The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

By James Mann

First of all, I'd like to say thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments. It's good to see that nearly everyone liked the book, and that even the one who didn't, Grover Norquist, also agrees that the book is accurate, well-sourced, and interesting. Since the book is intended to be a history, not a polemic, and is meant to be read, not reduced to sound bites, such praise is gratifying.

I want to reply primarily to Grover Norquist, who offers once again the retrospective conservative view of Reagan and of the end of the Cold War.

Norquist begins by asserting it is now the Republican Party's "history" and "mantra" that Ronald Reagan "defeated and dismantled the Soviet Empire." Phrased in this fashion, the statement is literally true: This is certainly what most Republicans now say they believe. But it is in fact the task of a journalist or historian to determine the underlying reality -- not what Republicans say, but what relationship their beliefs bear to what actually happened.

There are two fundamental problems with Norquist's view. First, he wants to ignore, or explain away, what Reagan was doing in his diplomacy with Gorbachev during the three-year period from 1986-88 when (as Norquist wants to forget) the conservative movement was furious at Reagan for abandoning the cause. And second, he doesn't understand how the Cold War ended.

Norquist focuses almost exclusively on the ways in which the United States, under Reagan's leadership, increased its strength vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. But this did not mean the end of the Cold War. Rather, it could well have led to a prolonged standoff, in which the Soviet Union, while falling further behind the United States in military and economic power, still continued to play the same role in Eastern Europe and at home that it had played since the 1940s. Yes, the Soviet Union was (or, hypothetically, would have been) in a weaker position than in the past, but this would not have changed the underlying realities in places like Poland or Hungary, much less in Ukraine or Estonia.

Let's assume, as Norquist, does that the Reagan defense buildup caused the Soviet leadership to decide it had to alter course.  (This is a more complicated question, whether decisions in Moscow were the direct result of American policies, but for purposes of this particular argument, let's just take it as a given.) Then the next question is: Once the Soviet Union decided to change policies in response to Reagan, which way should it go? In which direction? By abandoning the Cold War, or by regrouping, with an aim to eventually reasserting Soviet power?

And here's where Norquist strays from history. For it was the argument of many in Washington that Mikhail Gorbachev, after becoming the new Soviet leader in 1985, intended to respond to Reagan's policies of the early 1980s by rebuilding Soviet power over the long term, not by abandoning the Cold War. The proponents of this view included Norquist's conservative friends, who argued increasingly and bitterly throughout Reagan's second term that Reagan was being taken in by Moscow, that he had failed to recognize Gorbachev's intentions to revive Soviet power. (To take one of many examples cited in the book, consider this quote: Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus wrote in 1987 that Reagan was "a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.") Will Inboden's thoughtful essay concerning my book gives fair and ample recognition to this divide between Reagan and the conservatives; Norquist chooses to ignore the evidence of the split, a continuing theme of my book.

To explain away Reagan's policies in this period, and his diplomacy with Gorbachev, Norquist makes an argument that has no basis either in history or in my book. He says, "Both Reagan and Bush staffers this author spoke with agreed that Reagan and Bush did things to prop up Gorbachev because by 1987, the Soviet Union was on a road to collapse and Gorbachev was viewed as more likely to let things proceed to further weakness and possible dissolution with less blood on the floor." As a side matter, my book says nothing like this. More fundamentally, this is a retrospective argument that conservatives didn't make at the time. The people seeking to "prop up" Gorbachev in Washington in 1987 were Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz. Their opponents were Norquist's conservatives, plus officials like the CIA's main Soviet specialist, Robert Gates. During the 1985-88 period, all of them were arguing that Gorbachev represented merely a new face for the same old Soviet policies. None of them were talking at the time about "possible dissolution."

Finally, we come to the end of the Cold War itself. The decisive factor was Gorbachev's decision not to intervene with force in 1989 as one Eastern European Communist regime after another abandoned the policies their leaders had maintained, under Soviet domination, for decades. (I agree with Michael Tomasky's eloquent essay on the importance of Eastern European movements, and their leaders, just as he agrees with me that their success depended ultimately on Gorbachev's inaction.)

