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No other US president's reputation has risen so steeply in recent years as Ronald Reagan's. According to the Gallup poll, he ended his presidency in 1989 with a fifty-three percent job-approval rating, but now almost three-quarters of the American public applaud his performance in the White House. When Gallup asks respondents who was the greatest post-World War II president, about twenty percent answer Reagan - second only to John Kennedy. When I teach my students about Reagan, I find they frequently credit him with fortifying national pride and securing US victory in the Cold War. They often state that Reagan achieved that victory by outspending the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in an arms race. Some of them believe Reagan was readier to use force abroad than his predecessors, gaining him credibility in confronting adversaries. Republican candidates, of course, race to outdo one another in their praise of Reagan. The scandals that marked Reagan's presidency, notably the Iran-Contra affair, have faded in public memory. Like Kennedy, Reagan has come to be esteemed more highly by the general public than by scholars.
That discrepancy may be narrowing, however. Historians have started to come around to the public's more positive view of Reagan's leadership. But within this apparent reconciliation of popular and scholarly opinion, a great irony lurks. For, despite the widespread belief among Reagan's admirers that his militarism was the key to his success in superpower relations, the Reagan revisionists insist upon Reagan's profound desire for peace and his alleged hatred of nuclear weapons. Reagan's vision of a nuclear-free world, fhey tell us, inspired his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a plan announced in 1983 whose intention was to make America invulnerable to incoming nuclear warheads with a system that could shoot missiles out of the sky, and also led to the signing of the Treaty on IntermediateRange Nuclear Forces (INF) between the United States and the USSR in 1987 - die first agreement ever to eliminate a class of nuclear weapons.
The motives behind SDI were far less clear and less pacific than die Reagan revisionists would have us think. SDI, derisively dubbed "Star Wars" by critics who viewed it as science fiction radier dian science, was imagined by Reagan as a winning play in...