The Ash Heap of History: President Reagan’s Westminster Address 20 Years Later - “The Parliament Address and Ronald Reagan’s Crusade for Freedom” - Remarks by Elizabeth Edwards Spalding (June 3, 2002)

The June 8, 1982, address to the British Parliament was the most significant statement on foreign policy of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It has also been one of the most overlooked and misconstrued. But if scholars are to perceive the purpose of Reagan’s statesmanship, they must understand the meaning of the Westminster speech.

From this one speech flowed his other salient statements, from the Evil Empire speech of 1983 to his memorable words at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 and at Moscow State University in 1988. The Parliament address reinforced policy that had already been announced, such as the “zero option” of November 1981 and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) scheduled to begin in late June 1982, and policy that was behind the scenes -- notably NSDD 32 of May 1982, intended to destabilize the Polish communist government and support indigenous forces for freedom in Eastern Europe. It under-girded as well as adumbrated the rest of Cold War policy during the Reagan years.

The Westminster speech cannot be seen in a vacuum but grew out of decades of Reagan’s thought and experience. It followed by a month Reagan’s May commencement speech at Eureka College, which many regard (along with the Parliament address and the president’s 1985 State of the Union address) as the rhetorical base for the Reagan Doctrine. And the Westminster speech deepened the president’s 1981 commencement remarks at the University of Notre Dame, where he predicted almost in an aside that “the West won’t contain communism. It will transcend communism. It won’t bother to dismiss or denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”(1)

The Parliament address is the clearest and deepest articulation of President Reagan’s understanding of the Cold War, including his prediction about the conflict’s future course. At the heart of the speech is his understanding of the fundamental regime difference between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as his conviction that America embodied freedom and democracy and the USSR was the focus of tyranny and totalitarianism in world politics. Reagan regarded the 11 new pro-Soviet regimes that had been established between 1975 and 1980 as evidence that the Kremlin violated détente, pursued Marxist-Leninist “peaceful coexistence,” and was creating a “correlation of forces” in its favor. The Communists were the worst violators of human rights in human history, he believed, and the Soviet regime was illegitimate; détente was a flawed policy, because it was premised on an equivalence between the United States and the USSR, and accepted the Kremlin as a government that was politically stable and morally legitimate.

Reagan thought that the Cold War was winnable, if the United States (and the West) renewed its political, military, economic, and moral strength; pressured the moral, political, and economic weaknesses of the Soviet empire from without and encouraged the peoples within to push for their freedom; and negotiated with Moscow only from a position of strength and for verifiable treaties. Echoing NSC 68’s call in 1950 “to frustrate the Kremlin design,” his ultimate goal was to undermine the Soviet Union through a forward strategy of freedom.(2) At a time when it was not popular in intellectual, policy, or media circles to depict the East-West conflict in moral terms, let alone contemplate alternatives to détente, Reagan chose to tell the truth as he saw it about the Cold War and America’s main adversary in that struggle.

The argument of the Westminster speech was revolutionary. But the speech was largely overlooked by the academy or was folded into an overall interpretation of Reagan’s rhetoric and policy as superficial, warmongering, rash, and destructive. Twenty years later, that view, perhaps moderated, still dominates the interpretation of the Parliament address and Reagan’s foreign policy.

In the early 1980s, scholars typically bemoaned the blow to détente dealt by Reagan’s presidency. There was a widespread faith that arms control had to steer U.S.-Soviet relations and that the SALT philosophy was sacrosanct. Those academics who wanted to go beyond détente advocated a world order based on unilateral U.S. disarmament and economic equalization in North-South relations. Reagan questioned the acceptance of superpower parity in nuclear forces as well as political legitimacy that had prompted Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter to replace containment with détente, and ordered a U.S. military buildup. In this context, he announced the zero option in 1981, calling for the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear force weapons in Europe by both sides, rather than for SALT’s limits on increases.

Many intellectuals had hoped that the 1979 NATO dual track decision would disappear. Instead, Reagan reinforced and elevated its importance in U.S. foreign policy. Negotiations seeking the removal of Soviet SS-20s with warheads able to strike any city in Europe would be pursued with the Kremlin, but, if negotiations failed, the United States and NATO would deploy intermediate range Pershing IIs and ground-launched cruise missiles in countries where they could reach Soviet targets. Reagan’s combination of dual track, the zero option, and START stemmed from his intent to negotiate from strength and his belief that a bad treaty was worse than no treaty, both of which ran counter to détente. Unlike the mainstream academic opinion, he put his political understanding of the Cold War before arms control, and saw the “arms race” between the superpowers as derivative of the larger conflict.(3) Scholars lambasted his rejection of détente and regarded the new approach of arms reductions and the affirmation of dual track as an invitation to nuclear war.

The gap between Reagan and the academy on nuclear attitudes reflected a difference in interpretation about the nature of the Cold War. While Reagan viewed the Cold War as a fundamental battle between freedom and tyranny, between good and evil, scholars expressed two main outlooks that were both opposed to Reagan’s perspective. In one academic portrait, the East-West conflict was a struggle between two superpowers seeking to maintain and increase their spheres of influence; regime distinctions between the principles and governments of the United States and the USSR were not responsible in international politics and, if asserted by political leaders, caused moralism to subvert realism in U.S. foreign policy.