Here again, the question is: Was it inevitable, given the Reagan defense buildup, that the Cold War would end, and would end in this fashion? No, it was not. There could easily have been other outcomes -- that is, other Soviet responses to the upheavals of 1989. And indeed, Grover Norquist himself finally recognizes this reality. At the very end of his essay, Norquist writes: "Gorbachev was eventually toppled in a coup by those in the Soviet Union who, had they acted earlier, might have been able to maintain the Empire through violence directed at their own people."

But if this is true, then the Cold War did not have to end in the way that it did. Gorbachev's role was crucial. There could have been violence; there could have been a long effort to preserve the status quo; there could have been lots of other responses to the events in Eastern Europe than the one Gorbachev chose. It was the policy of the Reagan administration in 1986-88 to build up Gorbachev, to recognize his importance and to prevent the traditionalist elements in the Soviet leadership from gaining the upper hand against him.  Reagan did this against the continuing, determined resistance of American conservatives.  A few of the conservatives who were criticizing Reagan at the time, such as George Will, have since acknowledged that Reagan was right and they were wrong. Norquist chooses instead to remember an airbrushed Reagan.

Norquist has, indeed, won a victory within the Republican Party, in the sense that today, Republicans now unite around the "mantra" that Reagan "dismantled the Soviet empire." Whether this "mantra" is good for the Republican Party is an open question. It is certainly not an accurate reading of history.

James Mann is author-in-residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

By Michael Tomasky

There's an old joke that no one who graduated from Harvard is capable of uttering a sentence that begins, "When I was at college..." It's only partly a question of bragging rights: John Harvard's name is talismanic for them, his campus the center of their universe.

The joke is meant to make the rest of us feel all right -- that our little patch of land-grant earth was good enough. I react similarly sometimes about arguments over who won or lost the Cold War. When the question arises in America, there are, let's say, three camps: Ronald Reagan won it; Mikhail Gorbachev, to use James Mann's word, "abandoned" it; or finally, some combination of the two prevailed. Some will toss in that Pope John Paul II was really the guy who kicked things off. Something, and someone, is left out of that argument.

Now, before I go any further, let me pause to praise The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan. Among its other virtues, it is simply cracking-good history. The big stuff and the little things are both attended to with thought and reflection, and brought to vivid life in the writing, from the contours of the debate about the language of Reagan's famous 1987 Berlin speech to why a particular bed was imported from Lisbon to Venice for the president's comfort before a parley. The plotting -- the authorial decisions Mann has made to carry us back and forth between context and action, description and dialogue --  is so well-paced that the book at many times really does read like a good novel.

It also contains what strikes me as more than its share of new revelations. Maybe this reflects my own ignorance, and so be it, but I hadn't even known the name Suzanne Massie until I read this book. She was an amateur (in the true sense) historian and Russophile down to the soles of her shoes. How she managed to get into a president's inner circle is a mind-boggling story, but the role she played in getting Reagan to understand that, underneath the thick and sluggish Communist epidermal layer, there lay a Russian soul that was a more complex and alive organism, was salutary, or at least more positive than not.

I also think Mann's general portrait of Reagan is neither stinting nor overly generous, and probably quite accurate. Mann's Reagan is not an intellectual, but a person with pretty shrewd instincts. I decided at some point while reading this book that perhaps the way to describe Reagan is this: He knew what he didn't know. He hadn't read a lot of history or stacks of policy papers, and for the most part he wasn't going to be bothered. But at least, unlike a certain recent White House occupant, he understood that there were lots of things he didn't know and he seemed to try to keep that in mind and compensate for it. I say all this as one who was not and is not a fan of Reagan, especially on the domestic side, where I think his legacy is for the most part cankerous; and as a believer in the general principle that one ought to bother knowing.

But here -- and this is no reflection on Mann -- is where my mind starts wandering a bit when I read any Reagan v. Gorby history, no matter which side it takes. I keep wondering: What about the people who, dare I say it, freed themselves? That is, if you ask me who won the Cold War, I will answer neither Reagan nor Gorbachev. I'll cast my vote for the courageous people of Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, and especially the people of Hungary, who are always given the shortest shrift of all. I'll say Walesa and Michnik and Havel, yes, but I'll also say Miklos Haraszti, the Hungarian dissident writer and human-rights activist. And perhaps more than any other name I'll say Gyula Horn.

