Echoing a 2007 book from Nicholas Wapshott (and quoting Wapshott along the way), the latest TIME magazine features Jon Meacham‘s exploration of the political relationship between the late Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The Iron Lady–a nickname that came from the Soviet Union–played a unique role in modern statecraft. A pioneering conservative force in a socialized Britain, she, like Reagan, shifted the terms of political conversation and of public possibility in her nation by challenging the received liberal wisdom of the postwar era. She quickly became a defining feature of the global landscape, an unapologetic, nearly always blunt advocate of freer markets, greater individualism and tougher anticommunism. Her fellow Tory Alan Clark was once asked whether he liked Thatcher. “Like her?” he replied. “She is not there to be liked. She’s a force of nature.”
So she was, along with her transatlantic friend Ronald Reagan. Dismissive of the language and ethos of détente with the Soviets, they were frank about the goal of winning, not merely enduring, what JFK had called the “long twilight struggle” with communism. And for all their ferocious and bracing rhetoric–Thatcher’s delivered in a no-nonsense British way, Reagan’s in the plain-speaking style of the American frontier–they were fundamentally pragmatic. It was Thatcher who first declared that Mikhail Gorbachev was a man with whom she could “do business,” and the Soviet leader’s ensuing partnership with Reagan (and later with George H.W. Bush) resulted in the collapse of the totalitarian system that had seemed a permanent force before Thatcher and Reagan’s joint rise to power in their respective nations.
On the home front, both were attacked as uncaring. Thatcher was dubbed the Milk Snatcher for attempting to reform a free-milk program in British schools when she was Education Secretary in the 1970s; Reagan was pilloried when his Administration proposed categorizing ketchup as a vegetable in American public schools. They both soldiered on, sustained by active historical imaginations; they fervently believed that their countries, and the free world, had a great destiny to fulfill if only individual energies and communist nations could be freed.
