--------------------------------
H-Diplo Roundtable Review
www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables
Volume XI, No. 5 (2009)
6 November 2009
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Copyright (c) 2009 H-Net:  Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
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Roundtable Editors:  Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse
Roundtable Web/Production Editor:  George Fujii
Assistant Web/Production Editor:  John Vurpillat
Introduction by Thomas Maddux
Reviewers:  Archie Brown, Beth A. Fischer, Kyle Longley, Joseph M.
Siracusa

--------------------------------
James Mann.  The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the
Cold War.  Viking Press, 2009.  416 pp.  ISBN:  978-0670020546
(hardcover, $27.95).

A fully-formatted PDF version of this roundtable is available at
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XI-5.pdf
--------------------------------

Contents

Introduction by Thomas Maddux, California State University, Northridge
Review by Archie Brown, University of Oxford
Review by Beth A. Fischer, University of Toronto
Review by Kyle Longley, Arizona State University
Review by Joseph M. Siracusa, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Response by James Mann, Johns Hopkins University School of International
Studies (SAIS)

--------------------------------

Introduction by Thomas Maddux, California State University, Northridge

James Mann's The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the
Cold War makes an important contribution to studies that focus on the
end of the Cold War and the contribution of Ronald Reagan and Michael
Gorbachev to this result.  Through the extensive use of interviews,
memoirs, and secondary sources, Mann's study reinforces the movement
away from an initial dichotomy in which conservatives depicted Reagan as
having developed the strategy to win the Cold War versus liberals who
gave most of the credit to Gorbachev's decision to end the Cold War as
part of his ultimately unsuccessful campaign to reform the Soviet
Union.1  Mann's assessment of Reagan reinforces an increasing scholarly
emphasis on the contributions that both leaders made to bringing the
Cold War to a relatively non-violent conclusion.  The contributions are
not the same, and scholars disagree to some extent, in their assessments
of both leaders' strategy and tactics.2

Mann explores the relationship between Reagan's rhetoric and his actual
policies  with respect to the Soviet Union by looking at four main
topics:  Reagan's relationship with Richard Nixon before and during
Reagan's administration; Reagan's involvement with the author Suzanne
Massie who became an informal adviser on the Soviet Union; the origins
of Reagan's 1987 speech in front of the Berlin Wall in which he urged
Gorbachev to "tear down that wall"; and Reagan's summit conferences with
Gorbachev, especially the last two in Washington and Moscow.

The reviewers are impressed with Mann's study and generally endorse his
central thesis on Reagan's contributions to the end of the Cold War.
They do raise some issues and Mann's responds to their concerns:

1.) Mann's central thesis is that in the last three years of his
administration Reagan broke with both conservatives and Republican
foreign policy leaders to negotiate with Gorbachev, recognizing that he
was different from previous Soviet leaders, and thereby provided
Gorbachev with time and space to proceed with his reforms and end the
Cold War.  As Mann concludes, "unquestionably, Gorbachev played the
leading role in bringing the four-decade-old conflict to a close.  Yet
Reagan, overcoming considerable opposition of his own at home, played a
crucial role by buttressing Gorbachev's political position.  It was in
this sense that Ronald Reagan helped ensure the Cold War ended in the
tranquil fashion that it did.  Reagan didn't win the Cold War; Gorbachev
abandoned it.  By recognizing Gorbachev's significance, when many others
in the United States did not, Reagan helped create the climate in which
the Cold War could end." (346) The reviewers don't question this thesis.
Instead, they suggest that it restores some of the contemporary context
that has been lost or misused in continuing political debates about
Reagan and bolsters a number of studies, including those by the
reviewers that point in this direction.

2.) Mann's assessments of Reagan's relationship with Nixon in Part I and
Massie in Part II receive a mixed reaction from the reviewers.   The
reviewers do not question the attention devoted to the Nixon-Reagan
relationship or Mann's assessment of how the relationship evolved from
one in which Nixon advanced détente against Governor Reagan's increasing
criticism to one in which President Reagan implemented a real détente
with Gorbachev against the reservations advanced by Nixon in the media,
correspondence, and White House meetings.  Mann uses the relationship to
foreshadow the larger conservative criticism of Reagan's diplomacy on
arms control after 1985.  Kyle Longley questions the attention devoted
to Massie at the expense of more coverage of officials such as George
Schultz and Reagan's chief of staff Howard Baker.  Beth Fischer and
Archie Brown note more significance in Massie's contribution in
influencing Reagan's shift in his view on the Soviet Union and the
Russian people, although Brown would have welcomed more attention to
Ambassador Jack Matlock's influence on Reagan.

3.) The reviewers also have reservations about the attention Mann gives
to Reagan's Berlin speech in 1987.  Mann's detailed analysis covers
everything from  background on the Berlin Wall to Reagan's campaign
visit to West Berlin in 1978, from the internal battle between the White
House speech writers and conservative advisers versus the State
Department and National Security advisers over whether or not Reagan
should ask Gorbachev to "tear down the wall" to discussions with Moscow
concerning aspects of the speech.  Mann's treatment definitely supplants
previous evaluations and he frames this case study with the larger
debate on Reagan's strategy toward the Soviet Union and whether or not
the speech was a "triumphal moment" in the victory strategy or "mere
showmanship, without substance" in the "stumbling along" strategy.
(117-118)  Brown suggests that Mann "devotes far more space to the
minutiae of the writing of Reagan's 'Tear down that wall' Berlin speech
than the speech was worth,"  although he gives Mann credit for noting
the lack of any immediate impact of the speech except with Reagan's
Republican and conservative supporters. (3)  Mann, however, does find
significance in the speech in what it reveals about Reagan's willingness
to disagree with Secretary Shultz and NSC advisers and as a reflection
of Reagan's hope that Gorbachev might follow through on his rhetoric
about reform at home and abroad.  Furthermore, Mann highlights the
larger point on Reagan that he probably didn't think through all the
calculations attributed to him.  Reagan "didn't talk about underlying
strategy or tactics.  The world saw only the simple façade:  catching
Reagan in some Machiavellian maneuver would have been akin to catching
him dyeing his hair.... It may well be that Reagan based his decisions
largely on instinct.  He may never have explained even to himself the
considerations that lay behind changes in policy, his reasons for
sometimes standing on principle and at other times setting those
principles aside in favor of diplomacy or negotiation."  (218-219)

