I'm warning of an eradication of that of the American memory, that it could result ultimately in an erosion of the American student. From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot com. This is the power Line Show with your host Steve Hayward. Well, Hi everybody, and happy holidays. And it pleases me today to offer this bonus episode a conversation I had some months ago
now with Will Imboden. Will is the author of a terrific book I reviewed a year ago in the Washington Freebeacon on Ronald Reagan, called The Peacemaker Ronald
Reagan, the Cold War and the World on the Brink. And as I said in my review, I didn't know that there was much new to be said about the subject until I read Will's book, and he dedicated himself to going through the most recently released material in the archives at the Reagan Library and found lots of things that was not available to me fifteen twenty years ago when
I was working on my own Reagan books. But beyond that, Will is an important and interesting person because, in addition to having worked on Capitol Hill and at the National Security Council under President Bush, he was for a long time the director of the Clement Center for National Security Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and most recently he has become the professor and director of
the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. Now there are a number of these initiatives at various universities around the country, including Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina coming soon, where legislatures essentially have been saying, you know, we need to do a better job of civic education. We need to offer an alternative to students from the narrow, conformist and often
mediocre and bland consensus of academic liberalism. I guess you might say, and so Will is brand new on the job, but he has great ambitions to build out the program, and so after talking about Reagan, we spent a few minutes talking about his plans for the Hamilton Center and the higher education scene generally. Now, needless to say, this conversation took place before the events of October seven up ended college campuses in the academic world everywhere, but that
makes his enterprise all the more important. And so, without further ado, here is Will M. Boden. Will I am delighted to sit down to talk to you about your book The Peacemaker, and also a couple other things that are on my mind. And let me start off this way. You know, I didn't think there was anything new for me to know about the
essentials of the Reagan Cold War story. I mean, of course there's new information and all the rest, and because I finished my work more than fifteen years ago, and so you know, I thought, well, it'll be a good book from Will, but I'm not sure to learn anything new. And I was completely wrong about that. Not only is there really fascinating new information, but really original and new and important insights into the story. So I think, you know, most listeners will know the basic story, or
maybe not completely. But I want to pick pick on home in on three different things that and then one or two stray things. I'll mention all three at the top, and then we'll take them one at a time. The first is how much more active Reagan was in formulating the Grand Strategy to use that phrase. I mean, I always knew that that was there, but more levels of detail than I had appreciated myself. The second one was I had totally missed the importance of Japan and Reagan's focus on Asia in general.
I knew a bit about some of the trade frictions and all the rest of that, but I didn't realize the extent that they really understood the importance of Asia. Think that's brand new in your book. And the third thing is late in your book is the importance of Reagan's religious faith in shaping his views. Some people have mentioned that before, but I think you've integrated that in
a way that is again new and carefully done and quite incisive. So let's start at the top and let me sort of start the question over again by saying, sorry, I'm going to listeners. I'm going to go on too long. Were there any surprises along the way? Were there anything that changed your thinking about what the storyline is about your understanding of Reagan that way?
