at GW Hospital.

He’s very near death. And he he prays that God will forgive John Hinkley, the man who tried to assassinate him. And Reagan even says, I feel like since God has forgiven me for my sins, I need to, you know, pray for this this confused young man to to be forgiven. This is not some speech he’s giving on the campaign trail to a religious group, to wear his palladium and sleep. It’s a very personal moment for him.

Or when he is, you know, meeting with Gorbachev in, you know, to their their iconic summit in Moscow in nineteen eighty eight, and Eric, you were serve in there at US embassy Moscow at the time. Reagan spends a lot of time in his personal meetings with Gorbachev trying to persuade Gorbachev to believe in God. Right? I mean, this is It’s a very personal thing for Reagan. And Reagan shares his own personal grief at his son’s atheism.

And, again, this is not the usual fair for super power symmetry. So the the personal commitment of Reagan to his faith is, you know, idiosyncratic as it as it could be. I I think it’s very genuine.

Yeah. The the other example you’re using in the book is the letter he writes to is dying father-in-law, Lloyd Lloyd Davis, which you use actually to prefigure this conversation with Gornbach that takes place some years later in the Moscow Summit. You know, the thing I really liked Will about the book is this is really kind of grand narrative history which is a bit old fashioned, which is probably one of the reasons I like it. Mhmm. And I’m curious whether your experience in government, in the State Department of Policy Planning staff, and then later on the NSC staff contributed to this.

It conveys very well, which is hard for historians to do. The veil of ignorance behind which policymakers operate, you know, sort of we know how the story comes out, you know, because we’re, you know, living here at the end of the story. But they, of course, didn’t know how it was gonna come out. And all of this stuff is coming at them that’s like a hockey goalie. I mean, you know, there’s Taiwan, and then there’s the Middle East is blowing up.

And we’ve got Paul Nitsky negotiating with Kucinski on, you know, INF, etcetera. So there’s this ongoing sort of concatenation of events that keeps hitting people constantly. And you evoke that I think very well by using a narrative rather than doing it thematically saying, okay, here’s a chapter on Reagan’s Latin American policy. Here’s a chapter on, you know, the Soviet. K?

You interweave them all chronologically, so do you really get a sense of how complex the world was that they were facing?

Well,

thanks, Eric. I’m I appreciate you picking up on that. And of course, I know you and Elliott both, you know, very accomplished policy careers yourselves. So you understand this firsthand. And that’s where I well, I don’t wanna claim that my own background and policy gave me a Rosetta Stone of insight that no one else would have.

It certainly did shape my approach to trying to tell the story and, you know, the two things you highlight are really important. First, how for policymakers, the future is so uncertain. And we in hindsight, we may know how it played out, but at the time, it just wasn’t known. And so I tried to write with some amount of existential sympathy for Reagan and his team on asking myself what were what did the world look like to them at the time? What seemed to be the available plausible options?

I’m judging them by that standard rather than only judging them retrospectively. And the other of course is just the simultaneous events. You know, I get that phrase from George Schultz himself as far as we may be able to look back as a matter of analytical clarity and say, alright, well, let’s try to disentangle causality and how the cold war ends and, you know, what were the structural factors within so union and what were the policy factors from the US or government choices. But while Regan and his team were dealing with all those, they’re also dealing with economic challenges and trade war with with Japan and pressures from Congress on, you know, Central America funding and yet another hostage crisis in the Middle East or yet another terrorist attack in the in the Middle East or a sanctions, you know, bill on South Africa that they have to they have to assess all those at once and, you know, wanted to give the reader at least something of a feel for what it’s like to be a policy maker when all those different things are crashing in in your inbox. They all need they all need decisions.

You know,

and that that really is the power of narrative history and I completely agree with Eric, you do a wonderful job of it, and it does it just rings true. I think if you’ve if you’ve seen any of the Hurley burley. Okay. Well well, you know, we’re always gracious and hospitable to our guests on a shield of their public, but we never give them a completely easy time. Nor should you.

You know, nor should we. And so what I would like to do is in the somewhat cowardly move, I would like to I would like to turn it to Eric and say, Eric, you knew these people. You worked with and for a number of them. Could you tell us where you think will got it just right, where you think he underestimated people and where you think he overestimated people. And if you wrestle him to the ground, maybe he’ll change what the paper back looks like.

