Word: reagan
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...Ronald Reagan did. "I didn't know when it would come, but I have to tell you, I'm an eternal optimist," the former President said in an interview with ABC's Sam Donaldson that night. "I believed in all my heart it was in the future." Two years earlier, Reagan had addressed a crowd of some 20,000 near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate and challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. At the time, even his closest advisers dismissed the notion as far-fetched. "It's a great speech line," Reagan's National Security Adviser, Frank...
...years later, Reagan's role in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful end of the Cold War remains exaggerated, manipulated and misunderstood. To many of his conservative admirers, the challenge to Gorbachev in Berlin epitomized the toughness that made Reagan great: by refusing to compromise his core principles, he defeated communism and won the Cold War. But the truth is that Reagan was more adaptable, politically shrewd and open to compromise than either his champions or his critics prefer to admit. He may have called the Soviet Union an "evil empire...
...Reagan loathed the Berlin Wall. "It's a wall that never should have been built," he often said. As early as 1967, while still governor of California, he said the U.S. should have knocked down the barbed wire separating East and West Berlin the moment the communists put it up. On a trip to West Berlin in 1978, he was told the story of Peter Fechter, an East German youth who had been killed trying to crawl over the Wall in 1962. The authorities left Fechter unattended for nearly an hour while he bled to death. "Reagan just gritted...
...National Security Council and the Pentagon, especially in wartime. Only a few of Clinton's recent predecessors have distinguished themselves. Henry Kissinger, a National Security Adviser who belatedly became Secretary of State, was Richard Nixon's schizophrenic alter ego; George Shultz was a strong policy voice in the Reagan Administration; James Baker had clout because he was George H.W. Bush's best friend and a world-class dealmaker. Most of the others have been frustrated or forgettable. And yet this is Hillary Clinton we're talking about - the second most popular American in the world, an eternally compelling and supremely...
...Virginians will judge me on my 18-year record as a legislator and Attorney General and the specific plans I have laid out for our future - not on a decades-old academic paper I wrote as a student during the Reagan era and haven't thought about in years. Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older." - In a public statement that ran in several newspapers in August, in response to the Post's story on his controversial thesis attacking feminists, homosexuals and unmarried couples he wrote as a 34-year-old student...