Well, no, Steve, and I will I will answer that directly, but first I got to buy my own preface say it's a real honor to be here, but also thank you because you are such a great help to me, especially early on when I was just starting this project of thinking it through, to suggesting people to interview, giving me some thematic ideas. You're the one who turned me on to her Meyer, vice chair of the NICK
and some of his really important work. So anyway, so thank you, And of course I've benefited tremendously from your two volume magisterial Age of Reagan treatment. So anyway, I'd be a bad guest if I didn't give that plug
to your question. Yeah, in a lot of ways, we hadn't pre orchestrated this, but those three themes that you just highlighted were three of the biggest surprises or revelations to me. You know, I went into the project with, you know, ten years ago, now, I guess, with a generally favorable assessment of Reagan as a foreign policy president, but not knowing a lot of details. Right, most of my previous work had been on the early Cold War Truman and Eisenhower, and then of course time as a
practitioner of the nine to eleven era. So this I was in some ways taking a fresh look at the Reagan era in the nineteen eighties. And yeah, I was surprised at how much more not just personally involved, but kind
of the personal orchestrator he was of his overall grand strategy. He's not just getting ideas from other people and saying yes to them and giving a nice speech about it, right, I mean, and this is where for his historians were so dependent on using archival documents, you know, the original records of the Reagan administration, and many of those had only been declassified in the last
ten fifteen years. So I was one of the first scholars, since we're doing this after Reagan Library, actually able to come here to the library and read things like the transcript of Reagan's meetings with heads of state or the transcripts
of Reagan's National Security Council meetings. Let me interrupt on that point that, I mean, that's one thing that really had me not raising my eyebrows and chock, but like to say, wow, therese accounts of NSC meetings where Reagan is really i might say, running the meeting and really saying here's what I think, and utterly original, utterly different, completely unknown to me, how active and deliberate and sort of driving that process anyway, continue, yeah,
exactly so, and so reading those in tandem with you know, I read every word of every page of his diaries, you know, obviously the two volume absolutely fascinating connection. And so the interior Reagan worldview and Cold War strategies came out a lot more, as well as things like, you know, reading memos that some of his key staff, whether it's Bill Clark or Dick Pipes, are writing, and then seeing Reagan's notes to them back too. You know, he doesn't write extensive notes in all those, but on
enough of them. You see he's tracking this carefully, he's editing it, he's putting his ideas in. He clearly has much more of a strategic blueprint in the Cold War, whether it's on insights on Soviet vulnerabilities or the need for more pressure on the defense and economic and ideological fronts, but also his early on hopes to negotiate with the Soviets, just to negotiate from a position of strength after having you know, kind of really really cornered them, and
so all that was new to me. Can I ask a particular question about one document, and that was the to me famous NSDD seventy five, That was that you know, what's our grand strategy the Soviet going forward? And I think that's a really key document. My particular question is it's long been reported, well, I was heard fifteen twenty years ago. Is that Reagan edited the final version, and the story is he toned down certain things, and I think Pipes wanted And so do you have any of the earlier raw
drafts. Do we know specifically now what it was he toned down or is that still behind a veil? Yeah, so there's and I'm going to be doing some of this from memory since it's a few years ago that I looked really closely at that one and I just summarized in the book. But it
is a fascinating story. So again for your listeners, who may make me oliver with the background, Dick Pipes was an eminent Harvard professor, a great historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, one of the very few conservatives on the Harvard faculty, and Reagan hired him as the first Senior Director for Soviet Affairs on the NSC staff. So Pipes is coming in from academia as this
hawkish academic to advice Reagan started in nineteen eighty one. So the very first draft of what became NSDD seventy five was a seventy five page single space paper that Pipes writes for Reagan. Okay, so yeah, now, Reagan, as you and I know, is much more of a reader than he was given credit for. But no president's going to read a seventy five page memo, right, and so Jimmy Carter exatly okay, which is part of the
problem. RS yeah and so and so Pipes sends that to Dick Allen, the National Security Advisor, to send into to Reagan and analysis, you got to tone this down. I mean, not that it's too strong, it's just too long, right, you know, I don't have time to read it. So Pipes is, you know, very irked at this. So then Pipes edits it down to I'll put this in air quotes for your listeners, you know, a short twenty five page memo, which he actually then
does. Reagan does read and you can see Reagan's writings on it, and it and it's it's it's a much more fleshed out version of what becomes NSDD seventy five of challenging the Soviet system, pressure in it on on its vulnerabilities. The one area where there's a little bit of difference is Pipes was much more skeptical of any negotiations with the Soviets, and Reagan early on wanted to
negotiate with them. He just wanted to do from a position of strength, and so again doing this from memory, that's where some of Reagan's edits were, but he had Pipes come up with this really interesting formulation, which you can see in the final document. Part of the pressure is to pressure the Soviet system to strengthen its reformist elements and to produce a reformist leader. And so this was another big insight for me. You know, there's this endless
