One reason I’m not posting much right now is that I’m in the middle of a three-day conference for scholars at the Reagan Library that they kindly titled after my books, “The Age of Reagan.” Last night the conference featured me in an after-dinner conversation with Beth Fischer of the University of Toronto, author of The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan’s Cold War Legacy.
Don’t be misled by the title. Prof. Fischer is not a Reagan-bashing revisionist, nor a champion of “Gorbachev gets all the credit” school. She’s a great admirer of Reagan, but her recent research has uncovered a lot more about how badly we assessed the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, and how that may have actually delayed the end of the Cold War. Despite some quibbles, I like Beth’s work.
But more to the point, if you are an insomniac, here’s the conversation on YouTube, about 50 minutes long after the introduction:
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