4.) In the fourth section on summit diplomacy, Mann skips Geneva in 1985
and devotes little attention to Reykjavik before moving on to Washington
and Moscow with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (I.N.F.) as
the major focus.  Reykjavik, however, might have added further support
for Mann's insights on Reagan's approach of "winging it" with respect to
strategy and tactics as Reagan went all in on giving up missiles and
nuclear weapons and held back only on the right to test a future
strategic defense weapon rather than confining it to the laboratory.
This approach, moreover, intensified his problems in persuading his
advisers, the Pentagon, his allies, and especially Republican leaders,
to agree to an I.N.F. Treaty with Gorbachev.  Joseph Siracusa and Brown
suggest that Mann covers the many-sided negotiations and political
maneuvering very well, although Brown notes that Mann has some problems
on the Soviet side with respect to Gorbachev's domestic policies.  In
his evaluation of the summits, the I.N.F. Treaty, and the Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty (START) negotiations that Reagan backed away from as he
focused on winning Senate ratification of the I.N.F. Treaty and, as a
77-year-old president, relied more and more on his senior advisers to
keep the ship moving forward, Mann highlights the conflict Reagan faced
with Republicans and conservatives, from Nixon and Henry Kissinger to
Senators Dan Quayle and Jessie Helms, over approval of the INF treaty
and, in a larger sense, his acceptance of an end to the Cold War with
Gorbachev.  Since Reagan always viewed the Cold War as an ideological
battle and lacked any significant training in international relations
and geo-politics, it was far easier for him to accept the end of the
"evil empire" and Gorbachev's decisions to end the conflict than it was
for Nixon and Kissinger who couldn't believe that an empire like the
Soviet Union would give it up, scrap its Marxist-Leninist ideology, and
withdraw back to Russia.  States just didn't behave like that according
to their training and experience and they refused to trust Gorbachev or
believe that the "Great Game" of the Cold War was over.

5.) Does Mann enhance understanding of Reagan's objectives and
leadership with his case studies?  Fisher and Brown suggest that Mann is
successful; Siracusa points to the difficulties that every author faces
in finding Reagan's views and identifying his contributions.  "Finding
'out what was uniquely Reagan during the period' may have been a bridge
too far," as "we may never know exactly what he was thinking or what his
motives were" and we will have to evaluate him primarily on his actions.
(2)  Mann and the reviewers agree that Reagan left little evidence for
historians beyond his speeches and letters as his diary and memoirs are
relatively unrevealing.  Longley suggests that Mann would be better
served by giving more consideration to the context around the summit
negotiations, suggesting that the Iran-Contra affair prompted Reagan and
his advisers to search for other issues to divert attention from it.
Reagan clearly was somewhat befuddled, at least in public, about what he
approved, what he knew, and welcomed help from all directions. (3) Mann
points out in his response that Reagan shifted toward the Soviet Union
long before Iran-Contra exploded on the Washington scene and had already
bet all of his chips at Reykjavik. (2-3) Longley also raises the
question as to whether Reagan "merely reflected" the views of the
advisers around him and when they changed, he changed. (3) Reagan was
eager to talk with a Soviet leader whereas he maintained a fairly hard
line around the globe with other communist and socialist countries from
Vietnam to Africa to Cuba and Central America and never pulled back the
Reagan Doctrine of providing aid to "freedom fighters" against
communism.  Why resist, as Longley notes, negotiations in Central
America focused on Nicaragua led by Oscar Arias?  Republican leaders
like George W. Bush, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger were more willing
than Reagan to participate in geo-political based negotiations despite
ideological issues.  This example could support Mann's view of Reagan as
following his own drummer.


Participants:

James Mann is an author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University School
of International Studies (SAIS). He is a former Washington correspondent
and Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. His previous books
have included Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
(New York: Viking, 2004) and three books about Sino-American relations:
Beijing Jeep (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1989), About Face: A History
of America's Curious Relationship With China, From Nixon to Clinton (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) and The China Fantasy (New York: Viking,
2007). He is currently working on a book about American foreign policy
in recent Democratic administrations.

Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of
Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College within that
university. He taught there for thirty-four years after seven years as a
member of the Department of Politics at Glasgow University. Brown's
publications include The Gorbachev Factor (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika
in Perspective (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
and, most recently, The Rise and Fall of Communism (New York: Ecco;
London: Bodley Head; and Toronto: Doubleday, 2009). He has written
extensively on the end of the Cold War (in, for example, Cold War
History, The Journal of Cold War Studies, and The Cambridge History of
the Cold War). He is currently embarking on a study of political
leadership.

Beth A. Fischer is a senior lecturer in the Political Science Department
at the University of Toronto where she specializes in international
security and U.S. foreign policy. She is the author of The Reagan
Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1997) and Triumph?: The Reagan Legacy and
American Politics Today (forthcoming). She has written numerous articles
and book chapters about the ending of the Cold War, as well publications
on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the international campaign to ban
landmines, foreign policy making, and other security-related issues.
Fischer was a Senior Nobel Fellow in 2002, as well as the editor of
International Journal, Canada's leading journal on international
affairs.

Kyle Longley is the Snell Family Dean's Distinguished Professor in the
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies and the
School of Government, Politics, and Global Studies at Arizona State
University.  He is the author of The Sparrow and the Hawk:  Costa Rica
and the United States during the Rise of José Figueres (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press,1997), winner of A.B. Thomas Prize for
outstanding book by the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies,
In the Eagle's Shadow:  The United States and Latin America (Wheeling:
Harlan Davidson Press, 2002), Senator Albert Gore, Sr.:  Tennessee
Maverick (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,2004), editor
and contributor to Deconstructing Reagan:  Conservative Mythology and
America's Fortieth President (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2006), and Grunts:
The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2008).
Currently, he is completing this semester, The Houses of the Purple
Hearts:  The Morenci Nine, Small Town America, and the Vietnam War, and
starting a book on the foreign policy challenges of the United States in
the twenty-first century with Admiral Jim Stavridis, Supreme Allied
Commander, Europe.

Joseph M. Siracusa is Professor of Human Security and International
Diplomacy in Global Studies in the School of Global Studies, Social
Science and Planning, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
where he is a specialist in presidential politics and global security. A
native of Chicago and long-time resident of Australia, he studied at the
University of Denver and the University of Vienna and received his PhD
from the University of Colorado (Boulder). He is internationally known
for his writings on nuclear history, American diplomacy, and
presidential politics. Professor Siracusa is also a frequent political
affairs commentator in the Australian media, including ABC Radio
National. He has worked at Merrill Lynch, in Boston, the University of
Queensland, in Brisbane, and for three years served as senior visiting
fellow in the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance,
Griffith University. Among his numerous books are A History of United
States Foreign Policy (with Julius W. Pratt and Vincent De Santis)
(Englewood: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Depression to Cold War: A History of
America from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan (with David G. Coleman)
(Westport: Praeger,2002); Presidential Profiles: The Kennedy Years (New
York: Facts on File, 2004); Real-World Nuclear Deterrence: The Making of
International Strategy (with David G. Coleman) (Santa Barbara: Greenwood
Press, 2006); Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction; Reagan, Bush,
Gorbachev: Revisiting the End of the Cold War (with Norman A. Graebner
and Richard Dean Burns) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and
Globalization & Human Security (with Paul Battersby) (New York: Rowan
and Littlefield, 2008).

