Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War

Introduction

Introduction On June 8, 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke in the Royal Gallery at Westminster to assembled members of Parliament and other dignitaries .1 In the speech, Reagan discussed the danger that “the existence of nuclear weapons could mean, if not the extinction of mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it” and the importance of real arms control that would reduce “the risk of war by reducing the means of waging war on both sides” (15). But the speech is most remembered for Reagan’s defense of classical liberalism and democracy. He famously said that “we live now at a turning point” (21) in which there is a growing consensus rejecting“the arbitrary power of the state” (25). He claimed that “we are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis” (22) in the Soviet Union and pointed to a host of nations that had chosen or were trying to choose democracy. Reagan then called for a grand effort “to foster the infrastructure of democracy” (40), an effort built on the core idea of the speech that “democracy is not a fragile flower. Still[,] it needs cultivating” (34). He said that effort of cultivation would produce “the march of freedom and democracy” and “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” (49). A quarter-century later, while not totally forgotten, the speech is remembered mostly by neoconservatives as the moment when Reagan and Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put “freedom on the [฀] introduction offensive where it belonged.”2 In this view,the speech was immediately recognized to be,in Thatcher’s words,“a triumph.”3 For example,Peggy Noonan, in a hagiographic analysis of Reagan’s greatness titled When Character Was King, reports that “the applause was mighty, thunderous . It was a beautiful moment in Western history, certainly one of the most stunning of the past century.”4 In actuality, the speech was not recognized as particularly important or effective at the time, and no contemporary source verifies Noonan’s account of the reaction. At the time,the reaction to the speech was tepid,a point we describe in detail later in this book.It is revealing that initially the strongest positive reaction to the speech related not to its content but to “President Reagan’s smooth, word-perfect delivery.” Members of Parliament had never seen a teleprompter prior to the address and “crowded the dais to see how he managed his rhetorical feat.”5 Writing in the Financial Times, Elinor Goodman observed sarcastically that“President Ronald Reagan came to Westminster to improve his image and reassure MPs that he was not the aging film actor with his finger on the trigger of popular repute,but an international statesman dedicated to peace and freedom. What he succeeded in doing was dazzling his audience with the use of the latest presidential support system and demonstrating that he retains the same homely [sic] outlook that took him from B movies to the White House.”6 It certainly did not bode well for the importance of the speech that Conservative Party allies of Prime Minister Thatcher were more impressed with how Reagan had delivered the address than what he had said. Rhetorical critics, political commentators, and historians were also not especially impressed with the speech, either during the Reagan administration or in the years immediately following his presidency. For example, in their insightful book, Ronald Reagan: The Great Communicator , Kurt Ritter and David Henry do not even mention the speech, except for listing it in a chronology of major speeches. In her important book,Playing the Game: The Presidential Rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, Mary Stuckey does not mention the Westminster speech at all. She clearly was not impressed with the speech since she notes that “Reagan’s foreign policy statements during this period [1981–1982] [฀] introduction were few and far between.”Paul Erickson also ignores the speech in his book Reagan Speaks.7 It is notable that a survey by rhetorical analysts did not include the speech in the top one hundred American speeches of the twentieth century.8 Early books about the Reagan administration also mostly ignored the speech. For example, Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates do not even mention the speech in their book The Acting President. A discussion of the speech is also curiously absent...