Abstract
There are sharply conflicting assessments both of Ronald Reagan’s performance as president of the United States and of the manner in which the Cold War ended. Critical views of Reagan abound, both in the United States and abroad: he was, it is said, an ill-informed and ideologically driven leader who pushed his country “in the wrong direction,” raised international tensions to a dangerous level, and furthermore was an inattentive manager who, at crucial times, lost control of what his subordinates were doing.1 There are, in contrast, supporters who assert that Reagan was a far-sighted statesman who “brought the country together again” and presided over a “Reagan Revolution,” lowering taxes and freeing the economy of suffocating overregulation, while winning the Cold War and bringing down Communism.2
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Notes
For example, Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years (New York: Anchor Books, 1992).
and the chapter on Reagan in Stephen Graubard, Command of Office: How War, Secrecy and Deception Transformed the Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 441–472.
For example, Peggy Noonan, When Character Was King (New York: Viking, 2001).
and Peter Schweitzer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994).
Both negotiators have described the compromise proposal in their memoirs. See Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center ofDecision —A Memoir (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1999).
and Julij A. Kwitzinski, Vor dem Sturm: Erinnerungen eines Diplomaten (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1993).
Murray Sayle, “Closing the File on Flight 007,” The New Yorker, December 13, 1993, 90–101.
Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962–1986) (New York: Random House, 1995), 527.
Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
See Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005).
and Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 82–83.
Mikhail Gorbachev, My Country and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 53.
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© 2008 Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies
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Matlock, J.F. (2008). Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War. In: Hudson, C., Davies, G. (eds) Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616196_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616196_5
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