Presidential Leadership and the Great Conflict of Ideas: A Conversation with William Inboden about the Legacy of President Ronald Reagan

Albert Mohler:

This is Thinking In Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Will Inboden is the Executive Director of the Clement Center for National Security and Associate Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his PhD in history from Yale University and he has already had a distinguished career in public service, in national security, and in the academy.

He has served at some of the highest levels of the United States government, including tenure as the Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform for the National Security Council. He’s also worked for the National Intelligence Council and for the historical advisory panels for both the CIA and the State Department. He’s authored numerous books and written commentary and articles for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. I’m so glad today to be talking about his most recent book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. That book is the topic of our conversation today.

Professor Inboden, welcome to Thinking in Public.

 

William Inboden:

Thank you, Dr. Mohler. It’s great to be with you.

 

Albert Mohler:

There are books that I think demand attention because of the importance of reviewing a certain portion of history, making a certain argument. There are others that take a fascinating personality and evaluate and reevaluate. And yet for me, this is the absolute crossing point, intersection of intense personal interest, personal history, world history, the end of the Cold War, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the singular person of Ronald Reagan redefining the political landscape. How did you decide to put all that into one book?

 

William Inboden:

So yeah, it was an evolving process. It had started as a closer technical look at how he developed his national security strategy, but I pretty quickly realized that even though a lot of books have been written on Reagan already, that there was still, it seemed, a new story to be told about everything he was trying to do in the Reagan revolution in American foreign policy. And I was also concerned about a growing sense, in recent years, among all of us, but including younger generations, that the peaceful end of the Cold War was inevitable, that perhaps Reagan was just kind of lucky or played an incidental role, that it was Gorbachev or structural forces or other things outside of his control that had led to this very happy collapse of the Soviet Union, end of the Iron Curtain, the world being spared nuclear destruction.

And I thought, boy, I want to recapture the central role of leadership, of courageous strategic vision, of agency, of contingency and history that presidents really can make a difference. And I was also benefiting from quite a few new documents being declassified. I was one of the first scholars able to see a lot of the internal Reagan National Security Council memos and transcripts of his meetings with heads of state. And so, the book in that sense really evolved over two or three years to become a much more ambitious undertaking as it was, as you pointed out.

 

Albert Mohler:

When I first got to know you, you were writing your doctoral dissertation at Yale. What’s the relationship between that project and this project?

 

William Inboden:

Yeah, it’s one of those things that I wouldn’t have seen it at the time, but looking back, I can see some real continuities. And as you well recall, my dissertation at Yale was focused on religious influences on American foreign policy in the early Cold War years, particularly Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower being big characters in that as well as, of course, John Foster Dulles.

And as you know with the Reagan book, his Christian faith and the role of religion and religious liberty in his overall Cold War strategy plays a really important part of the story. And then even early influences of President Eisenhower on a younger Ronald Reagan in the 1960s. And so, I think having done that doctoral work at Yale and later published that as an earlier book, it laid the foundations just as I was looking then at the spiritual roots of the beginnings of the Cold War, this is now my effort to look at the American strategy and Reagan’s role, including the role of Christian faith in the peaceful end of the Cold War. So there’s a nice bookend between those two projects, even if I hadn’t planned it originally in that way.

 

Albert Mohler:

Well, the layout of our intellectual projects are often not planned, and that’s a part of what makes them so timely and important. You are one of the most experienced hands in American foreign policy in national security having served in government positions and you know things, let me put it that way. And you’ve been Head of the Clements Center now for a number of years there, at the University of Texas looking at this more academically. So why was the time right in this particular period to go back to the 1980s and look at Ronald Reagan in his presidency?

 

William Inboden:

Yeah. I think this is the confluence of several factors. One is, as you remember firsthand from obviously having lived through the Reagan years, it was a very controversial time and he had many strong partisan critics and he had elicited strong reactions from a lot of people. And oftentimes I think we need to allow almost a generation or more to pass before history and historical perspective can come in, where we can have a little bit, we know more how the story ends, we can have a little bit more critical distance on something.

Of course, I have my convictions and my beliefs, and I certainly lay those out in the book too, and it’s overall a very favorable assessment of Reagan, but I thought now might be a good time to take a fresh look at him, especially for people of that generation who now have let the partisan passions cool and might be able to look at him a little more objectively, particularly knowing how the story ends.

 

Albert Mohler:

Maybe.

 

William Inboden:

Yeah. And then also for the younger generation. I’m a professor at the University of Texas. Now, all my students were born well after the Reagan years. He’s a figure in the distant past for them in the way that FDR or Teddy Roosevelt or even Lincoln might be. And I wanted to provide a fresh account that the new generation can take a look at.

But one other angle I want to mention too on why it was the right time to do it. So I mentioned, of course, the recently declassified documents. We now have a lot more access to what were previously top secret strategy memos and transcripts of his meetings. But at the same time, we are close enough to the Reagan years that quite a few people who served his administration are still alive. And so I was able to interview about 30 or 40 of them and sitting down with a George Shultz or a Budd McFarland or an Ed Meese or a Colin Powell and hearing their firsthand accounts. And so it’s kind of that sweet spot of distance enough that it can be history, but recent enough that we can talk to people who not just lived through it, but were making that history.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yes. Well, I am older and this is a matter of intense interest to me at every single level. And so I’m going to do something, and I don’t know if this is wise or not, but I’ll simply put up this picture. There I am as the leadership of a youth group for Ronald Reagan in South Florida in 1976. When he was-

 

William Inboden:

Amazing.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yes, it is amazing. Look back at that kid. By the way, I still believe now what I believe then. I was a passionate advocate for, and 16 year old activist, for Ronald Reagan in an insurgent campaign against an incumbent Republican president. And one of the reasons I want to hold that up, and by the way, it was a brave crusade. And as you know, it came down all the way to the convention. It could have gone either way, but the incumbency eventually won out.

But the reason I raise that is because I think it’s important for today’s folks to understand that the worldview divide, the great ideological divide over this wasn’t just between the Republicans and the Democrats. Far more importantly, it was among the Republicans where Ronald Reagan was a pariah figure in terms of the way he understood communism, the world threat of communism, and how the United States should respond to it.

