President's Day is the perfect occasion for paying tribute to the greatest President of the 20th Century, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Author Jay Winik describes his new book, On the Brink, as "a portrait of the Reagan era. It is," he says, "a complex, riveting, and as yet untold tale: of a visionary president and the men and women who served him; of the great and divisive debates over how to deal with the Soviet Union; of shifting political loyalties and the rebirth of one political party and the floundering of another; of personal anxieties and untold hopes; and of a tumultuous time that gripped the nation at home, stirred the imagination abroad, forced unprecedented change upon the Soviet Union, and forever altered the world."
Winik reminds amnesiac Americans what the world was like before Reagan: "Soviet troops were brutally setting siege to Afghanistan; from the dusty roads of Nicaragua to the bushlands of Angola, regional conflicts were exploding with ferocious intensity; America was routinely under attack at the United Nations; and the policies of containment and détente, or U.S.-Soviet co-existence, lay in tatters. As the Carter administration drew to a close," he recalls, "a U.S.-Soviet confrontation loomed in Europe over the deployment of nuclear missiles. For a dispirited America, which was then doubting itself militarily, politically, and economically, these events had ominous portents."
Winik's book, On The Brink, tells the story of how "Ronald Reagan and his administration decided to break radically with the past. Where preceding administrations had believed military confrontation and brinkmanship were a costly precursor to war, the Reagan administration believed they were a necessary component to secure peace; where preceding administrations had sought diminished tensions with the Soviets, the Reagan administration vocally championed democracy and human rights. And, in the most audacious break of all, the Reagan administration decided that the Cold War must be not simply 'managed,' but that it was a contest to be decisively won."
And win it they did! "Under Ronald Reagan, everywhere the Soviets had turned, their pressure was met by U.S. counterpressure. Where the Soviets had supported Marxist-guerrilla movements, their imperial gains were checked and reversed by U.S.-backed anti-Communist groups; where they had blustered that 'History is on our side,' the U.S. rocked the very conceptual foundations of their empire with robust ideological warfare in defense of democracy; and where the Soviets had deployed their missiles, the U.S. refused to back down and firmly put its missiles into place."
Jay Winik emphasizes that "America's winning of the Cold War liberated entire nations and freed ordinary individuals from tyranny. And Ronald Reagan and his administration won it without sacrificing battalion upon battalion of bright, young lives, without dotting any continent with freshly dug American graves. It was," he observes, "a marvelous thing." Ronald Reagan, Winik predicts, "will be remembered by history as one of America's great presidents and his administration as one of the most historic." God bless you, Ronald Reagan!
