the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our constitution, and that is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. the society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities. now, you may notice that i have an adam smith tie on today. and that's not because we have an economic historian coming to speak to us. but it's 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, who is speaking to us today, is known as a very exuberant, enthusiastic education. i first met marcus several years ago at an institute for humane studies 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 didn't do such a good job, and i made it so much easier for him to follow. i was an easy act to follow, so 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's become an icon for conservatives. we have presidential primary debates within the republican party held at the reagan library. and it's like a de facto prerequisite for these candidates to air their opinions, to pay homage to ronald reagan. but as marcus likes to point out, there's 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 symbol. marcus and i were at a philadelphia society meeting once, and we were at a reception, and don divine, 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 -- they kind of got into this argument about how much reagan actually cut, and it was a funny moment for those of you who have seen don divine on television, he's a very animated person and a very adamant person, so marcus is as well. it was a pretty robust argument, and a very exciting one to be standing next to. reagan's image was to a great degree self-made. 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 articulated by frank meyer. well, that united people as disparate at libertarians and neoconservatives and evangelicals and they all 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, paleoconservatives, we have locallests, 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 and resident at the history department at the arkansas center for research and economics, otherwise known as acre, and he's at the university of central 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 ark a, and received his ph.d. from the university of alabama. this is when all the auburn fans in the room boo. dr. witcher offers classes in modern american history, including courses on the cold war, the conservative movement, the history of economic thought, and u.s. economic development. he's published in a wide variety of places including white house study journal and is coedter of a three volume anthology entitled public choice analysis of economic history. he's researching for his next book titled "fulfilling the reagan revolution, clinton, gingrich, and the conservative 1990s." please welcol join me in welcomg dr. witcher. >> you're doing a great job. i don't know that i even need to speak. well, thank you so much for having me. it's a pleasure to be here and talking to the montgomery chapter of the federalist society. a society that has done so much in terms of reshaping the american judiciary and has played such a large role in the conservative movement. it's a great pleasure for me to be here today. as allen said, i'm going to be speaking to you guys today about reagan, conservatives, and the end of the cold war. and i want to start off by sort of asking you to think about what do you think ronald reagan stood for? right? what defines ronald reagan for you? and i think for many, many conservatives, what defines ronald reagan for them is an adherence to principle. an unflitching adherence to principle, conservative principle, specifically, that he never sort of deviated from. and this conception of reagan really, really started to emerge around 2005, 2006, in the wake of sort of george w. bush's dismal presidency from the point of view of conservatives where they became very, very disillusioned with george w. bush. and so what i want to talk to you guys today about is i want to talk to you about how conservatives viewed reagan during the 1980s. oftentimes they viewed him with frustration, contempt, anger, because not more was being done to sort of achieve conservatives' policy goals. i was really, really surprised when i was researching for my dissertation because i went through steven hayward's book and found this nice paragraph where he talked about all of these conservatives upset and frustrated with reagan and then he went on and told the story, the long story about the reagan years. i'm like, that's really fascinating. i found that aside in several other books i was reading in my seminar class and took it to my dissertation advisers and they said this sounds like an excellent topic. go and research it. out of that research came the book "getting right with reagan, the struggle for true conservatism" and that's what i'm going to be talking about today. we'll go ahead and we'll sort of talk about how conservatives view reagan today. and then we'll sort of go 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 foreign policies and then we'll talk a little bit about how reagan want to be remembered and we'll end off with me sort of gesturing toward how conservatives began to construct the reagan legacy and later the reagan myth. i really, really love this quote from matt purple, i wish i had written it, but i didn't. he wrote it in the churchill we misremember, and i think it really sort of grasps what i'm trying to do in the book. purple says, quote, historical memory is like a great compacter. crushing nuances and flattening wrinkles until a person or event is made a perfect morsel for popular consumption. and i think this has largely happened with ronald reagan today among conservatives. he's sort of been compacted down into a simplified version of himself, maybe a purest version of