Look, I think Will has done a marvelous job of doing pen portraits of the major players. I I do have some, you know, minor differences having been having worked in the state department secretary at staff under secretary Hague and having traveled with secretary Hague and then having moved up to secretary Schultz’s personal staff after secretary Hague resigned slash was fired. I mean, Will does a, you know, marvelous job of recounting Hague’s effort first to tell Reagan all the things he wanted Reagan to do to make Reagan stay on his secretary of state only to come back the next day and have president Reagan say thank you very much for your resignation, which Hague did not get written. Look, I think secretary Hague, with my sense, and I will, is that in the administration, he was by far the person with the most foreign policy experience. Secretary Weinberger really had had no major international experience to speak of.

He had been director of OMB. He had been secretary of HHS or HHS which was before I think it was HHS before became HHS. Yeah. Or HEW before game HHS. Richard Allen had been a staffer for, you know, in the kissinger NSC apparatus, but a relatively junior person with a lot not a lot of of great experience.

Judge Clark, the deputy secretary who was clearly put in place to kinda keep an eye on egg — Yeah. — was a neophyte, you know, in international relations. So, Hague, I think, did himself no service as you rightly say. By his oversized personality. But I think he also felt that he was the one person other than vice president Bush who had really some significant international experience.

And so I, you know, I think he was trying in his own way to serve the president. I think from one having been part of the Falkland shuttle or actually was I was in London waiting for him to come back from from Buenos Aires, which he never did. You know? I kept waiting, watching the luggage, being loaded on the plane taken off the plane in BA and waiting for him to arrive in London. I think he did a little bit better job, you know, on the Falklands then then you suggest, I I think he’s a little less pro argentino, who’s definitely conflicted.

Not not kind of in the argentine camp. As Jane Kirkpatrick was, but wanting to try and balance the two sides. I I know you take him to task for saying afterwards that he was for England, for the British all along. But I mean, I think he does a little bit better job in that. You you have a very nice revisionist account of judge Clark, which I I kinda credit up to a point which which is that he did bring some order to a very disorderly national security process.

But, you know, he never really mastered the issues. I mean, he really was, you know, a nephite And in the end of the day, he only had the job for twenty two months before he before he left. So it’s true that, you know, a number of important documents get written, particularly the national security directives that you cite on Russia or Soviet policy and on US strategy. But, you know, he’s not around for, like, six years, like George Schultz. Mhmm.

You know, he’s so I guess I would modulate the, you know, judge Clark as, you know, as statesman. And then on Schultz, I mean, this is gonna seem very churlish on my part since you credit Schultz with, you know, being arguably the greatest secretary of states since Dean Atchison, a a judgment with which I totally agree. Okay. Good. I I have, you know, I wrote appreciation of George.

I was just special assistant full disclosure between nineteen eighty two and eighty four. And, you know, there’s the old saw that no no man is a hero to his valet and, you know, I’m I’m I’m here to say that, you know, George Schultz is the exception to that —

Mhmm. —

that general rule. But but you depict him through the course of having said that, you know, at the outset when you introduce him when your place says, hey, you you depict him as, being, you know, occasionally arrogant of, you know, having a somewhat fragile ego. I guess I would say I thought he had a healthy ego. But not one that, for instance, not one like Hague’s that got confused about who was the president, who was the secretary of state. Schultz says you, yourself acknowledge, never ever deviated from the view that the president made policy and he would execute it.

He would he would give his, you know, best advice to the president. But so those are my kind of, you know, personal just you know, nuances of difference with with your depiction.

So I’m I’m just trying to see whether there’s sweat pouring down those things. You take these things. Will let them have No. Thanks,

Eric. That is really, really helpful. And, you know, these are, you know, some of those relate to, you know, conversations we’ve had for ongoing now, and I I look forward to continuing for for many many years to come and I don’t think we’re we’re that far apart. I will say on on Hague, I am I see him as a very tragic figure. And and I went into the process the the beginning of the research, wanting to like him more, wanting to give him an even, you know, more pause to per per per trail.

So I certainly hope it doesn’t look like adding sort of acts to grind, and I tried to emphasize some of his areas of strength. You’re absolutely right about the tremendous experience he brought. On paper, he was the perfect man for the job. I mean, so that sense, it made sense that Reagan hired him. Certainly, when it came to, you know, his experience and credentials, but the tragic part of him is his hubris or some of his other interpersonal traits or lack thereof just became crippling.