Who? Horn was Hungary's foreign minister in 1989. In the early summer of that year, he posed for this rather breathtaking photo-op with his Austrian counterpart, Alois Mock. Each holds a large clipping shear, and they are cutting the border fence between their two countries. More substantively, in September of that year, it was Horn who made the fateful decision (this is making a very long story very short) that opened the Hungarian border to Austria. If you ask me, once there was one leak in the Iron Curtain, there was no stopping events. In under 60 days, the Berlin Wall was dust. Without its European satellites, the USSR was doomed.

Again, I say none of the above by way of criticizing Mann's work. This was not within the ambit of his book, and yet to his credit he did indeed give seven or eight pages to all this in his epilogue.

I'm simply making a broader point: Like the Harvard grads for whom the old school looms over-large in their imaginations, we Americans think that everything that happens in the world must happen because of something we did or did not do. Reagan played a role in the collapse of the East. No one should deny it. But if "deny" is the verb, then "Eastern Europeans" is the subject: They are, in our histories, routinely denied their agency and their role in setting these events in motion.

Tony Judt, Michael Dobbs, and Paul Berman are three who've told us something of their stories, Judt most thoroughly. Indeed Judt's basic thesis on the fall of the East in Postwar provides ballast to Mann's assertion that the Cold War ended mostly because Gorbachev "abandoned" it. The Eastern European revolutions, Judt explains, could never have happened if Gorbachev hadn't let them happen. He could've rolled tanks into Budapest if he'd wanted to (Mann makes this point as well). But he did not. This process unfolded away from the field of U.S.-Soviet relations but again was probably more important than anything that happened at Reykjavik or any other summit.

So I salute the history that has been written here. As a liberal, I don't easily tire of narratives that show persuasively that a conservative president found success when he abandoned conservatism. But I also await the history that has yet to be written.

By William Inboden

A decade ago I attended a talk that Suzanne Massie gave at Yale, in which she described her curious relationship with President Reagan as a regular informal advisor and back-channel interlocutor on Soviet affairs. At the time of her talk, the conventional academic wisdom on Reagan's presidency mostly ranged from bemused dismissal to scathing derision -- polite scholars did not take him seriously, and impolite scholars vilified his presidency as disastrous. Perhaps revealingly, the most balanced and authoritative book on Reagan's presidency then available was written not by a historian or a political scientist, but by the journalist Lou Cannon, who had covered Reagan since his days as California governor. Academic scholars had not yet been able to overcome their ideologically-charged biases and general disdain to give Reagan a fair treatment.

So Massie's talk was striking and memorable, especially in how she violated two academic taboos. First, she described a Reagan who took ideas seriously and who displayed acute vision in perceiving the moral bankruptcy and fragility of the Soviet system, the genuine potential for change under Gorbachev, and the chance to chart a new course in U.S.-Soviet relations. Second, she spoke candidly about the importance of God and religious faith in the lives of both Reagan and the Russian people, and suggested that religion was an underappreciated factor in Reagan's approach to the Cold War.

Massie was ahead of her time. In the ten years since her talk, numerous respected scholars (not all of whom are politically conservative) have published a refreshing series of reappraisals of Reagan. Books by Sean Wilentz, John Patrick Diggins, Paul Lettow, and John Lewis Gaddis, among others, have in various ways presented Reagan as a consequential president with elements of greatness.

Add to that list James Mann's splendid new book. Mann uses Massie as one of four themes to illustrate what he provocatively calls Reagan's "rebellion." Though he never quite spells out his meaning, by "rebellion" Mann seems to be describing Reagan's rejection of the conventional wisdom on the Soviet Union held by three somewhat disparate camps: the U.S. intelligence community, arch-realists, and Reagan's own conservative political base. Along with an intriguing profile of Massie, the other themes highlighted by Mann include Reagan's complex relationship with fellow Californian Richard Nixon, the bureaucratic bloodbath waged over the "Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down this Wall" speech, and Reagan's own series of negotiations with Gorbachev.

