A number of added follow-up volumes featuring more of these transcripts have been released by Skinner and the Andersons, or will be released in future planned volumes. The transcripts are also available at the Reagan Library among four boxes. My vetting of Reagan material initially included nearly all but the voluminous radio broadcasts from 1975–79. Once Skinner found and published the contents of those broadcasts, I found no inconsistency whatsoever with the Reagan record I studied. What she found in those hundreds of broadcasts conforms with what I found in some 10,000-plus pages of Presidential Documents, boxes of Reagan Library documents, and thousands of pages from other sources, from memoirs to secondary sources to interviews to oral histories and more. In sum, what happened in the 1980s—in terms of Reagan’s intent to undermine the USSR and roll back Communism—matches Reagan’s 1975–79 intentions, as clearly expressed in his radio broadcasts from the period. 6. Interview with Ed Meese, March 23, 1998.
26. Genrikh Aleksandrovich (Henry) Trofimenko in Hofstra conference (1993) proceedings, 136.
27. Peter Osnos, “Angola Stirs Questions on Détente Fine Print,” Washington Post, January 16, 1976, A12.
28. Quoted by James Reston, “The Mood of the Capital,” New York Times, February 27, 1976, 31.
29. Reagan commentary delivered on March 23, 1977. His source was a February 11, 1977 Boston Globe article by William Beecher, reprinted in National Review on March 4, 1977. According to the Globe article, in early 1973 British intelligence obtained a speech by Leonid Brezhnev given at a secret meeting of Eastern European Communist rulers in Prague. (An excerpt from the speech was quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on the New York Times op-ed page on June 18, 1977. Tyrrell’s piece also quoted the exact same words from Brezhnev’s 1973 Prague speech.) The Brits rated the speech comparable in importance to Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “Crimes of Stalin” speech. In the handwritten text of his radio commentary, Reagan complained that “the British informed our government of Brezhnev’s speech, but apparently it didn’t lessen our desire for ‘détente.’” Brezhnev told his Communist bloc comrades: “We are achieving with détente what our predecessors have been unable to achieve using the mailed fist. We have been able to accomplish more in a short time with détente than was done for years pursuing a confrontation policy with NATO…. Trust us comrades, for by 1985, as a consequence of what we are now achieving with détente, we will have achieved most of our objectives in Western Europe. We will have consolidated our position. We will have improved our economy.”
And then, Reagan continued to report, Brezhnev “added the bottom line which certainly should have guided our own policy for these intervening years. He said, ‘…a decisive shift in the correlation or forces will be such that come 1985, we will be able to extend our will wherever we need to.’” Brezhnev, said Reagan, “was optimistic about the future of Marxism in France” and said that “Finland was already in the Soviet pocket, trends in Norway were in the right direction, and Denmark was no longer a viable part of Western strength.” Reagan expressed anger at Washington’s nonresponse to the British intelligence report on the speech. According to the Globe, Secretary of State Kissinger had minimized the importance of the report.
The only official reference to it came three years later (1976) in a CIA National Intelligence Estimate. Reagan wrote (in his unedited draft): “Maybe in 1973 there was some excuse for interpreting Brezhnev’s remarks as a form of campaign rhetoric for in house consumption. But now we can look back over the four years since the speech was made and see how consistent with his words Soviet policy has been.” Reagan then chronicled the Soviet advantage: He said that
CHAPTER 6
1. Otto Kreisher, “Desert One,” Air Force Magazine, January 1999, 82, no. 1.
2. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (University of Arkansas Press, 1995).
3. Jim Greeley, “Desert One,” Airman, April 2001; and Kreisher, “Desert One.”
4. Greeley, “Desert One.”
5. Ibid.
6. “Transcript of President’s Interview on Soviet Reply,” The New York Times, January 1, 1980, 4.
7. Reagan wrote this January 1980 letter to a Professor Nikolaev, in Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, eds., Reagan: A Life in Letters, 400.
8. Ibid., 433–34. Reagan wrote this January 1980 letter to a man named Edward Langley.
9. Carter responded with a series of actions: On January 3, 1980, he asked the U.S. Senate to suspend approval of the SALT II treaty he had signed with Brezhnev in Vienna the previous June. The next day he announced a sanctions package highlighted by an American boycott of the coming Olympic Games in Moscow as well as an embargo on U.S. grain exports to Russia. If the Soviets did not withdraw “within the next month,” said Carter, the Olympic boycott would remain. The Soviets did not pull out.
Importantly, this sparked a major shift within the Carter administration, which embarked upon a tougher foreign policy and initiated notable increases in military spending. President Carter now sided with Zbigniew Brzezinski’s more hawkish National Security Council, as opposed to Cy Vance’s dovish State Department, which had previously won over the president.
10. Martin Schram, “Reagan Urges U.S. Mideast Presence,” Washington Post, January 10, 1980, A3.
11. Morris in Wilson, ed., Power and the Presidency (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), 125–26.
12. For an extended analysis of this, see Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan. 13. Reagan, “Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference,” Washington, DC, February 6, 1977, in James C. Roberts, ed., A City Upon a Hilclass="underline" Speeches by Ronald Reagan Before the Conservative Political Action Conference (Washington, DC: The American Studies Center, 1989), 31–33.
14. Ibid., 34.
15. All of Reagan’s first four CPAC speeches in the 1970s featured Shining City imagery. Reagan, “Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference,” Washington, DC, February 6, 1977. Text appears in Roberts, ed., A City Upon a Hill, 31, 37.
16. Kissinger interviewed for CNN documentary, “The Reagan Years: The Great Communicator,” Pt. II of series, CNN, February 2001.
17. Greenfield speaking on CNN documentary, “The Reagan Years.”
18. Reagan, An American Life, 219.
19. For the text of these Reagan remarks, see Peter Hannaford, The Reagans: A Political Portrait (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), 214–18.
20. “Ronnie’s Romp,” Time, March 10, 1980. See Reagan September 9, 1980 speech, “A
CHAPTER 7
1. A complete handwritten text of the inaugural address is on file at the Reagan Library.
2. On this meeting, see Schweizer, Victory, 5–8.
3. Part of this plan was to “intentionally,” “deliberately,” “initially take us into a confrontation with the Soviet Union.” Allen pointed to Reagan’s confidence and perseverance in pursuing such a strategy in the face of criticism all around him from observers like George F. Kennan and Strobe Talbott: “Reagan was confident his strategy would work.” Allen added: “Eventually, though, he put no timeline on it and certainly did not see it as something to be exploited politically….Rather, Reagan thought of the eventual demise of the Soviet Union as a good to be pursued in its own right.” Interview with Richard V. Allen, December 7, 2001. See: Richard V. Allen, “The Man Who Changed the Game Plan,” National Interest, Summer 1996, 60, 62, 65.