And even more than any ideological differences he he may have had. You know, obviously, the standard narrative on Reagan staff feuding is it’s between the conservatives and the moderates. And that’s partly true. But the only thing the conservatives and moderates agreed on is they all hate to hate. Yeah.

And and so the fact that he managed it Elinate, Mike Deaver, Jim Baker, and Dick Allen, and Ed Meese, and, you know, Anne Weinberg, Ed, and what it that that’s and Reagan himself, that that took some doing. And I just I I couldn’t I couldn’t get past that.

Yeah. No. So just just to to add to what you say, I mean, I actually you know, you described the sort of the final days of Almagnet’s secretary of state on that European swing. And I would I guess I would say two things. Well, one is, Hague, I think deserves more credit for pacifying European concerns about the Reagan administration when it came in, then maybe maybe one gets from reading your account.

Yeah. I I think that was really a very important element because there was a lot of anxiety in Europe about Reagan when he first appeared on the scene.

Yeah.

And and Hague did a lot because he was just coming out of being supreme allied commander and knew it pretty much everybody in Europe. To sort of allay those concerns. And I think his presence in the cabinet helped, you know, allay those concerns. But you’re a hundred percent right about how you know, all the, you know, the troika and the White House, Baker, Deaver, Meese, all had been completely alienated by Hague. By by that trip, I I actually was part of the advance team for the Versailles Summit, part of that trip.

And so I, you know, I did the advance, the pre advance. I was and I was in constant contact with the White House staff. And I watched as literally folks who were working for my dever because all those folks worked for dever, did everything they could to push every button possible. To make Al Hegg self destruct and the the tragedy is he he, you know, he took the bait. But they — Yeah.

— they made it you know, they left me in the position of trying to make sure he could get in the right motorcade. I had to get a French helicopter to take him when they moved from Paris to Versailles. Because they wouldn’t put them in Marine one or two, you know, which was crazy. At one point, the White House lead advance forbade me from talking in French to my French, you know, colleague because I was trying to Anyway, I watched that happen, and so you’re right. I mean, but they they literally were trying to force Hague to to self imolate on that trip, and then he did as soon as he got back to Washington.

So let me

ask you a question on that score because one of the things that struck me well about this is it it did bring back that indictment of Reagan as a terrible manager.

Mhmm.

You

know, just the amount of back biting and also the flame outs. You know, Richard Allen, Casey, Hague, Epic feuds, you know, wine burger versus schultz. Is this first your judgment as both a historian but also as a practitioner? Was this just maybe a, you know, somewhat enhanced version of what always goes on in administrations where there, you know, icepicks sprouting out out of kidneys? Or was this something that was

that did

reflect the weakness of of Reagan’s? That’s a great question, Elliot, and I’m gonna gonna answer to have a number of thoughts. I wanna come back to this one final thing on Hey, Eric. To give credit where credit is due. And I think I say this in the book.

I wanna make sure it’s on the record here. Back to his efforts to pacify the Europeans, the final tragedy of Hague is you know, I think it’s clear that the final precipitating thing on why he quits or gets fired is his difference with Reagan over the pipeline sanctions. And Hague was right about that. You know, and that’s why Reagan then has to lift the pipeline sanctions because it caused so much friction with Europeans. It was gonna jeopardize the INF deployments and everything.

So I just wanted to put put that out there that that is the final tragedy of HAGUS even when he’s correct on an issue as far as what would best serve Reagan That’s also what caused him to lose his job. So — Right. — exactly. Yeah. But, Elliot, to to your question, you know, I I think it’s it’s pieces of everything you’re talking about.

So on the one hand, every White House, every administration has its feuding and has its differences. That just comes to the territory with talented people with healthy egos and where the stakes are very high. So in that sense, the reg administration’s feudine is different in degree but not kind to the previous White House, a different degree in there. I think it is it is worse than most other White House’s, but it’s not like most other White House’s are you know, islands of Pacific calm and and unity as opposed to this. Well, they all have their feuding.

This one is just is just worse. And then second, I think the feuding in this one is a function of a few things. One, this is, again, one of those ironies, is most of these people are very capable. You know, some more capable than others. Right?