himself. and all the nuances, and all the sort of pragmatic policies of the '80s have largely been forgotten. this is really personified by wwrd. okay, this emerged in 2005. ann coulter sort of quipped, she said, you know, for christians, it's wwjd, right? what would jesus do, but for conservatives, it's wwrd, what would reagan do? and of course, after this sort of takes off in 2005, it really takes off in 2007 in the lead-up to the 2008 republican primary, sean hannity and the heritage foundation sort of partner on this to say, wwrd, right? what would ronald reagan do today? that's what we need. we need a candidate to do what reagan would do. so it's equipped with bracelets. you can go on amazon and buy a wwrd bracelet, a t-shirt, as you can see up here, you can buy yourself a bumper sticker to put on your car. you can buy a mouse pad like the one on the far left that says if we could resurrect him, we would re-elect him. the idea of zombie reagan running in the 2020 primary. but nonetheless, conservatives in 2000 -- from around 2005 to 2016 or so began to really reconstruct reagan as a conservative purest and they began to sort of claim, and it's really sort of maybe even before, that ronald reagan won the cold war by sticking to his conservative principles and that reagan, through his sort of conservatism, is to credit ultimately for the dissolution of the soviet empire and the end of the cold war. today, we're going to bow back in time and look at what conservatives were saying about reagan's policies in the 1980s and how that sort of is quite different from what they claim today. so what does my manuscript do? it 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. i think that's something unique to my book. i think other historians have done a good job with it as well, but it's one thing i really try to grapple with, all of the differences within the conservative movement. i don't think we historians have done enough in terms of understanding conservatism and all its various iterations. it also questions whether or not the reagan years were actually the triumph of conservatism. i don't think this is true. i think the 1990s were probably the triumph of conservatism in the wake of sort of the gingrich revolution. i think the clinton administration achieved many, many of the things, maybe not on purpose, right? maybe begrudgingly after looking at polls, but nonetheless, the clinton administration, right, and president clinton, they ultimately get welfare reform. they get the balanced budget, et cetera. so it questions whether or not we should view the 1980s as the triumph of conservatism, especially in light of the fact that many, many conservatives did not see the 1980s as a triumph of conservatism, at least in the 1980s. finally, the book examines the interconnectedness of politics, memory, and myth building among american conservatives, and attempts to explain the creation of the reagan legacy and the evolution of that legacy and the creation of the reagan myth. so i've got this slide here that tells you sort of where the sources come from. i was lucky enough to visit a vast number of archives including ronald reagan's presidential library, which is a great place to go do research for two weeks, like fly out to california. hard times, right init was excellent. going to simi valley and going through the reagan papers, specifically the morton blackwell files, but if anyone has questions about the evidentiary basis and where the sources came from, we can return to this at the end of the talk during the q&a. so just sort of as a primer, so that everybody here is not up ce upset with me, there are four schools of thought about what ended the cold war. the first is probably the most dominant, and that's that mikhail gorbachev through his policies deserves most of the credit for the end of the cold war, because inadvertently, he undermined the soviet system, undermined the communist party, and in doing so, destroyed the fabric that held the soviet union and its satellites together, basically the control, the threat of coercion. and that's probably the largest school of thought within the historical profession. within this school of thought, reagan has given very little credit for the end of the cold war. there's another school of thought that claims that ronald reagan actually prolonged the cold war. not only did he not contribute to it, he actually prolonged it because his sort of fiery rhetoric simply emboldened the hard liners 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. this is made up of mainly conservative historians who claim ronald reagan won the cold war by forcing the soviet union into bankruptcy because of their military buildup in the united states, they put pressure on the soviets. they couldn't keep up. as a result, this had to enact reforms. they ultimately undid the soviet union. finally, there's sort of emerging a school of thought, and this is the school i want to belong to, right, is that reagan and gorbachev worked together to create sort of, set the foundation for a peaceful end to the cold war and the dissolution of the soviet empire. i think that gorbachev probably deserves most of the credit, although he probably wouldn't like to take it. he was an avowed socialist, but i think his policies ultimately are what undid the soviet union, but i think reagan deserves a lot of credit for working with gorbachev in order to basically establish better relations to enable gorbachev to carry out those reforms at home. that's where i fit into the historyography. i know i'm speaking to a more conservative audience, so i'll not one of the first two, so don't be too angry with me, right? all right. let's go ahead and jump into the 1980s. so conservatives were frustrated with reagan's 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. so