In recent years, as scholars have explored Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy with greater access to primary-source documents, something utterly baffling to the conventional wisdom of his time (and ours) has come into focus: Reagan, determined to win the Cold War, was also eager to rid the world of nuclear weapons. And while many, in his time and ours, imagine those to have been incompatible goals, the 40th president of the United States was capable of holding both ideas in his head at once, and acting toward both ends.
Reagan’s straightforward definition of an acceptable end to the Cold War—“We win, they lose”—would have earned him a thumping “F” in any conflict-resolution seminar. That definition, however, grew out of a sophisticated grasp of the communist system and its irreformability: an understanding the man derided as a “B-movie actor” had gained the hard way, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, when he fought communists for control of Hollywood’s most glamorous union.
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