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One way to make a splash as a biographer is as a debunker of “myths” about your subject. If that subject happens to be the most important Republican president of the 20th century, there’s a good chance the “debunking” will be in the service of taking the man down a peg or two, or three.
So, no one should be surprised that Max Boot’s highly lauded new biography, “Reagan: His Life and Legend,” [ [link removed] ] seeks to reassess various aspects of our 40th president’s legacy and dim some of the glow that has lit Ronald Reagan’s reputation in the 36 years since he left the White House. But while there are plenty of things about this book to take issue with, it’s Boot’s treatment of Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War that is most egregiously incorrect and unfair.
Boot’s take on Reagan’s Cold War achievement is not only wrong but a bit of a muddle. For instance, he sees Reagan’s “moral certitude” on communism as a character flaw and blames Reagan for confronting the Soviet Union in the early 1980s “with his military buildup and histrionic rhetoric.” At the same time, Boot regards Reagan’s negotiations with the Soviets on nuclear arms control as contradicting his longstanding anti-communism. Nevertheless, the key to Reagan, Boot then insists, was his essential pragmatism. In other words, though he was a strong anti-communist, Reagan was willing to abandon his convictions when he had to. Ultimately, Boot concludes, Reagan merely followed the lead of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, who in the author’s telling is the real hero in ending the Cold War.
As with his assessment of Reagan’s Cold War legacy, Boot’s interpretations of other aspects of the president’s life also are fraught with misconceptions. For instance, he believes Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign probably conspired to prevent revolutionary Iran from releasing U.S. hostages before the election. In fact, Reagan supported President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to negotiate an end to the crisis, as explained [ [link removed] ] in Lou Cannon’s outstanding biography, “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.”
Boot dismisses Reagan’s effort as president of the Screen Actors Guild to oppose Hollywood communists because the author says they weren’t a serious threat. But Reagan, a liberal Democrat at the time, saw the issue up close and believed, correctly as it turns out, that communists in the late 1940s were trying to take over [ [link removed] ] the motion picture industry at the behest of the Soviets.
Boot also scolds Reagan for his supposed intellectual shallowness—despite being as well-educated as most American presidents—with a simplistic “Reader’s Digest” understanding of the world. But as the leftist intellectual Susan Sontag [ [link removed] ] acknowledged, those who read “Reader’s Digest” were better informed on the real dangers of communism than readers of fellow-traveling “The Nation.” Reagan understood the bigger issues at stake better than most intellectuals at the time did.
Still, these dubious judgments are trivial compared to Boot’s downplaying of Reagan’s most significant achievement, his campaign to end the Cold War peacefully and victoriously. Liberal historian John Patrick Diggins assesses that by employing “patient dialogue and mutual trust,” [ [link removed] ] Reagan was our only president to resolve “a sustained, deadly international confrontation without going to war.” This great achievement should not be underestimated. And it was Reagan’s principles, not cynical pragmatism or slavishly following Gorbachev, that made it happen.
My problems with Boot’s bestselling book might seem like historical nitpicking. After all, these events occurred decades ago and the Soviet Union no longer exists. But getting Reagan’s legacy right still matters because his successful approach to the principal challenge of his era holds important lessons for our latest Cold War with China and its authoritarian allies. More on that later.
A Visionary Leader
To grasp Reagan’s essential importance in ending the Cold War, imagine if he hadn’t been elected president. Had Carter been reelected instead, would the same Cold War outcome have unfolded? Would Carter have ramped up our military spending to 5% of GDP [ [link removed] ]? Would he have proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or unleashed the CIA on Soviet proxies? Would Gorbachev have felt the same military, diplomatic and rhetorical pressure from the Americans? Despite Carter’s late conversion to the dangers of the Soviet threat, he simply lacked Reagan’s vision and force of personality to inspire the U.S. and its allies to confront Moscow.
Diggins calls Reagan a “political romantic impatient with the status quo.” Reagan believed that history was ultimately about the march of freedom. He also believed that nuclear weapons were evil and that everything should be done to eliminate them. But Reagan was no simple-minded dreamer. He demonstrated the quality of practical wisdom. Ending the Cold War meant applying economic and military pressure on the Soviets while avoiding war and agreeing on meaningful and substantial arms control.
