Reagan Administration Research Articles

Ketchup as a Vegetable

The 1981 Ketchup as a Vegetable debacle has rendered ketchup an indelible fixture in our political as well as our culinary culture. In the Reagan administration’s attempt to slash $1.5 billion from children’s nutrition funding, school lunch program requirements were worded (whether deliberately or not) so as to conceivably allow for designating ketchup as a vegetable, allowing the USDA to eliminate one of the two vegetables required to meet minimum food and nutrition standards, and thus shrink costs considerably. While the proposal included other changes that involved similar, dramatic category shifting, these received only minor attention compared to the idea of the salt and sucrose–laden condiment ketchup as an equivalent to a bona fide vegetable. Ketchup came to symbolize the malevolence of the economic policy of the Ronald Reagan presidency even as it underscored the deep government indifference to children in lower-income and minority populations.

Editorial Letter

Editorial Letter

Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea and the Ronald Reagan Administration in the United States

The USA, as well as the USSR, initiated the convocation of the III UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (1973—1982). However, after the Ronald Reagan administration came to the White House, American diplomacy significantly changed its policy toward the Conference, which eventually resulted in US refusal to support the draft Convention on the Law of the Sea, which was worked out during the Conference. This behavior was in line with policy course of the Reagan administration — more aggressive than that of their predecessors. The article considers the American policy regarding Law of the Sea negotiations in the first months of Reagan's presidency, during the Tenth Session of the III UNCLOS.

Reagan’s Cold War on Immigrants: Resistance and the Rise of a Detention Regime, 1981–1985

Abstract Through migrant and activist testimonies, media coverage, and government documents, this article explores the modes of resistance inside and outside of immigration detention that arose in response to new, more punitive detention policies enacted by the Reagan administration that specifically targeted Caribbean and Central American asylum-seekers in the early 1980s, and the modes of retaliation adopted by the administration in response. It argues migrant detention operates as a form of counter-insurgency, re-centering the geopolitics of asylum within the transnational scope of counter-insurgent warfare and its role in the rise of carceral trends more broadly. Reagan’s “Cold War on immigrants”—defined as a suite of new immigration enforcement measures that was adopted by the Reagan administration during its first term and buttressed the subsequent growth of the detention system—sparked mass resistance. Mounting public dissent against Reagan’s foreign and immigration policies, as evidenced by “inside-outside” and transnational activism, Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, and the Central America peace and Sanctuary movements, prompted the administration to wage a total war against its opponents to maintain its immigration control and foreign policy aims. The contemporary US immigration detention system emerged, and continues, out of this dialectic of resistance and retaliation.

Originalism from the Soft Southern Strategy to the New Right: The Constitutional Politics of Sam Ervin Jr

AbstractAlthough originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other conservative southerners explain to outsiders and to themselves why they shifted from support for an interventionist state powerful enough to enforce segregation to an ideology founded on individual rights and liberty. It thus eased the South’s integration with the emerging New Right.

The challenge to US hegemony and the “Gilpin Dilemma”

This article makes a comparison between the challenges faced by the US to maintain its hegemonic position at the end of the 1970s and in the 2010s. To do so we review Robert Gilpin’s writing during the first period. He suggested the US had three options: 1) a defensive protectionist reaction 2) fragmentation of the international system 3) a new wave of innovation, (“rejuvenation”). It is argued that the Reagan administration was able to establish support for the third option. We argue the US is now faced with the same dilemma again, but with a different kind of challenger: China.

