Reagan at Westminster: Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War (review)

This book is a contribution to the Library of Presidential Rhetoric. It reprints in numbered paragraphs (52 in all) the speech of President Ronald Reagan on 8 June 1982 to members of the British parliament at the Royal Gallery in Westminster. As background it provides a chapter on the evolution of U.S. Cold War policy and rhetoric, followed by a detailed exposition of the drafting of the speech, including the parts done by Reagan himself (15 percent of the speech). The authors analyze the speech as a matter of “ultimate definition and dialectical engagement,” describe the reactions to it at the time, and end with comments on its importance.

The contribution of the book lies first in its presentation of the speech itself and then in its account of the drafting process—which, for students of how senior U.S. officials and their staffs produce high-level statements of U.S. policy, is exemplary in its details. The most senior officials, and especially the president, rely heavily on their staffs to gauge their thoughts, reflect the consensus of their administration, and provide them with sufficient opportunities to massage the near-final drafts. The process can be difficult, as the authors scrupulously report. Competition rages to get favored views included. The book gives due credit to Tony Dolan, Reagan’s principal speechwriter, for bringing it all together coherently. For all those involved, the actual delivery of the speech may have been something of an anticlimax, but in reality much solidarity within the administration must have been created in the drafting, guided by the long-established views of Reagan himself.

The authors’ subtitle is “Foreshadowing the End of the Cold War,” and they imply that the speech at Westminster was somehow instrumental in bringing that end about. They assert that the language of the speech was somehow new. Their main analysis of the speech’s rhetoric, in chapter 3, and particularly their assertion that it “revers[ed] the Communist claim to superiority over the West,” may be appropriate for professors of communications, but to the casual reader who lived through the Cold War the language is not at all exceptional. The speech is rather a quite good capturing of the rhetoric that characterized discussions within the United States about the nature of the Soviet regime and its ideology—discussions dating back to George Kennan’s “X” article in Foreign Affairs in 1947. Perhaps the accomplishment of Reagan and his staff was finally to catch up to and summarize that standard rhetoric. The reactions to the speech, as the authors report them, were tepid. That is, its impact might have been more in consolidating views within the Reagan administration itself than in affecting the views of U.S. and British observers.

The authors devote only two pages to reactions in the Soviet Union, reporting only the commentaries by the TASS news agency and the newspaper Izvestiya (which were negative). Given the materials that have come to light since the fall of the Soviet Union and the numerous former Soviet officials who have written memoirs about the last decade of the Soviet Union, including Mikhail Gorbachev, it would have been useful if the authors had done deeper research on the Soviet reactions at the time and in retrospect. The speech does allude to economic troubles in the Soviet Union that perhaps were not fully recognized at the time, but most experts in the West by 1982 were well aware that both the Soviet economy and its political coherence were in decline. The Solidarity demonstrations in Poland in 1980–1981 and the resulting imposition of martial law there already had had two effects: (1) martial law meant the eclipse of Communist Party rule in Poland, regardless of the institutional formalities the Polish government might have followed; and (2) the Soviet Union had to take on the further economic burden of keeping Poland from economic collapse. Leonid...