But, I mean, you know, Jim Baker, very capable. Cap Weinberger, very capable. George Schultz, very capable. Bill Clark, I think pretty pretty capable. Casey Kirk Patrick, very, very capable.

I all have very strong opinions and they’re gonna have some differences there. And so some of the feuding is just a function of these very skilled capable people with some big differences. A big part of it is Reagan’s aversion to conflict and what I thing are pretty lousy, you know, management skills overall. Like, he doesn’t pay a lot of attention to management and and when he does use. You know, not leasing or in Fort not policing these fields, not enforcing more more more order on the administration.

And then some of it also is just a function of the state. These are impossibly high stakes. Right? It’s quite literally the fate of the world, the fate of humanity, you know, this totalitarian conflict against this, you know, evil tell tell totalitarian foe. So that just brings a pretty combustible combination.

You know, the paradox or the the puzzle is is you and Erica both asked in different ways is How is this administration still able to achieve some pretty significant policy successes amidst that organizational dysfunction? And I think they’ll give two answers to that. One is at times the feuding produces a sort of creative tension. They somewhat silly analogy I’ve used before is with the Rolling Stones, one of my favorite bands. Right?

For most of the, you know, the decades of the Rolling Stones, these guys are always feuding with each other. Right? They are the, you know, feeling to have you go and have these different riffs and breaking up and get that part. And yet, when they all come together, they’re making some pretty awesome music, and it’s partly that creative tension. There’s some of that going on with the Reagan team.

But then there’s also the fact that on the big issues that matter most, where Reagan becomes personally involved, makes the decisions, enforces the decisions, and then makes George Schultz first among equals, really elevates the state department as premisons or Paris, in American National Security Policy, especially in his second term. That’s when I think they drive home to get some of the some of the big big successes. Of course, deal with the Soviets is a big part of that. But frankly, I think the reordering of the US posture in Asia and especially the transformation in US to Japan relations is also a big part of that. Yeah.

They you know, I have to say that was, for me, one of the more interesting parts of a very interesting book, about the extent to which Regan always saw Japan less as a competitor than as potentially very important now. I thought that was really interesting. Okay. So let me now take my chance and see if I can get you to change things for the paper back edition. Okay.

I I may be much under the influence of having recently read Vladislav Zubox collapse — Mhmm. — which is a I think the best account of the end of the Soviet Union, at least that I’ve read. And of course, it’s written from somebody who was on the inside of of Russia. And, you know, his overwhelming argument is,

you know,

it wasn’t Star Wars, it wasn’t Afghanistan. It was Michel Gorbachev was trying to reform a system that was unreformable. Now he wanted to reform it in part because there were signs of sclerosis there. But he’s very clear that this the end did not have to come. At this point, there’s of it, you probably could have lasted for decades if not even conceivably generations.

And, I mean, he I think he goes even a bit further than that suggesting that the Americans made it more difficult. But he really does, I think, reject the thesis that this book argues, which is one, frankly, that I have tended to believe just now I’m in a bit of a state of doubt. That it was the very kind of competitive hard competitive strategy of Reagan administration that finally did in the Soviet Union. So could you speak to that? Yeah.

And first, I I do wanna well, I I will, you know, answer answer that directly and certainly have a number of thoughts and, you know, readers can can read the book and make up their own mind. And I think Vlad’s book tremendous too. Right? I I benefited quite quite quite a bit from reading it. You know, I want to be clear that Gorbachev is an essential part of the story.

Without Gorbachev, I don’t think we see the peaceful end of the cold war, the collapses. So again, the the the way the way that we do. And so even though my account puts more weight on Reagan, and I’ll come to that in in a second. This is not a monocousal argument by any means. The two of them I think are playing essential roles and then as well as structural factors and other things.

But Two big themes, I guess, to to focus on on why I think the American role and the Reagan role in in particular are are a very important part of the story. And I are you certainly maybe even a little more important than than Gorbachev is first, just running the counter factual. Up until Reagan, the Soviet Union was a permanent part of the geopolitical landscape and, you know, no previous American president had liked or wanted to deal partner with the Soviet Union necessarily, but none of them had envisioned the potential collapse of the Soviet system or trying to put bring that sort of pressure to bear on it. All of them had pursued in different ways, different versions of containment and and coexistence. And so just as a social science experiment, first time we then have an American president come along with a very different strategic vision who believes in the vulnerability and brittleness of the Soviet Union well before Gorbachev come come comes along, and then implements policies designed to accelerate those those pressures.