Mann makes a persuasive case for Reagan's singular vision and idiosyncratic genius in several ways. First, Reagan conceived of the Cold War as an ideological contest between two worldviews and values systems, one of which was superior and the other of which was destined to fail. The latter point is especially salient, as it rejected the prevailing consensus and put Reagan in an adversarial posture against the prominent "realists" in his own party -- such as Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and even at times his own Vice President George H.W. Bush. All of whom instead saw the Cold War as a static power contest between two rival states that was destined to continue in perpetuity and thus could only be managed, not won. As realism today seems to be enjoying a popular and not entirely unwarranted resurgence, Reagan's Cold War doctrine is also a helpful reminder of realism's limits and past errors. 

Second, Reagan understood not only the need but also the most effective ways to maintain popular domestic support for his national security policies, both in Congress and among the American people. This again led to the use of speech language and symbolic gestures that often put him at odds with the received foreign policy wisdom, including among his own State Department and National Security Council staff. Depending on the course that Reagan was trying to chart, sometimes this meant using more forceful rhetoric (e.g. the "evil empire," "tear down this wall"), while other times it meant conciliatory measures such as the reciprocal Washington and Moscow summit meetings in 1987 and 1988. 

Third, Reagan displayed acute perception in assessing Gorbachev, and embracing him as a genuine reformer much sooner and much more eagerly than either the realist camp or Reagan's own conservative base. This was not just a matter of personal opinion but carried serious policy implications.  Reagan's belief in Gorbachev's sincerity and reformist trajectory led Reagan in turn to support far-reaching proposals -- most substantively the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty that eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles -- which outpaced any of the arms control measures from the previous decade of detente. It also led Reagan to forge a peculiar personal bond with Gorbachev, even to the extent of trying earnestly to disabuse Gorbachev of his atheism and persuade him to believe in God.

Fourth, ahead of their time Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz both recognized the emergence of globalization as a seismic new force shaping the international system. They described in detail to an anguished Gorbachev how the already decrepit Soviet economy, seemingly mired twenty years behind the economies of the free world, would soon be an entire century behind if the USSR did not liberalize and enter the looming new era of global information, capital, and trade flows.

This book is not a hagiography. Mann includes an abundance of less flattering facts, such as Reagan's dozing off (twice) during meetings with the Pope, his deference to Nancy Reagan's astrologer for scheduling significant events such as the INF treaty signing ceremony, his general inattention to policy details and government management, and his troubling detachment from presidential duties during his last year in office.

Nor is everything in Mann's book is persuasive. For one, the first section overemphasizes Nixon's role and importance in the 1980s, and has the feel of treating Nixon and Reagan's differences over Soviet policy in that decade more as a contrived literary device than as a consequential driver of history. More significantly (and here I echo some of Grover Norquist's critique below), Mann's conclusion that "Reagan didn't win the Cold War; Gorbachev abandoned it" gives Gorbachev too much credit and depicts Reagan as a mere facilitator. It also belies many of the facts that Mann himself details. Reagan's policies, especially the military build-up, the domestic economic revival, the Strategic Defense Initiative, active support for anticommunist forces such as the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, human rights initiatives, and forceful rhetoric all created the context in which the Soviet system had little chance of succeeding. In short, Reagan created new "facts on the ground" which altered the international reality that Gorbachev inherited.  The Soviet Union, illegitimate and bankrupt at home, and overstretched abroad, could not keep pace. For all of his laudable reforms, Gorbachev could not control the tides he unleashed -- tides which Reagan helped engineer. 

Finally, it is interesting to reflect on the turns of history. Mann reminds readers of how Reagan in his last three years as president faced stiff criticism on Soviet policy from querulous realists and disgruntled conservatives. Even when Reagan left office in January 1989, no one knew that before the year was out the Berlin Wall would indeed be torn down, and just two years later the Soviet Union itself would cease to exist. In that sense Reagan passed history's ultimate tests: he was right, and his policies worked. That may also serve as a caution to not be too hasty in pronouncing categorical verdicts in the immediate aftermath of a presidency, when we do not yet know how the story will end.

