The debt owed to Ronald Reagan

No mention was made of President Ronald Reagan in the speeches at the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall that the current President was unable to attend. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked about Reagan’s contribution to that historic and generally unexpected event at a speech last week, there is a broader effort among the transnational elite to scrub the record of Reagan’s contribution and lay the cause entirely at the feet of Mikhail Gorbachev. Certainly Gorby had a big role to play, but the Russians themselves earlier conceded Reagan’s vision and steadfastness of purpose as forcing them into an untenable economic, military, and, eventually, political position.

Peter Robinson was then a speech writer for Reagan. Indeed, Robinson was the one who put to more complete words Reagan’s sentiment about the USSR and its oppressive domination of various political satellites in that classic 1987 speech near the Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Robinson recollects Reagan’s determination, over the objections of the timid naysayers in the State Department and on his own National Security Council, to see that wall come down. So the speech was one tactic, albeit a very powerfully symbolic one, in the President’s overall strategy to topple the “Evil Empire.”

Peter Robinson does an interview with Steven Hayward, the author of authoritative accounts of Reagan’s early years in national politics, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, and of Reagan’s presidency, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution.

They develop a fascinating portrait of an engaged President with a clear agenda on specific domestic and foregin relations issues. Hayward also describes Reagan as having to fight his own advisers and the Congressional Republicans almost as much as the Democrats and the media. Again and again, Reagan ignores his advisers on crucial questions, the great majority of which result in vindication for him. 

This is a transcript of the interview. [Caution: The transcript is done from the video, so that words are often transcribed according to how the sounds register, rather than what the actual words are.]