Product Description

New details of the remarkable relationship between two leaders who teamed up to change history.

It’s well known that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were close allies and kindred political spirits. During their eight overlapping years as U.S. president and UK prime minister, they stood united for free markets, low taxes, and a strong defense against communism. But just how close they really were will surprise you.

Nicholas Wapshott finds that the Reagan-Thatcher relationship was much deeper than an alliance of mutual interests. Drawing on extensive interviews and hundreds of recently declassified private letters and telephone calls, he depicts a more complex, intimate, and occasionally combative relationship than has previously been revealed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #294868 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-25
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
White House press secretary James Brady once declared [i]t took a crowbar to separate President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher. Biographer Wapshott (Thatcher) assesses the nature of that sometimes testy but always close freindship. As Reagan put it, they were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom. Not content with biography, Wapshott also provides a political history of the post-WWII period and the 1980s. Elected under similar circumstances, the two faced many of the same trials: assassination attempts, striking workers and tensions with the Soviet Union. Wapshott's attention to Reagan and Thatcher's compatibility sometimes comes at the expense of a deeper analysis of the ideas that united them. On their economic conservatism, Wapshott is insightful and exhaustive; on the ideas driving their foreign policy, he is less thorough, and more detailed comparison of Thatcher's cold Methodism and Reagan's sense of God's purpose after his attempted assassination would have been welcome. Throughout, Wapshott favors the nitty-gritty, painting a portrait of the friendship that shaped the 1980s and the alliance that won the Cold War. (Nov.)
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Review
“Nicholas Wapshott, with access to their unpublished correspondence, gives us a nuanced—and immensely readable— portrait of how Reagan and Thatcher resolved their differences in leading the world out of incipient chaos. This is a shrewd and affecting portrait.”
—Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles

“I can recommend a rattling good read with lots of new material on their previously private meetings and correspondence.”
—National Review

“Briskly written, perceptive, and, ultimately, moving.”
—New York Sun

“Wapshott is insightful and exhaustive.”
—Publishers Weekly

About the Author
Nicholas Wapshott is a senior editor at The New York Sun and the former New York bureau chief of The Times of London. As political editor of The Observer, Wapshott covered Margaret Thatcher’s final years in office.