About a President (and a Pope)
George Weigel (!) writes, at Catholic Exchange, about a new book that draws on recently de-classified letters exchanged between Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II to shed additional light on the complex relationship that existed between these men (at both a personal and a diplomatic level), and on Reagan’s keen grasp of just what was required to pursue his dream of a world without nuclear weapons.
Yes, that Ronald Reagan. At his core, he was a nuclear abolitionist, albeit one who realized that unilateral disarmament was a suicide pact.
The new revelation about the relationship in the Andersons’ book is that the Pope and the President had an extensive correspondence, involving dozens of letters back-and-forth, which Professor Martin Anderson told me were by far among the most interesting of all the Reagan letters he had examined. Among the letters referenced in Reagan’s Secret War is a January 1982 letter from the White House to the Vatican in which Reagan shifted the subject of the exchange from events in Poland (which had just been put under martial law) to his hopes for genuine disarmament, not just arms “control,” at the talks about to begin with the Soviet Union in Geneva.
Indeed, the Andersons’ book makes clear that, somewhat to the consternation of many of his close advisers, Ronald Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist: he really did believe, as he often said, in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. His instruments for doing so—ramping up U.S. missile capability to demonstrate that America couldn’t be outmuscled, and the strategic defense initiative as an insurance policy—were bitterly criticized by the liberal arms controllers, whose influence on the deliberations of the U.S. bishops as they prepared their 1983 peace pastoral was, to put it gently, considerable. But as the Andersons demonstrate, it was Reagan who was the true radical in this business: the man who wasn’t satisfied with simply managing an arms race, the man who wanted to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Historians of U.S. Catholicism will thus be grateful to the Andersons for clarifying just how mistaken some of the policy assumptions underlying “The Challenge of Peace” were.
I may just have to pick this book up. John O’Sullivan’s The President the Pope, and the Prime Minister was a fascinating, insightful, and enlightening read on this same subject, and this new work sounds as though it adds considerable amounts of extra detail about the man — an actor-turned-president — at the core of the West’s struggle against Soviet communism.
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I started blogging back in 2004 -- in May, if the Wayback Machine is to be believed. Not that I remember the exact day. To be honest, I didn't take it that seriously then; it was a fun distraction, but nothing more.
That all changed, I think, once the Danish cartoons were published, and the assault on the right to freedom of expression became very visible. With the recent issues in Canada concerning the "human rights" commissions, the gravity of the matter has only increased, and my interest in blogging has increased right along with it.
I used to blog at a domain called Time Immortal, but it seemed to be the right time for a change -- there's been a lot of that in my life of late. Hence this blog: a fresh start, and proof positive that I won't shut up even if I get shut down once in a while.