debate about who deserves more credit, Reagan or Gorbachev. They're both essential, obviously, but one of the themes of my book is for the first four years of his presidency, Reagan has a deliberate strategy to pressure the Soviet system to produce a reformist leader. And so that's why he recognizes Gorbachev when he comes along. And again that was one of the things that came out of
that interplay between him and him and Pipes. Yeah, I remember two things that come back to mind now is somewhere in the middle it says, I don't know, I don't have this quite right, but negotiations on the basis of strict reciprocity, right. And then at the very end, the very last paragraph says, this is a strategy for the long term now here on really paraphrasing, it's going to be controversial. There's going to be a lot
of pushback. We're going to be told we need to go back to the old daytontis ways, that's not how it's phrased, like I say, But there's a recognition that this is bold and new and we're going way out there. Yeah. Yeah, And that's where you know, the timing matters too, because Pipes stays on the NSC staff through December of eighty two, so he's there for Bill Bill Clark's first year as National Security Advisor, and then he's he wants to go back to academic. You know, I've gotten my
draft done. And then Jack Mattlock comes in to succeed him. And Mattlock, who is you know, very capable and important and I think the right person at the right time, but he's a not quite as hard line as as Pipes is. And so Mattlock wants to soften and tweak the NSDT seventy five a little bit, and he does in a few places, but Reagan says, no, Pipes and I agreed to this, and I want this
is the basic framework. So let's not you know, we're not going to rewrite it to turn it into a you know, a Ford Area Daytononic strategy, right right, you know. I of course, one of the things that's one might say is well, these are classified documents for a long time. True, as was NSC sixty eight. And you know, when I have to try and talk about the Cold War very briefly the students or anybody else, I always say, look at these two documents. They were both
classified NSC sixty eight. It's Paul Nitza, writes Paul Nitza, who's still around in nineteen eighty two. Yeah, this is amazing, right, And then nsd D they changed the acronyms. Is also the similar idea, here's our grand strategy. And I always say what people say, well, what
how do you understand these things? And I always say, this is the senior reaches of the government talking to itself because they want to get clear in their heads and keep guidance for all the other people who have to try and carry these things out. Here's what we're about. And we underestimate the importance of even in the classified document of the government sitting down our top leaders and saying what are we all about? What what are we trying to do here?
Instead of just inheriting, you know, vague path dependent policies. That okay, Well, on the second one, which was I thought, wow, this is really interesting. I had never perceived this or thought about it. It was Reagan and his team realizing the importance of Japan as part of
their strategy of confronting the Soviet Union. But of course I thought layered us in very well, this had a domestic side to it, right, We're having all the controversy about our trade deficit with Japan and the auto industry and quotas on their cars and this and this, and so I thought I hadn't really ever thought it through about how Reagan and I think you said, pretty very successfully balanced domestic policy pressures while also enlisting Japan as such a key ally
when that both sides of that could have gone badly wrong. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, again, this is another one of these revelations for me in the course of the research. I didn't start the book project looking for that, right, but the evidence was just overwhelming and it just had a few themes to highlight there for our listeners. It is one. This shows what a real different it's Reagan made as a leader because he inherited a framework
in American strategy, which is that China is the key to Asia. And that's what his three predecessors, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you know, Democrats and Republicans, had done, and so they were just trying to shunt Japan to the sidelines. And so Reagan inherits this framework of China is the key to Asia. And you know, China at the time was somewhat helpful encountering the Soviet So this is it's not as terribly wrong headed a policy
as we might as he might think today. But Reagan thought this is his way out of whack. Japan was at the time the only democracy in Asia. They were, you know, the world's second or third largest economy, depending how you crunched the numbers. They're an American treaty ally, and he thought, this is nuts. Why we would be favoring communists China over free Japan. And this is where we also need to appreciate and you probe this
in your great book on him. He'd been the governor California for two terms. California is a Pacific state, right. So when Reagan, you know, during his eight years in Sacramento, when he's when he's you know, looking across the position that he sees Japan as a really important ally and the
key to the future. He's not only an Atlanticist, so what he but he inherits this challenge of you know, most American foreign policy makers want to privilege China, and meanwhile, most Americans don't care for Japan because they're blaming it for our lost manufacturing jobs. Right. And so Reagan executes this transformation if he takes the US Japan relationship from primarily this economic rivalry and he turns it really into a strategic partnership, and that you know, that's not just
happy talk. I'll give it just a couple of tangible examples. He persuades Japan to triple its defense spending in eight years, triple it right in absolute dollars, and that puts you know, Japan is just across the sea from the Soviet Union there, so that puts tremendous pressure on the Soviets and there far east. So Reagan essentially gets Japan to open up an entire new front in the Cold War. You know, it's not just across the Iron Curtain.