That’s just a new part of the equation. So we have to run a counterfactual, you know, impossible one. What if Carter had had a second term? What if it’s MO four or maybe the h w Bush was the American you know, they’re public in president in the nineteen eighties, and you don’t have that same level of pressure on the on the Soviet system. Sure, there were the the internal rocks, sure, you know, Gorbachev makes them very important and for the Soviet, you know, systems say climateist decisions But those are not taking place in a vacuum.

They are taking place against this context of this accelerated pressure on the military front, economic front, ideological a political, you know, the whole the whole gamut from the United States and from and from Reagan. So that that can’t be disregarded. Then the second and I I do think this is a relatively novel part of my book’s argument. This is very clear from, you know, from the get go, Reagan talking with Dick Pipes, trading memos, you know, codifying this in n s d d seventy five, part of Reagan’s strategy is to pressure the Soviet system to produce a reformist leader. To strengthen these these reformist reformist impulses.

And that does not mean that Reagan dictates the Soviet picked Gorbachev in March of eighty five. He’s still more product of the internal system. But, you know, we can’t ignore if this is a very explicit part of the American strategy. And that that strategy includes specific policy lines designed to pressure the system to to produce a reformer. I also don’t think we see Gorbachev come into power or at least along the same way that he did without that pressure.

And in turn, this is one reason why Reagan recognizes Gorbachev sooner than most others as a legitimate reformer because he’d been looking for reformer, And sometimes if you’re looking for something you find it, that can sometimes be a trap. But in this case, I think it was a real is a real opportunity.

Yeah. I wanna come back to to that at some point in the conversation wheel because at the end of the Reagan presidency, and you point out actually throughout the Reagan presidency. He’s being attacked by conservatives. Yes. Yeah.

For being for being too moderate, for being, you know, having, you know, given allowed, you know, a a bunch of moderates like Jim Baker and Richard Darmen to kinda take over and run things and and certainly an eighty eight at the Moscow summit after the INF Treaty, Charles Crow late Charles Crow, Amber, is attacking him, you know, for going far off. It’s it’s, you know, George will

attacks him. Yeah. That, you know, many times in print. Yeah.

There’s a there’s a lot of that. But but before we get to that, I wanna, you know, get to this question we raised earlier about how does this policy process that so dysfunctional produce this policy success we’ve just been talking about Along the way, there are a couple of policy disasters. Mhmm. I mean, that that the that the bad process at least allowed to happen. You talk about them in a book.

I’d like you to talk about them, you know, with us for the audience. One is Rekivik. I mean, no, I don’t think there’s ever been a summit that was done as much on the fly. As as Rekivik. And it’s it’s a fascinating kind of vignette into how the interaction of policy and and process Ken Edelman, of course, has written a book which is I think about to be turned into a movie.

I think Elliott and I will have Ken on when when that comes out. But the other episode, of course, besides Derikovic, is the Iran contra, which almost brings down a whole Reagan presidency in which, you know, almost gets impeached over. So tell us how do those things come about and how does how does he recover from them? Yeah. Sure.

And

and just one of the one I just wanna put out there for the record, Eric, about what I think is another policy disaster produced in part by this very dysfunctional process. Is, of course, the marine deployment in Beirut in in nineteen eighty three and then the, you know, the tragic deaths of two forty one Marines. Again, there were not very many good options there, but in some ways what Regan said along was the the worst combination of putting them there, but without the necessary authorities and and resources to so either either go hard or go home, essentially. He did he did neither. But Rekivik Yeah.

You know, don’t try this at home. Right? This is not the normal way to do some of the tree with, you know, months of pre negotiations and elaborate choreography and planning. At the same time and and the initial outcome seems to be disastrous. No agreement whatsoever, and, you know, Reagan and Gorbachev both walk out.

We, you know, with you know, ashen faced, you know, should rate and disappointment. That said, reading the transcripts of their their convicts, It’s also pure Reagan. This is, I think, a very good case for why Reagan himself matters as president more than you know, as advisors or being a product of of the staff system or anything. Because none of that is there. It is just Kim negotiating with Gorbachev making it up as they as they go along.