Notes

            1 For the conservative victory assessment, see Peter
Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That
Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1994) and Paul Kengor, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall
of Communism (New York: Regan Books, 2006).  For accounts that attribute
more credit to Gorbachev than Reagan, see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great
Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War
(Washington: Brookings Institution, 1994) and Frances FitzGerald, Way
Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

            2 For a range of perspectives, see the H-Diplo roundtables
at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/ on Melvyn P. Leffler, For
the Soul of Mankind:  The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold
War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed
Empire:  The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev
(Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007); John Paul Diggins, Ronald Reagan:  Fate,
Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); and
Norman A. Graebner, Richard Dean Burns, and Joseph M. Siracusa, Reagan,
Bush, and Gorbachev:  Revisiting the End of the Cold War (Westport:
Praeger Security International, 2008).


--------------------------------

Review by Archie Brown, University of Oxford

The argument that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by increasing US
military expenditure, launching the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),
and employing stern rhetoric (his 1983 description of the Soviet Union
as an 'evil empire' and his injunction of June 1987 in Berlin, 'Mr
Gorbachev, tear down this wall') has many adherents. James Mann does a
good job of showing that these are serious misconceptions. He is,
however, far from dismissing Reagan's role in the ending of the Cold
War. While not a starry-eyed admirer - he acknowledges the late
president's intellectual shortcomings and ignorance of the world beyond
America's shores - he shows that Reagan's political antennae were well
attuned to change in Moscow. His understanding that real and substantive
change was occurring in the Soviet Union, after Mikhail Gorbachev had
assumed its leadership, was far in advance of that of many leading
members of the Washington political and foreign policy establishment.

Henry Kissinger, for example, hopelessly underestimated the significance
of the Soviet perestroika and misjudged Gorbachev's intentions. Mann
shows how time and again Kissinger and former President Richard Nixon,
who saw themselves as realists, got things wrong. Even after Gorbachev's
successful visit to Washington in December 1987, when the Soviet leader
made a good impression on the American public, Mann notes that Kissinger
'refused to take seriously the idea that Gorbachev might be trying to
wind down the Cold War'. (275) Reagan's growing rapport with Gorbachev,
his willingness to reach concrete agreements with him - and especially
the goal he shared with him of attempting to rid the world of nuclear
weapons - alarmed not only many conservative columnists but also members
of his own administration, among them Cap Weinberger, Kenneth Adelman
and Richard Perle. Mann's well-researched study demonstrates that the
Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) hardly
distinguished themselves by their perception and foresight during the
second half of the 1980s. The State Department under George Shultz was
far quicker to grasp the opportunity of putting an end to the Cold War,
recognising that Gorbachev was at least as interested in terminating it
as they were.

Reagan's role as a 'peacemonger' rather than warmonger is not entirely a
new insight. It has already been stressed by Shultz in his memoirs and
by Jack Matlock, who moved from being the Soviet expert on the National
Security Council to heading the American Embassy in Moscow from 1987
until 1991.1 Matlock, in particular, has already shown that Reagan, even
in his first term, was willing to negotiate with Soviet leaders if only
he could find a negotiating partner. As Reagan complained, though,
'These guys keep dying on me'. Furthermore, in the final analysis Reagan
preferred the judgement of Shultz to the disbelief of the Defense
Department and the dogma of his conservative Republican power base. In
his second term, in particular, he could afford to ignore the advice of
the latter.

That much is not especially novel. However, Mann devotes more attention
to the process by which Reagan came to a different view of the Soviet
Union and of Russians as people than any previous author. In particular,
while he is by no means the first to note that the writer Suzanne Massie
had an influence on Reagan's perceptions of Russia, Mann more fully than
anyone hitherto documents the extent of her contact with him and its
significance. Although Massie eventually overstepped the mark, even
proposing herself as American Ambassador to Moscow at the time when
Matlock was appointed (105), her informal contact with the President
helped make him more empathetic with the average Soviet citizen and
enhanced his desire to talk with his Russian counterpart. Although the
administration distrusted Massie's one-to-one meetings with Reagan and
did their best to discourage them, her amateur diplomacy did far more
good than harm. No doubt there were hundreds of Americans who knew more
about Russia than she did, but Massie was able to hit the right
wavelength for engaging with the President and she strengthened his
resolve to seek a peaceful resolution of the East-West conflict.

In noting that there was no great love lost between Massie and Matlock,
and stressing the role of the former, Mann does not, perhaps, give as
much recognition as he might to the highly positive role of Ambassador
Matlock. Both in the National Security Council and, still more, when he
became America's man in Moscow, Matlock provided a steady stream of good
advice to the administration. As the political landscape of the Soviet
Union was transformed before his eyes between 1987 and 1991, he was the
right person in the right place at the right time. Massie's influence
was significant in the earlier years of Reagan's presidency when she
became a surprising counterweight to the influential voices within the
administration who took the view that the less engagement with the
Soviet Union the better. From 1987 onwards the professional diplomat and
highly-qualified Russianist Matlock was far more important in keeping
Washington well-informed. He himself was an exceptionally skilled
practitioner of the new engagement. Sometimes Matlock was able to brief
Reagan face-to-face, as when he prepared him for his 1988 summit talks
with Gorbachev in Moscow. More often Matlock's insights came to the
President via George Shultz who developed his own good sense of
political trends in Moscow and of the evolution of the thinking of
Gorbachev - and of Shultz's direct Soviet counterpart, Eduard
Shevardnadze.

Indeed, Shultz's judgement was superior to Reagan's. The President must
have sorely tried Gorbachev's patience with his store of bad anti-Soviet
jokes. Gorbachev, like most Russians, doubtless knew far funnier ones.
It was also simple-minded of Reagan to think that if only he could show
Gorbachev America and, in particular, in what splendid houses people
lived, he would forsake his ideological beliefs. Reagan was doubtless
unaware that Gorbachev had in the 1970s seen on short visits quite a lot
of Western Europe - France, Italy, West Germany, Holland and Belgium -
and that had, indeed, had an impact on him. Gorbachev himself has noted
that this was when he began to appreciate the gulf between Soviet
propaganda about the West and how people actually lived in Western
Europe. Reagan's response to Gorbachev's West European insights might
possibly have been: 'You ain't seen nothin' yet!'. However, for
Gorbachev, who in less than seven years in the Kremlin evolved from
Communist reformer to socialist of a social democratic type, Western
Europe was a more important and attractive exemplar.

In general, Mann's book is both readable and well-constructed. My one
qualification on the latter point is that he devotes far more space to
the minutiae of the writing of Reagan's 'Tear down that wall' Berlin
speech than the speech was worth. It certainly did nothing to hasten the
fall of the wall. Mann himself has no time for the simplistic nonsense
that would see cause and effect between the 1987 speech and the
breaching of the wall on 9 November 1989. Indeed, he makes the good
point that the rhetoric was aimed rather more at Reagan's domestic
audience than at Moscow and East Germany. (Mann also amusingly notes
(210-211) that the East German leader Erich Honecker was greatly annoyed
that it was 'Mr Gorbachev' and not 'Mr Honecker' who was asked to tear
down the wall. Honecker had absolutely no intention of summoning the
bulldozers, but he thought that since it was East Germany's wall, he
should have been the addressee of Reagan's demand.) As he prepared for
further diplomacy with Gorbachev, Reagan, Mann observes, 'was protecting
his political flanks, particularly on the right' (218). Leading Western
politicians (with the possible exception of Margaret Thatcher, whose
hostility to movement toward a united Germany later became clear) were,
of course, virtually at one in wishing to see the demolition of the
wall. The State Department, though, was not alone in questioning the
timing of Reagan's insistent demand. By calling directly on Gorbachev to
demolish the wall, Reagan made it harder for the Soviet leader to do
precisely that. However, as it turned out, Gorbachev did not need to do
any demolition of his own. His policies changed the entire political
climate in Eastern Europe and provided the facilitating conditions for
the dramatic changes of 1989, of which the ending of the division of
Berlin and, subsequently, of Germany was a logical consequence.