This drives the Soviets crazy when when Reagan, when Gorbachev meets with Nakasani's he's braided And why are you so close to Americans? Why do you listen to that guy? Reagan drive some nuts. Then Japan, of course, as a technological powerhouse, also provides us some key research helpon SDI and some of our defense modernization too, so we get real benefits out of the Japan partnership. Interesting. Yeah, and again I wasn't looking for that, but
it's just it's there abundantly in the newly declassified doctor. Yeah, but I think you know, all the people writing about strategy in the eighties or Strobe, Talbot, whoever you want to pick, that none of them seemed to pick up on this that I recall, or that I had noticed in my own review of things. All right, now. The third one was everyone knows that Reagan was a godly man, let's put it that way, and
his faith was important to him. But of course there's always the Reagan's the reserved you know, the fact that Reagan held a lot of things closely, and so I think you bring out here and there not I don't I read your book months ago. Now I don't remember quite exactly how prominently, but it was clear to you and that his religious faith was essential, oh yeah,
to his thinking through this problem. Yeah. And again another one of these things that I wasn't really looking for, but the evidence was just overwhelming. And I do want to give credit here. Paul Kengor at Grove City College has done a couple of actually a number of great books on Reagan, but a couple in particular on Reagan's Christian faith. And I had read those and so that that had told me, Okay, there's there's definitely something here,
but I wasn't connecting it to the broader Cold War story. But the key sources for me on this again Reagan's diaries, which he when he was writing those every night faithfully as president, he wasn't planning for them to be published, right, so that he's not thinking about this as the bestseller. And so that's where you can really see the private, the private Reagan and
his faith is really clear there. I mean, just you know, one example I cite in the book, right after the assassination attempt, as he's lying there on the hospital bed at GW Hospital, about to go under. You know, he's this close to death, and and he praised that God will forgive John Hinckley Junior, the dranged, you know, a man who had just try to kill him. And Reagan says, I realized, I can't pray that God will heal me if I'm harboring hatred in my heart towards
the man he tried to kill me. And aren't we all God's lost sheep? Right? So this is not political posturing for the evangelical votes, right, This is I think, an intensely personal, intensely sincere sentiment. The other one that really came out fast forwarding is Reagan's some it means with Gorbachev, especially the last one. He spends a lot of it trying to persuade
Gorbachev to believe in God. Okay, again, this is not your typical summer tree, right, This is not you know, typical arms control negotiations. And this is just Reagan's genuine worry for Gorbachev's soul. He thought, this guy's an atheist, he's missing out on the real source of transcendent internal meaning in life. And I because I care about him as a person, even if I detest the system he represents. I want to persuade him and believe in God. Right, So this is you know, you can't chalk
this up just to political expediency or centenceism. There's other examples like that in the book, but you know, I remember one one really startlingly personal aspect that conversation. And I don't remember if Reagan brought it up or if Garbachah brought it up to put Reagan on defensive, but it comes up that, you know, Ron Reagan is not a junior, but Reagan's son was an
atheist. Yeah, Reagan himself present, Reagan brings that up. Yeah, And that's again where it's a very intensely personal, revelatory thing to share with a Soviet leader. Yeah, with anyone. Yeah, especially you know, your sadness of your own son being an atheist and right, and Reagan you know, speaks mournfully about that and says he's, you know, trying to
persuade his son to believe in God and this. You know, I'm not there in the room, but I'm reading the transcript, and you can see that Gorbachev has kind of taken aback by this and then kind of touched by it. He I don't think he's persuaded. I don't see any evidence Gorbite ever, you know, became a Christian necessarily. But but again that shows you something about Reagan. But finally, to connect it to the Cold War strategy. This is also one reason where Reagan hated Soviet communism. It's not
just that it's a command economy. It's not just that it's a totalitarian uh you know, one party rule. It's that it's atheistic and that it would not let Jews go to synagogue or Christians go to you know, do Bible study or go to church. And he just thought that that was so iniquitous but also a sign of its vulnerability, like what kind of barbaric system won't even lets people worship God? Right? Right? So let me do one uh one, not stray voltage exactly, but here and there in your book
several places. I think I wasn't counting, but I did take note to the fact that you were. I'm not sure critical or regretful is the right term to use, the fact that you thought Reagan and his team were too
tolerant. First of all, human rights was such an important thing for him, and yet we had to tolerate or were too tolerant of authoritarian regimes with dreadful human rights records that could have been Argentina and nty one Asian regimes, and and I mean the explanation for that would always be the real politique, right I think? And so what what are your I'm not sure you sort of declared inclusion or and a narrative. It doesn't quite work to do that.
