Reagan and Thatcher

Starred review from November 14, 2011
Aldous re-examines popular myths of the closeness of the political partnership between President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, drawing on recently declassified documents, interviews, and newly opened private archives. Aldous (The Lion and the Unicorn), professor of British history and literature at Bard, reveals the dynamics between the leaders who ushered in the collapse of the cold war. He presents a “complex, often fractious” and competitive relationship from 1981 through the heated disputes between the two leaders over the Falkland conflict, nuclear arms, and Soviet strategies. Aldous says that while Reagan’s style was anecdotal and without frills, Thatcher’s leadership tone was “policy-driven, analytical,” and very confrontational. “It all worked,” Thatcher once said, “because he was more afraid of me than I was of him.” Yet Thatcher feared Reagan’s willingness to engage in unilateral military actions, such as invading Grenada and retaliating after the attack on American barracks in Lebanon. Aldous shows the leaders navigating on a high wire in a hothouse political climate, agreeing to disagree while never exposing the other to ridicule. This is excellent revisionist history, giving another slant to the interaction of two political icons on the world stage. 8 pages of photos. Agent: Georgina Capel at Capel and Land

January 1, 2012
A historian charts the ups, downs, and in-betweens of a transatlantic partnership that defined an era. The just-released biopic starring Meryl Streep is likely to spark renewed interest in the whip-smart, hectoring and humorless Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first woman prime minister. No small part of her legacy was the relationship with her philosophical, transatlantic counterpart, the big-picture, affable Ronald Reagan. Partners in helping to end the Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher were always careful publicly to paper over differences, to appear united, to demonstrate that the "Special Relationship" between Britain and America remained unshakeable. But during the eight years their tenures overlapped, there were frequent, occasionally sharp differences between these two different personalities who seemingly shared only two traits: deep conservative conviction and an absolute devotion to their nation's interest as they understood it. Although Reagan's senior in service on the world stage, Thatcher was acutely conscious of her country's inferior power position. Accordingly, she set out early to court the American president. Relying for color on declassified documents, interviews, oral histories and the published accounts of many observers, Aldous (British History and Literature/Bard Col.; The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli, 2007, etc.) revisits the two tangling over supplying technology for Soviet construction of the Siberian gas pipeline, over arms sales and control and over nuclear weapons and Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan disappointed Thatcher by his less-than-full-throated support for her Falklands war; she responded with lukewarm enthusiasm for his Grenada invasion. They disagreed over policy in Lebanon and Libya, and they clashed over how best to deal with Gorbachev. Throughout, Aldous carefully and persuasively demonstrates the elaborate care each took to "handle" the other, precautions unnecessary had the relationship been as close as publicly portrayed. A revealing look at the political marriage of two titans, who, like Roosevelt and Churchill, will be forever linked in history.

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February 1, 2012
Aldous, a historian of nineteenth-century British leaders William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli (The Lion and the Unicorn, 2007), capitalizes on records of the interactions of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He finds that the archives belie the bonhomie thought to have prevailed between the two conservative leaders and reveal many disagreements during the years (198189) they were simultaneously in power. Raising contretemps as they cropped up (the Falklands War of 1982, the 1983 invasion of Grenada), Aldous places them against the backdrop of the principal foreign-affairs theme of the time, the Cold War and the policies adopted toward the new leader of the Soviet Union. The enlivening aspects of Aldous' accountprincipally consisting of the contrast between Thatcher's emphatic, lecturing manner of speaking and Reagan's more jovial, anecdotal banterillustrate the influence of personalities on national interests, with Aldous concluding, la Palmerston ( Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests ), that their countries' national interests tended to trump Reagan's and Thatcher's personal and political affinities. An interesting revisionist history, Aldous' study should attract the foreign-policy audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)