Mann is a perceptive guide to the making of America's Soviet policy
during the Reagan years and, in particular, to the evolution of the
President's own thinking. It was not easy to keep track, and understand
the full significance, of the still more dramatic changes of outlook and
policy in Moscow. However, as Mann shows with many examples, Reagan came
closer to grasping the profundity of them than did many of the people in
Washington who were paid to be aware of what was going on in the Soviet
Union.

Mann is, understandably enough, not as sure-footed when discussing the
Soviet political context as he is when dealing with high politics in
America. It is very misleading to describe Gorbachev as 'an aide to
Chernenko' (137) at a time when Gorbachev was the second secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with a growing power base of
his own, and while Chernenko's actual aides were casting around for a
way to put a stop to Gorbachev's seemingly inexorable rise. It is also
incorrect to describe Boris Yeltsin in 1987 as 'the populist mayor of
Moscow'. (257) The adjective is right but the noun wrong. Yeltsin was
the First Secretary of the Communist Party in Moscow. Moreover,
important as was Gorbachev's speech to the United Nations in December
1988 (317), it was not the first major public occasion on which he had
unequivocally embraced 'freedom of choice' for all countries. He had
done so in the summer of the same year at the Nineteenth Conference of
the Communist Party.

More seriously, Mann is wrong in saying that Gorbachev was 'hardly
radical in his domestic policies'. (345) The author recognises (ibid.)
that Gorbachev's foreign policy was 'a break with the past'. But it was
no less of a break with the past to introduce contested elections for a
legislature with real powers (a policy Gorbachev pushed through the
Nineteenth Party Conference), with the elections taking place in March
1989. He allowed members of the Communist Party to compete against one
another, espousing fundamentally different polices, thus driving a coach
and horses through the sacred Communist precept of 'democratic
centralism'. Gorbachev consciously presided over the withering away of
censorship, allowing glasnost to develop into freedom of speech and
publication. Even Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, which made
clear not only Stalin's but also Lenin's culpability in setting up the
system of slave labour camps for political offenders, was serialised in
1989 in a large-circulation Soviet journal.

Yet, this is a very valuable book. It is a necessary corrective to much
that has been written about Ronald Reagan. So far as the U.S.S.R. is
concerned, it is the transformation of Soviet foreign policy which is
most germane to Mann's arguments. While acknowledging that Reagan played
a significant part in ending the Cold War - but not in the way so many
of his admirers believe - Mann is quite clear that this role was by no
means as important as the contribution of Gorbachev. He appositely
concludes (346):

Unquestionably, Gorbachev played the leading role in bringing the
four-decade-old conflict to a close. Yet Reagan, overcoming considerable
opposition of his own at home, played a crucial role by buttressing
Gorbachev's political position... By recognizing Gorbachev's
significance, when many others in the United States did not, Reagan
helped create the climate in which the Cold War ended.

Notes

            1 George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as
Secretary of State (New York: Scribner's, 1993); Jack F. Matlock, Jr.,
Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse
of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995); and Matlock, Reagan
and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004).


--------------------------------

Review by Beth A. Fischer, University of Toronto

The ending of the Cold War has become a cottage industry in academia,
with a plethora of outstanding books by both academics and foreign
policy practitioners.  A downside to this bounty, however, is
repetition: in all honesty, how many times can even the most avid Cold
War scholar read the chronology of events during the Geneva summit
meeting and remain engaged?  Happily, James Mann's book does not
summarize the march of events during the 1980s, despite what its
subtitle suggests.  Instead, it takes a more unconventional approach.
Mann has chosen four topics pertaining to the end of the Cold War and
written a section of the book about each.  Three of the four sections
are rather unique, while the fourth is a more traditional rendering of
the summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev.

Mann begins the volume with a section on Richard Nixon, someone who
typically makes nothing more than a cameo appearance in more
conventional volumes about the ending of the Cold War.  Drawing upon
Nixon's own memos and notes from his meetings with Reagan, Mann tells
the story of two ardent anti-communists and the manner in which their
roles, views, and relationship evolved over time.  Despite their common
roots as California Republicans, the two leaders rarely agreed on U.S.
Soviet policy, even in private: Reagan believed President Nixon had been
too "soft" on communism, while Nixon felt likewise about Reagan's
policies during the late 1980s.  Nixon shared neither Reagan's trust of
Gorbachev, nor his desire to eliminate nuclear weapons.  Although Nixon
had promoted détente during his own term in office, he (and former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) increasingly joined forces with
other conservatives in an effort to forestall Reagan's overtures to the
Kremlin.

This opening section of the book sets the stage for a theme that Mann
returns to frequently: the growing conservative opposition to President
Reagan's Soviet policy.  By the late 1980s Reagan's detractors were not
liberal Democrats, but rather conservative members of his own party.
Nixon, Kissinger, journalist George Will, Brent Scowcroft and other
party luminaries not only believed that Gorbachev differed little from
his predecessors, but were adamant that nuclear disarmament was
foolhardy.

The second section of the book focuses on Suzanne Massie, who served as
an ad hoc adviser to President Reagan on Soviet affairs.  She was also
an informal emissary, carrying messages between the White House and the
U.S.S.R.  Massie has been something of a puzzle: she was a writer who
adored Russian culture, but she had few, if any, of the traditional
credentials of a presidential adviser.  She was not a government
official, or an academic, or even a Soviet expert.  Neither was she part
of the inside-the-beltway cognoscenti nor a member of Reagan's so-called
"California Cabinet," which had been advising Reagan since his days as
governor.  Yet during Reagan's term in office she had approximately
twenty meetings with the president, oftentimes in private.  As Mann
notes, this was "more often than any Soviet expert or indeed anyone else
outside his own immediate subordinates." (64) The two also corresponded
frequently.

As Mann tells it, Massie was able to bring the Soviet Union alive for
Reagan through her stories about Russian culture and history.  She was
his informal tutor.  Never one to delve deeply into pedantic briefing
books, the president found her anecdotal style and passion for the
country engaging.  Massie also taught Reagan snippets of Russian,
including "doveryai no proveryai" (trust, but verify) which, as
Gorbachev pointed out, the president repeated at every summit meeting.