Revitalizing the Generation-Skipping Transfer Tax

Congress first enacted the generation-skipping transfer (GST) tax in 1976 to protect the estate and gift tax base and to ensure that extraordinary fortunes would bear their fair share of the transfer tax burden. Nearly a half-century into the life of the GST tax, those goals remain unrealized. In recent decades, high-net-worth individuals have succeeded in shifting hundreds of billions of dollars to “dynasty trusts” that—under current law—are poised to escape federal wealth transfer taxation indefinitely. The rise of dynasty trusts reduces the revenue-raising potential of the estate and gift taxes and allows a privileged class to exert vast economic and political power based solely on an accident of birth. This white paper presents a legislative reform agenda designed to reinvigorate the GST tax, stem the rise of dynasty trusts, and bring hundreds of billions of dollars back within the federal transfer tax base. We highlight three flaws in current law that account for the GST tax’s failure: (1) very high exemption amounts; (2) loopholes that allow high-net-worth taxpayers to stuff GST-exempt trusts with assets worth many multiples of the exemption amount; and (3) the lack of any durational limit on dynasty trusts in states that have abolished the rule against perpetuities. Our three-part reform agenda addresses each of these flaws. First, we propose a reduction in the GST exemption from the current level ($11.7 million) to the 2009 level ($3.5 million). A $3.5 million GST exemption still would be higher, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the exemption amount advocated by the Reagan administration. Second, we propose a set of common-sense loophole closers that would prevent high-net-worth taxpayers from stuffing GST-exempt trusts with assets worth far more than the exemption amount. Third, we propose to limit the maximum duration of a trust’s GST exemption to two generations, with an exception that would allow tax-free distributions to beneficiaries who were alive at the time of the trust’s inception. Our plan would shore up the estate and gift tax base and stem the rise of dynasty trusts while allowing more than 99 percent of American families to pass wealth across multiple generations tax-free.

De-Mythologizing Magnuson-Moss: Reviving Section 18 Rulemaking at the FTC

America faces twin crises of metastasizing corporate power and foundering government capacity to respond. Cries for economic justice grow louder as corporate consolidation has reached record levels and “informational capitalism” has systematically shifted power from individuals to large, data-rich firms. Americans are left vulnerable to “dark patterns” that extract customers’ wealth, to gig work companies that siphon customer tips away from workers, and to algorithmic decisionmaking that exhibits racial and gender bias. Yet, many rightfully doubt that America’s elected branches of government remain functional enough to handle these emerging challenges, and the Supreme Court continues to impede efforts that Congress and the President do undertake. The Federal Trade Commission is well-positioned to step into this breach. Section 18 of the FTC Act grants the agency the authority to issue new consumer protection rules to police against unfair or deceptive business tactics, backed by tough penalties and consumer redress. Yet, this power has sat virtually dormant for the past thirty-seven years after a “Reagan Revolution” at the agency decisively ended its rulemaking activity. For the first time in decades, a majority of FTC Commissioners supports using this tool, but long-unchallenged received wisdom stands in the way. This common narrative holds that Congress saddled the agency with almost impossibly onerous “Magnuson-Moss” procedural requirements for rulemaking in reaction to overbroad and politically unpopular FTC regulation. This paper argues that the conventional story is mistaken. A review of the history, statutory text, and judicial constructions of section 18 show that this pessimistic view confuses a historical decline in rulemaking—which was driven by non-statutory factors including an ascendant corporate lobby, changing congressional pressures, and a deregulatory ideological moment—with supposed flaws in section 18. Puncturing the mythology that has grown up around the Magnuson-Moss Act provides a more clear-eyed view of the FTC’s authorities. Doing so makes apparent that the Commission can—and should—pick back up its powerful tool of consumer protection rulemaking. Future rules can rein in marketplace misconduct such as deceptive online “drip pricing,” unfair privacy abuses, and much more. Reinvigorating the FTC’s regulatory program can restore the agency as a champion of American consumers and a cornerstone of an administrative state that is able to counterbalance dominant corporations and establish a more just economy.

The Politics of Deference

Like so much else in our politics, the administrative state is fiercely contested. Conservatives decry its legitimacy and seek to limit its power; liberals defend its necessity and legality. Debates have increasingly centered on the doctrine of Chevron deference, under which courts defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutory language. Given both sides’ increasingly entrenched positions, it is easy to think that conservatives have always warned of the dangers of deference, while liberals have always defended its virtues. Not so. This Article tells the political history of deference for the first time, using previously untapped primary sources including presidential and congressional archives, statements by interest groups, and partisan media sources. It recounts how the politics of deference have varied over time, even though the issue is often framed in terms that resist evolutionary analysis. As the administrative state grew in the 1970s, conservatives in Congress sought to rein in deference, while liberals defended it. These positions reversed in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration relied on flexible readings of statutes in service of its deregulatory efforts, including in the Chevron case itself. After a period of political detente, the 2010s witnessed a resurgence of conservative opposition and liberal support for Chevron, driven largely by the ascendance of libertarian interests in the Republican Party and the increasingly central role of administrative policymaking to the agenda of the Democratic Party. The Article then develops a framework for understanding the shifting politics of deference. It argues that the politics of deference are the politics of regulation: for nearly a half-century, partisans and interest groups have viewed doctrinal debates as inexorably tied to interests in policy outcomes. Positions about Chevron have varied based on which party controls the presidency and the ideological makeup of the federal courts. But the parties are also asymmetrically reliant on the administrative state, and thus on judicial deference. Liberals depend on deference to advance their regulatory goals in the face of an often-gridlocked Congress, while conservatives have many paths to accomplishing their deregulatory ends. The conservative turn against the so-called “deep state” and Chevron’s non-application in areas where conservatives most favor deference (such as national security) further exacerbate the partisan split on the doctrine. And Chevron has become a rhetorical cudgel in broader partisan debates about the legality and legitimacy of the administrative state as a whole. Unless these dynamics change, Chevron deference will continue to have a political valence. And so long as the doctrine is understood to create winners and losers, partisans and interest groups will fight to ensure its survival or hasten its demise.

Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association by Thomas A. Britten

Reviewed by: Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association by Thomas A. Britten Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller Voice of the Tribes: A History of the National Tribal Chairmen's Association. By Thomas A. Britten. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 240. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) If remembered today, the National Tribal Chairmen's Association (NTCA) is recalled as a pawn of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a force against change that opposed the Red Power activists of the early 1970s while serving as a force of exclusion, seeking to silence the voice of newly arising unrecognized tribes, urban Indians, and pan-Indian groups. As I revealed in my book, Claiming Tribal Identity (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), scholars have not paid enough attention to the legitimate concerns of federally recognized tribes in seeking to protect valuable economic, political, and social capital in opposition to a chorus of competing groups seeking to speak for the "Indian people" in the modern era of tribal sovereignty and self-determination that began in the early 1970s. With this work, historian Thomas Britten has provided a valuable and nuanced examination of these contending constituencies and demands through the lens of the NTCA from its creation in 1971 to its demise during the Reagan years in 1987. In clear prose, Britten details the efforts of the NTCA to influence developments in Indian policy during these important decades. As he notes, the chairmen's group claimed to be the only legitimate voice of Indian people due to its position as the representative body of duly elected tribal chairpersons. Until the mid-1980s when it reversed course (a stance that led to its demise, according to Britten), the NTCA strived to utilize its insider status, personal connections, and generally accommodationist strategy with the BIA (in the executive branch) and Congress to pursue its goals to improve the status of reservation-based Indians. National developments that the association influenced included helping to pass the landmark Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and other laws that protect Native children, trust lands, and natural resources. Britten concludes the NTCA was moderately successful in its lobbying and consulting work to defend recognized tribes from various efforts to erode tribal sovereignty posed by "backlash" groups over fishing and hunting rights, legal jurisdiction, and campaigns to end the BIA and the perceived dependency of Indian peoples on government funding. Throughout the book, Britten attempts to offer assessments as to the efficacy of the NTCA's work in its various campaigns. As critics often noted, the association potentially was compromised and coopted because it received almost all its funding from the federal government, particularly the BIA. To this Britten argues the NTCA was able to resist cooptation due to its ability to reach out to the public and by having made itself "indispensable" to the government in providing data and information, recommendations on legislation, and meaningful consultation. However, once [End Page 503] its new executive director Elmer Savilla took charge in 1981 and took a clearly adversarial tone and stance toward the anti-tribal Reagan Administration, its funding was canceled in 1987, and the organization ceased to exist. In its analyses regarding the impact of NTCA lobbying and political activities, the book is marred by a strong tendency to conclude with statements such as it "may never be known" or it "cannot be determined." This propensity is linked to the general absence of oral interviews, which if conducted correctly, could have rooted out the answers to these questions, given more voice to the participants, and strengthened the work overall. That said, the book is well-grounded in appropriate secondary sources as well as strong research into archival sources. Voice of the Tribes should be on reading lists of serious students of federal Indian policy, modern Indian organizing, and tribal politics of the 1970s and 1980s. It is well written and fills an important gap in the literature on native politics during these decades. Mark E. DeGiovanni Miller Southern Utah University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War by Hideaki Kami