some conservatives were upset with the sell of advanced airborne warning and control systems to saudi arabia. they thought this violated sort of israeli national security. and the israeli prime minister even came out and condemned reagan for this sell. this was reagan's first sort of foreign policy accomplishment or legislative accomplishment while he was in office. and he actually stood up to sort of the israeli lobby and also the prime minister of israel and basically told the prime minister, listen, i'm the president of the united states. other countries don't make our foreign policy. you can imagine how that went over with neoconservatives. when reagan made that type of comment. also on taiwan, reagan accepted china's nine-point plan for taiwan, which included reduced weapon sales from the united states, conservatives for historical reasons were very wedded to taiwan and still are in some ways. so many conservatives criticized reagan as being soft on china here. thirdly, reagan was criticisms specifically by neoconservatives for his lack of a public response to sort of 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 other things like that. they said he largely did nothing. we know now because there was a new book released on reagan and the cia and poland, we now know that reagan behind the scenes was very active actually in helping to support sort of dissident groups within the eastern bloc, and that he was doing quite a bit, actually, at least his administration was doing quite a bit. in poland, but conservatives at the time didn't know that because that was not public knowledge. they were criticizing him for that. they're also criticizing him because they thought they elected him to pursue a more aggressive policy towards the soviet union, and in the first two years they don't see that really materializinmaterializin. tay don't see that materializing. let's get to some specific criticisms. so in 1982, right, normal pothurts writes a piece in "the new york times." he's a major neoconservative figure. he writes the neoconservative anguish over reagan's foreign policy over which he cyst mat clack dismisses the idea that the president had any accomplishments in the first year and a half of his presidency. he insists the reagan administration hadn't outlined a clear vision for what they wanted to accomplish in the cold war. they had a focus on the economy during the first year. obviously, when reagan comes into office, that's their number one concern, is getting sort of the economy back on track, and they do get the tax cuts, 1981. they get some to divine's point, they do get some spending cuts initially in the first year. but by and large, foreign policy conservatives, neoconservatives, hawks, feel that reagan's really focused on economic matters and hasn't really defined a conservative foreign policy. the result, according to him, was a vacuum into which have come pouring all of the old ideas and policy against which ronald reagan himself has stood for so many years. he continued, then in the first two years of the reagan administration, reagan had followed a strategy of helping the soviet union stabilize its empire, rather than a strategy aimed at 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. they had an extended conversation in which reagan tried to convince him he was not pursuing a policy of detente. the policy of detente is the idea of cooling of tensions with the soviet union that nixon and kissinger had sort of outlined in the early 1970s, which was widely criticized by conservatives including president reagan. pothurts, you know, listening to the president, tried to justify what he had done to this point politely after a couple times of trying to get off the phone, finally says, yes, mr. president, thank you so much. hangs up the phone, and writes down later in his memoir that after he had hung up with reagan, he realized that the president waw pursuing what he would call, what he would call detente. even if it wasn't what reagan himself would call detente. in 1982, the new right under the leadership of richard vigry, published an edition of conservative digest, in which they systematically criticize the president. they criticize him on social issues, for not getting the school prayer mandate passed. they criticize him for not getting a right to life amendment passed. so you have social conservatives criticizing the president in this edition. you also have fiscal conservatives, budget hawks criticizing him because of the imbalanced budget, the budget deficits run up in 1982. you also supply siders who are mad with reagan because reagan had raised taxes or is on the path to raise taxes. and you have foreign policy conservatives who are the people that we're going to focus on in the next slide, who are really criticizing reagan for not really outlining a clear vision in terms of his cold war foreign policy. the title of the magazine has reagan deserted the conservatives? where is the best of me, right? a play off one of reagan's films. where is the best of me, has reagan deserted the conservatives? like i said, this magazine, or this edition of the magazine, this volume, it has criticism from across the spectrum. like, if you were like, i don't really buy your argument in the book that conservatives had major problems with the reagan administration, i would just somehow find this, which i haven't been able to do on ebay or amazon, just hand it to you because it's that good of a source, that convincing, i think. here are just a few quotes from that magazine. on foreign policy. general daniel graham, chairman of the coalition for peace through strength, asserted there is, quote, very little difference between reagan's policy and carter's policy. joseph chum bra, former analyst for reagan's arm control lame lamented, we have no