Lessons My Father Taught Me by Michael Reagan

Author:Michael Reagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Humanix Books

7

Don’t Worry about Who Gets the Credit

THE SOVIET UNION AND East Germany began building the Berlin Wall in August 1961. The Wall stood for nearly three decades, and during that time more than 200 people were killed attempting to escape from East Berlin to the West.

My father hated that wall from the moment he heard about it. He first spoke out publicly, demanding that the Wall come down, in a nationally televised debate with Robert F. Kennedy on May 15, 1967. He repeated that call the following year in a May 21, 1968, speech in Miami. Ten years later, during a speaking and fact-finding tour of Europe, Dad visited the Wall with a number of advisors, including Peter Hannaford and Richard V. Allen. Glaring angrily at the concrete barrier and guard towers beyond the broad “death strip” separating East and West, Dad said to his companions, “We have got to find a way to knock this thing down.”1

Immediately after his inauguration in 1981, my father went to work on his goal of dismantling the Berlin Wall—and the oppressive Soviet empire that erected it. He pursued what came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine—a rejection of Nixon-Ford-Carter-era détente, an end to the truce with Communism, and a concerted effort to provide material support to people fighting for freedom in places like Angola, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Poland, and yes, East Germany.

On January 17, 1983, my father signed National Security Decision Directive 75 (NSDD-75), which secretly but formally committed the United States of America to a strategy of confronting Communist aggression and destabilizing the Soviet economy. Norman A. Bailey, president of the Institute for Global Economic Growth and a former member of the National Security Council, called NSDD-75 “the strategic plan that won the Cold War.”2

My father repeatedly tried to warn Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States would break the Russian economy if the Soviets continued to pursue nuclear superiority. At their first summit in Geneva, in November 1985, Dad warned Gorbachev that the Soviets would be “driven into bankruptcy” by the arms race. Gorbachev wouldn’t listen. Instead, according to U.S. officials, Gorbachev spent 80 percent of his time in the arms control discussions trying to talk my father into shutting down the Strategic Defense Initiative.3

Martin Anderson, one of Dad’s top national security advisers, was directly involved in the Reykjavík summit in October 1986, and he reports that Dad again warned Gorbachev that America would bankrupt the Soviet economy. “I was with Reagan,” Anderson recalled, “and let me tell you, it was brutal. Behind closed doors, Reagan stiff-armed Gorbachev.”4 Still, Gorbachev wouldn’t listen.

In the early 2000s, I made several appearances with Mikhail Gorbachev at town hall meetings, and we discussed the events of the 1980s. During one meeting, I said to Mr. Gorbachev, “My father told you that America would bankrupt your economy. Just how bad did your economy get?”

“Oh, Michael,” he said, “it was so bad that I had to appoint a czar of pantyhose. Women in Russia could not buy pantyhose. And you cannot believe how angry Russian women become when they cannot get their pantyhose.

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