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Originally posted by sgtclub
That's a tough question, mainly because I haven't reread any of them in a while. Most of the ones I've read are written by former Reaganites, so they aren't appropriate for a guy like you. Morris' book is the most critical of Reagan that I've read, but if my memory serves me, he does give Reagan a fair amount of credit. And if you can get over the fictional style of the book (he writes it from the first person, lifelong aquaintence point of view, but he made up the fact that he was an aquaintance), it is not a bad read.
Dsouza's (sp?) book is more on the academic side and I don't believe he worked in the administration, so that's not a bad choice either, especially when read in conjunction with Reagan's own writings which have been published over the last few years, because these writings dispell the notion that Reagan's supporters are creating conveniently backfilling strategy for a political purposes.
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I've heard that Morris' book is better than the critical reception he got for its form. I'm not interesting in reading something for the sake of it being critical, per se, but nor am I interested in reading anything by D'Souza, who is, IMHO, a partisan hack. He's the way you guys see Krugman, except that Krugman made a name for himself as an academic, while D'Souza is getting published by Regnery.
You were talking about revisionist history, but neither of these guys are really historians, in any academic sense. I guess I'd be interesting in something about the fall of the USSR from an academic perspective, but at a minimum I'd want to see something from an author who spoke Russian.
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Let me state for the record that I am not of the view that Reagan single handedly brought down the USSR. That's just not the case. It was a long, cold war, and many other presidents (and others) had a hand in it's ultimate demise (Truman, Ike, Kennedy, etc.). The more important question, on which I have not reached a definitive decision, is whether the fall of communism in the USSR was inevitable. Many, even many Reagan supporters, believe it was inevitable. That certainly wasn't the conventional wisdom in 1980, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who suggested that in many respects the USSR's economy was superior to ours because it had more natural resources and made better use of its manpower, but I can see the reasoning that goes into that view.
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No doubt it's a question of degrees. There are a lot of people who feared that they had a better economic model, not just on the left.
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In evaluating that inevitability view, there are two questions that stick out in my mind: (1) why hasn't China fallen yet? Yes, they are SLOWLY "reforming," but the Communist still have a strong, and at times brutal hand, over the country; (2) saying it was inevitable is one thing, but how long would it have taken? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years?
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There are other totalitarian regimes that have lasted a long time. The Chinese have done a better of job of trying to find economic -- but not political -- progress. Maybe they're trying to learn from the USSR's mistakes.
And I don't think inevitability is the right word. Nothing was inevitable. Another leader besides Gorbachev, different events, and something different might have happened.
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So given all this, I think it can be said with a great deal of certainty that, at a minimum, Reagan greatly sped up the inevitable.
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Why? Where does this come from?