So I'll put it this way a little bluntly. What's your point here? Is there something way you think they could ever should have done it differently? Or were they just simply too single mindly focused on the Soviet Union and thinking perhaps too one dimensionally that we solve that problem, then the rest of this starts to change. I don't know. Yeah, no, this is a very good question, and I'll share some further thoughts on that since I
sprinkles. You're right, I sprinkled some of those things out of the book, but I just didn't have time or space to fully develop it. And let me just first say that my standard with writing the book was I tried to ask myself what were the feasible available options at the time, right, So I'm not trying to do I hope it doesn't come across as armchair quarterbacking. You know, I write as a former policy maker myself. Right, sure we can point out in hindsight, would you wish you would done some
but what were the available options at the time. And so I start actually with some real empathy for the challenge Reagan and inherited, which is that you know, most recently in nineteen seventy nine the Iranian Revolution and then the Sandinista Revolution Nicaragua, we had seen how there are worse things than a thuggish right wing autocrat, which is a radical revolutionary regime, whether it's you know,
radical Islamic revolutionaries in Iran or communist in the case of Nicaragua. And so Reagan and Jeane Kirkpatrick I think had very good grounds to criticize the Carter administration for this double standard, like you'd give the Soviets a pass on their barbaric oppression, but you're beating up on our friends and who are not great, but at least they're anti communist. And there is a worse alternative, and
we've seen that in the cases of Iran in Nicaragua. So I start with some real sympathy there, like they inherit a difficult hand, and when you look at the feasible options, it seems like it's either right wing dictatorship or communist dictatorship, and they're both bad, but communist is worse. I'm fully
on board with that. Where I am a little more critical, however, and this is where I think I can point to the Reagan record to vindicate this is there was developing a third way option of transitioning to democracy, that it didn't have to be a choice between right wing or or communist dictatorship.
And Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams they recognize this pretty early on, and by nineteen eighty two, especially with the Westminster Address, but also the Salador in elections, Reagan himself is starting to move more and think, actually, maybe there is a way that we can nudge these right wing military dictatorships, not such communism. We don't want that, that's the worst, you know, possible outcome, but nudge them towards democracy. And some of it's pragmatism.
The Falkland's invasion is a big deal. When the Argentine you know, military hunter, you know, he realized when they invade the Falklands, he realized,
Okay, these right wing dictatorships. They may be anti communists, but they're also prone to doing stupid things like invade your friend's allies, you know, eyelids, right, It's okay, And of course they then fall, and so he starts seeing actually in some of these governments there is a hunger among a lot of the people, you know, the student demonstrators of South
Korea, for democracy. And so the challenge he faces is how can you know, he and his administration nudge them towards democracy without letting them, you know, go the revolutionary path into communism. And that's where they do have some amazingly successful policies. Right So Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, especially by the second term, they
all do undergo peaceful democratic transitions. And so so I'm where I'm more critical of Reagan is not recognizing that earlier on he gets hit by eighty two eighty three, but that was after supporting some pretty thuggish stuff in eighty one. But I hope readers will hear from me that I have some sympathy for the hard choices they faced. I just think that there was that option to be a little more morally and strategically consistent early on. But these are hard choices.