In the other academic picture, the Cold War had been triggered and perpetuated by the American failure to recognize the security needs of the Soviet Union, a legitimate nation-state with progressive credentials that was more authentic at its core than the selfish capitalism animating the United States; if anything, America owed reparations to the world for its economic and cultural imperialism. In both cases, the United States was the problem. Although these two scholarly interpretations differed in part, they agreed on the level of policy: The nuclear threat was the most pressing in world affairs, and détente -- not containment, rollback, or some other approach -- was the correct diplomacy to keep global annihilation at bay.

While he was not trained in the academic fads of the time, Reagan understood his critics. He used his words as a tool -- perhaps the most important intellectual tool -- in developing a moral, coherent, and effective Cold War policy. In his memoir, he described the spring of 1982 as a period in which he “made it a point to speak with frankness on what I thought of Soviet expansionism” and to “send out a signal that the United States intended to support people fighting for their freedom against Communism wherever they were.” Reagan stressed these themes, even though “a lot of liberals and some members of the State Department’s Striped Pants Set sometimes didn’t like my choice of words” and some “congressmen and columnists claimed that I was determined to get us into a nuclear war with the Soviets.”(4)

To the Eureka College Alumni Association dinner in May, he explained, “For my graduation speech, we had decided in Washington that I should make a speech on the world situation and our plans for attempting disarmament, reduction of nuclear weapons and so forth. And they were talking about what would be a proper forum in which to make this speech before I go to Europe at the end of this month to meet with our allies and all. And, I said, ‘I have the perfect forum: I am making a speech in Illinois.’ And I reminded them of Winnie Churchill making a speech at a little college in Missouri some years ago in which he coined the term ‘Iron Curtain.’”(5) Speaking his mind about the Cold War and America’s policies was deliberate on Reagan’s part and tied to the other main goals of his administration: strengthening and rethinking U.S. defenses across the board while renewing the Atlantic Alliance and Western unity; and overhauling containment in order to destabilize the USSR, reverse the Brezhnev Doctrine, and shape conditions for a future that could move past the Cold War on terms consonant with freedom and democracy.(6)

What Reagan Said and Did

The president left for Europe in early June and seized the moment before the British Parliament. One could argue that it was essential for Reagan to offer a clear description and present a bold declaration in 1982 in Europe, much as Winston Churchill -- or “Winnie,” as the president had said -- described the “iron curtain” and called for a new policy in March 1946 at tiny Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The Atlantic Alliance was quarrelling internally, and many academic articles and books in the early 1980s announced its imminent demise.

The British had invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982, straining U.S.-Anglo relations despite the closeness between President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That same month the nuclear freeze movement had organized “Ground Zero Week,” in which over a million Americans across 350 college campuses and in over 600 cities joined in various anti-nuclear activities, leading up to an anti-nuclear demonstration in New York City with a half million people only four days after Reagan’s Parliament address. The debate surrounding the Soviet trans-Siberian natural gas pipeline had put the United States, which wanted to restrict credit to the Kremlin and impose sanctions to halt construction, at odds with key Western allies. Just prior to the president’s trip to London, the G-7 economic meeting at Versailles had achieved little, although Reagan made a positive impression, and the upcoming NATO summit was not expected to go well; much attention was diverted to the Middle East, where Israel had invaded Lebanon on June 5, in response to the killing of an Israeli diplomat in London and in the midst of ongoing disputes with the Palestinians. Within the administration, Secretary of State Alexander Haig would resign later in June. And these circumstances of spring and early summer 1982 must be seen against the larger Cold War backdrop, including the immediate canvas of the 1970s.

The June 1982, trip would be Reagan’s first to Great Britain since becoming president. Initially, there was the hope on the part of the White House that Reagan would be the first American president to speak before a formal session of both the House of Lords and the House of Commons in Westminster Hall. In order not to alienate Thatcher’s opponents in the Labour Party, however, Reagan addressed both Houses of Parliament in the Royal Gallery, next to the House of Lords, within the Palace of Westminster.

It was still a rare speech by an outsider in the hallowed halls where significant debates and decisions in the history of Western democracy had occurred.(7) Reagan quoted and paid homage to Churchill and his most famous speech between his two premierships -- indeed, Churchill’s most important speech in the postwar era and one that he chose to give in the United States. Now Reagan came to Britain and directly cited Churchill: “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have to consider here today while time remains is the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries.”(8) As with the aim of the Eureka College speech, so the content, timing, and setting of the Parliament address must be seen as intentional.(9)

Many scholars and experts have dismissed Reagan as one-dimensional in his understanding of world politics. To Reagan, the gravest threat to the United States and the free world came from the Soviet Union. For the members of the British Parliament, he painted a picture of the twentieth century and the outlines of the future he envisioned, all the while invoking and updating Churchill’s “iron curtain” message:

We’re approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention -- totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order, because day-by-day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none -- not one regime -- has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root.(10)

Critics are correct that on one level -- the primary level -- Reagan was one-dimensional. Like President Harry Truman, he put a country’s type of government first in his analysis of the world and was convinced that a free constitutional and representative government was the best form to secure the “inalienable and universal right” of freedom endowed to all human beings. Everything Reagan believed about politics flowed from this understanding of the regime distinction. Totalitarianism was the worst form of dictatorship and therefore the worst form of government, because it denied each and every person’s fundamental right of freedom. All totalitarian regimes were anathema to Reagan -- from, as he put it, Stalin’s great purge to Auschwitz and Dachau, from the Gulag to Cambodia -- and the Soviet Union was the archetype that, since 1917, had been spreading Communist ideology, violence, and subversion, and giving “covert political training and assistance to Marxist-Leninists in many countries.”(11)

