American Enterprise Institute

March 6, 2007

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

3:45 p.m.	Registration
4:00	Speaker:	John Patrick Diggins, City University of New York
	Discussants:	Peter Wallison, AEI
		Alan Wolfe, Boston College
	Moderator:	Steven F. Hayward, AEI
5:50	Wine and Cheese Reception
6:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Steve Hayward:  Welcome to AEI.  I’m Steve Hayward, resident scholar here and occasional writer myself on all subjects Reagan.  We should have a fascinating panel this afternoon.  I’d like to introduce it in the following way.  It was about twelve or fifteen years ago or so that Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley wrote a widely noted article in which he said that academic historians had not paid sufficient attention to conservatives and the conservative movement in America, and that this constituted a lacuna in our historical scholarship.  Before very long, some of Brinkley’s best students started producing a series of excellent books about Ronald Reagan, in the case of Matthew Dalek [phonetic], and other aspects of the conservative phenomenon in America over the last two generations.

But it struck me that when all these authors reached the summit of their work, to plant their flag, they reached up that last part of the mountaintop – and there found a flag already in place that said “Jack Diggins was here.”  In fact, one of Professor Diggins’ early books, one that I’m very fond of, is a book from 1975 called “Up from Communism: Conservative Intellectual Odysseys in American Intellectual History.”  It covered the stories of Max Eastman, John Dos Passos [phonetic], Will Herberg [phonetic], and James Burnham, four of the ex-communists who gravitated to National Review in the 1950s and who helped recast the conservative movement under Bill Buckley.  This book by Professor Diggins was one of the first books by an outsider – that is, a non-member of the Conservative Movement – that took these thinkers seriously and did not merely dismiss them as some trivial affectation of reaction.

This book, Professor Diggins tells us in the preface, was conceived in the late 1960s during the turmoil and riots of San Francisco State University, where he was teaching at the time, and where Californians and indeed the rest of the nation became acquainted with the plucky university president, Sam Hiacawa – at that time a Democrat, as it turned out – and of course people were fascinated by Ronald Reagan’s jousting with student radicals at UC-Berkeley and elsewhere.  One observation I’ll offer is that Reagan was always blessed with perfect opponents, and certainly the students were an ideal foil to him at that time.

If you pause for a moment, a book about four communists who turned to the right should emerge from the crucible of the late 1960s in the Bay Area might seem somewhat incongruous or counterintuitive.  Indeed, Professor Diggins wonders in the introduction to “Up from Communism” whether radicals of that moment that he observed in front of him at San Francisco State, whether those leftists might turn out to be tomorrow’s rightists, just as members of the radical left in the 1930s – some of them – gravitated to National Review in the 1950s.  So there in 1975, and there ten years later, almost as if on cue, David Horowitz arrives.

But what really captures Professor Diggins’ interest, although it’s explicit in this book, is I think more the phenomenon of what we call neo-conservatism.  So with his most recent book, “Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History,” I think Professor Diggins might be said to have come full circle and returning – despite the obvious discontinuities of the subject matter – Will Herberg and Ronald Reagan are not two people you put in the same sentence very often – nonetheless I think you see some continuities between “Up from Communism” and this book.

I’ve chided Professor Diggins elsewhere that his approach to Reagan is arguably mischievous.  At the end of the preface to his new book, he says part of his purpose is to “rescue Reagan from many of today’s so-called Reaganites.”  I told him I may resemble that remark, I’m not sure.

But certainly Professor Diggins has a highly unconventional view of Reagan, one I’m not sure I agree with in all respects but I do not think can be easily dismissed either.  Above all, he’s brought some very fresh themes to the ever-growing conversation about Reagan, and that’s always to be welcomed.

Before introducing our discussants and commencing the formal part of the panel, let me just round out the introduction of Professor Diggins by mentioning that he’s the author of eleven books in all and editor of two others, on subjects as diverse as Max Weber, Mussolini and fascism, Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, and 20th century pragmatism – the philosophy that I like to joke didn’t work.  But one other book of his that stands out for me for special mention is his 1984 book, “The Lost Soul of American Politics.”  It deserves to be back in print, I think.  I think it’s an extremely original and important contribution to the intellectual history of liberalism and republicanism as it unfolded in American thought.

Joining us today to discuss Professor Diggins’ book is Peter Wallison from here at the American Enterprise Institute.  Peter has been at AEI for seven years now, specializing in legal and financial regulatory matters.  His relevance to this topic is that during the first term of President Reagan he was general counsel at the Treasury Department and during Reagan’s second term he served as White House Counsel during some of the most difficult days of the Iran-Contra scandal.  These experiences led him to write his own very good book on Ronald Reagan called “Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency.” 

We’re pleased also today that Alan Wolfe has been able to join us from Boston College.  He’s the director there of the Boise Center for Religion in American Public Life, and the author of numerous books including one I’m especially fond of, “One Nation After All.”  He writes frequently for The New Republic, The Wilson Quarterly, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post and – as I reminded him – he used to write frequently for The Nation back in the 1980s when Reagan was in office.

We’ll let Professor Diggins talk for twenty-some minutes or so and then each of our discussants will offer their reflections for about twenty minutes or so.  Then we will have, I expect, a lively cross-talk amongst the panel and open up the floor to questions and discussions.  With that, Professor Diggins, the floor is yours.

John Patrick Diggins:  Thank you, Steven.  Thank you for inviting me to the American Enterprise Institute to present a talk on Ronald Reagan, who probably you know more about than I do even though I spent years working on a book about him.

What’s usually asked of a person who writes a book is, how did you come to write it?  What was the background, what was the motive?  Or as my students say, where were you coming from?  Early in my life or academic career I was one of the Reagan haters, because I was teaching in California and he was governor and it was a time of student disruptions on campus, the protests against the Vietnam War.  He was coming down hard on the campuses.  That impression stayed with me for a number of years.

But when he becomes president, I take another look at Reagan and I begin to notice how he’s approaching the whole idea of the Cold War and the Soviet Union and the arms race.  I begin to change my mind about Reagan.  Then his letters came out and that was really an eye-opener for me, because his letters are very intelligent, they’re very sensitive.  They’re full of conviction and passion.  I thought, there is something there. 

I didn’t really do anything about it but I gave a talk one night and Barnes & Noble and it was based on a book I had written about Abraham Lincoln.  Someone in the audience said, “Aside from Lincoln, who are the other great presidents?”  I said, well, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, and I mentioned Ronald Reagan.  The audience just gasped.  This was the Upper West Side in Manhattan.  So I kind of thought, I’ll never convince these people.  Still, even when my book came out, I ran into colleagues, they said: Diggins, I’m not convinced.  So I’ve given up trying to change the mind of the left about Ronald Reagan.

There was a conference held on Reagan at Hofstra College in 1995 and a professor made the comment that Eisenhower had the military-industrial complex to contend with and Reagan had the academic-media complex.  What he was getting at is that whereas Eisenhower had to deal with people who liked the Cold War for economic reasons – that is, the Pentagon and the arms industry – Reagan had to deal with people who disliked the Cold War for political reasons – that is, the academic intellectuals and the journalists.  Even when the Cold War comes to an end, I notice there is little appreciation about how Gorbachev and Reagan and Margaret Thatcher got together to bring it to an end.

So that was part of my background, to try to look into how this happened, because it’s one of the great achievements of modern history.  Nothing like this has ever happened – that is, an empire such as the Soviet Union collapsed without there being a war or revolution and the Cold War came to an end without a shot being fired.  I wanted to see how that came about.

The other thing asked about me is – my field is intellectual history, why am I writing about Ronald Reagan?  My reply is that a lot was going on in the 1980s.  This was the period when think tanks came into existence and there were all kinds of debates in economics about supply side economics.  But above all, in terms of theories of international relations, there were debates about the validity of a containment policy, of the idea of détente with the Soviet Union, and above all of the idea of deterrence, which Reagan himself came to question.

Then there were tremendous debates about totalitarianism and what this actually meant for modern history, because there was no precedent to that in the past.  Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote a famous essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” where she draws a distinction between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes.  The gist is that totalitarian regimes continue indefinitely whereas authoritarian regimes, such as fascist regimes, collapse.  That struck home with me.  I used to teach that to my students and I would tell them the difference between a fascist regime and a totalitarian regime is that fascist regimes – they all collapse once the leader goes, whereas communist totalitarianism, it doesn’t matter who the leader is.  In fact, Reagan lived to see several leaders die, no sooner had they taken office than they passed away.  He said to his wife, Nancy, “How can I deal with the Russians when they keep dying on me?”

This point of view of totalitarianism comes to be called the doctrine of irreversibility – that is, once a country goes communist, becomes totalitarian, there’s no turning back.  There’s nothing you can do about it.  It’s permanent, it’s indefinite.  I wanted to look into that to see how that played out in terms of historical research.

Then the other question asked of me: how is a person who’s not a conservative writing on Ronald Reagan, who’s a conservative through and through?  I know in some of the advertisements for my book I’m called a conservative.  Actually I see myself as a liberal and I was a Democrat up until the 1990s when Mr. and Mrs. Machiavelli were in office and you had to accept a lot of untruth in politics.  But there is the question of what kind of conservative was Reagan.  I think Alan will address that question, because he’s a conservative in the sense that he believes in the goodness of human nature, he denies the existence of evil, he feels God is everywhere – excuse me, that makes him a liberal.  Did I say conservative?  No.  These are – no, that makes him a liberal.  He’s not a conservative in the sense of the Founding Fathers who framed the Constitution.  They believed in the existence of evil, that human nature was not trustworthy, and that there had to be constitutional controls.  A skepticism about the idea of progress, about the idea of equality.  All those attributes associated with conservatism, Reagan doesn’t subscribe to.

