Colleen Graffy

Stand up for freedom and freedom will stand up for you (eventually)

It was hard to be a supporter of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Western Europe. As a student living in West Germany at the time, I remember well the commonly held view of him: B-rate actor who read cue cards, a nuclear-weapons-obsessed warmonger, and not very bright to boot. Never mind that he had also been a popular two-term governor of the most populous state in the U.S. (California), because that did not fit with the bumbling cowboy narrative. When he called the Soviet Union “the evil empire” the chattering classes saw it as simplistic, unsophisticated and cringe-worthy. Not so the people caught behind the Iron Curtain who silently cheered someone who stood up for them and spoke the truth about the oppression under which they were living.

Not all conservatives were happy with Reagan either. Their worldview encompassed an acceptance of détente and the US-Soviet arms race as the way things were and forever would be. To rock that boat was to venture into the unknown. Any alternative would jeopardize stability and security — as precarious as that was at the time. Reagan had another worldview: he thought the US-Soviet arms race was mutable, he believed we could do better than just a thawing of the Cold War that left in place the “evil empire”, and he believed people’s desire for freedom was universal and that we needed to support those who sought it.

In 2007 Time magazine recounted the background to Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech on its twentieth anniversary as “the four most famous words that were almost never uttered.” Reagan’s own National Security Council was against it as was the State Department. They worried that it was too provocative, they were afraid of the consequences and they were afraid that hard-liners in the Kremlin would use it to undermine Gorbachev.

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