Some scholars have identified Reagan as Wilsonian in his worldview.(12) But Reagan was not: To be pro-freedom and anti-communist was not the same as being an idealist. Rather, he looked at regime types and defended what he viewed as the best form in both theory and practice. Democracy and freedom, according to Reagan, were interconnected. The president identified a “campaign for democracy” that had been gaining strength around the world throughout the 20th century and saw it complemented by a “global campaign for freedom”; he called for a “crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation,” which in turn would assist the campaign for democracy. Such campaigns, however, were rooted in individual governments -- which were formed by different countries with diverse populations around the world making their own free and democratic choices -- not in international organizations or with a goal of world government. Rejecting the notions that democracy and freedom were either only theoretical constructs or aspects of cultural imperialism, he maintained that fostering the infrastructure of liberal democracy was necessary and proper for people to live fully and freely as they should.(13)

With hindsight, we can see that the whole of Reagan’s foreign policy is prefigured in the Westminster speech. The president set forth his views that Western military strength was a prerequisite for peace and that such strength was maintained in the hope that it would never be used; that a campaign for freedom and democracy would be pursued worldwide; that a free, representative form of government is best, and democracy requires cultivation; that the greatest threats to human freedom in the twentieth century came, at the same time, from global war and the “enormous power of the modern state”; and that the “decay of the Soviet experiment” should come as no surprise to anyone and should be encouraged.

In the context of saying that Western strength and resolve were required as the basis for any way to reach a post-Cold War world, he believed that his worldview and policies -- past, present, and proposed -- were grounded in an accurate understanding of the long term: “the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.” Reagan had confidence that “any system is inherently unstable that has no peaceful means to legitimize its leaders,” and that ultimately people would resist -- by force, if necessary -- the very repressiveness of the state.(14) Believing that such resistance had been occurring for years and would continue in Communist countries on many levels, he urged the United States and the free world to do their part to help peoples win their freedom.

Prime Minister Thatcher agreed with Reagan. Later that day, calling the president’s remarks a triumph, she praised the Parliament address for “putting freedom on the offensive, which is where it should be.”(15) In her memoir, Thatcher wrote she thought at the time the speech “marked a decisive stage in the battle of ideas which he and I wished to wage against socialism, above all the socialism of the Soviet Union” and, in retrospect, “marked a new direction in the West’s battle against communism. It was the manifesto of the Reagan doctrine -- the very obverse of the Brezhnev doctrine -- under which the West would not abandon those countries which had had communism forced upon them.”(16) Thatcher voiced a minority opinion, even within her own Conservative Party, with former Prime Minister Edward Heath saying the British “knew about communism” without a lecture from Reagan and that the “younger generation isn’t going to feel much for democracy when there are 30 million people unemployed in the West.”(17) From the other side of Parliament, in an open letter issued shortly after the Westminster speech, the Labour Party leadership denounced the president’s tone and substance: “We utterly reject an ideological crusade against the Soviet Union and its identification as the sole or even prime cause of conflict in the world.”(18)

The media elite also expressed the opposite view. In their news coverage, the Washington Post and the New York Times both referred to the Parliament address as militant. For the Post, Lou Cannon portrayed the speech as “ideological in content, moderate in purpose and conflicting in tone.” For the Times, R.W. Apple reported that “in substance and in texture, the President’s speech was full of echoes of the Cold War of the 1950’s.” While the New York Times’ editorial page was not entirely critical, the Washington Post editorialized: “It is only right, even necessary, that Europeans -- and not only Europeans -- ask if Mr. Reagan’s ideological muscularity masks a rededication to the excesses of military and political interventionism that many people on both sides of the Atlantic associate with the worst days of the Cold War.”

The Westminster speech was on a Tuesday, and columnists weighed in by the weekend. The Post’s Richard Cohen spoke for many when he said Reagan lacked leadership skills, instead wanting to be everyone’s friend, and that his Europe trip was “one vast photo opportunity” with little substance. The Parliament address, Cohen argued, “was anti-communist rhetoric of the type that Reagan peddled so successfully as a well-paid after-dinner speaker. But what worked so wonderfully on the rubber-chicken circuit merely scared the bejesus out of much of the world.” (19) Similar to Labour, Conservative, and editorial detractors in Great Britain, American media objected to the idea of a crusade for freedom and against the Soviet Union and to the notion of seeing the Cold War in terms of good versus bad.

What the Scholars Heard and Wrote

While columnists and pundits commented at length on the Westminster speech, the academy largely ignored Reagan’s remarks. Only in the 1990s did the Parliament address receive more references, and many of them superficial, in scholarly works on Reagan and his foreign policy. In practical terms, the mainstream in higher education has floated between liberal and left of center since at least the late 1960s. Reagan’s approach was and is antithetical, even alien, to this dominant perspective. In looking at the academic world, we see three waves of scholarship on Reagan: a reactionary period early in his administration, a period of reinterpretation near or at the end of his administration, and a revisionist period after the end of the Cold War. To illustrate these waves, it is worth looking briefly at commonly used texts in political science and history from the 1980s and the 1990s.