If you read the classic book by Russell Kirk, “The Conservative Mind,” he starts out with Edmund Burke and John Adams, who is my favorite philosopher, and Alexander Hamilton.  These figures do not resonate in Ronald Reagan at all.  His hero is Tom Payne and occasionally he quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I gave a talk here a couple weeks ago to several institutions and since that time there’s taken place the passing of Arthur Schlesinger, who was a dear old colleague of mine.  I’ve given a lot of thought to his role in American history and what it means.  All the eulogies and op-eds that have been coming out on Arthur suggest that he was one of the last public intellectuals, public historians, and he helped shape opinion, interpretation and so forth.  I’m very endeared to him but I want to say that if his theory of American history is right, there would not have been Ronald Reagan. 

He had this cyclical theory of American history.  That is, for every time there’s a conservative reaction – such as Harding, Coolidge and Hoover – there’s going to be a liberal thrust, such as Franklin Roosevelt.  After Roosevelt and Truman, after the Eisenhower years, he saw it in John Kennedy and a little bit in Johnson.  But then after that he was waiting for it to happen again.  He thought he saw it in Clinton and he said to me, “Isn’t it wonderful that Clinton is reviving the whole tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and progressive liberalism?”  I’d say, “But Arthur, I don’t see it.  There’s no poster of Franklin Roosevelt at the Democratic Convention.  There’s no song, ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’.”  Clinton and Gore disassociated themselves from the old liberalism.  I just didn’t see it in the 1990s.

Then there was the impeachment crisis.  He knocked on my door once and he – Sean Wolentz [phonetic] and Alan Brinkley and all the liberal historians got together a petition – 400 historians signed it – to oppose the impeachment of Clinton.  I just wouldn’t sign it.  I thought this was the end of democratic liberalism in the 1990s.  My colleagues couldn’t see it.  They thought it was a Republican attack – which it was, of course, that was there.  But I was greatly disillusioned because I was brought up a Democratic liberal and I always associated that with some quality of truth in politics.  But the idea that truth just disappeared was very bothersome to me.

Arthur said, “I respect your opinion, that’s fine, Jack.  Let’s get together for lunch.”  Then a couple days later he comes down the hall and says, “Jack, Alexandra agrees with you.”  Alexandra is his wife.  She too would not sign the petition.  Then later I was having lunch with him and he said, “I understand you’re writing a book on Reagan.”  I said, “Yes.”  He looked at me and said, “That’s good because I think you’ll have some fresh things to say.”  Then his eyes took on that twinkle and he said, “But don’t make him look too good.”

I thought when I was writing this book, is it possible I might change people’s minds?  People on the left, liberals – I’m not so sure.  Maybe, Alan, you can address that.

So that’s the background to the book.  The other thing I wanted to look into is this image of Reagan, the way he approached the Cold War, as though he had nuclear missiles in one arm and the crucifix in the other arm and he was going to be both a warrior and a crusader and so forth.  Very few people are aware of the extent to which he believed in peace and he dreaded the arms race, in the way in which John F. Kennedy did. 

The way he approached dealing with the Soviet Union I thought was quite imaginative, because he got no support in his administration except from George Shultz and his wife Nancy, and Michael Deaver, his administrative assistant, and Margaret Thatcher of course.  But the national security advisors, the secretary of defense, all others were totally against any type of arms negotiation.  They believed that the Cold War should escalate, that somehow the Soviet Union could be brought to its knees and send up the white flag in total surrender.

To this day there’s this assumption that America won the Cold War – not that it came to an end, but that America won it.  As though America actually fought the war.  People do not like to remember that where it was actually fought – in Asia – was not a very desirable outcome and where it was not fought – in continental Europe – it came to an end peacefully, as Thatcher and Gorbachev and Reagan wanted it to come to an end.

People spend a lot of time pointing to his rhetoric – the Evil Empire speech, a speech to the Parliament in 1982 where he talked about going anywhere in the world to support the forces of anti-communism, wherever we find them.  That’s 1982.  That same year he wouldn’t go to Poland to support Solidarity.  There are reasons for this.  It’s very complex and I won’t go into it.  But Reagan’s first priority was to come to an understanding with the Soviet Union. 

The first thing he does in terms of a diplomatic gesture is when he’s in the hospital recovering from an assassination attempt and he asks for a notepad, and he writes a letter to Brezhnev.  The letter is an illuminating document but many Reaganites do not pay attention to it.  But he’s trying to get at the bottom of what is the explanation of the distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Brezhnev just ignores the letter, or he’s very snippy about it.  Later though when Reagan tries the same approach to Gorbachev, there is a positive response.

All the time when Reagan is moving toward the summit, he’s being criticized by leading people, including Henry Kissinger.  Kissinger felt that Reagan had no sense of what diplomacy is all about.  Here’s a man who didn’t get a PhD in international relations, he was a Hollywood actor.  He pooh-poohs the idea that foreign relations can be approached in terms of what he called personal diplomacy – that is, human contact and goodwill and dialogue and conversation.  I suggest in my book that’s exactly what Reagan did and what he carried forward – unknowingly of course – comes out of classical Greek thought.  This is what Homer and Thucydides thought, that war can be prevented to the extent that politics continues – and by politics they meant dialogue and conversation.  Reagan wanted to continue that process and he did.  The end result, I think, was something we can all be grateful about.

I had some other things to say about the reform of the welfare state and so on, but maybe I’ll stop there.  Thank you.

Peter Wallison:  Thank you very much, Steve.  Professor, I’m going to be a little critical and I hope you’ll not mind that and we’ll have a discussion, because it’s entirely possible that I’m going to misinterpret what you have in the book.

I had been looking forward to a book like yours for a long time because my experience, my watching what is being published about Reagan, indicates that there’s very little serious scholarly work about Ronald Reagan or his presidency.  Although you could describe him as one of the three greatest presidents in American history, the number of scholarly books on Reagan almost two decades after he left office can be really counted on one hand.  You acknowledge in your book that Reagan’s reputation has suffered from Northern liberal biases that dominate the teaching and writing of American history. 

But I think there’s really another and perhaps more practical explanation for this.  Press coverage, often cited as the first draft of history, is really quite a bit more influential than that.  Historians and political scientists read The New York Times.  Its coverage of Reagan promoted the idea that he was simply an actor going through the motions as president, reading speeches written by his staff, dutifully following directions of his very shrewd advisors, falling asleep in Cabinet meetings and generally sleepwalking through history.

The fact that this imagery neatly fit with the interests of some of his staff in exaggerating their own importance was really lost in the media’s pell-nell acceptance of this narrative, I think.  If you’re a scholar and you believe this stuff – and why not? – you’re not going to make your reputation by studying the Reagan presidency.

To be sure, there were some problems with this story.  Reagan was successful again and again at getting the things he wanted most – tax cuts, spending cuts, tax reforms.  Increases in military appropriations and other priorities seemed to fall right into his lap.  Before Reagan became president, many observers of the presidency – especially after the Carter experience – concluded that it was just too big a job for one person. 

What we needed, they suggested, was a corporate presidency with several executives dividing up the work.  But Reagan actually made the job look easy – so easy that he was accused of being lazy.  Once when he was asked whether he was working hard as he should, Reagan responded: well, they say that hard work never hurt anyone, but I say, why take a chance?

But there is in fact an explanation for Reagan’s success.  He had a strategy for his presidency in which he would govern with principles and ideas rather than simply intervening in the decision-making process of his administration.  That is, he set out a series of principles and ideas and expected his administration to carry them out.  As you note, Professor, Reagan thought ideas were real and could move mountains.  He was truly an intellectual in the sense that he had great faith in the power of ideas. 

He also selected only four objectives that he wanted to achieve.  He wrote many, many radio addresses in which he studied policy very carefully, but when he became president he only focused on four of the policies that he had written about so extensively.  He wanted to reduce the role of government in the economy through deregulation, tax cuts and spending cuts.  He wanted to force American companies to compete by freeing trade.  He wanted to compel the Soviet Union to come to the bargaining table through a military buildup.  And he wanted to restore Americans’ faith in themselves after Vietnam – and Watergate, of course.

He concentrated almost entirely on this, left all the other issues to the staff in his administration, his departments and agencies.  And actually he achieved them all.  This was a completely different template for running a presidency.  This is much different from what FDR did.  You talk about Schlesinger – Schlesinger described how FDR ran his presidency.  Richard Neustadt picked up the same idea.  That became the central way for scholars to look at how a president should behave and Reagan did none of it.

In my book on Reagan, I tried to point out this difference in approach and strategy in the hope that it would attract interest of historians and political scientists.  But it never did.  At least it hasn’t yet.  This concerns me because it will be historians and political scientists who will ultimately establish Reagan’s place in history.  It would be a shame if he does not get the recognition that he deserves because of a misplaced view by academics about the reasons for the success of his presidency.

Which brings me to Professor Diggins’ book.  Although this is a book about Ronald Reagan, I have to say there’s very little Reagan in it.  By this I mean two things.

First, Professor Diggins makes a lot of interesting and controversial assertions about Reagan and what he achieved but he doesn’t take the time to support these statements with examples.  The book would be much more useful as a contribution to an understanding of its subject if we had been given examples of what Reagan was doing or saying.  That would give Professor Diggins observations some real substance.

