21. Reagan, “Address at Liberty State Park,” Jersey City, NJ, September 1, 1980. Speech text located at Reagan Library, “Reagan 1980 Campaign Speeches, September 1980,” vertical files.
22. Credit again goes to the digging of Kiron Skinner and Annelise and Martin Anderson. For full text, see Skinner, Anderson, Anderson, eds., Reagan, In His Own Hand, 470–79. Prior to their discovery, one had to read about the speech in the form of quotes in newspapers and other documents. This is the first full copy made available.
23. The other speech was on August 18, 1980. “The greatest fallacy of the Lenin-Marxist philosophy is that it is the ‘wave of the future,’” wrote Reagan in the speech draft. “Everything about it is as primitive as tribal rule.” Speaking of boat people from Southeast Asia and Cuba, fleeing “the inhumanity of communism,” he stated: “I believe it is our pre-ordained destiny to show all mankind that they, too, can be free without having to leave their native shore.” Text available at Reagan Presidential Library. Reagan-Bush 1980 Campaign Papers, 1979–80, Box 949.
24. Skinner, Anderson, Anderson, eds., Reagan, In His Own Hand, 478.
25. Ibid., 479.
26. Ibid., 471.
27. Ibid., 472.
28. Ibid., 474, 478, 479.
29. Ibid.
30. Kiron Skinner found that nearly a third of the 670 Reagan radio transcripts addressed defense or foreign policy, of which “Reagan’s main concern throughout… is the cold war.” “According to Reagan,” she deduced, “the main goal of the United States’ cold war policy should be to hasten the end of communism….Communism will not survive, he writes.” She listed steps that Reagan felt would (in her words) “hasten the demise of communism.” Skinner says Reagan wrote that (in her words) “a first step toward hastening the demise of Soviet communism was to distinguish the symptoms of the Cold War from its sources.” She lays out the steps on pages 23–25 of Reagan, In His Own Hand.
31. As will be seen in the chapters ahead: The “strategic deterrent” Reagan insisted upon might be any of a number of nuclear missile programs in the 1980s, from the MX to Pershing IIs. The Naval superiority was seen in Reagan seeking his 600-ship Navy, restoring old, mothballed destroyers. Pay for military personnel was jacked up significantly once Reagan became president, sparking much higher morale and making the armed forces a destination rather than a last resort for young people. The science and technology thrust was embodied most saliently in SDI and other technological challenges to the Kremlin. Lastly, intelligence in the 1980s was refocused to search out and exploit Soviet economic vulnerabilities.
32. Reagan said this in Anaheim, California. “Reagan Proposes Arms Approach,” United Press International, Washington Post, April 17, 1977, A5.
33. Quoted by Dugger, On Reagan: The Man & His Presidency, 395. To cite another example, in a May 1979 radio broadcast, Reagan complained: “Our President is telling us that SALT II holds out the promise of peace and an end to any costly arms race. But what does that do to us if we are the only ones racing?” In “Ronald Reagan: Pre-Presidential Papers: Selected Radio Broadcasts, 1975–1979,” October 31, 1978 to October 1979, Box 4, RRL. This is taken from a Reagan radio broadcast titled simply “Miscellaneous I.” For a full transcript, see Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, eds., Reagan, In His Own Hand, 104–5.
34. Reagan was again on cue in a 1980 interview with the Associated Press: “They [the Soviets] know our industrial strength. They know our capacity. The one card that’s been missing in these negotiations has been the possibility of an arms race. Now the Soviets have been racing, but with no competition. No one else is racing. And so I think we’d get a lot farther at the table if they know that as they continue, they’re faced with our industrial capacity and all that we can do.” In James S. Brady, ed., Ronald Reagan: A Man True to His Word (Washington: The National Federation of Republican Women, 1984), 38–39.
Also see speech written by Reagan and delivered in Chicago, August 18, 1980. Text available at Reagan Presidential Library. Reagan-Bush 1980 Campaign Papers, 1979–80, Box 949. Analyzing the late 1970s record with access to more original documents than anyone else has had, Kiron Skinner (in a piece for National Interest) stated that Reagan believed “that Russia’s inefficient economy and inferior technology ultimately could not survive competition with the United States over armaments. He discussed his hypothesis repeatedly, in his daily radio broadcasts and bi-weekly newspaper columns in the late 1970s.”
35. “Reagan: ‘It Isn’t Only Washington…,’” National Journal, March 8, 1980, 392. 36. Lou Cannon, “Arms Boost Seen as Strain on Soviets,” Washington Post, June 19, 1980, A3. Among others, see Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session via Satellite to Republican Campaign Events,” October 14, 1982.
37. Cannon oral-history testimony at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., Leadership in the Reagan Presidency, Pt II: Eleven Intimate Perspectives (Lanham, MD: United Press of America, 1993), 59, 65.
38. Lou Cannon in Hofstra conference (1993) proceedings, 468–69.
39. Letter in Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters, 374–75.
40. Reagan, “Acceptance Speech at Republican National Convention,” July 17, 1980.
41. Thomas C. Reed, At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War (New York: Presidio, 2005), 234–35.
42. Schweizer, Reagan’s War, 215–16.
43. Michael Deaver, A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 76–77.
44. Earl Dunckel in oral-history testimony, April 27, 1982. RRL, Oral History Testimony (OHT), Volume 31, Box 7, 19.
45. John Sears, “A Man Who Knows Himself,” Washington Post, July 13, 1980, E7.
46. George F. Will, “The best do not linger,” op-ed, Washington Post, August 20, 1995.
47. Quoted by Larry Berman in Berman, ed., Looking Back on the Reagan Presidency (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 7. This was not the first time he used such a line. At the December 1987 Washington Summit, a reporter noticed a gaggle of media fawning over Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, while Reagan strangely appeared off alone with no one interested in him. Asked if he felt upstaged by Gorbachev, Reagan replied: “Good Lord, no. I’ve been on the same stage with Errol Flynn.” Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With Area High School Seniors,” Jacksonville, Florida, December 1, 1987.
48. Interview with Ben Elliott, September 20, 2001.
49. Peter W. Rodman, More Precious Than Peace (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 234.
50. Commentator Fred Barnes adds that, “One of the amazing things about Reagan, and one of the traits that is the least commented on, was his amazing ability to just block out the buzz in Washington and in the rest of the world for that matter.” Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., Leadership in the Reagan Presidency: Seven Intimate Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1992), 96.
51. Dinesh D’Souza, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: Free Press, 1997), 236. D’Souza’s work is a solid source on the confidence issue.
52. By Delchamps’ description, “I spent a lot of time in the campaign, with the Reagan people and the people running the campaign.” Interview with Ollie Delchamps, May 7, 2004. During the Reagan presidency, Delchamps became chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Delchamps was not chairman for the entire Reagan presidency. The “U.S. Chamber,” as it is called, is a private entity that is not a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Delchamps said he worked “very closely” with the White House. He frequently had lunch with budget director Jim Miller and had “a lot of connections” to the White House, connections he describes in detail. He recalls that the economy was the overriding issue at the start of the Reagan administration. “The economy had to be improved first so we could rebuild the military that Carter had gutted so bad,” said Delchamps, expressing the conventional thinking. “Then that would put us back into the race against the Soviets. That was the thinking. That was the plan.”