The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the end of the Cold War
by James Mann
(Viking, 2009, 396 pages)
These days Ronald Reagan's leadership style has been given a name and there are whole books written about it. It's called "leadership through narrative".
The idea is that leaders inspire by talking about things in a way that people most easily understand. Facts and figures are abstract and vague. Not too many people relate to per capita GDP. But a good story can be personal, emotional, and can inspire action. Reagan's most memorable descriptions of the Soviet Union didn't involve reciting the numbers of people Stalin had murdered or the number of prisoners in Khrushchev's gulags. While "evil empire" wasn't a story so much as a description, it nonetheless had narrative power. It allowed his listeners to draw their own mental images of what "evil" and "empire" conjured up. Likewise "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall" wasn't a story but it painted a direct and immediate picture.
Politicians use facts and figures as "evidence" to support their case and to provide legitimacy to their cause. But when was the last time you can remember a single fact or figure a politician has quoted? Think about the things from politicians and leaders you recall and can repeat. There'll be a few quotes from Reagan, there'll be "we shall fight on the beaches" and with a bit of luck there might even be a few snippets of the Gettysburg Address. The most effective stories are the parables.
James Mann highlights this quality of Reagan in his excellent The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the end of the Cold War. One of the reasons Reagan was a great leader was because he was a great communicator, and he was a great communicator because he told great stories. By the time he became president Reagan had nearly fifty years of practice. As a sports broadcaster in Des Moines in the mid-1930s he described "live" major league baseball games by reading and interpreting abbreviations of play from a telegraph. He described over 600 games this way even though at the time he started in the job he had never been to a major league game.
To perform such feats required imagination, ingenuity, and stamina. And then, between 1954 and 1962 Reagan was a spokesman for General Electric. One of his tasks was to visit GE's 139 factories in forty states across the United States. He gave lectures, presentations, and pep talks to the company's 250,000 employees. Reagan later estimated that during his eight years with the company he had spent more than 4000 hours speaking in front of a microphone to audiences. That's equal to talking for eight hours a day, five days a week, every week for two years. Even if Reagan in fact only spent half as much time talking as he said he did, it's still a remarkable feat.
Reagan did so much talking and told so many stories that sometimes he would convince himself that what he'd imagined had actually occurred. When Reagan died in 2004, the presidential speechwriter David Gergen retold the story of one of Reagan's most famous stories.
[Reagan] loved to tell the tales of ordinary people who did extraordinary things during the war -- heroes like Jimmy Doolittle in his daring raid over Tokyo and the "boys of Pointe du Hoc" who scaled the cliffs in the face of German machine gunners.
It didn't seem to matter whether all of his stories were completely true. Celebrating Medal of Honor winners at a dinner, he told of a B-17 bomber flying over Europe. German anti-aircraft fire hit the plane, and it started going down. While the men up front jumped for safety, the rear gunner was wounded and couldn't get out. He sat terrified, awaiting death. Suddenly, an older man appeared, the pilot. "Never mind," he told the injured gunner, "we'll ride it down together." That story is recorded nowhere in military annals and may have come from one of the movies Reagan so loved, Wing and a Prayer. But no one really cared. Americans knew there were thousands of genuine heroes in those days, and Reagan gave them life through his stories.
Reagan told the rear gunner story many times. One of the occasions was during the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter. Some reporters who heard it questioned how if both men died together how it would have been possible for anyone to know what had happened. Various columnists later used the story to poke fun at Reagan and it seems his aides tried to stop him using it. The aides were unsuccessful.
Garry Wills in his Reagan's America: Innocents at home writes what happened when Reagan, as president, recounted the tale of the rear gunner to the actors Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton who were at the White House for a screening of the film Reds. According to Beatty the president started talking about film:
Without missing a beat he [Reagan] said: "You know what's really wrong with the Russians? What's really wrong with the Russians is this." He started to tell this long story from World War II, about a plane that is shot down, and the gunner is trapped, and the pilot, instead of parachuting out to save himself, cradles the gunner's head in his arms and they go down together. It must have been the plot of some movie he saw, or made, or something. I kept looking at Diane and she kept looking at me and we kept waiting for the punch line. And there wasn't one. And then we realized that he meant every word he said about the Russians.