Second, although Professor Diggins sees Reagan’s greatness primarily because he ended the Cold War and the totalitarian communist threat without firing a shot, he is somewhat unclear about what Reagan actually did to achieve this historic triumph.  In other words, the book does not fail in its conception but in its persuasiveness, I think.  Because of the publicity it’s getting, this book could encourage some scholars to look more carefully at Reagan.  But it won’t persuade anyone to accept Reagan’s greatness by the force of its argument.

To illustrate these points, I will focus on two central ideas in the book.  First, that Reagan had a romantic and transcendentalist personal philosophy similar to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson.  In place of the familiar Reagan philosophy of personal responsibility, freedom of the individual and small government, Reagan is described as a figure who is skeptical about the fundamental precepts of Christianity and believes that God wants people to create and take pleasure in material abundance.  Similarly, Reagan’s political philosophy is presented as inconsistent with the political philosophy and objectives of the Founding Fathers, which is an eccentric view, in my view, to be sure.

Second, that Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War and the threat of communism was the result of his conversion once he became president to views about the dangers of nuclear war that one would normally associate with American liberals.  I’m going to use the term “American liberals” to differentiate that kind of liberalism or whatever it is from classical liberalism, because as we’ll see Reagan was a classical liberal.  In the end, despite Professor Diggins’ high regard for Reagan, I believe this thesis actually underestimates Reagan’s contribution to the collapse of communism.

The central problem of the book I think is its failure to factor into its assessment of Reagan either a complete understanding of Reagan’s political philosophy or a complete understanding of the meaning of the terms liberalism and conservatism as they are used in the United States today.  Professor Diggins writes, “In confronting the Soviet Union, Reagan invoked principles of freedom, human rights, democratic elections and self-determination – liberal ideas derived from the natural rights legacy of John Locke and the foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson.  Yet if Reagan carried forward the message of liberalism, why did he become the emblem of conservatism?”

This question would seem incoherent to Reagan conservatives, who believe themselves to be and in fact are liberals in the classic sense.  They believe in smaller government, popular sovereignty limited by natural or god-given inalienable rights, individual self-reliance, and economic self-determination for individuals freed to the extent possible from government regulation.  In foreign policy, conservatives who align themselves with Reagan are idealists, believing that all people are basically the same, respond to the same economic incentives, and will if given the opportunity prefer democracy and self-determination to state controls.  They will tend to see the United States as a force for good in the world and in this sense have some kinship with Wilsonian foreign policy.  Reagan was without question a liberal in this classic sense, at least from everything I have seen him say and do.

In the American idiom, oddly enough, classical liberals are called conservatives.  In the sense that Reagan is the icon of conservatives and Republicans today, it can fairly be said that most Republicans and conservatives are today classic liberals.  Thus there is no paradox in his promoting classical liberal ideas as an “emblem of conservatism.”

There is also of course another strand of conservatism but not associated with Reagan.  This conservatism descends from Edmund Burke’s respect for society’s institutions and especially their effect in preventing turbulence and chaos.  Traditional conservatives of this stripe, true to their fear of chaos, generally see value in large, stable corporate bureaucracies and defend government regulation that helps fend off risk and promote confidence and stability.  Reagan conservatives, on the other hand, admire entrepreneurs and innovators.  They understand and welcome change and what Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” despite its propensity for risk, turbulence, and uncertainty.

While classical liberals are called conservatives in today’s America, there are important differences between classical liberals and what I have called American liberals.  The latter, in my view, see people primarily as members of groups rather than as individuals, believe the power of the state is necessary to protect individuals and groups from economic exploitation, and do not see the United States as an unalloyed force for good in the world.  Thus, American liberalism’s foreign policy is suspicious and generally hostile to the use of U.S. economic or military power in dealing with other countries and is much more sympathetic than most Americans are to conciliation with hostile groups.  This distinction becomes important when we get to considering the role that Professor Diggins ascribes to Reagan in the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union.

I believe the views of American liberals would be completely foreign to Ronald Reagan and, I would say, to most Americans.  In fact, Americans seem to have broken the code – that’s why American liberals today call themselves progressives and why conservatives can identify themselves as such without fearing that they will be considered hidebound or defenders of the status quo. 

The misperception about Reagan’s philosophy is fundamental to where, in my view, this book goes wrong.  It seems to consider Reagan without any philosophical or political context.  Thus, Professor Diggins spends a good deal of time in the book attempting to identify Reagan with Emerson’s transcendentalism, in which Emerson articulated an idealistic view of human nature that transcended Christian notions of sin and evil.  To be sure, there is something here.  Reagan was certainly an idealist, with great faith in individual effort and especially in the American people.  But the only way to say that Reagan was an Emersonian and had views that differed fundamentally from traditional Christianity is to tear Reagan from a philosophical context of his own construction.

For example, in one of the book’s few quotes from Reagan, Professor Diggins cites the following sentence from a lecture Reagan delivered at Moscow State University:  “Even as we explore the most advanced reaches of science, we’re returning to the age-old wisdom of our culture, a wisdom contained in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.  ‘In the beginning was the spirit,’ and it was from this spirit that material abundance of creation issued forth.”

Anyone who understands Reagan’s philosophy and outlook would have instantly known what he was saying.  Reagan was a believer in what I’ll call the spirit of enterprise, the entrepreneur’s ability – if given the necessary freedom – to innovate and create value.  Incidentally, this does not mean getting rich.  It means being productive so that others can live their lives better.

Thus, immediately after his spirit remark, Reagan continued with this, immediately after: “But progress is not foreordained.  The key is freedom – freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication.  The renowned scientist, scholar and founding father of this university, Mikhail Lemontov [phonetic], knew that.  It is common knowledge that achievements of science are considerable and rapid, particularly once the yoke of slavery is cast off and replaced by the freedom of philosophy.”  This is pure Reagan and pure classic liberalism. 

But without this context, Professor Diggins seemed to take Reagan’s words literally, summarizing what he believes Reagan was saying as follows: “God created the world to bring forth the affluent society of sheer abundance.  Religious faith depends on the fecundity of plenty.”

This is indeed a radical idea, that God wants humankind to seek and enjoy material abundance – in fact, that he created the world for that purpose.  But there is no hint of support for the proposition that Reagan actually believed this.  Yet Professor Diggins, a renowned intellectual historian, uses this reference to the spirit to place Reagan in an intellectual context that most of us – and I believe certainly Ronald Reagan – wouldn’t recognize.  Here are a few examples.

“Every major modern thinker,” Professor Diggins writes, “from John Locke to Adam Smith, from Darwin to Marx, believed that history moved in the opposite direction, from bottom up, with humanity’s moral nature evolving from below out of the material struggles of existence.  Reagan would use the language of idealism to rationalize the schemes of materialism, forgetting altogether Jesus and poverty and humility in order to re-conceive Christianity to make it serve the interests and power of the rich classes.”

John Patrick Diggins:  [off-mike] Can I just say, you moved from what I said in one paragraph to eight paragraphs later, and I was talking about his critics – I was talking about Reagan’s critics.  That’s not me [indiscernible].

Peter Wallison:  Okay, well, I think this is you I’m quoting.  Also, “Reagan thought our beliefs about God no longer repress but liberate, as though Christ died on the cross so that we might better pursue happiness, not the salvation of our souls.”  Again, “Tocqueville presaged Reagan in sensing that the American people, instead of seeking to be right with Jesus or putting the public good ahead of all other concerns, only loved material enjoyment.  If a life devoted excessively to an evanescent materialism and its petty pleasures filled Tocqueville with religious dread, it delighted Reagan.”

John Patrick Diggins: [off-mike]  It didn’t?  Reagan didn’t believe in material [indiscernible]?

Peter Wallison:  I don’t think that was the basis of Reagan’s philosophy.  I think much of that misses really what Reagan was talking about.

None of these statements regrettably is accompanied by footnotes or references to things Reagan actually said.  It’s very difficult to accept these ideas as entertained in any sense by Ronald Reagan without some reference to his own statements.

Reagan was not talking at all about religion or God when he was speaking of the spirit.  He was reciting one element of the views he had always held – that material progress and abundance comes from human freedom, by which he meant of course the freedom of people to communicate and innovate without intervention of government.  The spirit Reagan was talking about was the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation.  His reference to the spirit in Genesis was metaphorical and not literal.

The same problem arises with respect to Professor Diggins’ discussion of Reagan’s political philosophy.  You spoke about it just a little bit before.  Reagan’s political philosophy, he writes, “is also problematic because his theory of government has little reference to the principles of American founding.  Tom Payne, Reagan’s hero, was anathema to most conservative intellectuals who prefer the Federalist Papers as the foundation of political wisdom.”  I think that’s accurate.  I think most conservative intellectuals do prefer the Federalist Papers.  However, you continue, “Reagan, the scourge of big government, made it” – that is, big government – “inevitable.  The true conservatives, the founders, framed a specific system of authority in government to check the demands of the people. 

Reagan’s rejection of authority and his celebration of the people thwarted efforts to limit their will.  Under Reagan, Americans could live off the government and hate it at the same time.”  Clever statement but I don’t think there are any citations for Reagan’s rejection of authority or his celebration of the people, and none for the rather unconventional idea that the Constitution was intended to check the demands of the people rather than the power of government.

The general idea here, I guess, is that Reagan while denouncing the government actually presided over its enlargement.  That was because he did not, I presume, want to interfere with the will of the people.  In one sense it’s true that the government grew larger under Reagan but not for the reasons that Professor Diggins assigns.  Reagan certainly enlarged the government in spending on defense and was unable to stem the growth of entitlements.  But as my colleague at AEI, Veronique De Rugy, has pointed out, while Reagan boosted defense outlays by 26 percent during his first term, he cut inflation-adjusted non-defense spending by 9.7 percent.  No other modern president, from Lyndon Johnson to George Bush, has ever actually cut non-entitlement spending.  There is no doubt that if Reagan could have controlled entitlement spending, he would have done so.  But the Democratic constituency for entitlements was too strong during his tenure.