And that’s also where you see his tenacity in holding on to SDI, his vision of a nuclear, nuclear free world, his continued commitment on human rights. Right? He continues to to bring those up. And so, Rekivik is obviously short term disappointment, but I do think we see in at the seeds of, you know, some of the bigger successes, such as the INF treaty and central collapse, though, you know, Iran contra. I I hope it’s very clear in the book that I’m extremely critical of Reagan and his team on that.

So in that sense, it is not at all a revisionist case said, oh, there was nothing, you know, nothing to see here or it was it would that would be fine. What I did try to do with Ron Contreras is at least try to explain for readers how it came about. Like, how do we get ourselves to the minds of these, you know, different people who are the architects of this this disastrous scandal and and then provide some some context for how how how Reagan recovers from it. And I do say this is my one more benign revisionist take is it’s the only scandal I’m aware of in presidential history, which is done out of arguably pure policy motives. There’s no personal you know, there’s no effort to enrichment.

There’s no effort to hijack your opponent’s campaign. This is not a sex scandal. Some of the normal venal motives as presidential scandals that you find in Watergate or Clinton stuff or Trump and Zelensky. Those aren’t there. The motives are, let’s get hostage is released.

That’s a good motive. Let’s see if we can improve relations with the one of our main adversaries in the Middle East Iran. Terrible idea, but it’s at least it’s done with a good motive. And let’s try to support anti communist fighters in in Nicaragua. I think that’s a good motive.

I think communism was worth fighting against. The problem is, of course, they make catastrophically bad policy decisions and arguably break the laws along the way. And a lot of this comes as you pointed out because you know, Don Regan is a weak chief of staff at the time. But McFarlane and John Pointe next to the two national security advisers are not properly suited for those roles. Regan is sometimes in the dark on some of this.

And then when he is involved, such as authorizing the trading arms or hostages, and Ronnie is making really bad decisions. He’s ignoring strong objections from Schultz and Weinberger. Just like the only thing they do agree on is don’t do this, mister president. This is a really bad, really bad idea. And so I certainly don’t try to exonerate any of them in in in my telling of it.

But but also point out that because Reagan finally comes clean. Finally, tell us the truth. Finally, it it apologizes to the American people. And then turns the corner and, you know, has some regains the initiative in the cold war with, you know, the brandenburg gate speech and so on and so forth. He’s able to survive the scandal.

But as you know, having lived through it, and I remember watching on TV when I was in, you know, high school at the time, it very nearly broke that broke that presence. Which would have been a disaster. You know, you you

I mean, you cover a number of other lesser struggles, but, for example, the Bitberg episode, which was pretty pretty pretty simple. If I could change the topic a little bit, you know, again, I think there was a very unfair character of Reagan’s dumb Mhmm. And I think everything we now know suggest that he was not himself into intellectual, but he had really thought through the big ideas in the course of his career before becoming president. But the other thing that has really struck me reading your book is the extent to which

you

you have a whole series of intellectuals, whether it’s Jane Kirkpatrick, or, you know, Richard Price, And this is just in the foreign policy space. You also have them in the economic space and elsewhere, Irving Cristal, who are engaged in various ways in the formulation of policy. So could you just talk a little bit about Reagan and ideas or and Reagan and the intellectual because I think that’s really a fascinating angle.

Thanks. So I’m

I’m glad you picked up on that because it it was something that was experienced seem to me as an important part of the story. And I guess in a nutshell, I’ll put it this way. Reagan is certainly not an intellectual himself. They wouldn’t pretend to be otherwise. I don’t want to make, you know, such a such a radical case there.

But he is a man of ideas. He’s a man who values ideas. And he’s a man who saw he’s a president who saw the cold war as primarily a battle of ideas. And because he framed it that way, I think he in turn attracted a remarkable array of conservative intellectuals. You mentioned a a number of them, you know, a number of others we could we could cite as well, even on the African policy, I checked Crocker.

Guests in Seger on Asia policy, you know, Paul Wolfowitz on everything Paul was working on. Right? And at at one point, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but, like, in for his nineteen eighty foreign policy advisory team on his campaign, of the sixty people that signed on, something like forty eight of them have PhDs. And and significant number of those were tenured professors at Georgetown, Harvard, Stanford. Right?