Well, that's why I said, I couldn't decide whether to characterize your treatment of that as critical or regretful. Yeah, which is probably a little more regretful. Okay. Yeah, And and again, like I said, making the allowance of my standard is what seemed to be the available options at the time. And you know they even in eighty one, I think they didn't have some options to start, not withdrawing all support but rather using the
support is leverage. It's actually harder to promote democracy and human rights with your allies than with your adversaries, right, because there's a lot more at state. You don't want to lose the ally entirely, whereas you know you're not friends with you know, the East Germans or the Soviets. You could beat them up all you want, and it writes it's not going to cost much.
Yeah, I mean in detail about Argentine. I can't remember it's in your book, but I know it's a lot of other treatments about the whole Central America. SOCA is. We were using Argentina in nineteen eighty one as our sort of base for training the contra. Yes, and so that all ended with the Foles, Yeah, yeah, a big problem for okay. Yeah. And then the other one about the Asia story again is listening to here earlier to speak about an agenda for research, is you know about South
Korea? I mean, you know, and Reagan comes to office. One of his acts is what writing or even calling whoever is the general is running South Korea saying don't execute Kim day John Yeah, yeah, it was General Chun Yeah. And Reagan's has don't execute Kim je jung. Right. But then you know, you think about, well, you know, the I don't remember the exact timeline history of South Korea, but they're always having these
military governments while we have thirty thousand troops sitting there. Yeah, what an amazing practical problem we faced. Oh yeah, I know. And the very real threat of another invasion from the North too, I mean, yeah, that's you know, the fact that it didn't happen doesn't mean it wasn't a real, real possibility. Ye. And of course it's in a rough neighborhood because North Korea, you know, look at a map is bordering the Soviet Union at the time too. I mean, so it was. It was
a real challenge. But what Reagan and Schultz, even Vice President Bush I'll give him some credit for realized was the military dictorship in South Korea was becoming pretty brittle. That was more and more of these student protests and just the general loss of popular support. And of course the South Korean economic miracle had created this growing middle class who wanted a little more you know, say in
their political lives as they in their economic lives. And so the Reagan team realized that this may not be sustainable and had we may be facing another you know, eron type revolution here, and so we need to nudge them. We needed to tell Chun, look, you know, you need to peacefully step aside and allow allow transition to democracy, because we're not confident in your
continued ability to be the strong man anti communist. Wilier's been so and then oh sorry, and then Reagan had no hesitation and what was nineteen eighty six of well sending Paul Laxolt. But the point is to send the message to Marcos that it was time to go. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And again that's another one where he saw he's losing popular support and you realize, Okay, if we continue to just unconditionally embrace Marcos, he may get ousted
anyway. And there was a communist insurgency in the field Pines at the time. There's a real worry that and you know Vietnam and Goon communists is ten years earlier, right that this is a real fear. And so both on moral and strategic grounds, he realizes, okay, we need to pull that support for Marcos, and you know allowed and of course they already had the elections to elect Corea Kino with people power, which you know Marcos was trying
to defy. By the way, going back to twenty your early questions, this is where Nakasni and Japan were quietly helpful, where Nakasni sent a message to Marcos, quietly saying, look, I know we Japan have supported you before, but it's time for democracy, and we don't want to be the only democracy in the region anymore. You know, don't don't try to play us Japan off against the United States. We're not going to support you as
much either. And so so this is where the interlocking pieces of Reagan's support for allies and his freedom strategy kind of come together, right right, So let me make this last word about the book before going on to a second completely different subject. Listeners, you all need to get the peacemaker and read it. I'll just stop there. I do want to talk about a completely
different subject. That's one that's very high on my mind these days. You are just now heading off to Florida to run the Is it called the Hamilton Center? Yes, so it's the University of Florida. Yeah, we'll take it from the top and the sort of you know, give me your elevator pitch or however you like to describe this enterprise to the wider world. Sure,