Nor is it accurate to place Reagan in opposition in any sense to the ideas of the founders or even the two authors of the Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton.  Especially [indiscernible] the point is that Reagan wanted to loosen the reins of social control and free the will of the people.  Citing Reagan’s suspicion of government as a concern about the people’s liberties is certainly accurate, but that does not in any sense mean that Reagan believed that there was no need for compulsory authority.  If you don’t believe me about Reagan’s view of law enforcement, ask the air traffic controllers.

To the extent that Reagan wanted to reduce the weight and impact of government, it was certainly not to loosen the reins of social control or satisfy the appetites of the people.  His admiration for Tom Payne came from the sense that once again, in an economic context, revolution – that is, creative destruction, in Schumpeter’s phrase – was a positive good.

Without this political and philosophical context, Reagan’s statement in his first inaugural address that government isn’t the solution to our problems, government is the problem, could be construed as a loosening of government’s limitation on the will of the people.  But that is not of course what Reagan had in mind.  What he meant was not that the people should expect or demand more from government, or that he wanted government to reduce its traditional role in law enforcement, but that he was going to remove government as an obstacle to economic growth.  As he said that day, “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government.  It is rather to make it work – work with us, not over us; stand by our side, not ride on our back.  Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”  Reagan wanted to free the American people to be economically productive, which in fact he did, but certainly not to live off government.

Accordingly, Reagan’s views of government were much in tune with those of the founders, including the authors of the Federalist Papers – who, far from wanting a strong government to restrain the people, were at pains to demonstrate that the Constitution had limited the power of the government through checks and balances in the Constitution’s separation of powers.  The idea was to assure the people’s liberties.  When this did not prove to be sufficiently persuasive, limitation on government power was necessary through the adoption of the Bill of Rights, without which it is doubtful the Constitution would have been ratified by the people of the states.

As to the downfall of communism, the failure to understand Reagan’s classical liberal philosophy and his belief in the power of ideas led Professor Diggins to ascribe a more limited role for Reagan in the downfall of communism and the Soviet Union than in fact he played.  This is ironic because Reagan’s role in this momentous historical event is the one thing that caused Professor Diggins to classify him along with Lincoln as one of the greatest American presidents.  “Reagan did accomplish a great deal,” he writes, “so much so that he may be after Lincoln one of the two or three truly great presidents in American history.  All earlier presidents believed that the Cold War could be stabilized and communism at best contained.  The startling breakthrough that came with Reagan in the mid-1980s forecast the beginning of the end of the superpower rivalry. 

“Two momentous urgencies” – and this is the important point I want to stress here – “Gorbachev’s desperate need to initiate domestic reform and Reagan’s growing fear of nuclear escalation veering out of control converged to change the course of history.”  It is important to notice the respective roles of the two actors here, Reagan and Gorbachev.  Gorbachev’s role is to initiate domestic reforms while Reagan’s is to act on a fear of nuclear escalation.  “In the end,” Professor Diggins writes, “what brought down communism was liberalism itself, specifically Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost and perestroika.  The first expression signified openness, the attempt to free up the political mind; the second, restructuring, the attempt to reorganize the economy closer to a free market system.”

Gorbachev is thus seen as an independent actor.  Reagan is not a factor in Gorbachev’s decisions.  Reagan’s role is different.  “To be sure,” Professor Diggins notes, “Reagan supported the arms buildup actually begun under President Jimmy Carter, but he soon came to see that the only answer to the Cold War was to call it off.”

There are two implications here, both of which reduce Reagan’s actual role.  First, the suggestion that Reagan was merely following Jimmy Carter’s initiative in pursuing a military buildup is a badly distorted summary of reality, I think.  Carter’s military buildup, such as it was, did not begin until after he was shocked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an event quite late in his presidency and after he had told the American people to get over their inordinate fear of communism.

In addition, speeches that Reagan made before he became president show that he was following a considered strategy of either showing the Soviet Union that they could not compete with the U.S. in military power or bankrupting their economy if they actually did.  In either case, Reagan saw the buildup as a key element of his policy toward the Soviets, which he pursued from the beginning of his presidency.  Reagan did not suddenly have a revelation that a nuclear war was an intolerable prospect.  In fact, if he actually thought this, in an important sense his military buildup was a risky policy since it might have induced the Soviets to consider a first strike before the U.S. became too powerful.

The same risk is associated with the Strategic Defense Initiative, which Reagan also saw as having two purposes - first, to show the Soviets our technological prowess, and second, to persuade them that their nuclear power was a wasting asset – again, an inducement to a possible first strike.  If Reagan was driven solely by a fear of nuclear war, he was not following a policy that was most likely to avert it.

The second distortion in the sentence is the idea that Reagan could call off the Cold War.  The implication here is that the U.S. was the culpable party, that various groups in the U.S. were quite willing to continue the confrontation with the Soviets as they had for almost forty years and Reagan’s unique contribution was to transcend the views of these advisors and try to make peace.  For example, Professor Diggins writes, “The neocon hardliners sought victory, not peace, or a peace by fear rather than trust, until the enemy collapses in exhaustion.  They believed that Russia could be cowed into surrendering.  Frederick the Great, Napoleon and Hitler had also believed so.”  There are very few footnotes to support this idea, I’m afraid.

Let me shorten this a little and end it by just pointing out that we know who Reagan’s advisors were.  We know whose advice he discounted.  They were the secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisors, the director of the CIA and his chief of staff.  During his two terms they included Alexander Haig, George Shultz, Cap Weinberger, Bill Casey, Robert Gates, Bud McFarlane, John Poindexter, Frank Carlucci, Jim Baker, Don Regan and Howard Baker.  These are not conservative hawks.  They are not for the most part neocons.  But they were advisors who in fact had grave doubts about what Reagan was doing, but he did not have to overcome severe objections from these people – especially George Shultz, as you suggested – in going ahead and dealing with Gorbachev.  The emphasis, I’m afraid, on unnamed neocons and conservative hawks was for the purpose I believe of making it seem as though Reagan really did something more heroic than he actually did, according to Professor Diggins’ account. 

As described in the book, Reagan’s role was to overcome the fear of communism and the Soviets that gripped Washington, to recognize the overwhelming danger of nuclear war, and to persuade Reagan [sic] that the United States had no military or other designs on the Soviet Union.  This sounds vaguely familiar.  Where have we heard this before?  This is the American liberal’s view of the Cold War.  It was the fault of the United States, of our xenophobia, excessive anti-communism, and war-like behavior.  Reagan, in this telling, had a revelation as president about the horrors of nuclear war and at that point adopted the view that what was necessary was to call off the Cold War, to adopt a conciliatory approach to the Soviet Union and Gorbachev.  No wonder Reagan is a great president – he was elected as a conservative but had the sense to become a liberal.

What Professor Diggins never asks, however, is why Gorbachev felt the need to restructure Soviet society.  The reasons were from Ronald Reagan.  That is, first of all, the military buildup, and secondly, the fact that the enormous burst of growth in the United States was very influential throughout the world with economic advisors and with governments.  Gorbachev realized, as Reagan had made clear to him in that speech to the faculty at the Moscow State University, that in order to have a society that grew the way the United States was growing, you would have to have much more communication than a totalitarian society could endure. 

Therefore Gorbachev, having read this speech, was smart enough to realize that the totalitarian game was up.  The Soviet government could not hope to maintain control of the information its population would receive and still keep up with the technological developments in the West.  When Reagan made these points in Moscow and tied them to the open society and individual freedom that was the central point of his classical liberal philosophy, he was once again putting on display his belief in the power of ideas.

If Professor Diggins had followed this line of approach to Reagan rather than trying to convert him into an American liberal, his astute observation that Reagan was one of our greatest presidents would have had greater substance and been more persuasive.  As Ronald Reagan would say, thanks for listening.

Alan Wolfe:  Well, Steven, if your intention was to get different points of view, I think I can say you’ve succeeded, because I totally disagree with what we just heard.  I believe that Jack Diggins is absolutely right to point out the romantic element in Reagan, to point out the influence of Payne rather than Madison – the man who wanted a revolution in this country and then fled to France to fight one there, rather than the man who created, based upon a dark view of human nature, the institutions of government. 

So I’m totally in accord.  I think Jack Diggins is absolutely right to emphasize that romantic strain and I think he’s absolutely right to talk about the Emersonian aspect of Reagan, of his personality.  When we talk about Ronald Reagan, we are not talking about Jonathan Edwards.  We’re not talking about John Calvin.  We’re not talking about sin-obsessed people.  As Jack Diggins points out, I think in one of the most interesting passages in the book, Reagan was actually oblivious or seemingly oblivious to many of the most radical cultural changes that occurred when he was president.  He brought an Emersonian disposition to American politics.

So in contrast to what Peter Wallison said, I’m totally on Jack Diggins’ side about how romantic he was.  But unlike Jack Diggins, who thinks that romanticism is a good thing and that Reagan brought something fresh through this, I actually think romanticism is an enormously dangerous thing and that the problems it brought – why I would never include Ronald Reagan on any list of great presidents – has nothing to do with liberalism and conservatism.  It has everything to do with romanticism and realism.

I think that in the years in which Ronald Reagan was president, this country desperately needed a strong dose of realism, Niebuhrian realism, and what it got was a strong dose of Emersonian romanticism.  As a result we are dealing now with the mess that the Reagan presidency could never address because of its romantic inclinations.  So that will be the basis of my argument.  Exactly in between, in some ways perhaps, it is.