 

William Inboden:

Yes, exactly. And this is why I try to recapture that, particularly in the first chapter on my book on the crisis and divisions of the 70s and how Reagan’s worldview is being formed there. And we forget it now, but the Republican party was deeply internally divided. One camp led by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, which essentially saw the Soviet Union as a rival power to be managed. So they weren’t pro-Soviet by any means, but they had no notion-

 

Albert Mohler:

They saw it as a permanent fact.

 

William Inboden:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s a permanent part of the geopolitical landscape. The Soviet Union had been around for 60 some years at that point, was going to be around for another century, and we just need to acknowledge it and deal with it and manage it. And Reagan instead saw Soviet communism as a vile idea to be defeated. That’s why he’s got that famous line, “We win, they lose,” as his strategy in the Cold War. And looking back in hindsight, he was absolutely correct, but it was radical at the time and very much in disfavor with the Republican establishments. That’s why you’re exactly right, it was an insurgent campaign.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, I was a teenager in South Florida, and at that time, the Reagan candidacy was just incredibly divisive. But let me tell you what, it divided along lines that now make a lot of sense, but as a 16 year old, I was trying to figure all this out. Number one, one of the big issues on the Republican side was the Panama Canal. And in South Florida, that resonated a little differently than perhaps in Wyoming because it was a local issue. And look, national security was just a massive reality. And so I was in high school, and I can tell you what, the Cuban refugee families were adamantly pro Reagan because they believed he was the only man who actually saw what communism was, the very thing they’d had to flee in terms of the fall of Cuba to communism. And so many things are clear to people now that the Soviet Union’s broken apart and is no more. They were not at all clear, even among Republicans at the time. Ronald Reagan actually, in hindsight, saw the issue clearly and they didn’t.

 

William Inboden:

Yeah, you’re exactly right. And this is why one of the themes of my book is taking Reagan seriously as a man of ideas and how he saw the Cold War as primarily a battle of ideas more than just a great power contest. And those ideas were between the values of the free world, especially the United States being a market democracy, a belief in Judeo-Christian values, and then the ideas and values of communism. Of course, a command economy, a totalitarian dictatorship, and state-enforced atheism. And again, the contrast could not be more stark.

And yet, for a few decades up until then, American foreign policy had been predicated on containing that problem of Soviet communism and managing it. And Reagan worried rightly that this was essentially consigning a large swath of the globe’s population to slavery under communism, he would use, that’s a vivid term, but he absolutely believed it and I think he was right. And in his mind that was just both strategically foolish and morally appalling.

And so when he spoke out so clearly in denouncing communism as a vile idea, it really inspired people who had been victims of communist tyranny. Again, Cubans here in South Florida, or ones who are still living behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. And they thought, finally, for the first time, there’s an American political leader who is giving voice to us and speaking out on behalf of us.

 

Albert Mohler:

Worldview matters so much underlying understandings of history and the direction of history and how history works and how individuals relate to history, it just matters immensely. And Ronald Reagan took individual responsibility seriously and understood that there was a great battle of ideas, and he hated Soviet communism, not just because it was a rival power, but because he saw it as inherently evil, and that scared the American establishment.

 

William Inboden:

And he would speak with that moral clarity. And again, no previous American president had spoken in such stark terms. I’m not saying they were all soft on communism. Harry Truman denounced communism, Eisenhower, none of them liked it, but I don’t know that any previous American president had used that word ‘evil’ to describe it. And Reagan most famously did in calling it the Evil Empire in the speech for the National Association of Evangelicals, but he used that term repeatedly. He called them the focus of evil in the modern world. This drove the Kremlin crazy, but it really inspired many victims of Soviet communism to feel like, finally, an American leader is speaking clearly about the moral stakes in this contest and is on our side, on the side of freedom rather than accommodating our oppressors.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. Well, you’re so careful on these things, but I think a lot of listeners might not know the political lay of the land. So let me just make an argument and you come back on it. There were very few Soviet appeasers in Congress and the highest ranks of the American government during most of these decades. But there were an enormous number, indeed at many points a majority, who saw the Soviet Union as just a fact, and argued that it’s a permanent fact and the United States must somehow accommodate itself to that fact and do its best just to limit Soviet influence and to at least intervene, there were just some egregious incursions. But otherwise, the United States foreign policy establishment just took communism as a permanent fact and Ronald Reagan just flat refused to do that, and thus he scared people in his own party. And I showed that picture of the Reagan campaign photo from 1976. I mean there were those in the Republican party who took it as their sworn duty to prevent Ronald Reagan from getting anywhere close to the White House.

 

William Inboden:

Oh yeah. I mean they saw him as dangerous. They thought that he would destabilize this carefully calibrated strategic balance and the coexistence of the two blocks. They worried that he might stumble into a nuclear war. So, yeah, the controversies and opposition he inspired was tremendous. But a lot of it goes back to, as you were saying, he was a dissenter from the status quo, from the establishment viewpoint of, the Soviet Union and Soviet communism is a permanent part of the geopolitical landscape. We may not like it, but we just have to accept it. We just have to deal with it. This was kind of their version of realism with a small R.

But what Reagan rightly pointed out is, look, this framework of détente it was called, reducing tensions of coexisting between the two sides. The United States is losing because of that. We’re losing as slowly as possible, but we are still losing. And if you look over the course of the 70s, Soviet-sponsored communist revolutions take place in multiple countries across the developing world, south Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia. They invade Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Grenada, closer to home here in our hemisphere.

Meanwhile, Soviet military power is increasing. And so if you were looking at the strategic balance in the Cold War in the late 70s and early 80s, the United States was losing and too much of our foreign policy establishment was willing to accept that. They didn’t like it, but they were, “All right, well, we just need to be realistic about this. We’re a declining power, the Soviets are advancing. Let’s just manage this and try to preserve what territory we can.”

Reagan completely rejected that. He wanted to take the initiative. He saw the Soviets as more vulnerable than anyone else saw. He had much more confidence in American values and the values of the West and the free world. And he thought that not only could our losing be reversed, he thought we could actually win this thing. And so in hindsight, of course he’s exactly correct, but I wrote this book because I want people to realize very few people saw that at the time, and it potentially could have gone another way. And that is what visionary leadership is. To borrow from another figure that you and I hold in great esteem, Churchill, in hindsight, of course, we saw Churchill was right, but that summer of 1940, it was a very close run thing and for him to stand there and say no-

 

Albert Mohler:

Yes. And for longer than people remember.

