Reagan: In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (review)

Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan: In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America. New York: Free Press, 2001. 549 pp. $30.00.

Throughout his political career Ronald Reagan benefited immensely from the tendency of his opponents to underestimate him. Many of Reagan's critics derided him as a mere actor whose political success owed to his ability to deliver lines that others had written for him. The publication of Reagan: In His Own Hand, an anthology of his unpublished writings, should make this view harder to sustain. The collection contains few of his presidential addresses or writings; rather, it is devoted mainly to the 700 radio addresses that Reagan wrote and delivered from 1975 to 1979, after his terms as governor and before his successful run for the presidency. In these addresses, covering virtually every national policy issue during the 1970s, Reagan proved himself to be an accomplished writer who possessed a fine wit, thought seriously, and read extensively. The collection also shows that Reagan, not his advisers, was the main architect of the agenda on which he campaigned against Jimmy Carter in 1980 and which he successfully implemented as president.

What Reagan wrote in the 1970s challenged the conventional wisdom of the time. In this period of high inflation and low growth, with American power apparently in retreat and Soviet power apparently on the rise, many scholars and statesmen succumbed to the mounting pessimism about America's prospects and democracy's ability to compete against Communist states. Many considered the Soviet Union to be the ascendant power and believed that détente involving Western accommodations was the best way to tame Soviet power. Reagan had no such illusions. He championed the moral and practical virtues of America's political and economic system. For Reagan, the goal of American foreign policy was not to learn to live with, but to hasten the demise of, Soviet Communism through a policy of unremitting vigilance. "Communism is neither an economic or a political system—it is a form of insanity—a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature," proclaimed Reagan as early as 1975.

Many of the foreign and defense positions that Reagan articulated in the 1970s also reveal why neoconservative critics of détente found such a welcome home in the Reagan administration. Like the neoconservatives and unlike much of the old Republican right, Reagan viewed the Soviet threat through the prism of the lessons of Munich, warning that the mistakes made by appeasing Nazi totalitarianism must not be repeated with the Soviet Union:

The leaders of that generation saw the growing menace and talked of it but reacted to the growing military might of Germany with anguished passiveness. Will it be said of today's world leaders as it was of the pre W.W.II. leaders that they were better at surviving the catastrophe than preventing it? World War II did not happen because the nations of the free world engaged in a massive military buildup. In most countries including our own, too little too late described our reaction to the Nazi military colossus.

Reagan characterized détente in another essay as something that "a farmer has with his turkey—until Thanksgiving."

Reagan's views of the Cold War largely coincided with those of Senator Henry M. Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, whom neoconservatives revered for leading the fight and offering the most compelling arguments against détente as Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter pursued it. Like Jackson, Reagan stressed the importance of human rights in the struggle against Soviet Communism and decried the tendency of liberals to treat authoritarian right-wing regimes more severely than they did repressive left...