Jason Saltoun-Ebin's monograph The Reagan Files 2025: The First Term takes readers inside the White House to experience what it was like to be in the room as President Reagan and his senior advisers struggled to craft a foreign policy that would lead the United States to victory in the decades long Cold War.
Based on over two decades of research at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Saltoun-Ebin’s efforts through extensive use of the Presidential Records Act, the Freedom of Information Act and Mandatory Declassification Review requests dating back over twenty years, presents a Reagan Administration that genuinely feared a world-wide communist revolution. For Ronald Reagan, a man who lived through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Korean and Vietnam Wars and personally experienced the threat of communism in his days as President of the Screen Actors Guild, his crusade to defeat the Soviet Union would become nothing less than the raison d’être of his presidency.
Saltoun-Ebin’s study of Reagan’s first term predominantly relies on recently declassified memorandums of conversation between President Reagan and world leaders like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Egyptian leaders Anwar Sadat & Hosni Mubarak, French President Francois Mitterrand, Chinese Premier Zhao, Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi, Japanese Prime Ministers Suzuki and Nakasone, Jordan’s King Hussein, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, West German Chancellor Kohl, & Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, to name just a few. In between these tête-à-tête’s Reagan would use his National Security Council and more senior group, the National Security Planning Group, to assist him as he prepared to persuade world leaders that the path out of the Cold War started in the Reagan White House.
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