Jack Diggins talks about Emerson a lot in the book.  Emerson was indeed a romantic thinker.  But romanticism is not a particularly American invention.  It developed in Europe as a result of the Napoleonic wars.  The great romantics were William Wordsworth and Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  They were very much advocates of militarism, advocates of the glories of battle.  They were quintessential critics of – well, if you know Albert Hirschman and you know about the passions and the interests, they stood for the passions rather than the interests.  Their critique was of a mercantile, commercial – what Albert Hirschman calls “la deux commerce” [phonetic] – the idea that commerce would create uninteresting people without great depth and that what human beings really require was a much deeper, a much more complicated understanding of the world.

Romanticism was an enormously powerful movement.  With Wordsworth and Coleridge it took the form of an eventual conservatism.  With Karl Marx and the anarchists it took the form of a radicalism.  But there was a unified conception here of a critique of liberalism, a critique of the idea of liberal commercialism.  That liberalism spoke to the head, romanticism spoke to the heart.

I think this is a very powerful theme in European intellectual history and it did come to the United States through Emerson.  But it’s interesting to me that when we look at some of its various aspects, we see how actually unromantic much of American culture was.  For example, to try this to the founders.  One of the inspirations or one of the great contributions that the romantic movement made in Europe was toward nationalism.  Romanticism had a strong Germanic quality.  It had much to do with the German reaction against the French domination of Europe during the Napoleonic period.  Everything the French stood for – Cartesian rationalism and so on – was condemned by the German romantic thinkers as insufficiently robust and so on.

In his magnificent book, “The Liberal Tradition in America,” Louis Hartz points out that John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton were pretty much the contemporaries of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Whereas the poetic forms of nationalism that occurred in Europe saw the nation-state as embodying some kind of organic unity, American nationalism was very practical.  American nationalism was not the work of Rousseau-inspired poets, according to Hartz; it was the work of businessmen and lawyers.  It was John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton.  I think that’s a very strong sense in which a kind of romantic and a kind of commercial sense of the world were set off against one another.

It’s interesting to me, for example, that at the very moment when Lord Byron wrote “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which is a protest against the decision to allow Napoleon’s forces to withdraw from the Iberian Peninsula that Metternich and other realistically inspired diplomats made at the time – this sent Wordsworth and Byron into a frenzy, because they wanted to see courage rather than caution.  This was exactly the same year in which Carl von Clausewitz was writing “On War.”  Clausewitz was a romantic in his own way and was very much part of European romanticism, but his understanding of war was based upon realism.  It was based upon what actually happens in battle.  There’s a wonderful passage in “On War” where Clausewitz talks about that the requirement of military leadership is to be calm in the midst of furious excitement.  It’s the furious excitement that the romantics were emphasizing – war is about excitement, it’s about living at the margins.  But it’s the sense of the reality of battle and the reality of war that Clausewitz is contrasting, which I think is much more based upon a kind of realistic understanding.

This kind of romantic nationalism or romantic militarism is a very strong ingredient in European romanticism.  I think it does come to the United States.  Our great Napoleonic figure in the United States was Andrew Jackson.  Andrew Jackson really was a romantic at heart.  Andrew Jackson was someone who objected strenuously to anything like going to West Point to learn the arts of the military, because you didn’t need expertise according to Andrew Jackson.  Jackson was extremely suspicious of the professionalization of the military.  Samuel Huntington’s book, “The Soldier and the State,” has a wonderful description of Jackson’s romantic approach to the military.  Any genius can emerge from the ranks and be a great military figure.  So this Jacksonian sense of nationalism, this Jacksonian sense of militarism, kind of an almost insurgency-based kind of militarism, is very important in the United States.

For me, the people that kind of inspire the way I think about the world, especially in the contemporary period, are people who I believe look at these very issues I’m talking about and come away very distrustful of the romantic inclination.  For example, one of the great figures in Western European liberalism in my view is Max Weber.  In his famous essay, “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber contrasts in a very famous way what he calls the ethic of ultimate ends with the ethic of responsibility.  The ethic of ultimate ends is a romantic idea.  In fact he literally uses the word romanticism to describe it.  He talks about how the leaders that are committed to bringing about some sense of ultimate ends have none of the calm dispassion, none of the calculation necessary in great leaders.  Whereas those who are committed to responsibility – a term that Weber used a great deal – bring a kind of cold-minded reason to their decisions and they take responsibility for their actions.

What I’m trying to do basically is lay out these two different conceptions, a conception of the world really based upon reason and rationality and the head, and a conception based upon the heart and about instinct and about sort of instinctual genius.  My conception of this – Ronald Reagan is really much more in the latter category, one who sorts of understands intuitively in many ways what he thinks is right and what has to be done rather than one who appeals to some kind of tradition based upon logic and reason and all of these other things. 

That’s why I think Diggins is absolutely right here.  It’s not that one of these – well, it is, I think, that one of these is better than another.  But I think it’s particularly the case that, for reasons that I’ll conclude with, that when Reagan was president, it seems to me, we were really in desperate need of leadership that would point us in the direction of realism, that would come to grips with the fact that appeals to a kind of inherent American innocence were the last thing in the world that we would have. 

The ironists – again, these are people that Diggins knows so well and writes about in other books – but the sort of liberal ironists of the immediate postwar period, especially Lionel Trilling, Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell and others, this was the essence of what they were trying to tell America.  There’s a wonderful passage in Reinhold Niebuhr’s book, “The Irony of American History,” where he basically says that individuals and nations share one thing in common – they’re romantics when they’re young but they’re realists when they grow up. 

We put aside our romantic fantasies as we mature and as we get wiser, and so in a similar way the United States, in his view, needed to overcome its own innocence.  It needed to overcome its sense that it had some kind of special mission on the world, recognize that it was one nation among other kinds of nations.  It needed to accept the Weberian, Clausewitzian kind of perspective on the military and so on.

I don’t see much of this happening under Reagan but I’m not an expert on the Reagan presidency and I’ll leave the details to these two guys, who I’m sure are going to fight about this at great length.

What I see is that it was Reagan the romantic who would never have allowed himself to be pushed in a Niebuhrian direction, to have spoken about the tragedies of American diplomacy or the fact that hard and difficult choices have to be made.  That there are tradeoffs that occur with the responsible exercise of power, that military expertise is something that we ought to welcome, a kind of Colin Powell-like caution about the use of the military. 

Instead I see a kind of almost worship of amateurism in both the two great achievements, if you want to call them achievements, or the two most signal foreign policy aspects of the Reagan years – the insistence on an antiballistic missile defense and the end of the Cold War.  There’s this kind of sense we don’t need experts for this.  The experts would say that an antiballistic missile system will never protect you 100 percent against incoming missiles but we trust that we can protect ourselves in this way.  A distrust of military expertise and a distrust of the kind of realist tradition as well with respect to what we ought to do about the Soviet Union.

I think that right now we are dealing with the legacy of Ronald Reagan’s failure to push us in a more realistic direction.  In other words, I think we’re dealing with the failure of Reagan’s romanticism.  I think if Reagan was attracted to a kind of romantic outlook on the world, right now romanticism is an even bigger problem.  The sense that we’re special, the sense that we’re innocent, the sense that we do good in the world and never cause harm in the world, I think is causing great danger to us.

I certainly think it has a great deal to do with the disasters of the war in Iraq, which were brought about in my view by a very romantic understanding of military power and what it could accomplish.  It has all the features I’ve described – a distrust of military expertise, a distrust of the limits of power, a sense that if we just act heroically we can, like Thomas Carlyle’s hero in history, bring about a better kind of world. 

I think the romantic disposition in the way the war in Iraq was brought out has been very effectively described by Francis Fukuyama in his criticism of the neoconservatives.  As I read Fukuyama, neoconservatism is not one thing in the United States, it’s two.  It’s generational. The older generation – the Irving Kristols and so on – were primarily social scientists and primarily realists, people who understood the limits of what we could accomplish in the world, people who were in a sense marred by experience and cautious in their outlook, whereas their children – literally in most cases – are much more romantically inclined.  They’re not social scientists or historians or political philosophers or even humanists.  He’s not at the center of power in Washington, but the great romantic military advocate today is Victor Davis Hanson, who writes Byronic rhapsodies about the life at the margins in battle and the essence of human experience that you get through some kind of extreme situation.  It’s a highly romantic view of battle and to the degree that it colors in any way how this nation goes to war – we went to war in Iraq for romantic reasons rather than true realistic reasons.  I think it was a disaster that we did.

In a similar way, I think we are suffering from a romantic conception of the American nation.  I think that at the moment there has always been a kind of war of ideas in the United States about what kind of nation we are, a conflict between an idea that we are primarily a civic nation that stands for ideals and creeds or a cultural nation, a romantic nation, that stands for an ethnos.  In my view the romantic idea of the American nation has been making a reappearance in American life.  Its best expression actually comes from the greatest criticism of romanticism when it comes to military affairs, Sam Huntington, who is a realist in military affairs but a romantic in terms of the American nation.  A cultural definition of nationhood in his book “Who Are We?” that I think runs the risk of setting us off in a reactionary direction that emphasizes our culture, rather than in a direction that recognizes that what we are as a nation is creedal.  It’s a commitment to certain kinds of ideas rather than a commitment to certain people defined by their ethnicity.

