Rethinking Reagan attempts to present new evidence that rethinks the way historians think about the Reagan administration. The blog is written by Jason Saltoun-Ebin. Guest blogs about new research on the Reagan administration would gladly be posted. Jason Saltoun-Ebin can be reached at thereaganfiles@gmail.com
October 20, 2011-- The Death of Gaddafi and the Reagan Legacy
Almost 30 years ago, in February 1982, inside the White House a very top-secret paper was being circulated with the title, "Next Steps On Libya." The short paper, a National Security Council staff summary of a Department of State paper prepared for the February 4, 1982 NSC meeting on Oil and Gas Equipment Controls, argued that the U.S. objectives were to…
Click here to continue reading….
October 18, 2011-- 25 Years After Reykjavik: What We Now Know
In the summer of 1984, as President Reagan was moving forward with his intention to research and deploy the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Soviets called for bilateral meetings on the "militarization of space" to be connected with intermediate range nuclear weapons and strategic arms negotiations. The NST (Nuclear and Space Talks) negotiations, however, quickly stalled as the Soviet's were undergoing a leadership crisis: three General Secretaries of the Soviet Union died between 1982 and 1985 giving Reagan the opportunity to famously say that he had been trying to negotiate with the Soviets since he took office in 1981 but that it was impossible because they all kept dying on him. With the ascendency of Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of general secretary, the Soviet Union was now led by a youthful reformer who would test Reagan's sincerity by proposing to not only eliminate intermediate range nuclear weapons, but all nuclear weapons.
Click here to continue reading….
March 3, 2011 -- SDI & THE COMPLETE ELIMINATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS.
Dec. 23, 2010 -- Supporting New START is Reaganesque
Oct. 3, 2010 -- Who Was Ronald Reagan? -- “I admire the way he stood up for causes he believed were right, no matter what.” That was Nick Jonas of the Jonas brothers, talking about why he admires President Reagan.... Click here to read more
May 17, 2010 -- Did Reagan Favor Abolishing Nuclear Weapons?
Conversation with David E. Hoffman (author of "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy,") on what it was like to revisit the Reagan years over twenty years after covering the Reagan Administration; nuclear weapons negotiations then and now; why the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union dissolved; and how Reagan failed to understand that the Soviet military was just as dysfunctional as the Soviet economy.
February 4th, 2010
Pacific Palisades, CA
JSE: Mr. Hoffman, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me to discuss your latest book, "The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy."
DH: Let me start off by telling you a little bit about who I am. I started with Reagan by covering the 1980 campaign at a time when no one thought Reagan had a chance of winning. In 1982 I came to The Washington Post to help Lou Cannon cover the White House. During that time I got to cover U.S.-Soviet relations, including both the Geneva and then the Reykjavik Summits. I later went on to become the Moscow Bureau Chief for The Washington Post, foreign editor and then assistant managing editor for foreign news.
I wrote The Dead Hand to create a history in stereo by using both White House documents and Soviet documents showing what Reagan and Gorbachev were both thinking at the same time.