To achieve this, Reagan imposed a radical new foreign policy vision, much of which Boot criticizes as over-the-top or unnecessary. His strategy of “rollback” sought to counter the Soviets everywhere. Reagan’s administration would oppose the Soviet Union’s foreign adventures, ratchet up military spending, pressure the ailing Soviet economy, and introduce a plan to intercept Soviet nuclear missiles with the SDI. Reagan promoted democracy abroad, openly supported Soviet dissidents, and covertly backed Poland’s Solidarity trade union against General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s Soviet-backed dictatorship. Just as important, Reagan’s anti-communist and pro-freedom rhetoric put the Soviets on the permanent defensive and made it acceptable to be anti-communist again.
Without this full-court press against the Soviet Union, the Gorbachev reforms that unraveled the empire might not have happened at all. Reagan’s strong convictions enabled him to gain support for his negotiations with the Soviets and achievements like the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Especially on nuclear weapons, he pushed further than some of his advisers were willing to go. His strategy was unsuccessful in some areas, but it did influence Gorbachev’s reactive position. Indeed, unlike many conservatives, Reagan rejected the status quo assumption that communism couldn’t change. His strong positions forced the Soviets to make unwanted concessions.
Rolling Back Soviet Advances
In the 1970s, Reagan and many concerned Americans perceived that the Soviets were on the march around the world. In the words of a KGB agent at the time, “The world was going our way.” [ [link removed] ] The Ford (1974-1977) and Carter (1977-1981) administrations had badly underestimated the Soviet threat. The detente era, with its emphasis on maintaining stability and the Soviet Union’s international legitimacy, gave cover for Moscow to increase military spending, aid Marxist revolutionary movements abroad, and increase its nuclear weapons stockpile. The Soviets’ nuclear weapons arsenal [ [link removed] ] exceeded ours by 1976 and wouldn’t stop growing until 1986.
Meanwhile, their influence abroad kept growing, especially in Africa, with 10 self-declared Marxist states, and in Latin America, where heavily subsidized Soviet-client Cuba expanded its reach into Central America and the Caribbean. In spite of these advances, Reagan’s instincts on Soviet vulnerabilities proved accurate. According to historian William Inboden, the Soviet economy was suffering from low growth and rising international commitments. In 1982, senior U.S. intelligence official Henry Rowen told Reagan that the Soviets were spending [ [link removed] ] half their GDP on defense and that they couldn’t keep it up.
Important National Security Council directives laid out the framework to put the Soviets on the defensive with economic pressure, a high-tech arms race featuring SDI, and the defeat of Soviet clients abroad, especially in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola.
According to former Ambassador Jack Matlock [ [link removed] ], an NSC staffer at the time, Reagan was consistent [ [link removed] ] in his policy throughout his two terms: The U.S. needed to convince the Soviets they couldn’t compete militarily and to encourage them to become more open and democratic. Reagan moreover believed in linkage [ [link removed] ]: Arms control was tied up with human rights and regional conflicts. While Gorbachev was forced into major concessions, Reagan never deviated from his original strategy or objectives.
Boot is mistaken when he claims that the Soviets could have supported their empire indefinitely. According to Inboden, subsidies to the Soviet client states were costing billions annually. By 1988, Cuba was off of Moscow’s dole. This strategy came at a price. Reagan’s determination to support the rebellious “Contras” against Nicaragua’s Marxist government led to the Iran-Contra scandal. But, then again, without other vital support to the Nicaraguan opposition, the Sandinistas would never have held (and lost) free elections in 1990.
For Reagan’s strategy to work, he had to tell the world the truth about the Soviet Union; there could be no more ignoring the obvious about its repressive nature. Political correctness or “woke-ism” is no new phenomenon. As Richard Gid Powers assesses in “Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism,” after the McCarthy era, “the vocabulary of anti-communism” [ [link removed] ] was banned from public debate. It was a singular achievement in Reagan’s Soviet strategy to end this taboo through the power of his rhetoric.