Finally, it seems to me we’re also caught in another trap of the romantic revolution in Europe – the trap of ideology.  The romantics were great ideologues.  They were people who had a vision of how the world ought to work that could run roughshod over how the world actually does work.  It seems to me that we are more and more in the grips of ideological thinking, that we’ve seen this ideological thinking par excellence in the Bush Administration – one that is trying to impose a sense of how the world ought to work upon how the world actually does work and as a result creates messes that it then has to come in and fix up because the world doesn’t work that way.  There’s a little parable of that taking place within the Green Zone in Iraq, as been documented by one Washington Post reporter after another.  But it’s also been taking place in Washington, D.C., where, guided by an ideological conception of how the world ought to be, we then find out that the world is not that way and then we have to correct all the things that have gone wrong.

So I believe America today is in the grips of three of the worst aspects of the romantic imagination – nationalism – at least ethnic rather than civic nationalism; a romantic militarism that has no real effective recognition of the limits that even the world’s greatest power are subject to; and ideological thinking.

Could Reagan have done anything to have averted bringing us into this world?  That’s a counterfactual question but it seems to me that while Reagan was president, the growing up and maturity that this country had to undergo to shed its romantic image of itself never took place.  I think while Jack Diggins likes the romantic side – I agree with him completely that the romantic side is there but find it enormously problematic.  The failure of the Reagan Administration is the Bush presidency.

Steve Hayward:  Thanks, Alan.  Jack, would you like to respond to Peter or Alan in any particular way?

John Patrick Diggins:  There’s some impression going around that Jack Diggins is trying to steal Reagan from the conservatives and make him a liberal, to save Reagan for liberalism.  But for the last twenty years I wonder how liberalism can save itself from liberalism.  So I don’t know.  That isn’t my purpose.  I was just trying to explain what Reagan was.

Peter, I’m just disturbed the way you jumped around in my manuscript.  You, for example, say that Reagan in opposing the Soviet Union stood for democracy, elections, self-determination.  I said these are the ideals that come from John Locke and liberalism and you say, no, these are also conservative ideals.  But the point I was making in the next sentence is then why, since he stands for those liberal ideals, why does he become the emblem of conservatism?  I use that as a transition to talk about the struggle in Hollywood with the communists, because he was a liberal then.  He gives up on liberalism because of that struggle out in Hollywood.  That’s the point I was making.

But your claim that the founding fathers were not against the people, they were against big government – they wanted all this exercise and control to rein in government – what do you do with Alexander Hamilton?  He’s said “the people is a beast.”  Madison said we have to have these controls because “you people cannot control your interest and passions without external restraints,” what he called “auxiliary precautions.”  People on their own were to be distrusted.  The idea that the mechanisms of the Constitution were set up simply to restrain government but not the people is really quite a stretch.

When it comes to what you call the spirit of enterprise, are you aware of the reason that Max Weber used the title “The Spirit of Capitalism”?  He was going against the whole body of thought that came out of Western Europe that capitalism was about materialism.  He was trying to say no, that capitalism comes out of a hard, frugal, Calvinist work ethic, that it’s part of spirit.  People were trying to realize spirit when they worked hard because they were trying to save their souls.

I tried to suggest in the book that this is part of the Reagan milieu as he’s brought up in the Church of Disciples of Illinois, and that his mother possibly was influenced by Unitarianism, which was influenced by William Ellory Channing [phonetic], and Channing had great influence on Weber.  I was trying to suggest, where does Reagan get the idea that, as he says in a letter to a woman, that God could not be the author of evil and therefore the desires he planted in us are good?  He says that again and again.  He says to his daughter, Patty – she says, father, if I reach up high enough, can I touch God?  He says, you don’t have to reach up, God is inside you.  He’s here, there, everywhere all the time.  I think that comes out of Emerson.

I’m not saying he was influenced by Emerson.  But sometimes in intellectual history people have parallel ways of thinking, you give them the same category.  Henry Adams once said, “I think I’m Hegelian but I don’t know what it is.”  I’m sure if I ever had the fortune to talk to President Reagan, I’d say, “Are you an Emersonian?”  He’d say, “I don’t know what that is.”  I’m sure he would say that.

But there are so many parallels between his thinking and those of Reagan that I use that, because it’s much better than Jefferson.  If you call Reagan a Jeffersonian, then you have to explain how does Reagan praise banks and commercialism and capitalism whereas Jefferson was very distrustful of that kind of thing.

With you, Alan, I thought my book was full of reservations about romanticism.  I’m a Reinhold Niebuhrian.  I said I wish Reagan had a little better sense of [indiscernible] evil in the world.  But I’ll stop there.

Steve Hayward:  Before I throw it open to questions, let me just pose a couple of follow-up questions for you and a couple of observations.

One little tidbit, by the way, that I find fascinating – I think I’m the first person to notice this, it’s a trivial thing – but the Moscow State University speech – I went and looked at the photographs – Reagan is wearing the same necktie that he wore in Berlin for the “tear down this wall” speech.  That may just be a pure coincidence, although as we learned during the Clinton impeachment, presidents wear ties to send signals to people.  So I don’t know, it may not be a coincidence.  I find that an interesting little oddity.

You both mentioned Tom Payne and I saw you on C-SPAN with George Will the other night, and George Will brought it up, because it always drove him nuts when Reagan would quote Tom Payne.  But didn’t Tom Payne – the point is, I think we all focus on Payne during his radical days, when he’s writing his pamphlets and Payne goes off to France.  But he comes back and ends his life deeply conservative, doesn’t he?  Doesn’t he move to the right out of disillusionment with what went wrong in France?  Isn’t this recollection right?

John Patrick Diggins:  His personal life ends up rather in despair but I don’t know about his politics.  He tries to be a bridge builder.  He tampers with scientific inventions.  I think in his later life he gives up on politics.  The way the French Revolution turned out, that [indiscernible] disillusionment.

Steve Hayward:  Let me ask a general question for you and the whole panel, if you want to jump in on this.  Regardless of exactly what animal we think Reagan was, did he change American conservatism?

Peter Wallison:  Yes, in one sense.  That is, he created a catechism for American conservatism that looks to me very much like classical liberalism.  He took what was the Republican Party, which was a number of different ideas, including traditional conservatism and what is really classical liberalism, and he said this is what we Republicans believe in and he set forth a list, a catechism, of things that you would believe if you were a conservative, which means, as I said, a classical liberal.  That changed conservatism and it changed the Republican Party, made the Republican Party – because it then stood for something people understood – the majority party for a while. 

And it also changed the United States, because again, what is very important in thinking about these things is what people believe.  Despite the fact that that is idealistic or romantic, it’s what people believe.  When you marshal what people believe and you give them categories in which to think about it, then you can make your views and the things you stand for much more acceptable and politically successful.

So I think he did have a tremendous impact on the country and on conservatism and on the Republican Party.

Steve Hayward:  Finally, before I go to questions, I want to draw Alan out on just one point of your remarks, and that’s your distinction between reason and realism versus instinct, matters of the heart and romanticism.  Isn’t it the case that most of the great political or successful political leaders who move countries and make large-scale political change would fall on the romantic, instinct, hearts side of that divide?  Wouldn’t that describe Roosevelt, Churchill, Napoleon?  It would describe the bad ones too.  But what I’m saying is, even if I fully agree with your goals about what you mean by realism, which I’m sure I don’t, doesn’t it actually require a romantic to make political change and make political movement?  I guess I’m sort of asking about a larger theory of political change in some respects.

Alan Wolfe:  Well certainly at the founding moment, no.  That’s where this debate – I entered this debate. The founders really were conservatives in an old-fashioned sense in the term.  If men were angels, no government would be necessary – this is a very classically conservative, Madisonian understanding of human nature.  It’s not a liberal one.  It’s certainly not a romantic one.  Without that heavy dose – I mean, I couldn’t imagine less romantic figures than the greatest state-builders in America.  John Marshall would be the classic case here.  

At other periods of time, I don’t see Lincoln as a romantic in any way but as someone who spoke hard and difficult truths at a very difficult time.  His greatness, I think, laid in his ability to focus upon tragic choices that had to be made and so on.  So I see him almost as a model of the Weberian leader thinking about the consequences of his actions.  Roosevelt?  Well, Teddy Roosevelt strikes me as a great romantic leader and an inspiring romantic leader, but probably not Franklin.

Peter Wallison:  Let me just respond a moment because this shows how difficult these definitions are.  Lincoln actually, I think, became president or came to public notice because he was a romantic.  His views of American values and what was stressed in the Declaration of Independence in addition to what was stressed in the Constitution really brought him to public attention through, for example, his Cooper Union speech.  The idea that you would go to war over maintaining the United States as a single nation – not sue for peace and go for five years in horrible war – was a completely romantic idea, or an idealistic idea at least - not necessarily a rational or realistic idea. 

So I think these whole concepts of realism and idealism or romanticism are very fuzzy and not subject to very useful definition.

Alan Wolfe:  Couldn’t we agree though that the one place where by any definition of what romanticism is, the one place it’s thrived in the United States was in the South under slavery.  The Cavalier – the imported notion of chivalry and the incredible popularity of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the South’s defense of a pre-capitalist, pre-commercial way of life was the very essence of American romanticism.  So Lincoln’s great contribution was to defeat that and prepare the way for the commercial civilization that the Southern slaveholders in their romantic fantasies thought would be our future.

Steve Hayward:  One of the things that’s wonderful about arguing about Reagan and Jack’s approach to him is that it does open up almost every question imaginable.  I’ll call on Bill Galston first.