William Inboden is senior vice president of the Legatum Institute and a regular contributor to FP's Shadow Government blog. 

The White House/Getty Images

By Peter Baker

The art of Kremlinology came back into vogue several years ago and among those who today make a living interpreting the byzantine machinations in Moscow rages a debate: Is Russian President Dmitry Medvedev his own man? And might he even be a closet reformer ready to break the shackles of his system?

To many skeptics, the very idea seems like the triumph of hope over experience. Medvedev owes his career to Vladimir Putin and served loyally at his side through the reconsolidation of state power earlier in the decade. While Medvedev has mouthed supportive words about the rule of law, his tenure has hardly seen much move in that direction so far.

Yet in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin, many want to believe that Medvedev someday will emerge as a force for change in Russia, a young modernizer who subtly or openly will shift away from his patron and turn his country back onto the road toward civil society. The other night I heard a person close to the Obama administration argue that the smartest policy for the West is to give Medvedev room to maneuver and grow out of his early role as a Putin protégé.

It's interesting how familiar that debate feels when reading James Mann's excellent new book, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan. The essential tension of the book pits Reagan against the conventional wisdom crowd in his assessment of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. While they dismissed the possibility that Gorbachev could represent anything other than a friendlier face for the old "evil empire," Reagan saw something else, a Communist general secretary ready to take on the system that created him to transform his own society.

Just how sharply Reagan tacked against the prevailing winds in Washington comes to life in Mann's account. In relentlessly pursuing accord with Gorbachev on arms control, Reagan the old Cold Warrior defied his conservative base, many in his own State Department and White House, and even Richard Nixon, the architect of détente. Although everyone told him that Gorbachev was faking his commitment to reform in order to strengthen the Soviet Union, Reagan believed his counterpart was the real deal.

As it happens, the skeptics included one Robert M. Gates, then a senior CIA official and now secretary of defense. Gates was so outspoken in his warnings about trusting Gorbachev's reforms that he clashed with some of Reagan's top lieutenants. In one memo on Gorbachev in early 1986 shortly before he became deputy CIA director, Gates wrote that all signs suggested that "on fundamental objectives and policies he so far remains generally as inflexible as his predecessors."

Gates ultimately was proved wrong. But does that mean that today's skeptics of Medvedev are? Not necessarily. The debate about Gorbachev has repeated itself since then with opposite results. When my wife, Susan Glasser, and I arrived in Moscow at the end of 2000 as correspondents for The Washington Post, many Americans wanted to believe in Putin the way Reagan believed in Gorbachev. After all, he was a young, energetic man installed by Boris Yeltsin and he was the first foreign leader to call then-President George W. Bush to offer his support after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

What we saw up close, though, made clear that was a misjudgment in the other direction. Putin was not the democratic reformer Washington hoped he would be. He was a far more complicated figure intent on reestablishing strong central authority and rebuilding Russia into a great power again. He has not reestablished the Soviet Union, as some overstate the case -- everyday Russian life today is far freer today than it was when Gorbachev took over -- but Putin has labored to squelch any alternative power centers that could challenge him, from parliament and the governors to big business and the news media.

By turning over the presidency to his lieutenant, Medvedev, and becoming prime minister instead, Putin fueled new hope in the West. Many took heart from the fact that Medvedev was not among the KGB veterans known as "siloviki," or men of power, and accepted his promises to take on corruption and "legal nihilism" in Russia and "protect civil and economic freedoms" at face value. What that overlooked was the fact that Putin has said similar things over the years. And Medvedev, the professed champion of freedom and rule of law, previously served Putin as head of Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant that has been used as an instrument of power against unfriendly media tycoons at home and uncooperative neighbors abroad.

Even as Medvedev flew to London to meet with President Obama for the first time this month, Russian authorities hauled onetime oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky from his jail cell to put him on trial again for what his lawyers call essentially the same charges. Many saw the move as a warning to anyone else who might get out of line like he once did -- and a sign that Moscow could not care less about protests from Khodorkovsky's friends in the West. And at the same time, Medvedev has done nothing evident to rein in Kremlin-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, whose enemies keep getting killed even as far away as Vienna and Dubai.