In the major scholarly books on the Reagan administration, U.S. foreign policy, and East-West relations published either during or around the end of the administration -- i.e., during the first two waves -- there is little mention of the Westminster speech. There is hostility to Reagan and his views and much criticism of the Evil Empire speech and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), but the Parliament address was eclipsed by Reagan’s words and actions of 1983. “Evil empire” became scholarly shorthand, a way for academics to encapsulate all they saw wrong with Reagan’s rhetoric and policy. No such phrase had leaped out of the Westminster speech; leaving “Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history” did not resonate with most political scientists and historians. And while 1982 carried with it many dangers, 1983 had shaped up even more ominously from an academic point of view that was unfriendly to Reagan: From SDI to the invasion of Grenada, from the deployment of the Euromissiles to the ongoing military buildup, from support of the Nicaraguan Contras to his reaction to the Soviet downing of KAL 007, Reagan not only sounded but also acted aggressively, even obsessively, according to many scholars.

In response to the deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles in fall 1983, the Soviets walked out of arms talks in Geneva; for the first time since the 1960s, there were no ongoing arms controls discussions being held between the United States and the USSR. Next Moscow announced that it viewed routine NATO war exercises in November 1983 as a precursor to an American nuclear strike.(20) All of this was disturbing to intellectuals whose interpretations of the Cuban Missile Crisis and opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam led them to view Reagan’s policies as “nuclear brinkmanship” that would revive a Cold War which had essentially been ended by détente. Indeed, there are frequent references to Reagan’s policies as the source of a “new Cold War” and “Cold War II” in textbooks published in the 1980s.

In the first wave of scholarship -- the reactionary period -- works by Stanley Hoffmann, James Nathan and James Oliver, and Raymond Garthoff are representative of the inattention to the Westminster speech and the judgment of Reagan during his first administration. A respected liberal professor at Harvard University, Hoffmann called for “a rhetorical de-escalation, which would put an end both to the wholesale indictment of the ‘evil empire’ (rather than to specific criticisms of Soviet practices and behavior) and to statements about the possibility of waging or winning a nuclear war.”

Hoffmann also rejected as provocative and clumsy the Reagan administration’s efforts “to return to a position of primacy.” While not embracing “the Soviet illusion of, or hope for, condominium,” he argued there was a “wide range of realistic goals and of convergent or common interests.”(21) Hoffmann’s 1983 essay, entitled “Taming the Eagle,” appeared in a book widely read since the late 1980s by graduate and advanced undergraduate students in international relations and U.S. foreign policy.

Authors of a popular text in U.S. foreign policy for undergraduates, Nathan and Oliver covered Reagan in a chapter called “The New Cold War,” and used the “evil empire” as a theme to criticize Reagan’s approach. The third edition of the book, published in 1985, held that “the Reagan administration in its direct dealings with the Soviet Union continued to operate within a framework of assumptions established in the earliest and darkest days of the cold war,” which caused the Soviets to respond in kind.(22)

And former ambassador and senior Brookings Fellow Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation is still assigned in graduate courses in international relations and U.S. foreign policy. In this 1985 book, Garthoff described the period between 1981 and 1984 as “adrift after détente,” with the Reagan administration, not the USSR, as the major problem. Like others writing on the early Reagan administration, he focused on the Evil Empire speech, but also saw in Reagan an ambivalence since he “could usually be persuaded by someone like Haig or Shultz to take a geopolitical position, although his own inner conviction and inclination were ideological.”(23)

With books published in 1988 and 1989, John Spanier, Walter LaFeber, and Coral Bell typify the second wave of scholarship, which sought to understand by reinterpreting Reagan’s presidency. These works appeared as the Reagan administration was ending or had just ended but before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. In the 11th edition of his textbook put out by Congressional Quarterly’s press and used extensively in political science and history, Spanier called the Reagan presidency “Cold War II.” Alone among the academics considered here from the first two waves of scholarship, Spanier referred to the Parliament address, quoting not only from the “ash heap of history” line but also from passages about the “great revolutionary crisis” of the Soviet political-economic system, the “decay of the Soviet experiment,” that “regimes planted by bayonets do not take roots,” and that the United States could not accept the “permanent subjugation of the people of Eastern Europe.” These quotes followed Spanier’s citations from the Evil Empire speech and comparisons of Reagan to “an old-fashioned evangelist” and to John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s much maligned secretary of state.

In his first years in office, Spanier wrote, Reagan “sounded like a crusader, even if in practice he was cautious and avoided confrontations.” Not all of Reagan’s words were inaccurate, Spanier allowed, but “unilateral rearmament,” the Strategic Defense Initiative, and policies in Central America and the Middle East were all militaristic.(24) With respect to Latin America, his area of specialty, Spanier indicted Reagan for the Iran-Contra scandal, even if the president’s action “pales beside Eisenhower’s in Guatemala, Kennedy’s at the Bay of Pigs, and Johnson’s in the Dominican Republic.”(25) Later editions of his textbook, with a harsher analysis of Reagan, continue to be a mainstay in undergraduate classes in U.S. foreign policy and the history of American foreign relations.