The third section of the book focuses on Reagan's June 1987 speech in
front of the Berlin Wall in which the president exclaimed, "Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"  Mann maintains that this speech "lies
at ground zero in the historical disputes over Ronald Reagan and his
presidency." (117)  One camp believes this speech to be a climactic
turning point, leading directly to the ending of the Cold War, while
another believes it was "mere showmanship, without substance." (118)
I'm not certain I would attribute so much weight to the Berlin speech
per se, but Mann's larger point is correct: two opposing views have
emerged regarding Reagan and the end of the Cold War.  One contends that
Reagan's tough policies forced the U.S.S.R. to capitulate, while another
claims that Gorbachev ended the conflict, with the president merely
looking on.  Ironically, it is conservative Republicans who have
promoted the first view - the same camp that opposed his policies in the
late 1980s.

The final section of the book is more conventional; it focuses on the
four summit meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev.  Mann emphasizes
Reagan's growing rift with conservative Republicans as he sought both
improved relations with Gorbachev and nuclear disarmament.

When reviewing edited volumes one typically asks whether all the
chapters "hang together" to form a coherent whole.  I found myself
asking the same question about this book.  Each section is something
more than a long essay, yet something less than a book, and together,
they do not quite form a coherent whole.  I found the section on Nixon
to be both innovative and engaging, while the part on the Berlin Wall
seemed unduly long.  Mann devotes over 100 pages to this speech, but
then concludes, "By itself, there was nothing new in Reagan's
declaration that the Berlin Wall should come down. Reagan had said so
before, and so had other American officials." (218)  The section on
Massie is uneven in that it includes some chapters with interesting
background information about the author, yet others have little to do
with her.  For example, the chapter on the 1983 war scare not only
doesn't pertain to Massie, it is a story that was told in much the same
way over a decade ago.  It is still an interesting read, but it is not
clear how it ties into this section of the book or the overall volume.

Nonetheless, I would recommend this book.  What it lacks in overall
coherence, it makes up in innovation. The sections on Nixon and Massie
are particularly worth reading.

--------------------------------
Review by Kyle Longley, Arizona State University

In the classic "Saturday Night Live" skit, "Masterbrain/Mastermind" from
December 1986, Phil Hartman impersonates Ronald Reagan at the height of
the Iran Contra Affair.  Initially, he plays a doddering old fool for
visitors to the White House.  However, as soon as they leave, his staff
enters including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA Director
William Casey.  Speaking furiously and coherently, he barks orders about
transferring funds from the sale of Iranian arms to bank accounts.
Then, he jumps on the phone to speak in Arabic before continuing his
lecture of his aides.  He only breaks to entertain feebly a Girl Scout
and Jimmy Stewart before starting again.  At one point, Casey asks
something about Iran Contra and Reagan curtly responds, "and you don't
need to understand! I'm the President! Only I need to understand! Is
that clear?" The skit concludes with Reagan presiding over worn out
associates and muttering, "Well, just me again . . . great. Well, I've
been doing it this way for six years, why should I change now?"1

In another "Saturday Night Live" skit from November 1987, Hartman again
portrays Reagan traveling around Washington D.C. with Mikhail Gorbachev
(played by Danny Devito).  As they circle, Reagan points out the
monuments, not as historical places but as sites where movie scenes
unfolded such as the Lincoln Memorial with Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington" or Washington Monument and "The Day the Earth Stood
Still."  Regarding the former, Gorbachev quotes, "With malice toward
none.  With charity for all."  Reagan corrects him, emphasizing it was
Jean Arthur saying, "You can't quit now, Jeff."  Throughout the tour,
Reagan presents his own reality, much to the consternation of the Soviet
leader.  Reagan concludes, "Klaatu barada nikto" (from the movie, "The
Day the Earth Stood Still") which Gorbachev translates as, "Live, from
New York, it's Saturday Night!"2

James Mann in The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan struggles to reconcile the
latter perception of a disconnected Reagan with that of an in control
Reagan.  He clearly comes down much closer to Reagan as the mastermind,
arguing that in the "political and bureaucratic battles in Washington"
relating to arms reduction near the end of the Cold War, "Ronald Reagan
was at the center of those conflicts." (xx) According to Mann:  "My aim
in this book is to reach beyond these simple formulas, to challenge old
stereotypes about Reagan, and, through a combination of new interviews
and newly available documents, to look back at what actually happened."
(xv)

Despite being over three hundred pages in length, this is a very narrow
story built primarily on English language oral histories, interviews,
memoirs, and secondary materials.  Fundamentally, it focuses on arms
reduction through examining episodes including Reagan and Richard Nixon,
the influence of Suzanne Massie, the Berlin Wall speech in 1987, and the
summits over nuclear arms reductions.  Ultimately, Mann concludes that
Reagan ignored his conservative advisers and recognized Gorbachev, not
as a continuum of Soviet leaders (as Nixon and Henry Kissinger
envisioned), but a significant break from the past that ensured an
opportunity for change in the Soviet Union.  In the end, Mann
acknowledges that Gorbachev's centrality to the process that ended the
Cold War, but he gives high marks to Reagan for aiding it.

The strength of the book is that it spends a great deal of time
debunking the mythology regarding Reagan, especially from the right.
He builds on the work of several authors in this area including Will
Bunch's Tear Down This Myth:  How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our
Politics and Haunts Our Future.3   For example, he challenges the idea
"the Reagan administration won the Cold War by intentionally driving the
Soviet Union over the brink." (248)  He argues that no consensus existed
in the administration, even among "hawks" like Weinberger who sought to
increase nuclear deterrence, not topple the Soviets.  Those hardliners
that supported the idea such as Richard Pipes, Thomas Reed, and Jeane
Kirkpatrick left the administration early.  Ultimately, Mann concludes,
"the Soviet economy was foundering because of a deep-seated and chronic
problems that had little or nothing to do with the Reagan
administration's policies." (250)

Mann also questions those who portray Reagan as disconnected or a puppet
of his advisors.  He correctly argues that Reagan clearly influenced
American policy relating to nuclear arms reductions. Of course, Reagan
could place a spotlight on an issue when he wanted to do so.  For
example, during the 1970s, he rabidly seized on the nationalistic side
of the Panama Canal debates.  When motivated, he learned the intricacies
of a topic and tenaciously zeroed in on it.  However, that typically
proved the exception rather than the rule.  As a result, Mann's effort
to place Reagan central in the bureaucratic battles has some limitations
created by the absence of historical context, a process exacerbated by
the concentration on only a few episodes that often created a redundant
and overlapping narrative.

The context around the arms reduction issue is important.  First, when
the administration changed its focus to negotiating with the Soviet
Union over the nuclear weapons, Reagan's numbers plummeted to very low
levels, as a vast majority believed that the president lied about his
knowledge of the events relating to the Iran-Contra Affair.  A
fundamental question relates to whether Reagan and his staff would have
been as likely to move forward if they had maintained the strong
position that they had in 1985 in the aftermath of the defeat of
Mondale.  Was the administration and, in particular, the president
desperately trying to grab onto something that would change the focus
off Iran Contra and the circus it became to something more positive such
as nuclear disarmament? While Mann often understated the effect of Iran
Contra, the change proved important.  The imperial presidency stumbled
mightily with the controversy and sent Reagan and his staff scurrying to
find other issues to divert attention.