Reviewed by: Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War by Hideaki Kami Patrick Iber Hideaki Kami, Diplomacy Meets Migration: US Relations with Cuba during the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. In recent years, some of the most innovative work in the history of Latin American international relations has moved away from analysis of bipolar relationships between Washington and other actors, and toward a multipolar consideration of the exercise of power. Tanya Harmer's Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, for example, argues forcefully for the importance of Brazil's foreign policy in the Chilean transition from socialism to military dictatorship. Renata Keller's Mexico's Cold War considers the covert and overt aspects of the triangular relationship of Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. Hideaki Kami's Diplomacy Meets Migration takes a similar approach, but with something of a twist: the third player in his analysis (to go along with the United States and Cuba) is not another country, but Miami. It is a decision that makes a good deal of sense. As Kami puts it, "Because Cuban emigres in Miami intervened in international politics at critical moments, relations between Washington and Havana also intermingled with the political dynamics of the Cuban-American community" (5). After the Cuban Revolution, Miami became the center of many a counterrevolutionary effort, some aided by the Central Intelligence Agency, others independent of it. Who Miami's Cubans were, what they did, and who might join them were matters of ongoing dispute. And of course, there was (and is) the importance of Miami's Cubans to Republican politics in a crucial state. [End Page 310] The book begins with a chapter on the origins of the Cuban émigré community in Miami in the years after the revolution and proceeds chronologically through to the end of the George H. W. Bush administration, at which point the paper trail ends, presumably on shelves of classified boxes. Kami makes use of a wide range of sources; beyond the US presidential libraries and those located in Miami, he has consulted records from the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Mexico. Many of his most interesting discoveries come from Cuban diplomatic archives. The analysis here is unlikely to radically revise understandings of Cuban-US relations. Though full of sound judgments and based on prodigious research, parts of the book have a rather familiar feel. Perhaps one of the book's contributions is inherent in its methodology and borne out by its findings, which show all of the ways in which Cuban Miami was not identical to Washington in its interests or its actions. Émigrés were not puppets; they were frequently frustrating to various administrations in Washington. But nor were they, as US diplomat George Kennan wrote in 1977, a lobby capable of "bending us to their purposes." Consider, for example, the case of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), founded in 1981 by Jorge Mas Canosa. Mas Canosa was able to bring Reagan to Miami in 1983 and help lobby for the creation of Radio Martí, and later for the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992. In the 1980s, CANF acted both like a lobby and like a government-in-exile, drawing up plans for a postcommunist Cuba with the assistance of right-wing free-market economists like Arthur Laffer and Manuel Ayau. But even with these ideological points of contact and the background of shared anticommunism, CANF and Reagan were sometimes at odds, especially over issues of migration. The Mariel boatlift had drawn much negative attention in the United States to the issue of Cuban migration. (A 1982 poll showed that Cubans, remarkably, were the least welcome migrants in US history, and popular culture in the 1980s, from Scarface to Miami Vice frequently associated Cubans with criminality.) Kami shows remarkable evidence of harebrained schemes the Reagan administration considered, but never carried out, to dump Cubans deemed criminal or insane back on the island. CANF, by contrast, deemed resistance to migration a betrayal of the cause of freedom. All in all, Kami portrays the triangular dynamic generated by Washington-Havana-Miami as a kind of a trap. Miami's Cubans, at least...

Hal Rogers’s Kentucky Kingdom

This year marks Harold “Hal” Rogers’s twenty-first consecutive electoral victory in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, making him the secondlongest-serving Republican in Congress. He rode into office on the wave of the Reagan Revolution in 1980, and the governing style he’s employed in the Fifth District—which covers the rural, mountainous, Appalachian region of southeastern Kentucky—can mostly be described as Reaganite: pro–War on Drugs, pro–prison expansion, anti-regulation of extractive industries, and pro-family. The congressman has had to improvise a little over the years in response to changes in the economy and political system, but he’s wellpositioned to do so: as a former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the elite “College of Cardinals” that manages the government’s budget, and the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, he’s one of the most influential men in Washington. Rogers has extraordinary discretion over where and how the government exercises power domestically and overseas, especially within the border regions; he can coerce other lawmakers to support his policies by withholding funding; and, crucially, he can funnel tons of “pork” back to his home district

Support of the Afghan Resistance Movement by the Administration of US President J. Carter (1978–1980)