Renowned revisionist historian Walter LaFeber and Australia’s well-known IR realist Coral Bell capture well the main scholarly outlooks opposed to Reagan.(26) In his text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, LaFeber detected hubris in U.S. foreign relations because Americans failed to admit that they had built a global empire and then found their power slipping away since the 1960s. Reagan -- in the Evil Empire speech but also his Cold War policies generally, and his presidency overall -- aimed to recover the heights of power the United States had enjoyed in the 1950s. For LaFeber, the Reagan Doctrine had roots that “went back at least to Woodrow Wilson’s faith that the world could ‘be made safe for democracy,’” and Reagan’s downfall lay in his “endless optimism,” pride, and inability to understand limits.(27)

“The initial Reagan rhetoric certainly pulled no punches,” argued Bell, for her part, “and had a simplistic quality, a sort of verbal Rambo-ism,” but the Reagan administration resumed détente in 1984. Critical of the “airy moral rhetoric about the ‘evil empire,’ she identified in Reagan a “right-wing Utopianism” that was preoccupied “with the world-as-it-should-be, the world as wish or aspiration, as against the world-as-it-is, which is the preoccupation of realism.” Similar to revisionist LaFeber, Bell, the realist, thought that Reagan tried to restore “an imagined golden age of invulnerability and therefore power”; SDI was “a particularly neat symbolic example of that.”(28) Also like LaFeber, Bell perceived America’s dwindling power as a positive development, since she thought it meant a multi-polar balance was replacing the less dispersed and less complex bipolar competition between the superpowers. Her book was entitled The Reagan Paradox, in order to convey what she saw as the disconnect between the president’s rhetoric and policies from 1984 through 1988.

The second wave of scholarship still found much to criticize in Reagan and his foreign policy, especially his rhetoric, but there was an accent on cautious actions following incautious words. To writers such as Spanier and Bell, Reagan failed to talk softly while carrying his big stick but at least rarely employed the stick; during his second term, he supposedly returned to détente because of the failure of his first-term policies -- especially in the area of diplomacy -- and because of the need to divert attention from the Iran-Contra affair. As a result, an emerging consensus -- seen in Spanier and Bell as well as implied earlier by Garthoff -- decided there was Reagan I and Reagan II. Some scholars maintained that the divisions were in terms of first and second term policies, but other authors claimed that Reagan himself had to be split into two presidential phases.

This fresh take on Reagan inspired much of the third wave of scholarship in the 1990s. Political scientist Beth Fischer, for example, based an entire book on the thesis that Reagan intentionally reversed course in U.S.-Soviet relations in early 1984 and sought a rapprochement with Moscow, and thus he and his policies had to be examined in two stages.(29) The president’s own view -- building up the moral, political, military, and economic strength of the United States and the West, pressuring the Soviets and helping those imprisoned by Moscow to win their freedom, and negotiating verifiable treaties from a new high ground with a weakened Kremlin -- was often lost in writings on Reagan from the 1990s. It was no wonder that, in the judgment of the mainstream academy, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and internal economic factors in the USSR ended the Cold War, and Reagan was often deemed responsible for prolonging the conflict.

In 1990, preeminent Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis wrote an essay with the title “The Unexpected Ronald Reagan.” The unexpectedness was that Reagan was able “to accommodate ideology to practical reality” and united the best of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s detentism with the reasonable and patient containment proposed by diplomat George F. Kennan in the mid 1940s. Détente had to be abandoned temporarily until Gorbachev, according to Gaddis, because an “increasingly senescent” Leonid Brezhnev had equated expansionism with defense -- much as Stalin had in the late 1940s. Once he detailed the problems presented by “evil empire” rhetoric “more appropriate to a medieval crusade than to a revival of containment,” Gaddis credited Reagan as a “simple and straight-forward man,” who “took the principle of ‘negotiation from strength’ literally: once one had built strength, one negotiated.”

Reagan was shook by the widespread criticism of his Evil Empire speech, Gaddis continued, leading to more restrained language and receptiveness to negotiations with the Kremlin.(30) Read as unqualified praise by many of his surprised colleagues in history and political science -- as well as those looking for academic affirmation of Reagan’s policies -- we should question whether Gaddis grasped the true unexpectedness about Reagan. The third and revisionist wave of scholarship, in which there seemed to be room to say something positive about Reagan, had begun even before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Books in the third wave of scholarship have often focused on Reagan and his Cold War policies, rather than surveying postwar U.S. foreign policy. As more time has passed since the Reagan administration and as more archival information has become available, the president and his policies are perceived as a defensible subject to examine. Two studies in political science by Mark Lagon and James Scott and a historical biography by William Pemberton characterize the last wave of academic writing to date on Reagan.

Among scholarly writers, Lagon presents the most careful and, in some respects, fairest, assessment yet published of Reagan. It must be noted, however, that his 1994 book was distributed in small numbers by an academic press that is not considered significant (even authentic) by mainstream scholars and is full of IR jargon. Setting prose and methodology aside, Lagon is the first scholar to give considerable attention to the Parliament address, which he terms the “Westminster paradigm” undergirding the Reagan Doctrine. Moreover, he takes seriously Reagan’s rhetoric as a whole: “His speeches reveal that inchoate worldview he shared with both the westerners and neoconservatives -- one that gave birth to the Reagan Doctrine when operationalized by the inner and outer circles of the true believers.”(31)

A research assistant to Jeane Kirkpatrick (former Reagan ambassador to the United Nations) when he wrote his book, Lagon based much of his writing on interviews with Reagan’s cabinet members, policymakers, and speechwriters as well as columnists such as Irving Kristol and Charles Krauthammer. His employment history is a liability in the eyes of the academic majority; as of now, Lagon’s book is an anomaly in the third wave of scholarship on Reagan.