 

William Inboden:

Exactly. So in that sense, and of course Reagan revered Churchill and certainly drew inspiration from his own courage and vision.

 

Albert Mohler:

What you don’t cover in depth in the book is something I just want to kind of lay out for listeners to understand, and that is that Ronald Reagan didn’t emerge from nowhere. You’re talking about someone with basically Midwestern values and small town America, who nonetheless ends up as not the most famous actor in Hollywood, but a very solid Hollywood reputation. And most importantly, eventually the Head of the Labor Union for Screen Actors Guild. And the Red Scare, that’s what the left calls it, and the threat of communism and all the rest is swirling about. And Ronald Reagan was a man of the left politically, at least when the left was defined by Franklin Roosevelt, not the ideological left, it was beyond Roosevelt, but he was even very much a new deal man. And-

 

William Inboden:

Yeah, he was a New Deal Democrat.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. And what you see is a ideological transformation of Ronald Reagan in which all of a sudden he begins to see that world communism is the great threat, that is an ideological threat, that it has infected Hollywood, that the thought class in the United States has largely decided just to accommodate to it, try to limit it, and furthermore, as he saw, there were those who were active agents for it there in Hollywood and beyond. And so Ronald Reagan comes on the scene and starts saying things that, as I say, even the Republican Party thought were just completely out of bounds. And he talked as if it were possible that the Soviet Union might not exist. I just want to have you talk about that for a moment because that was an unthinkable thought for the vast majority of political leaders in the United States.

 

William Inboden:

There’s a lot there. And I also appreciate you mentioning, since I don’t treat it as much in the book, I will say if any of our listeners do have a chance to read the book, you’d notice it’s a fairly long book. Well, the first draft of it, when I finished it and sent it off to my publisher was 100,000 words longer and was going to be about 1,100 pages. My editor said, “Inboden, you can’t do a book this long.” And so I had to cut out quite a bit, including a couple of chapters on Reagan’s background in the 1960s and 70s, but I’m glad we have a chance to discuss it here.

So, two very formative experiences for Reagan in his early worldview are World War II and then his early fight against communists in Hollywood in the late 1940s and 50s. And even though, because of his poor eyesight, he did not serve in combat during the war, state society, he was making training films, but he was very much committed to the war effort and he saw that, a couple of his lessons of World War II is the United States cannot be isolationist. We cannot sit back and hope the world goes our way and we need to be confident in our values in fighting against totalitarianism. And so he draws a very direct thread from Nazi Germany to Soviet communism. He sees Nazism and communism essentially of a piece, and there is a perverse continuity there.

But then as you mentioned, when he is still more of a labor union Democrat in Hollywood in the late 40s and early 50s, communists are infiltrating the labor unions, somewhat alarmist to our ears today, but it was absolutely true and he saw the perverse tactics they would use and he, by then, was aware of how evil Stalinism was and he fought very much against this. He was dealing with death threats. He had to sleep with a revolver next to his bed at night because the death threats is a very, very serious thing.

And so that early on galvanized him that the United States needed to stand firm against this threat. And this is also when he starts doing some deeper reading, which again isn’t fully appreciated. In the 1950s, he reads Whittaker Chambers’s classic Witness about Chambers’s turn away from communism, is obviously a great book, a very long one, but very formative for Reagan. And he would, he has a photographic memory and he would quote passages from witness from memory decades later. And so there’s this really important formation of his worldview about America’s role on the globe, the threat of totalitarian ideologies, and you see that play out 30 some years later when he’s now in the White House leading the free world.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. When Reagan’s elected to office in 1980 after having previously served as a Governor of California, deposing the incumbent Pat Brown, and then being reelected by a massive margin. And then there are years in which, like I say, he runs for the presidency, the Republican nomination, 1976, and doesn’t get it but comes incredibly close. And then he becomes the man for 1980, but opposed by the Republican Party establishment until he gains the nomination and then he reshapes that establishment.

But you look at all that and you recognize, this is not an inevitability in terms of politics. The election of Ronald Reagan was disruptive in the extreme. And to the foreign policy establishment, it was the greatest threat they had faced because they accused him of being a Manichean, the ancient philosophy where everything’s divided into black and white and there’s more to Manicheanism than that, but the argument was he’s a rub. He’s a dangerous man, he’s an extremist. And yet, it turns out that there’s a lot more to him than people thought. You may remember the old Saturday Night Live skit that was so famous in which there’s a foreign policy crisis and Reagan is in the White House and he’s in the Oval Office and he bumbles around some kind of fool. And then once everybody’s out of the office except his central team, he turns into a military genius, pulls down maps and starts barking orders and all this-

 

William Inboden:

Yeah. Speaks multiple foreign languages.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. The reality is something in the midst. But he was a serious man of ideas. And I think that’s one of the greatest achievements of your book. You deal with his limitations, you deal with his errors, but you treat him as a serious man of ideas in a world of a conflict of ideas.

 

William Inboden:

Thanks. Yes, I’m glad you picked it up because it is really central to understand the Reagan presidency and the book, and I think it’s been somewhat under appreciated or neglected by other scholars. And one area I want to highlight where you can really see Reagan as this man of ideas is his speeches. And yes, he had some very talented speech writers working for him, but all of them will tell you, and I’ve verified this in archives, on his most important speeches, Reagan was writing most of it himself. I mean he would do lengthy first drafts on his legal pads by hand. He would do lengthy, detailed edits of each draft his speech writer was giving him. And of course, each speech writer saw their role as helping channel Reagan’s voice anyway. And so I highlight a number of these in the book, but if you look at some of his most notable speeches, I won’t quote all of them because of time, but Notre Dame 1981, Westminster 1982, NAE Evil Empire 1983. Boys of Pointe du Hoc 1984. Tear down this wall, I could go on.