The aim of the article is to investigate, on the basis of American sources, the forms and means of support provided by the United States of America (both unilateral and mediated by the Allies) to the Afghan Resistance Movement in 1978–1980, as well as the factors that influenced the nature of that support. At the core of the research methodology is the method of a content analysis of historical sources, problem-chronological, typological and comparative methods. Main results and conclusions. The US support for the Afghan opposition from 1978 to 1980 in the USSR was exaggerated and became only an excuse used to justify the Soviet intervention in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. From April 1978 to December 1979, Carter Administration limited itself to an information campaign and to providing non-military assistance to the Afghan insurgents. This support included medicines, food rations, communications equipment, etc. It was not until the early 1980s that the United States developed the Hidden Action Program with a budget of $ 30 million which provided the Mujahideen with Soviet-made small arms, anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China and Egypt had been involved in the implementation of the Program. However, the volume of military assistance as well as the quality of the weapons could not significantly increase the Mujahideen’s combat capability. The military and technical superiority of the Soviet and Afghan troops remained significant. The US politicians, analysts as well as the Mujahideen field commanders noted insufficiency and lack and effectiveness of the US aid. However, the Carter Administration had managed to forge contacts with the Afghan opposition, to form a coalition of states around the Hidden Action Program, to develop and test ways to acquire weapons and their delivery routes to Pakistan and beyond to Afghanistan. This experience would later be taken into account and used by the R. Reagan Administration. In addition, the US support had a positive effect on the moral and psychological state of the Afghan insurgents. Practical significance. The main conclusions and factual material can be used to study the Afghan crisis as part of the Cold War. Originality. The US policy regarding the Afghan Resistance Movement is examined against the backdrop of deteriorating Soviet-American relations in connection with the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Scientific novelty. The ways and forms of the US support for the Afghan Resistance Movement at the initial stage of the Afghan crisis are specified for the first time. Type of article: descriptive.

A Foundation of Serial Murder and Appreciation of the Male Voice: Historical and Feminist Considerations in The Handmaid's Tale

Violent crime, and the impulse to temper it, fuel cycles of utopian and dystopian discourse in North American literature. Dystopian fiction operates as a social document that highlight the anxieties of the time in which authoring takes place, and in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, America's violent history/(his)story is legalized and gendered. The principal narrator, Offred, manages her perspective—the only thing she can claim personal ownership over—under the pressure of a strict monotheocracy. This paper examines Atwood's novel with a historical-critical lens and posits that groundwork for Gilead was seeded during a spike of lurid serial murders in the 1970s/1980s—a discourse established, perhaps hyperbolically, by the pre-digital press combined with the resurgence of conservative values during the Reagan administration; these conditions fertilized the neo-patriarchal legislation of the fictional Gilead—text born of context. Both historical and feminist criticism discover examples of gendered assault, contemporary to the time of the novel's authoring, bleeding into the nebulously timed present-day Gilead—for time, the narrator notes, has not been of enumerable value since the mid-1980s. The Handmaid's Tale repurposes the history of sexual violence and femicide; here, horror is systematically present within the Puritan womb which seeks to shield an infantilized population—women from the monsters in dark alleys to the proliferation of Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper doppelgangers in mass media.

독일 재통일과 미국의 탈냉전 구상

This paper analyzes the strategies of and a role played by the United States in the reunification of Germany. First, it explains that the main goal of US defense and security policies had been replaced in the second term of the Reagan administration from the containment of the Soviet Union to the fight against terrorism in the 3rd World. This was demanded by the changing international geopolitics toward the termination of cold war and the collapse of the communist bloc. The Bush administration started with this new set of strategies as it faced the rising tensions from the fall of the Berlin Wall to german reunification process. The United States tried to place the reunified Germany into the NATO system and make it a supporting partner of her post cold war strategies, including the war against Iraq. The story of the U.S. involvement in German unification reveals another episode of her continued efforts to hold world hegemony.

The contested origins of US democracy promotion: the national endowment for democracy and its congressional critics

In 1983, a compromise between the Reagan administration, members of Congress and private groups led to the establishment of the bipartisan democracy promotion organization: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Tracing congressional efforts to prevent the formation of the NED, this article offers the first comprehensive, archival-based study of the NED’s critics and their arguments and motivations. I find that opposition to the NED consisted of an unlikely and ideologically diverse alliance between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, who took issue with its organizational structure and strategic objectives. Although Congress eventually established the NED with minor concessions to its critics, its origin was considerably more contested than previously acknowledged. The case of the NED also demonstrates the substantial influence of domestic politics and individual members of Congress on US foreign policymaking.