So Medvedev is no Gorbachev. At least not yet and maybe never. What Mann's book reminds us is how little we understand about what really goes on inside the Russian leadership. Russian leaders, after all, are acting not as we want them to but out of what they see as Russia's interests. Gorbachev believed it was in the Soviet Union's interest to open up a closed system and put an end to the arms race. Reagan recognized that and collaborated with him. After a decade of instability, Putin saw consolidating power both at home and in Russia's immediate neighborhood being in Russia's interest.

So when it comes to evaluating Russian leaders, American presidents have to rely on a mix of gut instinct, sober assessment, and healthy skepticism. And sometimes they will get it right, and sometimes they won't.

Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, is co-author with Susan Glasser of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution.

MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images

By Grover G. Norquist

Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976 and 1980 challenging the establishment's views on domestic economic policy and foreign policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Empire.

Reagan first defeated and then largely absorbed the Republican establishment on both domestic and foreign policy. Howard Baker, once a contender for the 1980 Republican nomination did vote for the Reagan income tax rate reductions, while calling them a "riverboat gamble." George Bush called supply side economics "voodoo economics" but then in 1988 signed a pledge to protect the lower rates. Bob Dole voted for the lower tax rates while bitterly criticizing supply side economics only to endorse marginal tax rate reduction when he ran for president in 1996.

On foreign policy Reagan's "peace through strength" has become the party's mantra and "détente" is now viewed as another of Richard Nixon's character flaws. Reaganism, the party's history explains, defeated and dismantled the Soviet Empire after fifty years of bipartisan dangerous failure.

The center-right finds Reagan's successes easy to explain. Low taxes and less regulation create jobs and growth. A strong military, recognition of the evil and threat of Communism and support for anti-communist rebels in Afghanistan, Angola and the resistance in Poland aided by the failure of socialism as an economic system led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.  What is not to understand and applaud?

The establishment left has had a more difficult time explaining how Reagan succeeded in his two stated goals-turning the economy around from Carter's stagflation -- both high unemployment and inflation-and destroying the Soviet Union -- with such wrongheaded policies.

The establishment left has also had to back away from its favorite caricature of Reagan the "amiable dunce" who was "sleepwalking through history" and who had read fewer books than Illinois Democrat Senator Paul Simon had written. The final stake was thrust into the heart of this narrative with the publication of Martin and Annelise Anderson and Kiron K. Skinner's book in 2004, A Life in Letters that published hundreds of radio editorials written in his own hand, self-edited and clearly showing a first rate and well read mind. Reagan the product of clever speechwriters, the actor reading the ideas and words of others was gone.

The bitter enders of the revisionist Left wisely skipped over the  economic history of the 1980s and 1990s (deciding to avoid embarrassing conversations about GDP, employment, inflation, growth rates) and on foreign policy credited Michael Gorbachev with agreeably ending the cold war and dismantling the Soviet Union on purpose. Reagan was just standing there when the nice Soviet Leader fixed the world.

James Mann's new book The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is a cross between the Andersons' revelation of Reagan's unexpected and hitherto hidden, wisdom and the theory that Gorbachev reformed the Soviet Union out of existence absent external pressures-certainly not due to any right-wing, military build up, red baiting pressures from the cowboy Reagan.

Reagan's wisdom, per Mann, is found in recognizing Gorbachev's historic role and not getting in the way. A rather backhanded insult to the man's life work.

Mann divides his book into four parts that can be enjoyed or at least visited separately: first, a comparison of Nixon and Reagan's views of communism and the Soviet Union; second, the little focused upon role of Suzanne Massie as an informal conduit between Reagan and the Soviet Leadership in the mid-1980s; third, the story of the June 1987 "tear down this wall" speech, and fourth, the "easing of the Cold War Tensions during Reagan's final two years in office."

It is all interesting reading and appears accurate and well sourced. But it is a little like reading a history of Napolean's life after the retreat from Moscow. It skips over some of the good bits.