Political scientist Scott makes minimal reference to the Westminster and Evil Empire speeches, because he argues in a 1996 work that the Reagan Doctrine “emerged from the shifting interactions between the White House, Congress, bureaucratic agencies, and groups and individuals from the private sector.” Common now in textbooks as well as case studies, this academic method depicts the president as one -- and rarely the most important -- among many players in the formulation of policy.(32)

Scott’s book, well-written and thoroughly documented according to current scholarly standards, will have staying power in classes on U.S. foreign policy, case studies in presidential policymaking, and the closing years of the Cold War. Author of a Reagan biography that was well received in 1998, historian Pemberton raises the Parliament address in the context of Reagan’s admirers arguing that it stated “a simple but profound truth” as did the Evil Empire speech. However, “Nancy Reagan and others encouraged him to tone down his rhetoric, and he never used such harsh words again; but then he did not need to -- the message was clear and the words unforgettable.”

Citing favorably Kissinger’s assessment that 40 years of bipartisan effort and “70 years of communist ossification” ended the Cold War, Pemberton says “that rather than having some deep insight into the Soviet Union, Reagan was fortunate enough to be in power when that nation changed for reasons that he did not understand and did not influence.” The two chapters pertaining to President Reagan’s foreign policy are entitled “Engaging the Soviets, 1981-1985” and “Coping with Scandal, Exiting with Honor, 1985-1989.” Exiting with honor, according to Pemberton, was due to Gorbachev’s gravitas and the signing of the INF Treaty, “the first time in history that nations had agreed to destroy nuclear weapons rather than just slow down the arms race.”(33) In most of the third wave of scholarship, Reagan is either a minor cog in the policy process or lucky to have been president when Gorbachev was in power.

The Academy and Reagan’s Future

The best president to compare to Reagan, in terms of Cold War foreign policy, is Harry S. Truman. Truman gave many noteworthy speeches -- although not as many as Reagan did -- but is mainly remembered for his special message to Congress on Greece and Turkey of March 12, 1947, popularly called the Truman Doctrine speech.

At the time, the speech was seen as significant and received much domestic and international attention. In part, the reaction stemmed from the fact that Truman’s remarks were meant to inspire legislation to fund aid to Greece and Turkey -- an unprecedented commitment for the United States in 1947. As the decades passed, the speech received much academic attention, with some scholars saying that Truman had announced a new policy (which was noted either favorably or critically, and more often the latter) and others contending that Truman’s words should be seen as a temporary aberration from the limited, reasonable containment conceived by the State Department’s George Kennan. In time, Reagan’s Westminster speech will receive more academic attention. It will be seen as one of his four or so most important addresses along with the Evil Empire, Brandenburg Gate, and Moscow State University remarks. But the Parliament address will be studied -- and accepted or dismissed -- for its articulation of Reagan’s political philosophical approach. Reagan did not ask for a particular bill to be passed or for funding to be appropriated: He stated his understanding of the Cold War and his predictions about its future course while sketching the political circumstances around the world. To be sure, Truman also presented his political thought about the Cold War in his 1947 speech, but the practical element of aid to Greece and Turkey cannot be separated from the overall portrayal of the East-West conflict. Describing, as he put it, “a plan and a hope for the long term,” Reagan devoted a whole speech to his understanding of the Cold War, without prescribing specific policy measures or legislation.(34)

In the end, Truman will probably always have the edge over Reagan in academic eyes. Truman was unrefined, according to many, and his administration was plagued with scandals, but he was a Democrat.(35) Reagan, by contrast, was a Republican with a conservative philosophy. The most incisive and fairest writing on him will likely be from outside the academy. We have a recent example in Steven Hayward’s The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980. Hayward is trying to do for Reagan in a multivolume work what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. did for Franklin Roosevelt. It is not a stretch to contend that Reagan is the FDR of the right. But Hayward’s work -- however well researched and written -- will never be endorsed by scholars and media elite as Schlesinger’s Age of Roosevelt was. And to bring us back to the academy, Schlesinger’s books have been used over the years in many classes, but Hayward’s Age of Reagan will not see similar adoption in political science and history courses.

Once academics recognize the Parliament address as the philosophical document behind Reagan’s Cold War policies, a larger debate, already limned in the three waves of scholarship to date, will occur across the political spectrum. Some intellectuals will find Reagan’s speech problematic: rejecting détente, declaring a new or second Cold War, outlining an obsessive-compulsive foreign policy, and locking the United States into outdated policies that had been associated with the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. To such academics, Reagan was extreme in most every way -- from rhetoric to action -- as well as simplistic and lacking in the understanding of nuances. In this view, we were fortunate that Gorbachev came along to end the Cold War. This is and will be one end of the academic spectrum, and it constitutes a sizable minority.

There is and will be a middle group on this spectrum. These scholars argue that the Cold War ended because of numerous factors, especially the internal collapse of the USSR economically. At best in this picture, Reagan was one of several players or influences outside the Soviet Union involved in the decline of the Cold War. Reagan may be praised for “reversing” or “correcting” his earlier harsh attitude of the Westminster and Evil Empire speeches, but he will as likely be faulted for causing great instability during a misguided and irrational hard-line phase. In other words, peace through strength and a forward strategy of freedom were not necessary (or not that necessary) to the outcome of the Cold War, and Reagan lacked the astute judgment required to face the complications of international affairs. This is already the emerging majority opinion about Reagan and his presidency.