Bill Galston:  I despair of arguing about Ronald Reagan, particularly in this place.  I think what I’d prefer to do is argue about America in the terms that Jack Diggins has put on the table.  I have always understood the sort of spine of your intellectual career, Jack, as sort of a meditation on the presence or absence of a sense of sin in different figures and epics of American history. It seems to me that what you’re saying is the fact that Ronald Reagan did not have a sense of sin was a very important fact about him.  I say this based only on what I’ve heard because I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read your book.  In that respect, he was a lot like Franklin Roosevelt, who had a similarly sunny and affirmative view of human nature, and totally different from Abraham Lincoln, who most assuredly did not, as you have written very persuasively.

Here is my question, not about Reagan but about America.  Fifty years ago I could have told you where an understanding of the sense of sin was located in American politics.  We’ve already talked about some of the great names, not only Niebuhr but the anti-communist liberals tended to be realists and not romantics.  One of the many admirable things about them.  Where is the locus of an argument for a more wintry view of human nature, a sense of sin, to be found in contemporary American politics, if anywhere?  Contemporary American politics.  If you can’t find it, what does that tell you about where we are as a country?

John Patrick Diggins:  I remember George Will asked me, “Do you think a person with a sense of sin and human limits, like a James Madison, could be elected today?”  We both agreed he or she couldn’t, that the politician has to go out and tell the people how wonderful they are, how virtuous they are, and there’s some other alien force that’s working against them – the other party or government or so on – but the people are good.  The last person to try to suggest otherwise was Jimmy Carter and it backfired on him.  Since Carter there is no going back to any time before Reagan and politics as a sensitivity to contrition and limits.  It’s there in the founding fathers.  The framers are just all about this.  On every page they remind the people that – the words sin and evil drop out, but the word that’s taken up is desire.  You’re full of desires and passions and they have to be controlled.

The only place you hear that today is maybe among evangelicals or religious people.  Politicians do not talk about it.  As a result, we have a political culture today which is one of endless indulgence and consumption.  America has no capacity to save and has an infinite capacity to spend and enjoy life.  Even while young people are coming back, those that are fortunate to come back wounded from Iraq and in terrible shape and given terrible treatment in the hospitals, the American people are not willing to raise taxes or do anything about that.  This, I think, is the ultimate culmination of half a century of a politics of what Christopher Lasch would call narcissism. 

I don’t know what can be done about it.  I don’t know how anyone can reverse that and win office.  I don’t know.

Peter Wallison:  I just want to take issue with this whole idea that the Constitution was developed for the purpose of controlling the people’s desires.  If you read the Constitution, if you read about how the Constitution was finally approved by the states, most of the concern was about the fact that the government was the force that people were worried about and the government had to be controlled.  Not the people.  That was not the issue that anyone was talking about. 

So I’m very puzzled by the idea that the Constitution of the United States and the associated debate about it was really for the purpose of controlling the people.  Very little in the Constitution actually does that.

John Patrick Diggins:  Why was the power of making money taken away from the states and put in the hands of the federal government?

Peter Wallison:  Well, I actually can’t tell you why it was done, except that the states – it was a very confusing commercial environment when the states were printing their own money.  In fact, the federal government didn’t even start to produce money until the Civil War, when the national banks were created for the purpose of taking out of the hands of banks the opportunity to create their own money.  But I don’t know that that is particularly relevant.  Why is that relevant?

John Patrick Diggins:  Because in the states, during the Articles of Confederation, people were establishing control of money and printing cheap money in order to get out of debts.  They were carrying out their desires.

Peter Wallison:  That’s right.  Well, sure, people will always try to do that.  But the Constitution was not framed for the purpose of controlling people’s desires.  The Constitution was framed for the purpose of controlling the government.  If you were talking about an instrument that was to control people’s desires, there would have been something in the Constitution that does that.  But there’s almost no phraseology in the Constitution that gives the government specific power to control the beast, as you were talking about.  Almost everything that’s in the Constitution, including the separation of powers itself, was for the purpose of making sure that the government didn’t tread on people’s liberties.  That’s not the same thing as controlling –

John Patrick Diggins:  I don’t want to belabor this, go ahead.

Peter Wallison:  It’s not the same thing as controlling people’s desires.

Question:  I’m Yale Richmond, a retired Foreign Service Officer who served in five countries during the Cold War – Germany, Laos, Poland, Austria and the Soviet Union.  It’s made me very much a realist.  I want to tell you a very short story about a Russian who came to the United States during the Cold War and traveled across the country with an American friend.  He was very quiet during the first few days but finally on the third or fourth day he said, now I understand America! It works!

To really appreciate that remark, you have to understand the Soviet Union.  You have to have lived there.  The Russians knew it didn’t work.  Gorbachev knew it didn’t work.  It’s not my intention to diminish Ronald Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War, but we should also not diminish Gorbachev’s role.  We are very fortunate that history brought the two of them together at the same time.

Steve Hayward:  George Will mentioned the other night in your conversation with him that Reagan used to like to say – and by the way, if people in this building would hear him say this, would think he was nuts – “if I could just get Gorbachev up in an airplane and fly around America’s suburbs and could see everybody driving their cars and their swimming pools in the backyards, he’d understand.”  In other words, he was sensing something very much like the example that you referred to – I see why this works.  The scales would fall from his eyes.

Another important episode though that Jack doesn’t mention in his book – actually very few people do – George Shultz talks about this a lot.  I think you’re right, Gorbachev understood this system was badly broken.  But one of the first meetings with Shultz – I sort of pause here for an interjection.  Remember that when Shultz was picked to be Secretary of State, he was immediately on the cover of the two news magazines and he was wearing his University of Chicago Adam Smith necktie, which was the official tie of the Reagan White House.  He was already wearing the tie before he got there.  So in one of his early meetings with Gorbachev he has a long – I wouldn’t exactly call it a heart to heart, but he has a long, in that very stolid way that Shultz could talk – essentially giving Gorbachev the University of Chicago gospel on why – not so much capitalism and sort of the old language of the 1950s and the Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debates, but the idea of openness of markets.  Gorbachev was hanging on every word he was saying.  Shultz said, “I just kept talking, because he kept listening.”

I think that was among many moments one that was quite important to that whole story unfolding and one that’s not often told in any of the books about Reagan.

John Patrick Diggins:  When Gorbachev and Raisa, his wife, visit London and they meet Margaret Thatcher, Raisa says to Margaret Thatcher, “It’s so good to be in the land of Locke and Hobbes.”

Steve Hayward:  Anyone else?  Otherwise I can throw in a few more things.

Question:  You mentioned Ronald Reagan, you described him as sort of this frightening, naïve, romantic cowboy.  It reminded me of everything that I used to read about him in 1980 in the New York Times and Washington Post.  That’s how he was characterized.  People were afraid.  I remember people saying, I’m going to move to Canada because this romantic, naïve cowboy is going to start World War III. Everyone thought he was a complete lunatic when he said he could end communism and end the Cold War.  It was this crazy romantic fantasy.  It was bizarre.  And yet, as both Mr. Wallison and Mr. Diggins said, he was successful in that as well as in his other goals.  I wonder how you reconcile this naïve, romantic person with this person who actually achieved everything he set out to achieve.

Alan Wolfe:  I called him a romantic, I never used the words cowboy or naïve in describing him.  I use the word romantic to indicate a certain kind of intellectual disposition.  I may have been one of those people that when Reagan was elected, having also lived in California and been somewhat on the left – you mentioned David Horowitz in your introduction, and David and I were in a Marxist study group together at Berkeley with Todd Gitlin and a number of other people before we all moved in various different directions.  So like Jack Diggins, I had been in California when Reagan was governor and thought, my God, if this clown becomes president of the United States, what a disaster is going to be visited on the Republic.

But like Diggins, history has taught me a lot.  History taught Diggins that Reagan wasn’t so bad.  History has taught me that you can get many worse Republicans than Ronald Reagan.  So in comparison to the current occupant of the White House, I would view Reagan as a much more successful president.

He was good at getting what he wanted and I was persuaded by what Peter Wallison said.  But my job here is to evaluate not whether he got what he wanted but whether what he wanted was the right thing for the country at the time.  That’s the essence of my criticism.  I think a lot of the revisionism that’s gone on about Reagan has destroyed many of the assumptions that some of Reagan’s critics on the left had.  I have a different perspective than I once did.  But it’s not based on this idea that we had this ignorant cowboy.  As Diggins says, his letters are quite moving and he comes across as much more intelligent and successful politician than his image on the part of his critics at the time suggested.  But there still is this question about whether his vision for America was the right one.  I think we’re seeing the legacy of that.

With respect to the Cold War, I think Diggins is very persuasive in his book that this is an accomplishment.  But as the person here who served in the Soviet Union in the Foreign Service suggested, we should never lose sight of the fact that it was the Russians who overthrew communism.  It was the Czechs who overthrew communism.  It was the Hungarians who overthrew communism.  These were movements – Solidarity in Poland and so on – that were movements of great indigenous protest in their own countries.  I think in retrospect it’s good that we had Reagan in the White House and not someone else at that time.  But we cannot attribute it all to Reagan.

Steve Hayward:  Briefly, I’m going to follow up.  I’ve got a zinger for Alan.

Peter Wallison:  Let me just make a couple points about this.  It was in a sense the Russians who overthrew communism, but on the other hand it is important to understand that, as Professor Diggins said, it was Gorbachev who had to make some major changes in the Soviet system because he understood that the system could not survive in a world in which information was going to be freely available.  It had to be freely available otherwise they couldn’t compete with the West and particularly the United States.  So it was Reagan again who pointed out that that was the essence of the success that the United States was enjoying and told the Soviets in that speech and a couple of others that that’s the direction they had to move.

So these were ideas that were very important in this revolution that occurred in Russia.  It wasn’t simply the fact that the system had gotten rotten at the core.  It was that there was a person at the top of the Soviet Union at the time who recognized that Ronald Reagan in fact was right about where that country would have to move in the future.  So it’s a combination of things but Reagan’s ideas were exceedingly influential in that.