well, thank you. I'm very excited for this, although I need to, you know, give the big caveat here to your listeners that the day we're recording this, I've now been in the job in Florida for four days, I think. Okay, so I'm working in a temporary office there. I'm still literally figuring out how to unlock my door and turn on the lights. Okay, so I'm any potential donors out there, Sorry, this
is not a fully forged pitch yet. Okay, But that said, the reason I agreed to make this move, and I'm excited to do this. So the full title is the Alexander Hamilton for Classical and Civic Education, and it was an initiative of the University of Florida Board of Regents and then the state legislature and the governor. There essentially an effort to recover classical liberalism and more traditional humanities and social sciences education. So it's a center right now,
but we have faculty lines. We're going to be offering classes and hopefully building out a fairly robust academic program. I'll certainly be looking to hire a number of new faculty, so we'll be teaching in the great books, We'll be trying to do some multidisciplinary liberal arts degrees. We'll do hopefully something on history
and state craft, something on politics, philosophy, and economics. And to like I said, to really recover I shouldn't say recover, but at least restore the teaching of Western civilization and those values in the broader higher education landscape. So we want to stand for civility, civil discourse, but sort of reconnecting the traditional canon of classical liberalism, if you will, to the twenty
first century research university and hopefully bring some viewpoint diversity. Yeah, you know, open with a joke, is you want to restore the old great books in Western civilization, like it's a good thing. I mean that, I mean caricature here, but only a little bit. I mean, we're now seeing a lot of this happen around the country very rapidly Tennessee, North Carolina,
Ohio. And the last month State was a decade ago now. And the idea is, I mean, it's a complicated as you know, having spent all this time at the University of Texas and elsewhere, it's a complicated story about how the ideological skew happened in universities and even a lot of you know, and I've been, as I put in an inmate at Berkeley out for a while. And why am I there, Well, it's because even a lot of liberals and people pretty far the left say, yeah, something's
got a balance, we don't quite know how to fix it. And there's a shortage actually of conservative or even sort of slightly center right academics out there. Has become a negative feedback loop. It's all kinds of and I actually think also that something that's less perceived is how certain methodological fads, fads maybe is a pejorative term, but certain methodological emphasies and disciplines that have risen over
the decades. They're not intentionally ideological, but they've sort of reinforced it that way. Right. It's something in the case in my own field of history exactly. Oh, history, political science is I think way overweight in the empiricism. Yeah, the cult of the quantitative exactly. I mean what people, what people Berkeley say is you can't study what you can't measure, and
I think that's just completely wrong. Yeah. I mean I listen to these regression models and they're often useful and interesting, and I actually do teach you something. But that can't that's too limited in there. Okay. And by the way, most conservatives I know don't want to do that very much. Who just wants to do regression models? Right, yeah, you know the lake James Q. Wilson said, I only did one regression analysis in my
life, and one was enough. Okay. So, buts idea is, rather than you know, beat on departments said, oh, you're just a bunch of crazy leftists or something like that, this model looks promising, it's let's have competition. Yeah, yeah, and this is and you know, look, University of Florida has I don't know the exact number, maybe thirty four to thirty five thousand undergrads, and like, you know, one of
the largest, you know, state universities in the country. I just see our job as providing them some choice, right, I mean, we want to give those undergrads, especially as many options as we can, as well as you know the other departments can and just and they can, they can pick and choose and just you know, they're gonna be investing in so much money and time and their education, and we want to give them that and a lot of ways. You know. Because you brought up the politics of
this, I kind of hope that we can depoliticize things, right. I mean, you know, this is not to push any particular ideological agenda. I do share concerns that a number of other won't speak about UF because I'm so new there. But I've seen the other universities how politicized the humanity have become, you know. So I'm not going to be asking any faculty that we look to hire how they vote, or how any students how they vote.
