During the 1980s, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford expressed an opinion of President

Ronald Reagan that remains current in some quarters even today. Ronald Reagan Clifford said was

an amiable dunce. Now a historian has published a new book about that dunce,

the peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the world on the brink.

Historian William Inboden on Uncommon Knowledge Now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. A graduate of Stanford William Inboden

earned his doctorate in history from Yale. Dr. Inboden worked for 15 years as a policymaker

in Washington and overseas holding positions with the State Department and the National Security

Council, then returned to academia. He now serves as executive director of the Clements Center for

National Security and as an associate professor of public policy and history at the LBJ School of

Public Affairs, both at the University of Texas in Austin. William Inboden's new book,

his magnificent new book, The peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the world on the

brink. Today, the first of two conversations with Dr. Inboden, President Reagan's first term

or to use one of the chapter titles from this book, The Battle Is Joined. Will, welcome.

Thank you, Peter. Great to be with you. What was its stake? Ronald Reagan

announces his candidacy for President in 1979. Can you describe the correlation of forces to

use a good old Marxist term between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1979? And

the background to this question and to our whole conversation. We're recording this on the

Stanford campus. You work on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin.

18 and 19 year old freshmen walking around those campuses as all campuses were born after Ronald

Reagan died. They have no memory of Reagan. The Cold War is a distant grandparents, parents and

grandparents memory. So there's an act of imaginative recreation that you engage in here and that we

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