It was a classic Reagan moment—one that unnerved his critics and delighted his fans. Preparing to deliver a weekly radio address on Aug. 11, 1984, President Reagan started joking in front of an open microphone as technicians checked the sound system. "My fellow Americans," he declared, "I am pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." Most Americans dismissed the quip as a stupid mistake, but it came from the heart. Ronald Reagan hated communism and wanted to do all he could, short of starting World War III, to destroy what he called the "evil empire."

Yet after he won re-election in a landslide three months later, Reagan began a remarkable journey from Cold Warrior to partner in peacemaking with a new and vigorous Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. It turns out that behind Reagan's hair-raising flippancy and bellicose rhetoric was a more thoughtful intelligence than his critics ever acknowledged. "Rather than simply back the wounded bear into the corner, Reagan made it clear to Gorbachev that the U.S. stood not just for freedom . . . but also for peace," writes political scientist Jay Winik in On the Brink, a history of the Cold War. "The Soviets saw the inevitable, and then took the only feasible door left open to them, and, in turn, they too chose peace, even at the price of dismantling themselves."

Reagan's preoccupation with communism, and his penchant for delegating too much responsibility, also led to the worst crisis of his presidency—the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan's decision to send arms to Iran in exchange for U.S. hostages violated his pledge to never negotiate with terrorists, and, for a time, it shattered his credibility. And the decision by his aides to use profits from those arms sales to finance anti-Communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua broke the law and nearly ruined his second term. But the scandal turned out to be only a strange sidebar to the main story of the Reagan era—his role as a catalyst in breaking up the Soviet Union. Some historians still give him little or no credit for ending Soviet communism, arguing that the system would have collapsed on its own. But recent U.S. News interviews with key Reagan and Gorbachev advisers suggest that Reagan was a powerful agent for change within the U.S.S.R. "It was a special moment in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union," a senior Kremlin official says. "The Soviet Union could no longer exist as it had. And Reagan's influence was very substantial."

Gorbachev's deliberations with the Politburo from 1986 to 1988 clearly illustrate this influence, according to Anatoli Chernyaev, Gorbachev's aide and note taker during that period. The hard-line polices adopted by Reagan—including his willingness to increase the military budget from $185 billion in 1982 to nearly $304 billion in 1989—put increased pressure on a Soviet Union that was already suffering profound financial hemorrhages from declining oil prices, the cost of its lengthy war in Afghanistan, and the need to spend an estimated $13 billion to clean up the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Because of all these setbacks, Gorbachev repeatedly warned the powerful Politburo that the country could no longer afford escalations in the arms race. Chernyaev told U.S. News that the most significant factor in the breakup of communism was the conclusion of Gorbachev and his Kremlin allies that the Stalinist system was no longer workable. He argues that the military, economic, and diplomatic pressure imposed by Reagan was the second most important factor leading to the Soviet Union's demise.

Next Page