If you read them in sequence, you see there a sustained argument that he is making about the illegitimacy and the evil of Soviet communism and the virtues of the free world in contrast. And so that’s why some of the more memorable phrases, “The west won’t contain communism, it will transcend it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are now being written.” “Marxism and Leninism will end up on the ash heap of history.” “The aggressive impulses of an evil empire,” so on and so forth. Those are not just vivid turns of phrase or campaign lines. Those are, like I said, part of this well-developed worldview and a sustained argument he is making against Soviet communism. And no previous president had spoken that way before, but this is, again, part of the Reagan revolution.

And again, he got a lot of criticism for those speeches at the time, but in hindsight you can see that he knew exactly what he was doing and he was quite right.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. I want to come back to one of the speeches in a moment, but I want to ask you something. It’s one of the great intellectual questions I have in looking at all of this. And so let’s just say that two things are happening at the same time, and one thing was the ascendancy of the United States in terms of assertiveness and, I’d say clarity in foreign policy under Ronald Reagan.

In retrospect, the other thing that was taking place was unknown even to American intelligence agencies in terms of its scope. And that was the fragility of the Soviet Union economically and politically. And so it appeared to be the coming thing, but was actually just collapsing under its own inability to function. So I just want to ask you, how do those two things come together? And it’s not even clear that Ronald Reagan saw it as weak as it was, he was just convinced that it was evil and had to be defeated. How do those two things come together?

 

William Inboden:

Yeah, it’s a very important part of the story, and this is where I like to, in history, because in hindsight, we can look back and see how some of those threads come together, even if it wasn’t fully clear to everyone at the time as you lay out. And I do want to say, while my book focuses on Reagan, his leadership, his ideas, his policies, I try to make clear that this is occurring against the context of shifts in the geopolitical order, the communications revolution, the Democratic revolution, what we now know is some of the decrepitude of Soviet communism, but Reagan is also paying attention to these global shifts, these structural trends, and he’s trying to harness and accelerate them and have the United States lead them.

So particularly on this very important question about the fragility and vulnerability of the Soviet system, as you point out, very few experts saw this at the time. I cite this abundantly in my book, this foreign affairs article written by two Ivy Leagues Sovietologists in late 1982, page after page denouncing Reagan’s foreign policies and making clear the Soviet Union will be with us for generations to come. It’s strong and stable and-

 

Albert Mohler:

Or seven years.

 

William Inboden:

Right. I know exactly how wrong they were. Numerous, not to take cheap shots at CIA, which does a lot of great things during the Cold War, but numerous CIA assessments on up through 1987, ’88 saying the Soviet economy is stable and durable and it’s growing sufficiently and they’re not going to go away for generations either. And so this is the expertise that Reagan is being confronted with and he doesn’t buy it. And one of the puzzles is why, and there’s two important things here on how he sees the vulnerability of the Soviet system much sooner than most.

First is, again borrowing here from your excellent book on leadership, he is a convictional leader. He is a convictional president who starts off with some of these first principles about the superiority of free markets to command economy, the superiority of democracy and self-governance to authoritarian dictatorship, the virtues of religious faith over atheism. And starting with those convictions, that just gives him a different worldview lens through which to view thinks. And he looks at Soviet communism and he just thinks, this is so contrary to human dignity, to how frankly God created and ordered the world, that it just can’t continue forever. So it’s almost an article of faith for him, and I mean that in the best sense of the term. But also because he is a original thinker, because he does not get trapped by establishment wisdom, and because he’s very interested in the individual human condition, throughout the 70s and his time as president, he’s constantly seeking out meetings with accounts from people who have survived and fled from Soviet communism. He wants to hear, what is life really behind that system?

And so he’ll read a CIA or Soviet expert assessment saying the Soviet economy is strong, but then he’ll meet with some former Soviet dissidents who tell him, “Red lines are miles long. This system can’t feed its own people. We hate our government because it keeps lying to us about everything.” And so he almost develops his own intelligence sources, if you will, of people who have actually lived under this system and he is hearing a very different reality from them, which reinforces his own convictions and may go against the expert class opinion.

And so he thinks, “All right, I want to push on this. I think that this system is a lot more fragile and vulnerable than expert opinion is telling me and I want to push forward on that,” even if he may not have been able to predict chapter and verse on when and how it would all fall apart. Although even there, I’ll give him a little more credit. I tell in the book, in April of 1982, Reagan chairs a National Security Council meeting with his team saying, “All right, I want to put together and implement my strategy to confront the Soviet Union here.” And he had talked to one of his top aides, Tom Reid, and Tom starts the meeting by saying, “All right, gentlemen, I’ve talked to the president and we believe that the next 10 years are going to be decisive in the Cold War and it’s going to fundamentally change and we are here to encourage the dissolution, the dissolving of the Soviet Empire.”

That is in April of 1982, and they’re off by three months because it’s December of 1991, nine years and nine months later that the Soviet Union does collapse. And so I even want to give Reagan a little more credit for foresight there than is commonly appreciated.

 

Albert Mohler:

So I’m going to pose a question that has been associated with the late Democratic senator Ted Kennedy, a lion of liberalism. And at some point he supposedly asked a question, “Which is better, smart or stupid?” And I need to translate this. I love the question because its answer is not as obvious as you might think. And Ted Kennedy and I are in different worlds, and our definitions of smart and stupid might be different too, but it’s kind of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog and the fox, Reagan was very much looking at the big landscape, others frankly had the details down better than he did, but that wasn’t what he saw. He saw clearly the fragility of the Soviet Union, first of all because it was a lie and held together only by force. And there were limitations to this. I mean that’s why you need administration. You’ve served in the national security and foreign policy apparatus at high levels in an administration. So, talk to me as an insider into that world in a Republican, or more than one Republican administration, how exactly does the president exercise his will through a recalcitrant foreign policy establishment?

 

William Inboden:

Yeah, this is, again as you rightly point out, it’s another big theme of the book because while I think it’s very clear Reagan is a man of ideas, he’s not an intellectual, he wouldn’t tell you he is, that’s not a criticism, and he’s also not interested in the details of management, he’s not a micromanager. This was of course one of Jimmy Carter’s failings as president, too much of a micromanager. And so Reagan sees his job as setting the clear, big picture, strategic vision and priorities, and hiring good people to help implement those. And some of the people he hires initially, Al Heig, for example, his first Secretary of State, don’t work out so well and at times, Reagan is too inattentive to details, and that leads to certainly some of the problems that his administration faces, I’m clear about those in the book.

