How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan
The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan’s legacy across America.
In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan, coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away.
...The coming contours of the Reagan myth were neatly laid out in a series of short essays from the leaders of the conservative movement: that the Gipper deserved all or at least most of the credit for winning the Cold War, that the economic boom that Americans were enjoying in 1997 was the result of the Reagan tax cut (and not the march toward balanced budgets, lower interest rates and targeted investment), and that the biggest problem with the GOP was, as the title suggested, not Reagan’s legacy but a new generation of weak-kneed leaders who were getting it all wrong.
How Republicans created the myth of Ronald Reagan - Salon.com
James Hershberg: Reagan Should Not be Given Credit for Defeating the Soviet Union--It's More Complicated than that
Historians abhor the idea of attributing a vast, complex phenomenon to a single cause. No one person brought down the Soviet Union, but if I had to choose the one who mattered most, that person would not be Reagan, most of whose policies fit comfortably in the Cold War tradition of containment followed dutifully by presidents from Truman to Carter.
Rather, the historical wild card was Mikhail Gorbachev
History News Network | James Hershberg: Reagan Should Not be Given Credit for Defeating the Soviet Union--It's More Complicated than that