Three days in Moscow Ronald Reagan and the fall of the Soviet empire

Baier (Three Days in January), chief political anchor for Fox News, tenders a nostalgic account of the Reagan era and the end of the Cold War. Lauding the former president's "iron-fisted, velvet-gloved approach" to U.S.-Soviet relations while de-emphasizing the more complex forces at play in the late 1980s, he portrays Ronald Reagan as a hero for whom turning "the evil empire" onto a path of democracy was a life mission. He recounts the Reagans' first visit to Moscow in 1988 and the couple's unscripted and nearly disastrous meet-the-people stroll, revels in Reagan's anti-Communist one-liners, and asserts the president was "a far more complex human being than his critics gave him credit for." Baier's account of the tense arms negotiations and numerous summits that defined the era differs dramatically from other recent literature, in which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is given the more pivotal role. Baier also attributes the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to a speech Reagan gave more than a year earlier. Readers who hold Reagan in high regard will likely appreciate Baier's burnishing of the myths surrounding him, but those interested in a rigorous historical investigation will be disappointed. Agency: Folio Literary Management. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Conservatives lionize former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. Baier (chief political anchor, Fox News) and cowriter Whitney conform to this convention while skirting the thickest of the lacquer with which Reaganites coat their hero. As in 2017's Three Days in January, their superior biography of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Baier and Whitney take a single crucial event in their subject's life-in this case, Reagan's visit to Moscow in 1988-and use it to illuminate the character of an American president. The authors are happily pro-Reagan, downplaying the administration's less-than-stellar situations, such as the Iran-Contra scandal. They spout hyperbole, titling one section "Reagan's destiny" and describing 1980s U.S.-Soviet relations as the "endgame of a decades-long battle for the future of civilization." They indulge in glittering generalities and weasel words, including phrases such as "many judged that...." On the other hand, they capture Reagan's fraught but mutually warm relationship with Soviet reformist premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and they convey a good sense of Reagan's sunny yet aloof personality and leadership style. Verdict Fans of Ronald Reagan and Fox News will relish this book; other readers will prefer H.W. Brands's Reagan: The Life for a more grounded portrait.-Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Fox News anchor Baier (Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission, 2017, etc.) makes a cheerful case for Ronald Reagan's single-handedly talking the Soviets out of being communists.Reagan liked to be thought of as a political outsider, but "he wasn't really." He had governing experience as the two-term chief executive of California and a network of supporters within the federal government, and he "had evolved as a public persona who could articulate the issues of the day." After a difficult period of folded-arm posturing back and forth between his White House and the Kremlin, with a few results hard-won at the arms-reduction talks in Reykjavik, Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, developed something of a working relationship by which long-closed doors opened up. One of them came in the form of an invitation to Reagan to speak to an audience at Moscow State University; in the speech he delivered on May 31, 1988, he spoke hopefully, as was his wont, of new possibilities: "Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists." Baier's three-days narrative trope doesn't stand up to close examination, and his suggestion that the Iron Curtain began to rust away the minute Reagan stepped off the podium is a little too pat; he sometimes seems to forget that, after all, Gorbachev was doing his part to end the Cold War, too. To his credit, the author does note the considerable amount of shuttle diplomacy that extended from Reagan's second term into the incoming administration of George H.W. Bush, a skilled player on the international stage. Still, a more evenhanded and altogether better account can be found in Richard Reeves' President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (2005) and H.W. Brands'Reagan: The Life (2015).Popular history in a triumphant mode, of interest largely to Reagan partisans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.