The Soviet Union didn't fall. It was pushed. Gorbachev didn't end the Cold War any more than Mussolini ended the Second World War. He was a casualty and one fatally wounded in retreat.

When Reagan was elected in 1980 the Soviet Empire had ended a decade that included the American retreat from Vietnam, the communist take over of Angola, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua, Cuban troops in Grenada and the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. America had increasing unemployment and, despite all the best theories, an inflation rate above ten percent.

Driven by Ronald Reagan, the United States military doubled its procurement by 1985. Intermediate range missiles were placed in Europe to counter the SS-20s. Anti-tank weapons neutralized  the Soviet Armor advantage in Europe. The Soviet Union's plans for two pipelines into Europe that would make Western Europe dependent on Soviet oil and gas and a joint project with Japan were stopped by an American boycott. The First strand of the European pipeline delayed and the second stopped until after the Soviet Union ended. Europe was bullied into fuller participation in a technology embargo against the Soviet Union Western loans were discouraged to the Eastern Bloc.

The Afghan resistance was given Stinger missiles and brought down several hundred soviet planes, helicopter and pilots. Stinger missiles also went to the Angolan resistance, UNITA.

And Reagan's economic policies brought GDP from $3.2 trillion in 1982 when the tax cuts took effect to $6 trillion in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell.  Employment in America rose from 89.7 million to 108.4 million in those years. Books have been written on how the deregulation of airlines, buses, trains and trucking dramatically increased American productivity and economic growth in that period. Share ownership in the United States rose from 20 percent of American adults to more than 50 percent today.

Reagan made a series of decisions and won political fights against the modern Democrat party to change both our military and foreign policy and our economic policy that strengthened the Untied States and weakened the Soviet Union.

Both Reagan and Bush staffers this author spoke with agreed that Reagan and Bush did things to prop up Gorbachev because by 1987 the Soviet Union was on a road to collapse and Gorbachev was viewed as more likely to let things proceed to further weakness and possible dissolution with less blood on the floor. Gorbachev was eventually toppled in a coup by those in the Soviet Union who, had they acted earlier, might have been able to maintain the Empire through violence directed at their own people.

Mann correctly points out that Reagan and Bush handled the Gorbachev relationship in a way that maximized American strength and led to a non-violent Soviet Collapse. But that was the end, not the beginning of the strategy.

Grover G. Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform.

BILL FITZ-PATRICK/AFP/Getty Images

The following excerpt was reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the end of the Cold War by James Mann. Copyright James Mann 2009.

The impact of Reagan's second-term policies -- his summit meetings with Gorbachev, his arms control treaty, his declaration that there was no more evil empire -- could be felt both inside the United States and in the Soviet Union.

At home, Reagan gradually brought the American public towards an awareness that the Soviet Union was changing and the Cold War subsiding. He overcame the resistance of the political right, effectively marginalizing it. In the fall of 1987, not only the leading conservative columnists but all the Republican presidential candidates except for Vice President George H.W. Bush attacked Reagan for his non-confrontational approach to Gorbachev. In the Senate, Republican conservatives like Dan Quayle determinedly challenged Reagan's arms control treaty. But in the end, the opposition melted away; Reagan's treaty won more than ninety votes. After all, Reagan had been the political leader and, indeed, the symbol of American conservatism for two decades. In this end-of-Cold-War drama, he succeeded in defusing opposition at home where other American leaders might well have failed. Gorbachev and his aides recognized Reagan's political significance. "His big plus was his authority inside the country," said Anatoly Adamishin, the Soviet deputy foreign minister. "Other leaders, like [Vice President George H.W.] Bush, had to cater to political forces. But Ronald Reagan could overcome the resistance of the hawks."