Conserving what? Conservation easements and environmental justice in the coastal US South

Conservation easements, voluntary legal agreements whereby a landowner forfeits some of his or her land development rights in exchange for tax benefits, are an increasingly common strategy for protecting land from development in the United States today. For instance, from 2005 to 2015, private land under conservation easement in the United States increased by 175%, growing to more than 16 million acres held by land trusts, which are collectively endowed with more than $2.2 billion in funding. Recent critical analyses of this trend conceptualize conservation easements as a tool of neoliberal environmental governance, whereby nature is increasingly individuated and conservation is (at least partially) privatized. Conservation easements grew rapidly in the 1980s as the result of a compromise between mainstream environmental organizations and the Reagan administration’s anti-public lands agenda; thus, one interpretation is that they are the pragmatic “roll-out” of conservation efforts from a handcuffed liberal environmental movement. Yet, our historical and qualitative analysis of the politics of conservation easements in the coastal US South suggests that they were actually an elite white class project from the start, rather than a reaction to constraints on public lands protection. Thus, we argue that the environmental justice implications of conservation easements deserve more attention. Our efforts to develop a spatial-statistical assessment of the ways that their ecological benefits are distributed beyond parcel boundaries were limited by the privatization of data on conservation easements. Instead, we assess the distribution of easements themselves across the region, finding limited differences, but ones that we interpret as meaningful, between public and private conservation lands regarding racial composition and incomes of nearby populations. Importantly, this kind of mixed-methods analysis indicates how the exclusive control of data undergirds the exclusive control of land. Most broadly, we argue that Cheryl Harris’s theorization of “whiteness as property” remains an important resource for political ecologists because it helps specify the relationship between race, class, and nature under capitalism.

The special relationship revealed: US–UK materials in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, part of the National Archives and Records Administration, is a vast repository for the records of the Reagan Administration (1981–1989) and records relating to President and Mrs Reagan directly. The close relationship the Reagan Administration fostered with the United Kingdom is reflected in the related holdings. This material, including speeches, memos, video and audio recordings, and artefacts, would be of value to scholars in the field of Anglo-American relations. These myriad types of holdings interrelate to greater illuminate certain topics. With the unique laws that govern federal records in the United States, primarily the Freedom of Information Act, material may be made publically available more readily than at other institutions or in other countries. Archival staff seek to understand areas of greatest interest from researchers while balancing these with sound archival practices and practical concerns. Digitization of records is one tool they are utilizing to increase access to the collection, but it brings about its own set of challenges. The Library is navigating these while searching for best practices, as is the archival profession as a whole.

Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: how a Washington assassination brought Pinochet's terror state to justice

The brazen assassination by car bomb of prominent Chilean political exile Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt on 21 September 1976 in the heart of Washington DC—‘the worst state-sponsored assassination in U.S. history’ (p. 292) and the most egregious act of Operation Condor beyond South America—was the ghost that haunted US–Chilean relations for the next two decades. Its reverberations were such that the Pinochet regime was obliged to exempt the crime from its otherwise wide-ranging 1978 amnesty law. The unresolved case also proved to be an albatross around the neck of the initially friendly Reagan administration, whose 1981 repeal of the 1976 Kennedy–Harkin congressional amendment prohibiting military ties to Chile required, inter alia, steps being taken to bring to justice those Chileans indicted by US prosecutors. The prime motivation for the agreement for the new civilian government to pay compensation to the Letelier and Moffitt families in...

An Ounce of Prevention - A Pound of Cure? The Reagan Administration’s Nonproliferation Policy and the Osirak Raid

The Israeli June 1981 raid against the Iraqi nuclear reactor ‘Osirak’ has received much attention in the context of debate on the usefulness of strikes against hostile nuclear programs. Yet surprisingly, some important historical questions were left up till now unanswered: how did the raid impact the formulation of Reagan’s non-proliferation policy and how was the raid perceived by relevant administration officials? How did the administration design its political strategy of response to the raid and how did this strategy play out at the International Atomic Energy Agency? What does this episode tell us about Reagan’s foreign policy priorities? By exploring recently declassified document from several archives around the world, our study addresses the following questions, and in the process, we debunk revisionist myths relating to the raid.