The most interesting sections of Nicholas Wapshott’s joint biography of two of the 20th century’s greatest leaders, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage (Sentinel, 2007), involve transcripts of recently declassified letters.
The correspondence proves that Reagan and Thatcher enjoyed a close personal friendship along with their ideological bond. That friendship withstood major disagreements over the Falklands War, the Grenada invasion, and nuclear arms treaty negotiations.
Wapshott also puts the work of the two great leaders in perspective:
When performing at world summits and in negotiations with world leaders, Reagan and Thatcher personified a strong America allied to a strong Britain with a clear and urgent purpose: to change conventional economic thinking in capitalist countries and counter military threats to the West’s hegemony. Both became taunting examples of strong and resolute leadership. The Republican Party found in Reagan’s character a standard by which all pretenders to the White House should be measured, and his ideas remained the orthodoxy by which successive Republican candidates were assessed. None matched Reagan’s genius as a communicator of the conservative message. The two president Bushes who followed Reagan into the White House felt themselves being judged against his example and found wanting. Although Reagan remained a hero among the generation in Eastern Europe that watched the Berlin Wall fall, and with it the final cracking of the Soviet Empire, he was considered a unique figure, beyond emulation. Thatcher, however, did prove to be an inspiration to others. Though she did not become a prophet in her own land ? indeed, she remained something of a pariah whom her successor David Cameron felt the need to disavow ? she remained immensely popular in America and inspired waves of European leaders to follow her example. Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France both enjoyed electoral success by being directly compared to Thatcher, and many countries were left wondering whether they would ever be blessed by electing a Margaret Thatcher figure to liberate them from a poorly run economy, high taxes, and creeping state control.