But at the end of the day, he has some very capable people working for him who are more attentive to the details. So Bill Clark, his second National Security Advisor who I try to make a case for as an underappreciated great of the administration, Bill Casey, the controversial, but I think very effective CIA director, Cap Weinberger, expert manager of the Pentagon and the Reagan defense buildup and modernization, that takes incredible attention to detail, and Weinberger really had that down to the minutiae of the defense budget. And I try to make a strong case especially for George Shultz, his Secretary of State, who is very faithful to Reagan’s strategic vision in the Cold War, but also former CEO of Bechtel, former Secretary of the Treasury, former OMB director, very attentive to management details.

And Shultz takes Reagan’s strategic vision, particularly for the negotiations part with the Soviet Union and implements that pretty well. And so where Reagan would set that clear strategic vision, he did have a very capable team helping him implement it even if they were bickering and feuding with each other quite a bit too.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah, it’s interesting, the old order Reaganites would not speak of George Shultz with so much appreciation as you just did. And I was going to ask you two questions about George Shultz as soon as you mentioned his name anyway. And so let me just ask you, what’s your evaluation of George Shultz? He was the Secretary of State who really became the extension, some would argue, and others would argue the compromise of Reagan and Reaganism in terms of American foreign policy.

 

William Inboden:

I have a very favorable assessment of Shultz overall, and I know that’ll obviously cause some controversy in some circles, but a couple things there. First, I make a case, and readers can decide if they think I get this right or wrong, that Shultz is best understood as a true conservative. And I’ll just give a few examples here. He is much more supportive of Israel than Weinberger is, of the Pentagon for example. Shultz is much more committed to robust promotion of freedom, particularly for Christian and Jewish dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. He really channels Reagan on that in ways that some of the folks at the Pentagon were less focused, obviously, on human rights and religious freedom.

Shultz is much more assertive against terrorism. Shultz much more believes in… Sure, Shultz wanted to negotiate, he wanted to do diplomacy, but he’s very clear, diplomacy only works if it’s backed by force. And even though Shultz had his differences with Weinberger between state and Pentagon, they always agreed on a very strong and high military budget. Shultz was, as Secretary of State, he wanted the Pentagon to have as large a budget as possible. There were a few places, some of the Central America stuff where he would maybe take a little bit more of a moderate line and a couple of others we could point to, but I actually think that he is essential for helping implement Reagan’s strategic vision of pressure and diplomacy with the Soviets, especially when that’s an important part of Reagan too, is those negotiations. And I think there’s a real consistent through line of conservatism there. So without shying away from Shultz’s faults and liabilities, I have a favorable take on him. Yes.

 

Albert Mohler:

Well, and one of the things he did was to appear bland and to be satisfied with that, whereas he had the incredible personal magnetism of Ronald Reagan on the other hand. So in one sense, you can even see how that came together. George Shultz was trained as an academic, but he also served as CEO of a multinational corporation.

 

William Inboden:

Yeah, Bechtel.

 

Albert Mohler:

He knew how to make things happen.

 

William Inboden:

Yes.

 

Albert Mohler:

And Reagan needed him. And I want to ask you about one of the ideas associated with George Shultz, which is the simultaneity of events. And Shultz had an intellectual way of understanding that there are political opportunities and responsibilities that will only happen right now. So can you talk about that just a bit?

 

William Inboden:

Yes. You bring this up because this is two important threads in the book. I mean the first is, even though the main theme of the book, of course, is Reagan’s Cold War strategy, as you know, I talk a lot about Middle East policy and counterterrorism and Asia and trade policy and everything, because presidents don’t have the luxury of only choosing which issue they want to focus on. Their inbox is dealing with dozens, hundreds of difficult decisions every day and global crises, and so Reagan was also having to manage all of those while still fulfilling his Cold War vision. And that’s partly where I do draw on my experience as a policymaker.

When I was working for President Bush, seeing, sure, we’ve got our big picture priorities, war on terrorism, the Rock, Afghanistan, but all sorts of other crazy things coming in as well that presidents have to manage. But the other thing with what Shultz was getting at with simultaneity of events is he and Reagan really saw the Cold War in the 1980s as a global set of challenges and opportunities. And this is why they try to expand the Cold War chess board, particularly into Asia. And they’re very committed to transforming the US-Japan relationship from primarily an economic rivalry to now a strategic partnership. That’s a strategic play they’re making because they want to bring more pressure on the Soviet Union and the Soviet’s eastern front essentially, the Soviet far east.

And so when they’re looking at trade tensions with Japan, it’s not just a political challenge, they see it as an opportunity to regain the initiative there. Similarly with what they are trying to do with managing the communications revolution saying, “All right, well how can we leverage our new advantages and global communications and microchips and things like that?” Well, let’s take what’s going on in Silicon Valley and let’s use that to America’s advantage in bolstering the next generation of weapons systems, so that we will not just out build the Soviets, but outsmart them too. So they’re taking what seemed to be economic and technological developments in the Western world, especially in Silicon Valley, and using those for geopolitical ends. And so that’s where there’s a lot more strategic sophistication, I think, in agency and leadership going on than had been previously appreciated.

 

Albert Mohler:

Well, let’s talk about the simultaneity of events with the simultaneity of people. And so it’s not just inside the American government, not just in the Reagan administration, the rather amazing cast of characters who were assembled there. It is Ronald Reagan and John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher, just to mention three, arriving on the world scene at the same time.

 

William Inboden:

Yes, and this is where, another key to understanding Reagan is he is deeply committed to America’s allies. And this goes back to those formative years in World War II. He self-consciously wants to recreate the grand alliance of the free world fighting against totalitarianism. And he sees America’s allies as a key asymmetric source of strength, a key advantage. He knows that the Soviet Union doesn’t have any real allies. It has coerced vassal states, imperial properties, if you will, in the Warsaw Pact and there are other communist satellites around the world. Whereas Reagan sees the United States as at the center of this hub of alliances with our fellow market democracies.