That Reagan meant every word he said about the Russians is the point of James Mann's wonderful book. Reagan was unique because he genuinely and sincerely believed that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, and because he wasn't afraid to say what he thought. As Mann makes clear Reagan's views were very different from those prevailing in Washington in the 1970s and early 1980s. Reagan was poles apart from the established wisdom, as expressed by the likes of Nixon and Kissinger.
Nixon's view of the Cold War as a geopolitical contest, with each side able to annihilate the other, implied that neither side could ever win. For Reagan, however, America's contest with the Soviet Union was about economic systems and ideals. When the Cold War was viewed in this fashion, it was conceivable to imagine that one side might fail and end up on the "ash heap of history."
A focus of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan is the extent to which Reagan's belief that the Soviet Union could be defeated, and should be defeated was not just a rebellion against an existing paradigm, it was a revolution. Even after Reagan had won a second presidential term in an electoral landslide, Kissinger complained in newspaper columns that anyone who thought the Cold War could be won was naïve. According to Kissinger
There are no "final happy endings" ... Whatever they may agree on, the United States and the Soviet Union will remain superpowers impinging globally on each other. Ideological hostility will continue. Specific, precise arrangements can, indeed must be made. But they are more likely to ameliorate tensions than to end them.
Conservatives who believed themselves to have a "realistic" view of the world continued their campaign against Reagan right up to the end. As late as 1987 when Reagan and Gorbachev were negotiating the elimination of nuclear weapons in Europe, leading conservatives like George Will and Charles Krauthammer joined in on Nixon's and Kissinger's attacks on Reagan.
In retrospect those conservatives were not too different from conservatives like Erich Honecker, the East German leader who on January 19, 1989 -- Reagan's last full day as president -- announced that the Berlin Wall "will still exist in 50 and even 100 years". By November, Honecker had been proved wrong.
Reagan's speech at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987 is a focus of Mann's book. From the very beginning of the process of drafting the speech the State Department was opposed to the president saying anything that might upset the Soviet leadership. One official even remarked that to say anything about the wall was "in bad taste". But Reagan and his personal speechwriters persisted. Eventually the battle over the speech came down to the specific words of "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall". The foreign policy experts wanted the words out. Reagan's speechwriter wanted the words in. The speechwriter argued "That is the sound bite that everyone is going to grab". In the end the White House deputy chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein took the dispute to the president.
Duberstein said he thought it was a great line, but that the State Department strongly objected on grounds that it might be too inflammatory. Reagan asked Duberstein if he agreed. The White House aide gave no direct answer. "You're the president, he said. You get to decide." Reagan looked down at his desk, looked back up, and said, "I think we'll leave it in."
The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan demolishes two of the myths of the Cold War. The first is that Reagan increased military expenditure and embarked on the Star Wars defence program knowing that if the Russians tried to match the Americans' spending the Soviet Union would go broke. The second myth is that Reagan was simply lucky. While there's some element of truth in both analyses Mann makes the persuasive argument that Reagan's achievement was to appreciate the weaknesses of the USSR and then have the United States respond in such a way as to allow and encourage Gorbachev to undertake the reforms that would bring down the regime. Reagan was sensitive enough and smart enough to employ his leadership and his rhetoric as circumstances required. The man who spoke of an evil empire was also the man assailed by the Republican right for believing the Cold War could ever be concluded.
The stories Reagan told always had a point and often had a happy ending. Kissinger was wrong. Even if you can't quite call the conclusion of the Cold War to be a "final happy ending" it's an ending nevertheless. And Mann in The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan tells the story brilliantly.
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