RONALD REAGAN….Some views of Ronald Reagan:
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Alexander Gribanov, Soviet dissident who emigrated in 1987: “The ’70s were a decade of unrelenting Soviet expansion that met virtually no resistance. Reagan signaled that the period of non-resistance was over, and this gave us hope.”
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Reagan on the apartheid regime in South Africa: “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country, the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated ? that has all been eliminated.”
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Samuel Wells, Cold War historian at the Woodrow Wilson Center: “His staff, for all of the first term and most of the second, kept this out of the press, but Reagan was terribly, deeply opposed to nuclear weapons ? he thought they were immoral.”
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Reagan on trading arms for hostages: “Mistakes were made.”
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From The Clothes Have No Emperor: “12/15/1985 ? 60 Minutes interviews Berkeley professor Michael Rogin, who posits the theory that [Reagan] honestly can’t tell the difference between movies and reality. The evolution of a Reagan anecdote is traced from the point where he credits it as a movie scene to the point where he tells it as if it really happened. Viewer response proves this to the one of the least popular segments in the program’s 17-year history.”
So which one was he? Inspirational cold warrior? Social neanderthal? Ex-liberal idealist? Corrupt ideologue? Delusional old man?
All of them, I guess.