There is and will be a small segment of academic opinion that thinks that Reagan’s thought, words, and actions together were a major factor in the end of the Cold War. These scholars maintain that individual actors can play a large role in politics (including world politics), especially when that actor is president of the most powerful country in the world. Such scholars take grand strategy and political, diplomatic, military, and economic policies seriously, and thus believe that the moral and political understanding of the statesman is crucial to his policies. At conferences and in professional journals, these scholars do not call Reagan heroic or wise -- this is not academically neutral language -- but they speak of Reagan’s understanding, effectiveness, steadfastness, and prudence. This last academic group on the spectrum should not be expected, all else being equal, to grow much. Given today’s climate in higher education, scholars will find it difficult to write positive assessments of Reagan -- even if that is where research, observation, experience and consideration lead them -- for their academic work.

These three groups, primarily political scientists, will be joined, as time passes, by more historians. More papers will be processed at the Reagan Library and in other collections. Once past the 20-year mark for the whole Reagan presidency, historians will find it acceptable to publish in depth on the subject. It is necessary, then, to say a word about the disciplines of political science and history to explain why academics will largely criticize, deprecate, or diminish Reagan’s role in the Cold War.

Political science has fields in international relations and foreign policy. International political economy increasingly dominates IR, although September 11 has done much to resurrect security studies; as a result, there should be a spike in consideration of Reagan’s foreign policy in dissertations and university press books in the next several years. But individuals and their rhetoric receive little attention in IR, where such an approach is viewed as outmoded. In foreign policy, the current method is to dissect actors and processes -- e.g., the departments of state, defense, and commerce and bureaucratic, media, lobbying, and other influences. Although particular administrations are analyzed, individual presidents often get lost in this picture. This method replaced one that was still influential during Reagan’s presidency: an assessment of each modern president, typically starting with Franklin Roosevelt, and his administration, offering a worldview as applied to key regions and major topics (such as arms control, trade, and domestic politics). The result of all of this is that political science has some, but ultimately small, space for Reagan and his most important foreign policy speech.

The discipline of history is worse. History used to encompass the diplomatic, intellectual, and American fields. American history survives, but it has radically changed in recent years. Meanwhile, universities are replacing their diplomatic and intellectual historians, who are part of a large, retiring generation of academics, with social, psychological, and sociological historians across all fields. When the 1980s will be written about, it will likely be, for example, about how the peace movement shaped U.S.-West European relations, how alcoholism and food shortages eroded the Soviet Union, or how group identities informed social dissent. These factors are arguably necessary to address, but they do not explain the heart of the Cold War in the Reagan era. The role of significant individuals will be diminished by such histories. And this is all against the backdrop of the two Cold War methodologies now dominant in history: post-revisionism, which holds that mutual misunderstandings and a power struggle filling a vacuum in postwar Europe caused the Cold War, and corporatism, which contends that capitalism and America’s preponderant power underlay the East-West conflict. In this context, historian John Lewis Gaddis’ limited praise of Reagan seems a paean.(36)

It must be remembered that these political scientists and historians teach students, both undergraduates as well as a smaller number of graduate students who will be the next generation of college professors. How these students accept their teachers’ perspectives cannot be entirely predicted. The baby boomlet students are considered more moderate than, and sometimes even conservative when compared to, their baby boomer parents. New technologies make it easier than ever for students to access primary documents from the Reagan administration. But we need to consider what these students are being taught and what characterizes them.

Students currently in college have little knowledge of the most protracted conflict of the 20th century. Indeed, the 20th century is not their century. Some or all of their college years and their entire postgraduate lives -- including career, marriage, family, and retirement -- will be in the 21st century.

Even at the most prestigious liberal arts colleges, majors in political science and history lack a general knowledge of the Cold War. Students stumble in seminar discussion over the words Soviet, USSR, and Soviet Union. It is all Russian to them. As a result, they rarely understand the need to make distinctions. They want to like America, and some do outright -- especially after September 11. But students are also quick to sympathize with those who see the United States as an arrogant hyper-power guilty of geopolitical hypocrisy. Patriotism often confuses them, but guilt about their country does not.

The current generation of students is also less political and less ideological, generally lacking interest in political affairs. Some may view this development as progress. But there is little that sparks their public passions, and there are few great debates of today or the past in which they are willing to invest their intellectual capital. The students are, above all, pleasant and goal-oriented, and will undoubtedly succeed in politics, business, and other professions. They have lived lives of unprecedented comfort, and so world wars, depression, or the Cold War are alien concepts to them.

Do today’s students who will become future politicians, businessmen, media elite, and professors who write and teach about Reagan and the Cold War understand politics? Yes and no. And that makes the vocation of teaching well about a statesman like Ronald Reagan -- and about great speeches that shape our world, like the 1982 Parliament address -- all the more important. Winston Churchill said the historical record would be accurate because he would write the history, and thus his words and deeds would be remembered correctly. Reagan has not been in a position to do the same. It is therefore up to honest scholars, contemporary observers, and public intellectuals to set the historical record straight. Reagan’s most important foreign policy speech will not be forgotten, and his presidency will probably receive higher and higher marks in popular books. But do not look to the academy anytime soon for a fair assessment of the meaning of the thought and action of Ronald Reagan.

