In his excellent book God and Ronald Reagan: A Spiritual Life, historian Paul Kengor shows how the practice of reading others profoundly influenced President Reagan’s view of good and evil, freedom and totalitarianism, democracy and communism. He writes,
The intensity of the Cold War reached a fever pitch by the early 1950s. Fear of Soviet communism and nuclear conflict absorbed Americans, as did reports of Soviet espionage in the U.S. government.
During this period, Ronald Reagan read widely in his effort to comprehend the Soviet situation. Though his views on communism were colored indelibly by his own personal experience, a handful of thinkers were especially influential as he refined his thinking about the Soviet Union during these years… They included Malcolm Muggeridge (whom Reagan described as “brilliant”), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom he greatly admired; Wilhelm Roepke, and Frank Meyer…
However, of all the writers who had an impact on Reagan, the most influential was the former KGB operative turned anti-communist crusader Whittaker Chambers… Indeed, among the most unappreciated aspects of Reagan’s intellectual evolution is the place that Chambers’s memoir, Witness, held in Reagan’s estimation. Four decades after it was published, Reagan kept copies of Witness on his bookshelves at both Rancho del Cielo and his home in Los Angeles. Also on a bookshelf at the ranch is a copy of Odyssey of a Friend, a collection of letters from Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr.
Published at a critical time in the development of Reagan’s thinking about the Cold War and communism, Witness was to Reagan a mesmerizing source of information and affirmation. Though Reagan had been a staunch anti-communist for roughly five years by the time it was published, Chambers’s account offered a wealth of insight that Reagan would draw upon for decades… Witness was the one book that most profoundly shaped his political consciousness as an adult. Countless Reagan associates… confirm that Reagan could recite passages from Witness verbatim, and he drew upon it in speeches throughout his public life – sometimes crossing out lines and inserting long quotations from Chambers’s narrative from memory.
Reading Chambers shaped Reagan’s view of and approach towards communism. How did it impact his rhetoric? We’ll consider that tomorrow.