Alan Wolfe:  As I tried to make clear in my remarks, I’m worried about a certain kind of triumphalism that enters American foreign policy discourse.  For us to take credit for what people who themselves were the victims of communism were responsible for doing just perpetuates that.  Now I hear a balanced view that I have no problems with.  There was a mutual complementarity, that’s fine.

Steve Hayward:  Let me follow up the latest question, if I might.  Let me sugarcoat it a little bit because I think you know what’s coming.  Right after Reagan’s election, Hanes Johnson [phonetic] quoted some anonymous conservative saying, “This country is about to go so far right you won’t recognize it.”  Which of course didn’t happen.  Then on the left there was Alan Wolfe writing in The Nation.  One of them was, “Ronald Reagan will slide America deeper into its decline.”  Well, you may have been arguing that in your main remarks.  The other one is a little more extensive.  “The United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive, that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”  I think it’s comments like that the lady had in mind.  It appeared widespread in the press.

In what ways might you revise that judgment today?

Alan Wolfe:  As you’ve already generously indicated, I wouldn’t revise the first one.  In fact, when you quoted it, it sounded remarkably much like what I was saying.  That’s a kind of testimony to a certain kind of consistency.

But I think I’ve already answered your question.  As I said, I now think we can do much worse than Reagan.  And we have.  Yeah, we have.  To the degree I talk about the looming menace of whatever, that is heated rhetoric that I’ve long since abandoned.  You know I’ve abandoned it.  I’m proud of having been a romantic in my youth and I’m proud of being a realist now.  So what you’re quoting is the romantic side that I’ve overcome and if other people could similarly overcome the romanticism of youth, I think our country would be a lot better off.  How’s that for an effective riposte? - if I may use a French word.

Peter Wallison:  I wonder whether you would have said during Reagan’s period that he proved that the country could do a lot worse than Eisenhower.  I wonder whether twenty years from now when we look back on George W. Bush, we might not feel that given developments that would occur afterward, there might be a revised view of him.

Alan Wolfe:  Don’t hold your breath.

Peter Wallison:  That’s what you would have said about Reagan.

Question:  I also spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union after the breakup and I have a two-part question.  Number one, don’t you think you’re giving Gorbachev too much credit in working with Reagan to end the communist system, when my discussions with communist leaders were to the effect that Gorbachev postponed for about four years making any of the hard economic decisions, and that Reagan’s role in that was to play his cards perfectly against the communist regime to bring about its downfall?  Whereas if a liberal or another type of Republican president were there, the hard choices of pushing the communists to change their system may have been delayed another ten or twenty years.  That’s the first point.  By just reaching some sort of arms agreement where the U.S. would restrain its defense programs.

The second point is that there’s this discussion about Reagan being a romantic but yet a lot of his beliefs about the communist system were really colored by his experience with the Screen Actors Guild.  His instincts about how to deal with the communists were colored based upon his own personal experience so that when it came time for dealing with Gorbachev, when he was in a crunch because he hadn’t done anything for about four years, despite all the requests of the staff to do that, that Reagan made the right choices and perhaps deserves a lot more credit than many of his critics give him.

Steve Hayward:  Jack, you talk about that in your book.  I would just comment that Jack has in his book Reagan commenting that – look, after dealing with the Hollywood studios, the Soviets are easy – or words to that effect.  I’ve got to think that had to be deeply unsettling for the State Department diplomats to hear Reagan say that.

John Patrick Diggins:  He said that after dealing with Metro Goldwin Mayer and Paramount Studios that dealing with Gorbachev was a snap.  He loved negotiation.  After this terrible scare where there was almost a nuclear outbreak, holocaust – after the Evil Empire speech and the planning of putting Pershing missiles in Europe, the Soviets are convinced they’re going to be attacked, a preemptive attack.  They were on full alert.  The Warsaw Pact forces and everything.  Reagan gets word of this and he says, “If that’s the way they feel, I just want to get their leading officials in a room all alone and let them know we have no aggressive designs.  They have nothing to fear from us.”  That expression – all alone – he always felt he could deal that way.  He talks to Gorbachev, he says, “You and I get together, let’s walk down to the pool house and talk and leave our bureaucracies behind.”  He always thought that institutions and government got in the way and one-to-one relationships could work things out.

In diplomatic circles, that’s regarded as naïve, romantic I guess.  But it turned out.  He pulled it off.  He was not one like some people today who say we don’t talk to our enemies, we don’t negotiate.  He was not like that at all.

Alan Wolfe:  That’s a very persuasive point but let’s recall that Mr. Bush tried the same thing.  He looked Vladimir Putin in the eye and said, you know, I can trust this guy, I can look into his soul.  So it sounds wonderful when it works.  But it sounds dreadfully amateurish when it fails.  Who can doubt that while the Soviet Union is gone, we now have a pretty nasty character in there that strikes me as not the kind of person you can just go to a room and say, let’s get rid of all our advisors and we’ll hammer out something, Vlad, you and me together.  It doesn’t work that way.

Steve Hayward:  I agree with a number of the criticisms about Gorbachev that are made, although I agree with Jack that Reagan himself gave him considerable credit.  My own view is that in some ways he was more the Inspector Clouseau of Russian reform.  But the important thing is this, and this I think Jack is right about.  Gorbachev and his circle around him were the first Soviet leaders who across the table actually responded to your arguments themselves rather than flipping through a briefing book to find out what was the argument, what was the foreign ministry argument to that American position, which is the way it had been before.  Those guys understood English a lot better than they let on, but they’d always stop and listen to the translation, they’d flip through their book, they’d pause and then they’d give you an answer. 

Especially that first meeting, Reagan breaks all that up.  First of all, because that first session is not going very well.  They’re really arguing hammer and tong.  I think Reagan with that great sense of timing he had realized he’d done enough of that – now let’s try the other thing. 

You may know this story, this is in Lou Cannon’s books and some of the others.  It’s in that first session.  The Russians are there with their standard briefing book format, these big thick notebooks.  They’re laying out the issues they want to talk about.  Reagan says, somewhat like that letter to Brezhnev, he says to Gorbachev, “We fought alongside each other as allies against Nazi Germany.  My guess is tomorrow morning if the earth were invaded by aliens from another planet, we would be fighting side by side again, united.  All these differences would fall away.”  As Lou Cannon put it, the Soviet briefing book lacked a response to the American position on joining with imperialists to fight aliens.  Most people think this is Reagan being really goofy.  But of course after they take a break and he nudges Shultz – “I got them off stride with that one, didn’t I?”  There’s a lot more art there than people understood.

Peter Wallison:  I would just add that the part about Reagan dealing one-to-one with Gorbachev is attractive.  It’s interesting.  It’s naïve.  But Gorbachev was responding to some real pressures.  We have to understand that.  And Reagan knew that, and Reagan was creating those pressures – I think – through his arms buildup and through the ideas that he was putting out in the Soviet Union and what he was demonstrating about the U.S. economy.  Gorbachev might have been responding to Reagan.  I think he liked Reagan personally.  I think Reagan liked him personally.  But we have to realize that Gorbachev was in serious trouble because of the pressures from these two sides that Reagan was creating.

John Patrick Diggins:  There’s all this emphasis that America won the Cold War because of the economy.  But if a communist regime collapses because of the economy, how could you explain Fidel Castro?  All these regimes were in terrible shape.  In the United States, people were predicting the collapse of communism as early as the 1920s.  The New York Times, according to Walter Lippman, in 91 editorials predicted the collapse of Bolshevism between 1919 and 1920.  So it’s been predicted all along. 

There’s no reason why the Soviet Union couldn’t have continued.  It would have been more oppressive.  What the real turning point was was Gorbachev’s repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine.  The Brezhnev Doctrine was that the Soviet Union had the right to go into any country in Eastern Europe and put down any protests or any destabilizing forces.  Margaret Thatcher talks Gorbachev into repudiating that.  Once Gorbachev announces that, all the puppet regimes begin to collapse.  The young people, the brave people in Poland and Czechoslovakia rise up and overthrow their systems.  That’s the real turning point in the Cold War.

Peter Wallison:  I don’t think so. That might have been the turning point of the Cold War but why did Gorbachev agree to that?  The reason he agreed to that was that he knew that that doctrine couldn’t stand anymore.  They didn’t have the power.  They didn’t have the economic power to continue to oppress Eastern Europe.

John Patrick Diggins:  But previous leaders had continued that all the way going back to Stalin and Lenin and his NEP program.  It goes back – the Soviet Union lasts from 1920 to 1989.  To say that Gorbachev realized it couldn’t continue, with another man it could have continued.  Another leader might have said, this has to continue because if we don’t, the imperialist world is going to dominate us.

Question:  In this discussion, it seems to me that we mostly give credit either to Gorbachev or to Reagan, while for example we give short shrift to Europe.  For example, the Helsinki process, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also contributed to the fall of communism.  Also I would like to point out for example that the USSR was [indiscernible] in need of economic reorganization long ago.  I would like to stress that in the early 1960s, the USSR already imported grain from abroad.

But since I come from Russia and I was born in the Soviet Union, I’m very glad that such a book appeared, because still in Russia we have a lot of jokes concerning Reagan and concerning his ignorance and so on.  It was really revealing to me to know about his intelligence, like he wrote very sensitive and moving letters.  So I wonder whether there is any possibility for this book to be published in Russia and distributed?  Because I think it would be really great for those who study history in my country.

John Patrick Diggins:  I hear that Reagan is a b