My goal was to show the history of the end of the Cold War through both sides - the U.S. side and the Soviet side. I really felt that especially the Soviet side of the story hadn't been well told because we didn't know.
Presidents make history but are also a product of it. And there are two kinds: transforming and transactional. Reagan was a transforming president. He made history.
When you look back at the fight against Communism, one thing that is striking is the degree to which we [the United States] were carried on by our own values. One of the real challenges of the new era is going to be to maintain those values and not adopt those of our adversaries.
I see in [George H. W.] Bush a striving to be Reagan-like in the sense of having a big vision, and eschewing small details.
Today, we've got what seems to me to be binary-choice politics: black and white, ones and zeros, either you are with me or against me. How did we get here?
I think words were Reagan's greatest weapon - and more powerful than the Strategic Defense Initiative, which did not come to fruition in his lifetime.
I think his [Reagan's] policy toward the Soviet Union was more risky than most people realize, and it was risky because of the paranoia and fear among the isolated old guard in Moscow.
He [Reagan] was who he was, and it was not complicated. You didn't get a different person in an interview.
I do not think he [Reagan] put names and faces together but for a small group of people. There were a few, perhaps half a dozen reporters, that Reagan recognized, including my colleague Lou Cannon, and some from television and the wire services. The rest of us were faces.