And so he starts with that, but then individual leaders matter so much to him too. And he had first met Margaret Thatcher when she was the leader of the conservative opposition in the UK, I want to say either 1977 or ’78, I talk about it in the book. He had of course taken real notice when the Pope is selected as the first Polish Pope, a staunch anti-communist with his homeland of Poland occupied by the Soviet Union. And so Reagan invests quite a bit in these friendships with Thatcher and the Pope and others, Nakasone of Japan, Brian Mulroney of Canada, Helmut Kohl of West Germany, all in their different ways committed to market economies and democracy at home and strong anti-communism abroad.

And so these other leaders share Reagan’s values, but also look to him as the leader of the free world alliance, if you will, and based on those shared values and shared interests. And so it’s not by accident, the time he spends investing in those relationships and the countries that they stand for pays tremendous dividends for the United States. And I go into it in the book, there’s a few, he gets Japan to triple its defense spending over his eight years, triplet it. It’s amazing. We’re always rightly frustrated that our allies aren’t doing enough on burden sharing. He gets Germany and the United Kingdom to agree to allow America nuclear missiles to be based on their soil because it’s key to countering the Soviets. Thatcher and Kohl risk their own reelection. They put their own political prospects on the line because they’re committed to Reagan and the United States.

Of course, he builds a very effective partnership with the Pope and supporting religious freedom and solidarity and Poland behind the Iron Curtain too. So this is not by accident. I mean, sure, the hand of providence, I suppose, is there in the coming to power of these different leaders, but Reagan also recognizes it and embraces them.

 

Albert Mohler:

And looking backwards, which is always the easiest way to look, looking backwards, some of this looks almost inevitable, but none of it was. As you’re looking at this, the election of John Paul II as Pope, that’s a story inside the clouds of Catholic mystery, but there hadn’t been such a thing, there hadn’t been such a Pope ever. And so he had seen communism in terms of all this brutality there in Poland. And so, of course he would later write in Encyclical, the splendor of truth. He saw the great battle in the world between truth and falsehood. And even as an evangelical, I have to say, he helped to shift the intellectual landscape of the 20th century.

Ronald Reagan came along talking about the evil empire, and maybe his view is a little too simplistic in terms of the goodness of the United States, I’ll say as a Christian theologian, but when it came to the distinction between the United States and the Soviet Union, he was as clear eyes as could be and was furious at American intellectuals and the cultural elites for confusing it. And Margaret Thatcher, who I actually got to spend some time with, far more even than Reagan at first, is willing to go on the line about the great threat of the Soviet Union. So, was any of this inevitable? I don’t mean to ask that in terms of God’s providence, we will posit the sovereignty of God, but I mean in terms of how you look at this as a national security expert, was any of this inevitable?

 

William Inboden:

I would not go so far as to say inevitable, but I do think we can now look back and see some of these broader global trends in the 1970s reducing some frustration, and if you will, almost kind of a mini crisis in the free world of realizing the 1970s model isn’t working. So the more statused economic systems that the United Kingdom embraced in the 1970s, the big welfare state there, really high taxes, high regulation. Similarly, the social Democrats who had been in charge of West Germany in the 1970s and early 80s. And so, just as the United States had our own economic malaise and stagnation in the 1970s, I think there’s kind of, across the democratic world, there was something of a growing backlash among a lot of voters saying, “All right, the other way of doing this, this hand of big government and regulation just isn’t working for our economies. And oh, by the way, we seem to be losing against communism too.”

And so in that sense, you can see a convergence here, but still it takes some of these inspired leaders coming along. And you want to know the providential part? And going back to taking Reagan seriously as a Christian, the other bond he has with the Pope of course is they both survive assassination attempts within two months. Reagan in March of ’81, the Pope in May of ’81, and Reagan writes in his diary that he thinks God spared him in part so that he can end the Cold War. I mean he has a very clear sense of providentialism. And as a Christian myself, I would certainly affirm that. Obviously the mind of God is mysterious and we only know fully once we’re before the throne, but I find that a very understandable reading because as you know, Reagan comes very close to dying.

And so when he first meets the Pope the next year when Reagan travels to Europe, they bond right away over, “Hey, we both survived near-death experiences from assassins and let’s number our remaining days and let’s make bringing down Soviet communism the first task there.” Yeah, so I’m certainly comfortable speaking of the hand of providence at work in that respect.

 

Albert Mohler:

Yeah. You introduced a term early in your book, I want you to define it now: ‘hindsight bias.’

 

William Inboden:

I just made a passing reference to this earlier, but now that we know the Cold War ended peacefully, that the world wasn’t destroyed in nuclear war, that the Soviet Union collapsed, there’s a sense among some scholars and ordinary citizens, well of course that would happen inevitably. And I think that’s the bias of hindsight, because at the time it did not look so clear at all, and I do think history potentially could have turned out some different ways. I mean if there would’ve been a second term of Jimmy Carter, for example, not a president I hold in very high esteem, but very different for Ronald Reagan, he would’ve taken things in some different directions.

And even if, we haven’t mentioned Mikhail Gorbachev a whole lot yet, but let’s say if the Soviet Union had never selected Gorbachev as the final leader there, if they’d stuck with another hardliner, I don’t know how it would’ve ended up. Maybe there would’ve been a higher risk of a nuclear war. As you know from the book, I do give Reagan a little more credit than is commonly appreciated, even for the coming to power of Gorbachev, because part of Reagan’s strategy from the beginning is pressure the Soviet system not just to weaken it, but to produce a reformist leader. And so even there, I give him a little more credit for foresight in embracing Gorbachev as a reformer because Reagan had been pressuring them to produce just such a leader. But none of this was inevitable. And that hindsight bias, I think, can cloud our vision to just how fraught and terrifying and risky and yet remarkable those days were.

 

Albert Mohler:

You look at the Soviet Union, I think the average person not only has hindsight bias, has hindsight ignorance. And so if you look back, and you pointed out early on that many people who’d be listening to this weren’t even alive when these things took place, but the Soviet Union is this massive political fact. It’s an ideological force. It is an atheistic regime. It is imperialistic in its ambitions, but it is gerontological in its leadership. And especially in the Politburo, they produce these leaders and at one point, there were three Soviet leaders at the very pinnacle who died within basically three successive years. In fact, Reagan was criticized for not meeting with them. He said, “I’d like to meet with them. They keep dying on me.” And we now know, talk about hindsight, we now know that Gorbachev came to the top of the Soviet leadership largely out of desperation. They just didn’t have anybody else.

