Fred Kaplan: The 2 Reagans ... Which version of the Gipper would Republicans like Obama to emulate?
When President Barack Obama starts stepping out on the world stage, trying to strike deals with foreign leaders, a chorus of Republicans and right-wing pundits will implore him to take his cues from Ronald Reagan, who—the popular history has it—brought the Soviet Union to its knees through military strength and iron will.
In anticipation of these urgings, everyone should read the excerpt in this month's Vanity Fair (online edition only) from James Mann's forthcoming book The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, which reveals that the hard-liners' hero was, in fact, a babbling nut job who was lucky that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, a genuine reformer desperate for Western assistance, was on the receiving end. Mann also shows conclusively that, in the end, Reagan won the Cold War not by standing tough but by offering a gesture of peace.
The lesson that Obama and his team ought to take away from the tale is that Reagan should not be regarded as a model of any sort—and that his Republican champions continue to distort his true legacy.
Much of Mann's story—based on interviews and recently declassified archives—is eye-poppingly hilarious.
In the days before the Washington summit of December 1987, Gen. Colin Powell, then the national security adviser, briefed Reagan on the details of the nuclear-weapons treaty they were about to wrap up—but all Reagan wanted to know was at what point he should give Gorbachev a set of gold cuff links that he'd picked out as a gift.
At their first one-on-one talk, Gorbachev tried to talk substance, but Reagan kept telling interminable anecdotes and anti-Soviet jokes, leading Gorbachev at one point to mutter, "On boltayet yeshchyo" ("He's babbling again"). The next day, in a larger meeting that included 34 U.S. and Soviet officials, Reagan repeated the performance, causing Secretary of State George Shultz to scold him afterward. "Mr. President, that was a disaster," Shultz said. "You can't just sit there telling jokes."
The following May, in their face-to-face talks at the summit in Moscow, Reagan spent an astonishing amount of time trying to convince a clearly annoyed Gorbachev of God's existence. (The National Security Council's Soviet affairs director, Rudolf Perina, who took notes at the meeting, told Mann, "Reagan thought he could convert Gorbachev, or make him see the light.")
And yet the real dirty secret about Reagan—the one that Republicans would rather not remember or, in many cases, never knew—is that, at heart, he had no stomach for war and detested nuclear weapons. (This point was persuasively made in Paul Lettow's underappreciated 2006 book, Ronald Reagan and His Quest To Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which also noted that Reagan's top aides went to great lengths to keep his feelings on the subject under wraps.)...
Read entire article at Slate
In anticipation of these urgings, everyone should read the excerpt in this month's Vanity Fair (online edition only) from James Mann's forthcoming book The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, which reveals that the hard-liners' hero was, in fact, a babbling nut job who was lucky that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, a genuine reformer desperate for Western assistance, was on the receiving end. Mann also shows conclusively that, in the end, Reagan won the Cold War not by standing tough but by offering a gesture of peace.
The lesson that Obama and his team ought to take away from the tale is that Reagan should not be regarded as a model of any sort—and that his Republican champions continue to distort his true legacy.
Much of Mann's story—based on interviews and recently declassified archives—is eye-poppingly hilarious.
In the days before the Washington summit of December 1987, Gen. Colin Powell, then the national security adviser, briefed Reagan on the details of the nuclear-weapons treaty they were about to wrap up—but all Reagan wanted to know was at what point he should give Gorbachev a set of gold cuff links that he'd picked out as a gift.
At their first one-on-one talk, Gorbachev tried to talk substance, but Reagan kept telling interminable anecdotes and anti-Soviet jokes, leading Gorbachev at one point to mutter, "On boltayet yeshchyo" ("He's babbling again"). The next day, in a larger meeting that included 34 U.S. and Soviet officials, Reagan repeated the performance, causing Secretary of State George Shultz to scold him afterward. "Mr. President, that was a disaster," Shultz said. "You can't just sit there telling jokes."
The following May, in their face-to-face talks at the summit in Moscow, Reagan spent an astonishing amount of time trying to convince a clearly annoyed Gorbachev of God's existence. (The National Security Council's Soviet affairs director, Rudolf Perina, who took notes at the meeting, told Mann, "Reagan thought he could convert Gorbachev, or make him see the light.")
And yet the real dirty secret about Reagan—the one that Republicans would rather not remember or, in many cases, never knew—is that, at heart, he had no stomach for war and detested nuclear weapons. (This point was persuasively made in Paul Lettow's underappreciated 2006 book, Ronald Reagan and His Quest To Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which also noted that Reagan's top aides went to great lengths to keep his feelings on the subject under wraps.)...