So it’s like he attracted every you know, conservative in academia or adjacent to to academia. And I think that’s no accent because they saw in him as someone who valued ideas seize ideas as one of the main drivers of America’s role in the world and one of the main dividing lines between the free world and the Soviet block. And so It’s a it’s a very important, I think, underappreciated part of the story. Even while you’re dealing with the president who is just has a bachelor’s degree from Eureka College. So You know, I

I I I I do wonder whether we would ever be likely to be something like that again, at least on the Republican side of the house. I

at the moment, it doesn’t feel like it. Yeah. It it it certainly doesn’t. And I, you know, obviously, I wrote this book as a pure his three. I don’t have a complete chapter of ten lessons for today or anything, but I do hope that readers will see in it some

relevant

insights for today or maybe a picture of a a better time in conservative foreign policy, which is is worthy of revisiting. Amen to

that. So, well,

you know, George Schultz once told me, I’m curious your reaction to this. And this is in connection with Regan’s nuclear abolitionism, which you have adverted to in this conversation a couple of times, and which our friend Paul Leto has written about. You’re not the first to read about that, but you do cover it. George told me one time he thought that Ronald Reagan was able to conceive of a world without nuclear weapons because he had Because he was about a decade older than everybody else in his administration, he had come to political maturity before the advent of nuclear weapons Well, almost everybody else, with the possible exception of Paul Knitsa in his administration, had come to political maturity at the end of World War two or as part of the World War two generation and and viewed the World War two settlement as kind of this positive. Do you buy that?

Yeah. I think there’s something to that. I mean, I’m

I I mentioned a few times in different ways in the book, but didn’t fully explore it how Reagan is, you know, very much a product of his is formative years, especially in the thirties and early forties and, you know, the the depression, which is why he’s so opposed to protectionism and so opposed to i isolationism. But also remembering what a a pre nuclear world was was like. And as you I’m glad you mentioned Palletto, his book is outstanding on that. And he points out that the first known anti nuclear statement we have from Reagan comes from, I think, nineteen forty five, right, after Seuss of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And so So Regan’s anti nuclear stance runs runs very deep.

And I think Schultz that was one of the many reasons why Schultz paired with him so well on that Most of the rest of Reagan’s national security team, Poindexter, especially Weinberg, especially don’t share his abolitionism and are are are horrified by it. And, Eric, I do wanna come back to one or two things you said earlier on on Schultz just to sort of clarify, because I think you and I told him very, you know, very high very high esteem. I will say that I hold Schultz in such high esteem that I started to worry I would be too rosy in my portrayal of him in the book, and I selfconsciously made myself put in a few negative things. This is this is true. I mean, because I didn’t want it to be almost this, you know, cartoonishly positive depiction of him.

So But I will say this, where I will fault Schultz. And I’d love to hear your your comeback on this, if you think I’m missing something. I don’t see any evidence that he built close collaborative ties with any of his peers in the cabinet. Now, of course, he built close ties with the person who mattered most, the with the president himself. Right?

And that’s all that matters at the end of the day. But there I think there’s something to that about why was he not able to build close ties to at least, you know, one or two other cabinet members or partners that crossed the range of him. He was just said, at odds with so so so many of them.

Yeah. That’s an interesting point. You know, I remember when he first came on and someone someone asked him, might have been someone in the press. You know, would he be able to get along with Cap Weinberger better than Al Hei had? And he said, oh, yeah.

I I’ll get along fine with Cap. You know, he used to work for me. At OMV and then later at Bechtel, I think. Yeah. So, you know, I think he may have overestimated the degree to which he would be able to manage that relationship, which was a very difficult one, really difficult.

It’s hard, I think, to fault him for not developing a close relationship with any of the national security advisers because there was, like, what, seven of them during the — Yeah. — Reagan?

Six. Yep. The sixth

of them during the Reagan presidency. So then, you know, they Yeah. They were kind of a rotating cast. And his relationship with Jim Baker isn’t great. Yeah.

As, you know, treasury secretary. He was actually much the one cabinet member to whom he was genuinely close with Nick Brady. And and he did have a very close relationship with Brady Lesso with Baker. And Baker, I think when he comes in as secretary kinda makes it clear. That he’s gonna be the anti George Schultz.