In another way, the historical context seems absent for examples that do
not fit neatly into the arms reduction prism.  For example, if Reagan
had such a good handle on where Gorbachev seemed heading, then why was
he so adamant along with other conservatives in the United States in
torpedoing efforts such as those of Oscar Arias in Central America?
Repeatedly, Reagan denounced the efforts of Arias for legitimizing the
Sandinista regime with elections and in particular the defunding of the
contras.  If he really understood the changing dynamics as the author
supposes, why would he continue to maintain such an intransigent, hard
line position relating to efforts to end the civil wars in Central
America?  Ultimately, with the support of Democrats in Congress, the
Arias plan helped displace the Sandinistas in spite of Reagan's efforts,
not because of them.

The context is also important in the fact that the people around Reagan
had dramatically changed after his reelection in 1984.  Old California
associates including Lynn Nofzinger, Michael Deaver, and Edwin Meese
either had resigned or been forced out (or were in the process of being)
for corruption or other transgressions at the time Gorbachev appeared.
In addition, hard liners in the administration had been removed such as
William Casey (death), Caspar Weinberger (in process because of Iran
Contra), and others.  In their place came those who historically
promoted negotiation such as George Schultz who proved to be one of the
few to issue alarms about the diversion of funds to the contras and
negotiations for the release of hostages with the Iranians.  Schultz's
voice is often noticeably absent as are those of other moderates.  In
their place, the author tries too hard to fill in the importance of
people such as Massie, something that I had a hard time really accepting
given the perception of others regarding this rather obscure character,
both within the administration and among historians.

In addition, a missing piece of the puzzle throughout the story was the
arrival of Howard Baker as Chief of Staff, a much more pragmatic and
practical politician, before, during, and after his service as Reagan's
chief of staff during the dark days of 1986 and 1987.  There is nothing
in the bibliography that relates to the Tennessean, either in interviews
or the use of his papers at the University of Tennessee.  However, Baker
was a classic western Tennessee politician who exerted much caution,
both as a politician and foreign policymaker including his stint as U.S.
Ambassador to Japan, 2001-2005.  His hand clearly shaped the
administration, both in domestic and foreign affairs.  Nonetheless, in
this book, he is virtually a silent voice of the restrained position
open to negotiations with Gorbachev.  His absence along with those of
other moderates clearly limits the scope of the argument that Reagan
acted almost independently as inferred by Mann.

So an ultimate result might be concluded, both from this research and
that of others, that Reagan merely reflected those around him.  When the
hard liners dominated, his policy reflected that position.  When the
more practical, pragmatic advisors including Nancy held sway, his
policies echoed that orientation.  Other issues such as the confusion of
the president during the investigation by the Tower Commission where
Reagan often appeared incoherent and confused leads one to wonder how
much sway he truly held.  While I would hesitate to argue that his
handlers dominated Reagan, the author has to explain how Reagan really
affected the policy or was it shaped by those around him, or perhaps
more persuasively affected by those around him.

While the author has presented some pieces of the story on the arms
reduction issue and to a larger degree part of the story on the end of
the Cold War, the question of what actually happened looks far off in
the future due to the severe limitations placed on Reagan's papers by
his family and also the executive order of President George W. Bush.
The existing private materials such as those edited by Kiron Skinner and
others who often have been monitored closely by the family and
loyalists, both groups seeking to sustain a particular perception of
Reagan.  The Reagan Library also suffers additional weaknesses of
availability of important sources that could add to the debate.  Some
materials have begun trickling out, but the efforts to sustain a
particular Reagan legacy have severely limited the attempts.  Thus, the
full story has not or cannot be told at this time and more work remains
on many topics related to Reagan and his policies.

While I have some significant questions regarding this book, Mann must
be congratulated for raising the question and stoking the debate about
Reagan and his place in the history of American foreign relations.  The
field has too few contributions right now, although I look forward to
reading new works on the horizon including those by historians such as
Chester Pach.  Many topics remain outside of this one and hopefully the
historical field will step up and fill the void that until this point
has often been left to journalists and White House insiders.

Notes

            1 Transcript of "Masterbrain," "Saturday Night Live,"
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/86/86fmasterbrain.phtml. Clip of
"Mastermind," at Hulu,
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4174/saturday-night-live-president-reagan-mast
ermind.
            2 Saturday Night Live transcripts, Season 13, Episode 6,
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/87/87fgorbachev.phtml
            3 Will Bunch, Tear Down This Myth:  How the Reagan Legacy
Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future (New York:  Free Press,
2009).


--------------------------------
Review by Joseph M. Siracusa, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Not until the middle of 1946, when he became president of the Screen
Actors Guild during a strike against the producers, had Ronald Reagan
become concerned about communism, especially Hollywood communists. He
was deeply affected reading Whittaker Chamber's account Witness where he
apparently picked up the notion of the Kremlin being the focus of evil
in the world - and later it wound up in his "Evil Empire" speech in
1983. After he stood against communism during the House Un-American
Activities Committee hearing the following year, Reagan became convinced
that he was one of the truly blacklisted victims because his roles
virtually disappeared.

"I know of no leader of the Soviet Union...including the present
leadership," President Reagan declared in his initial press conference
on 29 January 1981, "[who denied that] their goal must be the promotion
of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state....
[And since these leaders] have openly and publicly declared that the
only morality they recognize is what will further their cause... [and]
reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to
cheat... [to gain that goal; thus, when you] do business with
them...keep that in mind."1

Reagan's strong conviction that communism was inherently immoral and
evil was matched by his fascination with the dramatic biblical story of
Armageddon - the world's final struggle between good and evil. As he
apparently understood the account, Russia would be defeated by an
acclaimed leader of the West who would be revealed as the Antichrist.
He, too, would fall, and Jesus Christ would triumph in the creation of a
new heaven and earth. The Armageddon story that Reagan envisioned as a
nuclear holocaust neve reconciled him to the possibility of a nuclear
war; indeed, he declared often, "A nuclear war can never be won, and
must never be fought." It was prudent, Reagan believed, to seek means to
avert or mitigate such a possibility by the elimination of nuclear
weaponry, which he eventually came to believe could be accomplished by a
missile defense designed to provide a nationwide shield.

The president did shift away from his initial inconsiderate and
provocative anti-Soviet rhetoric during his second term, especially
after meeting Mikhail Gorbachev. In his final years in the White House,
Reagan came to think of Gorbachev as a friend and proclaimed a "new era"
in American-Soviet relations. Reagan had changed, according to his
biographer Lou Cannon, even though he did not recognize any ideological
odyssey, oddly reminiscent of The Economist's verdict of Reagan's role
in the Iran-Contra scandal: "Guilty but asleep."

