ROGER PEACE. A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign.

Abstract

In his eight-year presidency, Ronald Reagan delivered three nationally televised addresses and twenty-two radio addresses calling on Americans to support military aid to counterrevolutionary “Contras” in their bid to overthrow Nicaragua's Marxist Sandinista government. He devoted more speeches to the subject than to any other issue in his presidency. He also authorized a vigorous public diplomacy effort to cultivate support for the Contras, and for his broader “Reagan Doctrine” of communist rollback. Yet despite such efforts, the Great Communicator failed to convince many in Congress and most Americans. Throughout his presidency, polls showed that more Americans disapproved of his policy than endorsed it, and congressional and grassroots resistance eventually forced a showdown over the Iran-Contra Affair. Today Iran-Contra is recalled mainly for what it revealed about the lengths to which Reagan would go in his anticommunist crusade. But Reagan's memoirs tell another tale, calling his failure to win support for the Contras “one of the greatest frustrations” of his presidency (p. 52).