Dr. Mendenhall good morning. Good morning and welcome to the montgomery lawyers chapter of the Federalist Society. The Federalist Society is founded on the freedoms that the separation of governmental powers is central to our constitution and that is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to tell say what the law is, not what it should be. The society seeks to promote both an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities. Now, you may notice i have an adam smith tie on today, and that is not because we have an economic historian coming to speak to us, but it is because adam smith was principally an educator. He was a professor and a private tutor, and he was beloved by his students. And marcus witcher, you is speaking to us today, is known as a very exuberant, enthusiastic educator. I first met marcus several years ago at an Institute Study conference, i spoke, and then he followed me. He later told me, and i mean years later, that he was so relieved that i went first, because i did not do such a good job, i made it so much easier for him to follow. [laughter] dr. Mendenhall i was an easy act to follow. He was very pleased by this. But marcus has spent the last five years writing this book on Ronald Reagan, and Ronald Reagan has become a symbol. He has become an icon for conservatives. We have president ial primary debates within the Republican Party held at the Reagan Library. It is a de facto prerequisite for candidates to air their opinions to pay homage to Ronald Reagan. But, as marcus likes to point out, there is a disconnect between the way conservatives thought about Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, in his own time and space, and the way reagan has been mythologized, the way we think about reagan today, reagan the icon, reagan the simple. Symbol. Marcus and i were at a Philadelphia Society meeting once and we were at a reception, and don devine, who was head of the Civil Service in the Reagan Administration, made some comment about the Reagan Administration to marcus, and marcus came back and said actually, reagan did not cut domestic spending, and they got into this argument about how much reagan actually cut, and it was a funny moment, for those of you who have seen don devine on television, he is a very animated person and a very adamant person. Marcus is, as well, and it was a pretty robust argument in a very exciting want to be standing and a pretty exciting to be one standing next to. [laughter] dr. Mendenhall reagans image was, to a great degree, selfmade. He was very aware of his legacy and sought to frame narratives about his presidency. During his presidency, the cold war united conservatives in a sort of fusionist way. Some of you may recall the fusionist project as it was by frank maier. That United People as disparate as neoconservatives and evangelicals came together because of a common enemy, but after the cold war, we sort of lost that fusionism, so conservatives today exist in a fractured state. We have neoconservatives, those who celebrate american greatness, we have libertarians, classical liberals, we have paleo conservatives, we have localists, we have evangelicals, and in the current political climate, they are not as united as they were under the reagan presidency. And a lot of that has to do with the cold war. So here to talk to us today about the cold war, reagan conservatives, and the end of the cold war, is dr. Marcus witcher. Dr. Witcher is a scholar in residence in the History Department at the Arkansas Center for research and economics, otherwise known as a. C. R. E. He is also at the university of arkansas. He teaches in the History Department. In addition to being an engaging and enthusiastic speaker, he specializes in political, economic, and intellectual history from 1920 to the present. His focus is on modern american conservatism, and his manuscript, getting right with reagan, comes out this month, november 2019. He earned his bachelors in history at the university of Central Arkansas and received his phd from the university of alabama. This is when all of the auburn fans in the room boo. [laughter] boo. Dr. Mendenhall [laughs] dr. Witcher offers classes in modern American History, including courses on the cold war, the conservative movement, the american presidency, the history of economic thought, and u. S. Economic development. He is published in a wide variety of places, including the white house studies journal, and is coeditor of a threevolume anthology entitled public choice analysis of American Economic history. He is currently researching for his next book, titled fulfilling the reagan revolution clinton, gingrich, and the conservative 1990s. Please join me in welcoming dr. Witcher. [applause] dr. Witcher thanks. You did a great job. I dont know that i even need to speak. [laughs] dr. Witcher thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to be here and to be talking to the montgomery chapter of the Federalist Society, a society that has done so much in reshaping the American History and such a large role in the conservative movement. It is a great pleasure for me to be here today. As dr. Mendenhall, as allen said, i will be talking about conservatism at the end of the cold war, and i want to start off by asking you to think about what do you think Ronald Reagan stood for . What defines Ronald Reagan for you . And i think for many many conservatives, what defines Ronald Reagan for them is an adherence to principle, unflinching adherence to principle, conservative principles specifically, that he never sort of deviated from. This conception of reagan really started