Selling Reagan's Foreign Policy: Going Public vs. Executive Bargaining

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This book examines President Reagans and his administrations efforts to mobilize public and congressional support for seven of the presidents controversial foreign policy initiatives. Each chapter deals with a distinct foreign policy issue, but they each is related in one way or another to alleged threats to U.S. national security interests by the Soviet Union and its allies. When taken together these case studies clearly illustrate the books larger thrust: a challenge to the conventional wisdom that Reagan was the indisputable Great Communicator. This book contests the accepted wisdom that Reagan was an exemplary and highly effective practitioner of the going public model of presidential communication and leadership, that the bargaining model was relatively unimportant during his administration, and that the so-called public diplomacy regime was a high-value addition to the administrations public communication assets. The author employs an analytical approach to the historical record, draws on several academic disciplines and grounds his arguments in extensive archival and empirical research. The book concludes that the public communication efforts of the Reagan administration in the field of foreign policy were neither exceptionally skillful nor notably successful, that the public diplomacy regime had more negative than positive impact, that the going public model had minimal utility in the presidents efforts to sell his foreign policy initiatives, and that the executive bargaining model played a central role in Reagans governing strategy and essentially defined his presidential leadership role in the area of foreign policy making. This study vividly demonstrates the enormous gap between the real-word Reagan and the one that often exists in public mythology.

Reviews

In this exceptional scholarly contribution, N. Stephen Kane confronts the conventional wisdom of President Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator. . . the book offers seven detailed case studies that challenge the going public model of presidential leadership. . . . Kane makes a clear and convincing case that Reagans public relations efforts largely failed on these policies. * Congress & the Presidency *
In this clearly-written, well-researched book, Stephen Kane demonstrates convincingly that Ronald Reagan was not at all `the Great Communicator of his era. Despite considerable effort, Reagan failed to alter widespread public opposition to his administrations key foreign and military policy ventures. -- Lawrence S. Wittner, , author of Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement

Author Bio

N. Stephen Kane is a former U.S. State Department officer and university professor.