Reagan employed a top-notch team of speechwriters led by Tony Dolan who emphasized the anti-communist, pro-freedom message throughout his presidency. For instance, in a speech before the British Parliament in 1982, Reagan predicted that the Soviet regime would end up “on the ash heap of history.” [ [link removed] ] In 1983, at a meeting of Florida evangelicals, the president decried “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” [ [link removed] ] Boot strongly disapproves of the “evil empire” speech because he believes it stoked tensions. But the Soviet empire’s many victims understood what Reagan meant. Strong wording fundamentally brought attention to the Soviets’ lack of legitimacy. What’s more, he did not have to repeat the “evil empire” theme because the label stuck.
These memorable speeches, along with the famous 1987 Brandenburg Gate speech—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—all served to throw the Soviets and their system on the defensive. In perhaps his greatest public address, at Moscow State University in 1988, Reagan extolled the virtues of freedom by talking past the Soviet leaders directly to the people. Again, this helped keep the Soviets on the defensive. Glasnost—political openness—came as an indirect result of Reagan’s consistent rhetorical pressure.
Engaging the Last Communist
Of course, Gorbachev set in motion the reforms that dismantled the Warsaw Pact and ended the Soviet Union. But he did this out of necessity, not choice. The Soviet economy was a mess, and he knew it. Moreover, according to Soviet reform economist Vasily Selyunin [ [link removed] ], the Politburo recognized the Soviets were hopelessly behind the West technologically: “The American Star Wars [SDI] programme created a major panic here, as Soviet industry could produce nothing of the sort.” Indeed, the entire Warsaw Pact depended on the theft of American technology [ [link removed] ] to build its most advanced weapons.
To prepare for nuclear arms talks with Gorbachev, Reagan looked beyond Carter’s flawed and unratified 1979 SALT II nuclear arms control treaty and proposed the more ambitious START treaty talks to reduce nuclear weapons arsenals. To counter the Soviets’ threatening SS-20 intermediate nuclear missiles, in 1983, Reagan deployed the Pershing II missiles to Europe, defying the extensive “nuclear freeze” movement and Soviet propaganda. This bold move [ [link removed] ] rallied our key European allies and pressured the Soviets to return to negotiations.
Perhaps the most salient example of Reagan’s convictions was his determination to hold onto the SDI program at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. Gorbachev was desperate to get the U.S. to abandon it. At the summit, Gorbachev made “concession after concession,” Diggins states. The summit ended inconclusively, with Reagan refusing to abandon SDI. Eventually, he was proven correct, as the Soviets continued negotiating anyway. Strong conviction, not pragmatism, brought about the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, ending the nuclear cruise missile threat to Europe.
Lessons for Our Era
The great Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn believed that Reagan’s pressure on Gorbachev ended the Cold War. In the novelist’s view, the promotion of “Star Wars” significantly upped the ante on Gorbachev and compelled him to act, not out of generosity or altruism, but necessity. Ambassador Matlock also believed that “psychologically and ideologically, the Cold War was over before Ronald Reagan moved out of the White House.”
The debate on who ended the Cold War may never end. What is not debatable is that Reagan initiated a plan to put as much pressure as possible on the Soviets, and those actions played a vital role in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful resolution. Reagan recognized the key challenge of his times. Better than many well-educated analysts, he understood the nature of our adversaries. As Cannon described it simply, Reagan demonstrated “the value of inspirational leadership.”
Boot insists that Reagan “abandoned the dogmas of a lifetime when it became evident they no longer applied to a changing world,” but this misses the essence of his greatness. In fact, it was Reagan’s adherence to his principles in the face of the daunting Cold War challenge that helped realize those changes. “I am proud to say,” Reagan stated upon leaving office, “that I am still an anti-communist.” [ [link removed] ]
As we face the challenges of another Cold War, we should keep in mind how Reagan maintained a clear core agenda and saw farther downrange than even his advisers. To counter our adversaries, he advocated a comprehensive strategy on multiple fronts, effectively using our economic and technological edge to weaken the Soviets, while his powerful rhetoric put them further on the defensive. Yet he was flexible enough to take advantage of openings for meaningful dialogue that produced real reductions in nuclear weapons.
Of course, the situation we face today is different. Still, current U.S. leaders and policymakers could learn a lot from Reagan’s approach to the Cold War. Pragmatism in public affairs is meaningless if unsupported by strong convictions and visionary leadership.

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