to emerge around 2005, 2006, in the wake of sort of george w. Bushs dismal presidency, from the point of view of conservatives, where we became very disillusioned with george w. Bush. What i want to talk to you guys today about is i want to talk about how conservatives viewed reagan during the 1980s. Often times, they view him with frustration, contempt, anger, because not more was done to sort of achieve the conservative policy goals. I was really surprised when i was researching for my dissertation, because i went to steven haywards book, and he i found this nice little paragraph where he basically talked about all of these conservatives who were upset and frustrated with reagan, and then he went on and told the long sordid story about the reagan years, and i was like that is really fascinating, and i found that aside in several other books in my classes, and i took it to my dissertation advisors and they told me this sounds. Ike a fascinating topic explore this, and out of that research came the book reagan the struggle for true conservatism. We will talk about how conservatives view reagan today, and then we will look back in time and take a look at how conservatives viewed reagan during the 1980s. Like i said, oftentimes with frustration, and even contempt when it came to his cold war policy, and then we will talk a little bit about how reagan wanted to be remembered, and we will end off with me gesturing toward how conservatives began to construct the reagan legacy and later the reagan myth. I really, really love this quote by matt purple i wish i had written it but i did not, matt purple wrote it in the churchill we misremember, and i think it really grasps what i am trying to do in the book. Purple said, historical memory is like a great compactor, crushing nuances and flattening wrinkles until a person or event is made a perfect morsel for popular consumption. I think this has largely happened with Ronald Reagan today for conservatives. He is compacted down to a simple simplified version of himself, maybe a purist version of himself, and all of the nuances and the pragmatic policies of the 1980s have largely been forgotten. This is really personified by wwrd. This emerged in 2005. Ann coulter quipped, she said, you know, for christians, it is wwjd, but for conservatives, it is wwrd, what would reagan do . After this takes off in 2005, it really takes off in 2007 in the lead up to the 2008 election, sean hannity and the Heritage Foundation sort of partnered on this, wwrd, right . What would Ronald Reagan do today . Thats what we need. We need a candidate to do what reagan would do. You can go on amazon, you can buy a wwrd bracelet, you can buy yourself a tshirt, as you see up here, you can buy a Bumper Sticker to put on your car, you can buy a mouse pad like the one eft that says if we could resurrect him, we would reelect him, right, the idea of zombie reagan. But nonetheless, conservatives from around 2005 to 2016 or so began to reconstruct reagan as a conservative purist, and they began to sort of claim, and maybe even before, that Ronald Reagan won the cold war by sticking to his conservative principles, and that reagan, through his conservatism, gets the credit, ultimately, for the dissolution of the soviet empire and the end of the cold war. So today what we will do is go back in time and look at what conservatives were actually saying about reagans policy in the 1980s, and how that is quite different from what they claim today. So what does my manuscript do . Well, my manuscript details the complex and often tense relationship that existed between president reagan and conservatives, and it acknowledges the wide range of different perspectives on the right, and i think that is something unique to my book. I think other historians have done a good job with that, as well, but it is something i try to grapple with, all of the differences within the conservative movement. I dont think historians have done enough in understanding conservatism and all of its various iterations. It also questions whether or not the triumph of conservatism. I actually dont think this is true. I actually think the 1990s or were probably the triumph in the gingrich revolution. I think the Clinton Administration achieved many, many of the things, maybe not on purpose, maybe begrudgingly, but after looking at polls, but nonetheless, the Clinton Admini balanced budget, etc. It questions whether or not we should view the 1980s as a triumph of conservatism, but especially in light of the fact that many conservatives did not see it as a triumph of conservatism, at least in the 1980s. Finally, the interconnectedness of politics, memory, and misgivings among the american conservatives, and it tends to explain the creation of the regular legacy and the evolution of the legacy and the creation of reagan myth. So i got this slide here that tells you where the sources come from. I was lucky enough to visit a vast number of archives, including Ronald Reagans president ial library, which is a great place to do some research, for two weeks, fly out to california, right . It was excellent going out to simi valley, see the reagan papers, specifically the blackwell files. If anyone has any questions about the evidentiary basis and where the sources come from, we can return to it after the talk during the q a. Sort of as a primer, so everyone here is not upset with me. There are four schools of thought about what ended the cold war. Dominant, and that is Mikael Gorbachev, through his policies, deserves most of the credit for the end of the cold war, because inadvertently, he undermines the soviet