I remember, you know, a baker thing. I’m not going to New York and having a dentist schedule at the, you know, UN general assembly the way George Schultz did. So he, you know, and he very pointedly changes the model of management of the state department. I think for the worse, mean George Schultz’s got the most out of the foreign service, I think, that any secretary of state, he understood the deficiencies of the foreign service. He understood it’s kinda a strategic institution, but that it had enormous subject matter expertise that he and the president could make use of, and so he empowers foreign service officers and political appointees both.

At the assistant secretary level, you mentioned some of them Paul Wolfowitz, Gaston Seger, Chad Crock record go out and do stuff, and they do a bunch of stuff. And baker comes in with a completely different model, which is to concentrate power on the seventh floor with himself and a group of undersecretaries and undersecretary equivalence and run the whole world from up there. And they do a reasonable job of it in the first year and a half of the Bush administration until they discover that they haven’t been paying attention to Sudan Hussein who is about to invade, you know, Kuwait. So — Yeah. — you know, they’re different, you know, strengths and weaknesses to different models for managing the state department, but it’s an interesting question you raised about George’s lateral relationships.

I will tell you he was revered by people who worked for him in the state department. So so yeah. Just a quick

thought on that is when I worked at the state, you know, twenty years ago and would travel, you know, darn different embassies and talked to, you know, the lung the lung serving the FSOs there. I’d always ask him, who’s the best secretary you ever served there? And they all said Schultz. And then often I will say, I’m a Democrat, but it was George Schultz. Yeah.

The only thing that

would qualify that for me is I remember asking the same question. A bunch of episodes and they said Colin Powell, you know, which made me question their judgment. But let me ask as a since we’re coming on time, big question which you end with, which is where does he belong in the pantheon of American presidents in terms of foreign policy. And and this was really

the

only point where I said, I don’t think I agree with Will. You you compared them to FDR. And actually in some ways favorably. And I that I just I I mean, I I don’t underestimate the challenges that Reagan faced, but he was dealing with a big prosperous country even with the initial economic difficulties that were having with a a failing Soviet union with a very weak China with a Europe, which was fractions, but was not really gonna throw over American. Leadership with Japan as an emerging ally.

I mean, obviously, it was very, very difficult. It’s always very difficult. But when you look at the hand that he was dealt as opposed to the hand that FDR was dealt or Truman was dealt, I I just think you have to put him in the rank below that. So could you tell me if I’m wrong? You’re partially wrong.

So

I will I will say the two greatest foreign policy presidents of twenty century FDR and Reagan. Okay? And I’m a big fan of Truman, but I would put Reagan Reagan below there. First of all, I think you’re right. The FDR and Harrods say more difficult at hand and kind of winning World War two is obviously the ultimate challenge there.

On the

other hand, Reagan does inherit a pretty difficult hand too, not as difficult as FDR difficult. And Reagan wins to Cold War peacefully. And again, I’m not faulting FDR for World War two breaking out or or anything like Right? There’s it’s much much more much more going on there. But I think we have to look at not just the successful policy outcomes, FDR, you know, victory for the allies in World War two, Reagan, peaceful end of the cold war.

But also, Regan’s able to do that at much less of a cost than FTR. And in turn, I think we see positives like the global advance of democracy even more under Reagan than we do say under under under FDR. So as as far as a global legacy, I think the Reagan one holds up pretty well. So it’ll be an endless debate, I’m sure. Well, we will

continue this. I’ll just say this really is truly great narrative, his and I wanna congratulate on it. You want it? Eric, before bringing this home, could you just tell Will that I’m

right? I think FDR was greater than than Reagan. But I think in the second half of the twentieth century, Regan stands out as the most most accomplished president, and I put him ahead of Eisenhower, which a lot of historians, I think, would probably, you know, quibble with, but to me, it’s not even close. Our guest has been will in boat and the author of the peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. It’s a great read.

It really will it just it it reads like a dream. You’re great to have come on and spent time with us. And, obviously, there’s so much more we could talk about. We’re gonna have to, I’m sure, bring you back in the future to continue some of these discussions and and maybe some of the great work you’re doing down in UT on the Texas National Security Review and other things. Here

here. Well, thanks so much guys. It’s been a real pleasure.