We're just gonna be saying we stand for a certain set of kind of the the older values of a classical liberal education, of reading core text carefully, of taking ideas seriously, of really exposing our students to a broad range of viewpoint and that will certainly include conservative viewpoints, but that won't be the only one, and just kind of recovering the more traditional model of what we
all think and hope a university can be. Right, Well, let me sort of press on you a little bit on the substance of the matter. By the way, I'm in heated agreement about my idea, is an ideal faculty, ideal department would be sort of fifty to fifty or maybe thirty three thirty three with somebody in the middle, right, Yeah, and that's the political spectrum. Yeah, the political spectrum, right. And the other thing
data point. I know you've heard this as much as I have. You ask around college administrators and faculty, and they say, one of our big problems in this country is civic education has just gone down the drain. Students don't know, you know, separation of powers or you know, the Bill of Rights and and and they say, so we've got to rebuild civic education. And I always sort of say, okay, I don't think anybody would disagree with that. But there is a problem when so many of the in
here it will be a little ideological for just a second. Is when the dominant teaching is, yeah, but it was all bad. You know, the country was found in by slaveholders. True. And in other words, a lot of the civic construction these days is just very negative. It's not to say criticisms aren't valid and shouldn't be dealt with directly. But then the other part of that, and you raise it, is when you say,
read the old books in a traditional way, take their ideas seriously. I think a lot of the problem these days is not so much necessarily a leftist bias. It's what we political philosophers call historicism. It's assuming that we don't really have that much to learn from an old book, and you read, say John Locke, just to pick on him because maybe it's a historical curiosity.
In other words, the old way of doing things was to start with the premise that maybe they have some insight that's true always and everywhere, and if it's wrong, let's figure out why it's wrong. And if it's parts of its right, let's sort of see how it still works. That's a difference in disposition of how you actually think about the world. And so, by the way, you don't necessarily have to be a leftist to be a historicist. I think there are right wing historicism and I argue with them a
lot. Yeah, anyway, sorry, that was a little speech. I don't know if you want to grab hold of any of that or no. I'll just yeah again, I'll give an overall a strong affirmation and agreement there is you know, given that obviously part of our mandate with the Hamilton Center is going to be uh you know, some some dimension of civics education. Uh. Yeah, we want to tell the whole American story. Now, I happen to think that the whole American story is overall a very good story,
right. Some of that whole story is, you know, taking our countries founders on their own terms, going back to what we were talking about with Reagan, like what did the world look like to them at the time, what were the available range of options. There's obviously some you know, very stortid, very very sordid and troubling aspects of our past, such as you know, slavery being the cardinal one. But let's look at some of the early debates over slavery, and let's look at some of the voices against
it as well. And then let's look at the values and principles hardwired into the American Founding that to create the basis to eventually abolish slavery, right, right too, And let's let's understand uh uh, let's understand those as well, rather than just merely sitting here in the twenty first century imposing our retrospective judgments on you know, those you know, benighted founders and everyone else,
right, yeah, I mean you probably know this. One of the best, I think best explanations of the Founding debates on slavery, and one of the best critiques of the way it's gone off the rails recently is by Sean Malance. Oh yeah, who's otherwise a pretty far left historian and certainly a
Reagan haters maybe the little strong, but not much. And you know, so if your listeners, he's a very eminent historian at Princeton University, Sean writes, yeah, yeah, yeah, well he has, but he's done a lot to really, I think, debunk the distortions of the sixteen nineteen project in particular, right, yeah, exactly, So that's why it doesn't have to be strictly a left right thing. Yeah, well, let's end
with this and take it back to Reagan. I think what you're talking about about this enterprise reminds me of the closing passage of his farewell address where he says, right, we have to remember our history, and he mentions particular typical Reagan says, kids need to know what the Doolittle raid was. Now, that's almost forty years ago. Now, a lot of people still alive in and know what that meant nowadays. You know, I mean, I'm
not entirely facetious saying you mentioned the students, now the doctor Doolittle? What are you? You know? What this right? No right? And not to be starky man. Unless someone makes a video game out of it today, it's forgotten, that's right. Yeah. Well, congratulations on the book, Congratulations and great hopes for the Hamilton Center. And thanks very much, well, thank you. Steve has been a privileged to do this. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what
she represents in the long history of the world. Those of us who are over thirty five or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught very directly what it means to be an American, and we absorbed almost in the air a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn't get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood. And I'm the father down the street who fought in Korea,
of the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you can get a sense of patriotism from school, and if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movie celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that too through the mid sixties. But now we're about to enter the nineties and some things have changed. Younger parents aren't sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right
thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven't reinstitutionalized it. We've got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise, and freedom is official and Rare Ricochet join the conversation.