In the Soviet Union, the impact of Reagan's second-term policies was less direct, but arguably even more significant. Reagan's policies gave Gorbachev enough time, latitude and prestige to proceed with his reforms, to the point where they could no longer be undone. Gorbachev was hardly radical in his domestic policies; he was opening up the Soviet system, but always with the goal of maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party. Yet Gorbachev's foreign policy was, in fact, a break with the past. During this period, he progressively reduced the role of the Soviet military -- bringing troops home, forswearing the use of force, allowing the Soviet Union's Eastern European allies to go their own way. These foreign and domestic policies were interconnected: his glowing reviews overseas helped Gorbachev to fend off domestic opposition for several critical years. Reagan and Shultz grasped Gorbachev's importance and these underlying dynamics in a way that Reagan's critics in Washington did not. They helped give the Soviet leader the breathing room he required. They also offered Gorbachev the underlying economic rationalization he needed for his changing approach to the world --that the Soviet Union had to accommodate to the inevitable trends of globalization.

The triumphal interpretation of Reagan says that he "won" the Cold War through the confrontational policies of his first term -- above all, by increasing spending for the military in a big way and by launching the Strategic Defense Initiative. But no matter how one judges the impact of the American defense buildup, it did not bring the Cold War to an end. By itself, it could at best have led to a prolonged stalemate during which the Soviet leadership, while unable to match American military spending, clung to power. There was nothing in Reagan's first-term policies that could induce Mikhail Gorbachev to abandon the Brezhnev doctrine's assertion of the Soviet Union's right to intervene with force in Eastern Europe. The "Star Wars" program did not persuade Gorbachev to sit passively by in 1989 while the Berlin Wall was torn down.

It was Reagan's second-term policies, his decision to do business with Gorbachev, that set the course for the end of the Cold War. If Reagan had not been responsive, then events might have taken a different course during the crucial period from 1985 to 1989. Gorbachev's critics at home could have succeeded in resisting change by warning that American policy remained a continuing danger and that Gorbachev was failing to obtain any alteration of the Soviet Union's relationship with the United States.

Gorbachev himself might have tried to freeze the degree of change in the Soviet political system. Or alternatively, traditionalists in the Soviet leadership might have attempted to overthrow Gorbachev -- as indeed, they tried to do in the abortive coup d'etat of August 1991. Instead, Gorbachev proceeded to open up the Soviet system, and by the time the old guard in the Soviet leadership finally mobilized against him, it was too late. The changes of the previous six years turned out to be irreversible.

Gorbachev occasionally joked that through his actions, he was depriving the United States of an enemy. The reverse was also true:  Reagan, through his policies, deprived the Soviet Union of the intensely adversarial relationship with the United States that had, over the decades, repeatedly served as Moscow's justification for preserving its enormous military and security apparatus. In order to proceed at home, Gorbachev had to show that he was moving towards a different role in the world. As Gorbachev later acknowledged, he needed American and international recognition of his foreign policy to shore up his position in Moscow and overcome resistance within the Soviet leadership. By treating Gorbachev as fundamentally different from his predecessors, Reagan's policies gave the Soviet leader what he required.

In the end, the Cold War sputtered out without any large-scale violent upheavals or explosions. It was not inevitable that the climax should have been so anticlimactic. Unquestionably, Gorbachev played the leading role in bringing the four-decade-old conflict to a close. Yet Reagan, overcoming considerable opposition of his own at home, played a crucial role by buttressing Gorbachev's political position. It was in this sense that Ronald Reagan helped ensure the Cold War ended in the tranquil fashion that it did. Reagan didn't win the Cold War; Gorbachev abandoned it. By recognizing Gorbachev's significance, when many others in the United States did not, Reagan helped create the climate in which the Cold War could end.

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This week, In Other Words reviews James Mann's latest book, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War.

In this new work, the award-winning journalist and author of The China Fantasy and Rise of the Vulcans again takes a critcial look at U.S. foreign policy. This time, with new documents -- previously undisclosed secret messages between Reagan and Moscow and internal White House intrigues -- Mann analyzes the significance of Reagan's relationship with Gorbachev (and the criticisms of that diplomatic connection by the likes of Nixon and Kissinger), and more crisply defines the true role Reagan played in ending the Cold War. 

What follows this week is a running commentary with fresh posts each day on Mann's new work by FP's own bloggers as well as special guest contributors.

Read an excerpt of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan here. 

James Mann is author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His Web site is www.james-mann.com.