Enter James Mann's The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End
of the Cold War. Mann, a journalist and author of the New York Times
bestseller, Rise of the Vulcans, a study of the careers of the members
of George W. Bush's foreign policy team, wants to have a closer look at
Reagan's ideological odyssey, particularly his rebellion "against the
forces and ideas that had made the Cold War seem endless and
intractable." (xvi) In particular, Mann's aim is to reach beyond the
simple formulas of who "won" or "lost" the Cold War and "to challenge
old stereotypes about Reagan, and, through a combination of new
interviews and newly available documents, to look back at what really
happened." (xv) To get where he is going, he has chosen to probe
Reagan's role in the end of the Cold War through the use of  four
narrative parts or interlocking essays: Part I: "Two Anti-Communists"
(the story of the relationship between Reagan and Richard M. Nixon and
their differing worldviews of Moscow); Part II: "Informal Adviser"
(Reagan's friendship with writer and author Suzanne Massie who tutored
the president about life in the Soviet Union and who occasionally acted
as a back channel to associates of Gorbachev); Part III: "Berlin" (the
story behind Reagan's West Berlin speech, in 1987, calling on Gorbachev
to "tear down this wall."; and Part IV: "Summits" (the story of Reagan's
summit meetings with the General Secretary). Each part, Mann maintains,
"illuminates the way Reagan operated, the role he played, the influences
on his thinking, and the underlying dynamics at work during the last
years (1986-1988) of his administration." (xvii) At another level, Mann
"wanted to find out what was uniquely Reagan during the period - the
personal role and views of the president himself, apart from the work of
his subordinates or the diplomacy of his administration." (xx) Did Mann
find the Reagan he was looking for?

Before I answer that question, I should first like to say that The
Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is a useful contribution to the growing
literature on the end of the Cold War, and that many of the interviews -
the most original part of this story - offer valuable contemporary
insights, though Mann should not have been "astonished to discover how
interviews produce more information, more details, more insight than is
on the historical record." (348) In any case, they are worth the price
of admission. As for looking for Reagan, I am not so sure that Mann did
not set himself an impossible task or what he himself calls "a special
problem: Reagan rarely chose to explain his policy shifts or not
infrequent changes in strategy or tactics. . . . [and] had shrewd
political instincts but rarely if ever articulated his underlying
motivations." (xviii) Add to this the problem which results from the
eternal conflict between the subjectivity of the writer and the
objectivity of the past, as well as reconstructing the climate of
opinion - the fundamental assumptions and attitudes shared by
significant elements of a population at a given time - and, finally, the
complex nature of the dualism of  conservative and reformer in the human
constitution itself, and it becomes clear that finding "out what was
uniquely Reagan during the period" may have been a bridge too far.

Don't get me wrong: Mann has done a first-rate job of detailing the
two-year struggle, 1986-1988, the president had with the constituencies
attempting to slow down his personal diplomacy with Gorbachev - the
political right, the realists, and the intelligence and defense
officials who didn't like what they were seeing. And he makes a good
case for what is fast becoming an emerging consensus: "Reagan didn't win
the Cold War; Gorbachev abandoned it." (347) No argument here. Perhaps
all we can do with Reagan is to judge him by what he did when he was in
the presidency - "the ultimate sources of action" in John F. Kennedy's
felicitous expression. We may never know exactly what he was thinking or
what his motives were. But, I suspect, that would have suited him just
fine.


Notes

            1 Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of A Lifetime (New
York: Simon & Schuster 1991), 281-282.


--------------------------------
Response by James Mann, Johns Hopkins University School of International
Studies (SAIS)

I want to thank the reviewers for their comments. I'm gratified that
they found the book to be valuable for its contribution to history and
readable in its narrative account. I'm also pleased that the reviewers
seem to accept the book's main points -- that Ronald Reagan did not
"win" the Cold War by driving the Soviet Union over the brink, and that
during Reagan's second term, he infuriated his conservative supporters
through his extensive diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev.

The historical question at issue in this period is why Reagan's Soviet
policy during his second term seemed so different from that during
Reagan's first years in office. The first and obvious answer, of course,
is that Reagan's second term coincided with the ascent of Gorbachev as
Soviet leader in March 1985. Although American conservatives and
Washington's foreign-policy elites portrayed Gorbachev as representing
continuity, a new face for the same old Soviet policies, Reagan saw
Gorbachev as fundamentally different from his predecessors. Those
debates within the United States about Gorbachev are easily forgotten
now.  Everyone remembers Reagan 1983 speech calling the Soviet Union the
"evil empire." Far fewer people know that, on his first visit to Moscow
in 1988, Reagan was asked if he thought the Soviet Union was still an
evil empire. No, he answered. "No," said Reagan, "I was talking about
another time and another era." Why the change? Mostly because of
Gorbachev, Reagan answered.

How should we evaluate Reagan's intensive diplomacy with Gorbachev? Was
it merely cosmetic in nature? And was Reagan personally responsible for
its genesis, or was he merely the instrument of others?

Kyle Longley's review seems to suggest that Reagan's move towards arms
reduction with the Soviets was a political response to the Iran-Contra
scandal. Reagan and his staff, he writes, were "scurrying to find other
issues to divert attention." Perhaps (so Longley's argument goes) if
Reagan had maintained the political strength he possessed soon after his
reelection in 1984, he would not have proceeded with the Soviets in the
fashion that he did.

I think this proposition is not supported by the historical evidence or,
indeed, the chronology of events. Reagan's Soviet policies changed well
before the Iran-Contra scandal erupted. Indeed, if there is any single
event that symbolized Reagan's departure from Cold War and conservative
orthodoxy, it was the summit at Reykjavik in October 1986 - the most
significant of all the Reagan-Gorbachev summits, at which the two men
discussed far-reaching reductions or even elimination of nuclear
weapons. That summit prompted widespread consternation about where
Reagan was heading, even from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yet at the time
of Reykjavik, the public knew nothing about Iran-Contra; few in
Washington (outside Reagan and a few of his aides) knew anything about
it.

Moreover, the Reykjavik summit was hardly the first sign of change in
Reagan's Soviet policy or of his desire to scale back on nuclear
weaponry. Some historians (among them Beth A. Fischer, author of the
book The Reagan Reversal and one of the commentators in the current
discussion) have made a strong case that one can trace the changes in
Reagan's Soviet policy much further back.  A series of events in late
1983 brought the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States
to a peak (the KAL shootdown, the Able Archer exercises, the "war
scare"). In early 1984, Reagan delivered a speech on Soviet policy that
was strikingly different in tone from the "evil empire" speech less than
a year earlier. In my own book, I focus on the series of events in the
late summer of 1986; when Soviet officials detained the American
reporter Nicholas Daniloff, Reagan's National Security Council (N.S.C.)
wanted to take a very tough line against bargaining for his release, but
Reagan chose instead to support his Secretary of State George Shultz in
quiet negotiations; and these negotiations to free Daniloff in turn led
to agreement for a summit at Reykjavik.  However or wherever one puts
the point of change in Reagan's approach to Moscow, it certainly
preceded Iran-Contra. In fact, by the account of Jack Matlock, then
working on Reagan's N.S.C., the effect of Iran-Contra was to slow down
the pace of the administration's ongoing diplomacy with the Soviets.