Note: The preceding remarks were part of a panel discussion held in The Heritage Foundation.

---

1. “Address at Commencement Exercises at the University of Notre Dame,” May 17, 1981,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1981 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1982), 434. Reagan would use the language of a “bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written” again in his March 1983 remarks to the National Association of Evangelicals.

2. NSC 68 was signed by President Harry Truman in 1950 and, for years, underlay American Cold War policy.

3. Reagan frequently said that the “arms race” was a misnomer, since the United States stopped and the Soviet Union kept going under SALT.

4. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 552.

5. “Remarks at the Eureka College Alumni Association Dinner in Eureka, Illinois,” May 9, 1982, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1982, online at reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1982, accessed on May 24, 2002.

6. The Brezhnev Doctrine, named for Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, declared that once a country became Communist, it would always remain Communist.

7. For more on the background in Great Britain, see Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 258, and Geoffrey Smith, Reagan and Thatcher (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 97-98.

8. “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” June 8, 1982, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1982 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1983), 742-48.

9.Reagan’s speechwriter was in sync with him. For description of how Reagan speechwriter Tony Dolan saw the parallel between Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech and Reagan’s Parliament address, see James C. Humes, My Fellow Americans: Presidential Addresses that Shaped History (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1992), 266.

10. “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” 742-48.

11. Ibid.

12. See, for example, Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 186-87.

13. “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” 742-48.

14. Ibid.

15. “Toasts of the President and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at a Luncheon Honoring the President in London,” June 8, 1982, Public Papers of the Presidents: Reagan, 1982, 748.

16. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 258.

17. Lou Cannon, “President Calls for ‘Crusade,’” The Washington Post, June 9, 1982, A10.

18. R.W. Apple, “President Urges Global Crusade for Democracy,” The New York Times, June 9, 1982, A17.

19. Lou Cannon, “President Calls for ‘Crusade,’” The Washington Post, June 9, 1982, A1, A10; R.W. Apple, “President Urges Global Crusade for Democracy,” The New York Times, June 9, 1982, A1, A17; “Ronald Reagan’s Flower Power,” The New York Times, June 9, 1982, A26; “’Campaign for Democracy,’” The Washington Post, June 10, 1982, A16; Richard Cohen, “Leadership,” The Washington Post, June 13, 1982, B1. For a similar view to Cohen’s from a British point of view, see Andrew Knight, “Letter From London,” The Washington Post, June 13, 1982, C7. Both Cohen and Knight imply that Reagan was generally inept.

20. For more on what the Soviets perceived as Reagan’s new anticommunist crusade, see Lawrence T. Caldwell and Robert Legvold, “Reagan Through Soviet Eyes,” Foreign Policy (Fall 1983): 3-21. It is interesting to note how often the Soviet and majority American academic views coincide.

21. Stanley Hoffmann, “Taming the Eagle: U.S. Foreign Policy and National Security,” 1983, in Hoffmann, Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), 334, 333.

22. James A. Nathan and James K. Oliver, United States Foreign Policy and World Order, third edition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985), 424-26, 444.

23. Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1985), 1009-12, 1012-13. Garthoff is also the author of The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994), in which he argues that Gorbachev and a new generation of Soviet leaders, not Reagan and his policies, ended the Cold War.

24. John Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since World War II, eleventh edition (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1988), 268-69, 270-346.

25. Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since World War II, 358.

26. LaFeber’s revisionism is different from the third—and revisionist—wave of Reagan scholarship. A revisionist historian, LaFeber maintains that individual U.S. leaders and the nature of American capitalism were the major causes of the Cold War.

27. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 668-69, 677, 699-700.

28. Coral Bell, The Reagan Paradox: American Foreign Policy in the 1980s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 52, 126, 139, 171.

29. Beth A. Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1997).

30. John Lewis Gaddis, “The Unexpected Ronald Reagan,” 1990, in Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 130, 120, 122, 125, 131. Gaddis mentions the Parliament address only in an endnote.

31. Mark P. Lagon, The Reagan Doctrine: Sources of American Conduct in the Cold War’s Last Chapter (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 143, 111. By westerners, Lagon means conservatives from the West Coast, especially California, and out of the Barry Goldwater mold.

32. James M. Scott, Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 2, 18, 22.

33. William E. Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 153, 154, 196. On page 155, Pemberton argues: “Détente, rather than strengthening the Soviet Union as the Reaganites believed, had opened the communist bloc to trade, travel, and intellectual exchange, and citizens there realized that they had less freedom and fewer consumer goods than those in Western and many Asian countries.”

34. “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” 742-48.

35. It should be noted that Truman’s edge over Reagan in the academy could end up being quite small. Although recent biographies of Truman have given him some or much credit in key Cold War policies, most political science and history studies of the Truman administration have diminished or criticized his influence and role.

36. John Lewis Gaddis’ most recent book, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), which covers the origins of the Cold War through the Cuban Missile Crisis, mentions Communist ideology as a factor in the Cold War; if other post-revisionists follow Gaddis’ lead, there will be an overall improvement in Cold War historiography. But Gaddis does not allow for the totalitarianism of Marxism-Leninism.