 

William Inboden:

Yes, yes. And in some ways, those deaths and rapid succession of Brezhnev and then Andropov and then Chernenko, it kind of symbolizes the decay and decrepitude of the entire system, that the only ones they could turn to as leaders are these old men who are old and infirmed physically, but also kind of Stalinist or 1950s in their thinking, a little more nuanced perhaps with Andropov, and they keep dying. And the Politburo itself, feeling some ways backed into a corner, feeling more and more pressure from Reagan, seeing the economy is not doing well, seeing that they are now starting to fall behind in arms race with the United States, they turn to the younger generation.

Gorbachev is about the only one they see as viable when they select him in March of 1985. And again, Reagan himself would give Gorbachev tremendous credit. I too in the book, he’s an important diplomatic partner for Reagan and Gorbachev is very courageous in some key decisions he makes about winding down intentions. But it needs to be said, Reagan and Gorbachev ultimately have very different goals. Reagan’s goal is to end Soviet communism and Gorbachev’s goal is to preserve it. He wants to reform it, but he wants to preserve it. And that’s why, even though they forge a real friendship and partnership, and there’s that, I find very touching scene towards the end in one of their last summits when Reagan is making personal treaties to Gorbachev to believe in God, to renounce his atheism, and Reagan’s doing that in private because he generally cares for this man, but it also symbolizes fundamentally different worldviews and fundamentally different goals. And that’s where their paths do go in different directions.

 

Albert Mohler:

There’s a lot of work on Gorbachev right now being done and recent books and a lot of good archival evidence. And one of the things that becomes abundantly clear, in fact you don’t even have to do that, you can just look at the archives of the New York Times or another major newspaper. Gorbachev is very much seeking to preserve the Soviet Union up until the very end. He sets loose forces of reform that he can’t stop. And eventually, events roll out. And yet, and you make this clear, and some others do as well, he makes the very courageous decision not to go to war to save the Soviet Union.

 

William Inboden:

Yes, yes. And that’s where, for particularly our younger listeners, you may not be so familiar with Cold War history, the Soviet doctrine for the previous decades had been called the Brezhnev Doctrine, which is that once we have, as Charles Krauthammer put it, once a Soviet possession, always a Soviet possession. So that’s why in 1956 in Hungary when there’d been a revolt by the Hungary carrying people wanting their freedom, the Soviets send in the tanks and crush them.

In 1968, in Czechoslovakia, again a revolt seeking freedom and the Soviets send in the tanks to crush them. And this was the real worry that as the peoples of Eastern Europe start tearing down the Berlin Wall, demanding free elections, and even the people, the Soviet system itself, that Gorbachev would take that page out of the old Soviet playbook, follow their doctrine, send in the tanks and crush them, and he makes the courageous decision to relinquish the regimen of doctrine, to repudiate it and say, “No, we have to let people go their own way.” It’s not what he wanted necessarily, but that decision not to use force. And so in some ways, some of Gorbachev’s most important decisions are what he decides not to do, rather than what he decides to do.

 

Albert Mohler:

Right. I didn’t ask you into this conversation to pose this issue, but to some extent, is Vladimir Putin and his notion of greater Russia and mother Russia, is he hearkening back to something like the Brezhnev Doctrine that Ukraine, having once been part of the Russian Empire, has to eventually remain in the Russian Empire?

 

William Inboden:

Yes. That seems to be it. And again, going back to understanding leaders in their formative years, remember Putin’s formative years are as a KGB agent stationed there in East Germany, and he sees the-

 

Albert Mohler:

Right. And horrified.

 

William Inboden:

… wall come down. And he’s horrified at this, right. And so, as I said in another context, if you want to understand Putin’s goal right now in just one picture, take a map of the old Soviet Union, look at the borders of the old Soviet Union, and that is what Putin wants to recreate. And that, of course, includes the Baltics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. It includes Georgia, which he invaded in 2008. And it very much includes Ukraine, which is more recently invaded. And so it’s this perverse combination of his hearkening back to the glory days of the 19th century czars and what he saw as the height of power and the height of Soviet control of that vast swath of the Soviet Empire. And so said this pretty explicitly, but before, so it’s a rather perverse use of history, but it’s key to understanding him.

 

Albert Mohler:

Well, obviously I have tremendous admiration for Ronald Reagan. I am also a Christian theologian who understands in a biblical and Augustinian worldview that we have to take human beings whole. And looking at Ronald Reagan, there were massive mistakes as well as massive achievements. And at one point, his administration nearly tanks over what was known as the Iran Contra Crisis. And that was, at least, largely an issue of his responsibility, if not by action, then by inaction. But it leads me to just wanting to ask a question. Obviously I believe that at the end of the day, he was one of the most consequential presidents in all of American history and absolutely for good, but it leads me to a very Christian question. How do you evaluate these characters who ride astride history?

 

William Inboden:

Yeah. And this is where, while I go into great obviously detail in the book on his policies and his thinking and his strategy, and also on his failings, this is not a hagiography. I don’t believe in that as a Christian or as a historian. As a fellow Christian historian once said of our work, we are historians of secondary causes. Meaning at the end of the day, I do, of course I very much believe as a Christian that the hand of God is writing history. And we may not always know the clear script. And so there still is some mystery within this. But from what we do know from the historical record, I still think there’s a pretty remarkable story to tell here.

And Reagan himself has, I think he meant this is a humble sense, a deep awareness of the responsibilities of the office. He knows that the role of government is ordained by God, that leaders come to power through certainly the will and sovereignty of God. And in Reagan’s mind, that’s not a grandiose sense of superiority, it’s a very humbling stewardship. And he’s very clear that this is just a stewardship he inherits for a time and he’s going to do his best with it. And that this is why he prays very regularly and he certainly is seeking God’s guidance for these awesome responsibilities. And on the flaws, just because you mentioned them, and again, readers will see, I don’t really pull any punches about these in the book. I mean his Middle East policy is a mess at times, Iran Contra is, I try to provide some context, there’s more to understand about it, but it’s still a very low spot in his presidency on which he bears responsibility.

