Reagan’s starring role in end of the Cold War
AS a former Hollywood star, Ronald Reagan was already a very famous man – and becoming the 40th US President only added to his high profile.
In late 1980, Reagan was already 69 and had achieved more than most.
He’d starred in movies for nearly three decades, and when that career dried up went into TV and was a star all over again.
Politically, too, he had travelled far and wide, starting that part of his life as a Democrat, and saying Franklin D. Roosevelt was “a true hero”.
By the early ’60s, though, he was a Republican, quite a transformation for a man who had tried to lead an anti-nuclear rally in Tinseltown in late 1945, only to be talked out of it after pressure from his film studio. One theme that did run from those early days right through his life was a hatred and fear of nuclear weapons, and he was intent on making sure America had more of them than the Russians.
Not that such matters were on his agenda when he got his first big political job, as Governor of California.
He won it with great speeches, and by vowing to send people back to work and to sort out student riot troubles.
Reagan was never one to shy away from confrontation, and threw himself into many political fights in California, just as he would later escalate tensions between his country and the Soviets.
So it should be no surprise that he hit it off so well, once he was President, with Margaret Thatcher, not a woman to mess about and look for compromise.
His foe was Jimmy Carter, a man who had won his own Presidential race as a dark horse outsider.
He had the ongoing Iran hostage crisis and various other major things to deal with, and Reagan chased votes with promises of lower taxes and less government interference in people’s lives. Reagan chose George H. W. Bush as his running mate, and having a good team behind him helped him look confident during debates. As, of course, did a lifetime in front of cameras.
His policies would divide opinion, doing some things that seemed designed to help the most needy but others that seemed dangerous.
But his relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring the Cold War to an end. He had beseeched Gorbachev, while in Berlin: “If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, come here to this gate! Tear down this wall!”
By the time Reagan made his fourth visit to Moscow in 1988, they asked if he still thought of Russia as an evil empire.
“No, I was talking about another time, another era,” he replied.