system, undermined the communist party, and in doing so, destroy the fabric of the soviet union and its satellites, basically the control. The thread of coercion. That is probably the Largest School of thought within the historical profession. Within this school of thought, reagan is given very little credit for the end of the cold war. There is another school of thought that claims that Ronald Reagan actually prolongs the cold war. Not only did he not contribute to it, but he prolonged it, simply emboldening the his hardened rhetoric emboldened the hardliners within the soviet union and made it more difficult for someone like gorbachev to enact his reforms. The third school is the reagan victory school, forcing the soviet union into bankruptcy, because of their military buildup in the United States that put pressure on the soviets. They could not keep up, had to enact reforms that ultimately undid the soviet union. And finally, there is sort of this emerging this is the school i want to belong to that reagan and gorbachev worked together to set the foundation for a peaceful end of the cold war and the dissolution of the soviet empire. I think gorbachev deserves most of the credit, although he probably would not like to take it. He was an avowed socialist. His policiesately are what undid the soviet union, but i think reagan deserves a lot of credit for working with gorbachev to basically establish better relations to enable rich gorbachev to establish those reforms at home. I know i am speaking to a more conservative audience, so i am not either of the first two, so dont be too angry with me, right . [laughter] dr. Witcher lets go ahead and jump into the 1980s. So conservatives were frustrated with reagans Foreign Policy throughout the 1980s, but they were also really frustrated with other things reagan attempted to do in the Foreign Policy arena in the first two years of the Reagan Administration. Some were upset with sale of the advanced Airborne Warning and control system to saudi arabia. They thought this violated Israeli National security, and the israeli Prime Minister even came out and condemned reagan for this sale. This was reagans first Foreign Policy accomplishment, or legislative accomplishment when he was in office, and he basically stood up to the lobby and basically told the Prime Minister of israel, listen, i am the president of the United States. Other countries do not make our Foreign Policy. You can imagine how well that went over with neoconservatives when reagan made that type of comment. Also, on taiwan, reagan accepted chinas ninepoint plan for taiwan, which included reduce weapon sales from the United States, which were very wedded to taiwan, and still are, so in some ways, so many conservatives criticized reagan for being sort of soft on china here. Thirdly, reagan was criticized, specifically by neoconservatives, for his lack of public response to the imposition of martial law in poland, the crackdown on solidarity. Neoconservatives claim that reagan should have done more, he should have pushed back against the soviets with massive embargoes on technology and things like that, and they say essentially did nothing. We know there is a new book on sort of reagan and the cia in poland. We know reagan behindthescenes was very active in supporting distant groups within the eastern bloc, and he was doing quite a bit, actually. At least his administration was doing quite a bit. Conservatives at the time did not know that, because that was not public knowledge. They are criticizing him for that. Him are also criticizing because they thought they were electing him to pursue a more aggressive policy toward the soviet union, and they do not see that really materializing. They dont see that materializing. Lets get to some specific criticisms. In 1982, Norman Podhoretz writes a piece in the New York Times hes a major neoconservative figure, he writes this paper called the neoconservative anguish over reagans Foreign Policy, in which he pretty much systematically dismisses the idea that the president had any accomplishments in his first year and a half of his presidency. Podhoretz insisted that he did have not outlined a clear vision of what they wanted to accomplish during the cold war. They have focused on the economy in the first year. Obviously when reagan comes into office, that is the number one concern, getting the economy back on track, and they get the tax cuts in 1981. They get some, to divines point, they get some spending cuts, initially, in the first year, but by and large, foreignpolicy conservatives, neoconservatives, hawks, feel one reagan is really focused economic matters and has not really defined a conservative foreignpolicy. The result, according to podhoretz, was a vacuum into which have come pouring all the old ideas and policies against which reagan himself has stood for so many years. He continued, but in the two first years of the Reagan Administration, reagan had followed a policy of helping the soviet union stabilize its empire rather than a strategy encouraging the breakup of that empire from within. His criticism was so piercing that reagan actually picked up the phone and gave him a call, and they had an extended conversation in which reagan tried to convince him he was not pursuing a policy of detente, the idea of a cooling of tensions with the soviet union that nixon and kissinger had outlined in the 1970s, widely criticized by conservatives, including president reagan. He is listening to the president , trying to justify what he had done up until this point, politely a couple of times, trying to get off the phone, finally