But any great leader not named Jesus Christ has deep flaws. And Churchill, you know, had many mistakes, including some strategic mistakes in World War II. But I think in a human sense, we better understand a leader’s greatness if we see it alongside the flaws. So again, one of Reagan’s greatest moments as president is when he stands on the Brandenburg Gate in June of 1987 and says, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” I think we appreciate that even more when you look and understand, his approval rating at the time was maybe 35% at home. He still was coming out of the lowest point of his presidency with the Iran Contra scandal, which was largely his fault.

And so, to use the sports analogy, he was the boxer who had been knocked down and he gets up off the mat and he’s still bloodied, he’s still a little weary, but he regains the initiative in the Cold War and he has that tremendous moment at the Berlin Wall. And so it’s great in its own right, but I think we can appreciate even more that it’s coming out of major mistakes and calamities that he had inflicted. And that’s also a real hallmark of leadership, it’s not being perfect, it’s how do you deal with your flaws and imperfections?

 

Albert Mohler:

And it’s a demonstration of courage in so many ways, because Ronald Reagan knows he’s standing astride world history. This is where, when the Berlin Wall was new, President John F. Kennedy famously stood in front of the same wall and said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” identifying with the people, but Reagan, and what we now know and you know this far better than I do in terms of the details, but Reagan was opposed by his own foreign policy establishment and his own speech writing team in putting that line in. And they thought they had an agreement that he wouldn’t do it, but he did it.

 

William Inboden:

Yes. I’m glad you brought up that word, courage. I wish I would’ve brought that up sooner in the conversation because that’s also key to understanding him. And throughout his presidency, or even the 1970s as we talked about, the courage to challenge conventional wisdom, the courage to be unpopular. I mean he stands up for free trade in the 1980s when his own party and the Democrats were very much against it. But on the Berlin Wall speech, his Secretary of State is against it, his national security advisor is against it. All of the experts are telling him, “You can’t say that, Mr. President. It’s too provocative. It’ll embarrass Gorbachev. It’s delusional. That wall is never coming down.”

And Reagan and his speech writer, Peter Robinson, who’s a friend and should get some credit here too, Reagan keeps saying, “I want that line in.” And he says, “Look, I’m the president. I can decide, right?” And so another moment of his convictions, his leadership, his decisiveness, play a… I don’t think any other president would have done that. And it’s really one of the most dramatic moments in the 20th century.

 

Albert Mohler:

One of the most dramatic moments in my life. And theologically, one of the most significant moments. And just in thinking of Christian truth, the flow of world history is standing, as I have now many times, on that line where the Berlin Wall once stood. And remembering that for a Christian, there are no historical inevitabilities except the Lordship of Jesus Christ and his sure incoming kingdom.

When it comes to human experience, there are no inevitabilities. And it is a matter of the clash of ideas, and it mattered not just in terms of world history and not just in terms of geopolitics and the map, it mattered in terms of who lived and who died and whether or not a repressive murderous state and empire would remain in power. And that line, as you know, and those bricks going right through the heart of Berlin, it’s just a reminder that there once was one of the ugliest human constructions of all time, a deadly wall where people were shot just trying to escape a repressive regime. History matters.

 

William Inboden:

Yeah. That really goes back to what we were talking about with Reagan’s worldview too. So there’s a very important moment in 1978 when he’s preparing to run for president again, but he’s out of office and he’s traveling the world to stay abreast of world events, and he visits Berlin and it’s his first time visiting Berlin. And he is standing in West Berlin, but looking out over the wall. And while they’re there, he sees the Stasi, the East German secret police, grab some young East German man and haul him into a store for an interrogation. They don’t shoot him necessarily, but Reagan’s looking at the wall, he sees the secret police, and again, it captures his sense of empathy, but also it so violates his own convictions. He said, “There’s something fundamentally wrong about a society that builds a wall to imprison its own people.”

It’s not about immigration debates now, this is not a wall to keep others out, it’s a wall to imprison the people of East Germany and keep them from getting their own freedom. And that’s why he later says, when he’s asked about the wall in 1982, “It’s as ugly as the idea behind it.” So the wall itself is a monstrosity, but for him, it encapsulates the whole idea of communism, of imprisoning your own people. And so I hope our listeners do have a chance to visit Berlin and see where it was. If you can’t, at least go to the Reagan Library in Southern California, they’ve got a chunk of the wall there. I took our young son there a number of years ago and took a photo of myself in front of him so he can can know it as well. This was real, friends, this was part of human history. And many others in the foreign policy establishment thought that we just need to accept it and it’ll be there forever. And again, it takes that very courageous, visionary president to demand otherwise.

 

Albert Mohler:

That is part of the biblical worldview to know that walls can come down. Let’s just put it that way.

 

William Inboden:

They can. Yes, that’s right. So yes, that’s right. Going back to Jericho and all the way forward to Berlin.

 

Albert Mohler:

Absolutely.

Will Inboden, I’m so thankful for your work and thankful for this work. I just want you to know that if I didn’t know you, this would’ve been one of my favorite books of this year. Thankful I do. And I thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public and I want to end by asking you a question. What’s coming next?

 

William Inboden:

Oh, I’m working on a few possible ideas. So, yeah, I’m still recovering from the process of this one. It was a pretty taxing one, but one possibility is a history of the US/UK, the British-American Special Relationship. Another one might be a deeper biography of George Shultz. So I’ll be deciding by the summer, I think, what the next project is. But I’m, yeah, like I said, still recovering from this one. It was a wonderful labor of love, but it was a labor.

 

Albert Mohler:

Okay, so all I want to say is, I want to read the pages that aren’t in the book.

 

William Inboden:

Okay. Right. So the Director’s Cut version? Yes.

 

Albert Mohler:

Professor Will Inboden, thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public.

 

William Inboden:

Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure.

 

Albert Mohler:

Many thanks to Professor Will Inboden for thinking with me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you’ll find well over 150 of these conversations at albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking In Public. For more information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.

Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public, and until next time, keep thinking.