Longley's review also raises the other broad question about Reagan: Was
he merely the agent or instrument of others? Was Reagan a real-life
version of Chance the Gardiner in the classic Peter Sellers movie "Being
There"? This is a perennial issue, both because Reagan often seemed so
passive in response to daily events and because his public statements
often seemed so simplistic.

During Reagan's first term, many argued that he was merely a front for
right-wing interests. By contrast, during Reagan's second term,
conservatives regularly portrayed him as the tool of a "moderate" cabal,
composed of people like Nancy Reagan and Secretary of State George
Shultz. Longley interestingly combines both theories, suggesting that
Reagan "merely reflected those around him as the personnel within the
administration changed. When the hardliners dominated, his policies
reflected that position. When the more practical, pragmatic advisors
including Nancy held sway, his policies echoed that orientation."

The first problem I have with this argument is that it is hard to square
with the facts. Shultz didn't replace the Reagan old-timers, as Longley
seems to suggest; he joined the administration in mid-1982. Michael
Deaver was by all accounts one of the doves in the administration's
internal debates, an ally of Nancy Reagan, so Deaver's departure from
the administration could hardly have weakened the conservatives. William
Casey stayed on at CIA all through Reykjavik and the change of direction
in Reagan's Soviet policies.

More broadly, the argument doesn't answer the question of why the more
hawkish aides seemed to "dominate" Reagan in the first term and the more
moderates ones held sway in the later years. Even assuming one can
divide up the administration into two competing factions, who decided
what group would prevail, and why did the personnel change? In the
middle years of the administration, conservatives like Casey pushed hard
for Reagan to make a top-level change by appointing Jeane Kirkpatrick
either as national security adviser or to replace Shultz as secretary of
state. This effort failed. Who made the decision to turn them down?

Nancy Reagan was certainly influential, but she didn't always get her
way with her husband. She didn't want Reagan to visit the Bitburg
cemetery in West Germany, but he did. (Had it been up to Nancy Reagan,
Reagan would have abandoned his 1976 challenge to President Gerald Ford
after a few primaries, rather than continuing all the way to the
convention.)  Shultz, too, was extremely important in setting the course
for Reagan's foreign policy during the second term, but Shultz didn't
always win out, either. He, too, was opposed to the Bitburg visit. He
didn't want Reagan to say, in his now-famous Berlin speech, "Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall." When Nancy Reagan or Shultz won out
with Reagan, it was usually after an intensive, weeks-long internal
struggle (such as Mrs. Reagan's prolonged campaign to get her husband to
fire Donald Regan as White House chief of staff).

To me, the proposition that best fits the facts is that Reagan himself
set the course for his own administration. He was often detached from
day-to-day events, but knew where he wanted to go; he was himself
responsible both for the administration's transgressions (Iran-Contra)
and its successes (the diplomacy with Gorbachev). So when it comes to
Longley's entertaining revival in his review of the two contrasting
"Saturday Night Live" sketches about Reagan - yes, he judges rightly, I
do tend towards the view of Reagan as more canny and more in control of
what his own administration was doing than his public persona suggested.
(I agree with Joseph M. Siracusa's review that we will never know
whether Reagan actually thought in Machiavellian terms without ever
acknowledging he did so, or whether his actions were the result of
instinct. His own wife admitted Reagan kept a wall around himself,
sometimes hiding his thoughts and motivations even from her. I agree all
the more with Siracusa that this opacity served Reagan's own purposes.)

I want to respond briefly to some of the points that reviewers have made
about leading personnel within the administration. Archie Brown is
certainly correct that Jack Matlock, both as a Soviet specialist on the
National Security Council and as U.S. ambassador to Moscow, played an
important and positive role in the last years of the Cold War, and I did
not intend to suggest otherwise. (The book mentions that Suzanne Massie
thought of him as bureaucratic, but this passage was intended to show
her own hostility to bureaucracy, not to accept her view of Matlock.)
Regarding Shultz, Longley is right to credit the secretary of state's
importance, and the book does so repeatedly, including in an entire
chapter describing the significance of Shultz's presentations to
Gorbachev on the subject of globalization. I interviewed Shultz and
Matlock for the book. As Longley notes, I did not have an interview with
Howard Baker (that was his choice, not mine); but I did interview his
top aides Kenneth Duberstein and Thomas Griscom. The book describes
(142) how the Baker team sought to revive Reagan's presidency after
Iran-Contra.

My argument is not that these other officials were unimportant to Soviet
policy, but that they couldn't have done what they did without Reagan
himself. This is a point that Shultz and Matlock themselves have
regularly acknowledged in their interviews and memoirs, but that others,
such as Longley, seem to discount. Reagan decided when Shultz won the
internal battles over Soviet policy and when he didn't.

Finally, Archie Brown makes a fair point in criticizing me for the vague
assertion that Gorbachev was "hardly radical in his domestic policies."
I was thinking of the early-Gorbachev period during Reagan's presidency;
the examples Brown gives are from 1989, after Reagan left office. I was
judging Gorbachev against the standard of others in the Soviet Union at
the time, such as Boris Yeltsin. Even so, I think "hardly radical" was
too imprecise a phrase, open to different interpretations. Gorbachev was
trying to preserve the Communist Party leading role, but in the process
of trying to do so, he was, as Brown notes, opening the way for
far-reaching domestic changes.

No matter how one characterizes Gorbachev's domestic policies, it is
clear that his foreign policies - his approach to Eastern Europe, the
changes in military doctrine and troop cutbacks - represented a dramatic
departure from the Soviet past. As the book says (345), Reagan and
Shultz grasped the significance of Gorbachev as an agent of change while
American conservatives, and realists like Henry Kissinger and Brent
Scowcroft, did not. Reagan's second-term diplomacy helped give Gorbachev
the international recognition and success that (by Gorbachev's own
subsequent account) he needed in order to protect his position and to
proceed with his reforms at home. That was no small accomplishment for
American diplomacy, even if it is often lost amid the current
conservative mythology about Reagan's role.


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Notes

            1 For the conservative victory assessment, see Peter
Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That
Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1994) and Paul Kengor, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall
of Communism (New York: Regan Books, 2006).  For accounts that attribute
more credit to Gorbachev than Reagan, see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great
Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War
(Washington: Brookings Institution, 1994) and Frances FitzGerald, Way
Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

            2 For a range of perspectives, see the H-Diplo roundtables
at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/ on Melvyn P. Leffler, For
the Soul of Mankind:  The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold
War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed
Empire:  The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev
(Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2007); John Paul Diggins, Ronald Reagan:  Fate,
Freedom, and the Making of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006); and
Norman A. Graebner, Richard Dean Burns, and Joseph M. Siracusa, Reagan,
Bush, and Gorbachev:  Revisiting the End of the Cold War (Westport:
Praeger Security International, 2008).

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