The following is an excerpt from my latest book, Dear Mr. President... Reagan/Gorbachev and the Correspondence that Ended the Cold War.

RONALD WILSON REAGAN, the 40th president of the United States, went to sleep on the night of March 10, 1985 unaware that relations between the United...

Almost 30 years ago, in February 1982, inside the White House a very top-secret paper was being circulated with the title, "Next Steps On Libya." The short paper, a National Security Council staff summary of a Department of State paper prepared for the February 4, 1982...

In the summer of 1984, as President Reagan was moving forward with his intention to research and deploy the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Soviets called for bilateral meetings on the "militarization of space" to be connected with intermediate range nuclear weapons and strategic arms negotiations. The NST (Nuclear and Space...

As the saga of Gaddafi's hold on power in Libya continues to play out, I want to share what the situation looked like to President Reagan in his first year in office. The following is from my forthcoming book on President Reagan and the third-world:

After Muammar Gaddafi seized...

The following is a short exerpt from my forthcoming book chronicling Reagan and the third-world. Given the situation in Libya, I thought it appropriate to share at this time...

Just months after the hijacking of TWA flight 847, on December 27, 1985 twin terrorist attacks in...

Having spent the last decade studying the Reagan administration, and the last few years focusing on Reagan's National Security Council, I thought it could be useful for Mr. Donilon to get a quick review (and a few lessons) of where some of his contemporaries failed in what is one of...

"I admire the way he stood up for causes he believed were right, no matter what." That was Nick Jonas of the Jonas brothers, talking about why he admires President Reagan. I'm not sure what "causes" Jonas is referring to. I wonder if he does.

Peter Castine, a 19-year-old from...

Immediately after the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, during which President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev were thought to have been within words of agreeing to abolish nuclear weapons, Reagan endorsed a paper called "Why We Can't Commit to Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons Within 10 Years." The paper, written by former National...

With the Reagan Centennial Celebrations set to begin in just less than a year, www.thereaganfiles.com is conducting a series of conversations with noted Reagan historians. The goal of the series, "Rethinking Reagan," is to evaluate the Reagan years through a modern lens by comparing the Ronald Reagan presented through recently...

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Reagan Files is proud to announce the digital publication of top-secret letters between Pres. Reagan and the four Soviet leaders during the Reagan presidency. The top-secret letters are online at the Reagan Files website.

Reagan first...

Though it is too early to start calling President Obama the next "Great Communicator," with Obama's speech on education this week, the time has come to compare it with President Reagan's speech twenty-one-years-ago, on Nov. 14th, 1988.

Speaking from the White House that day, President Reagan spoke to a...

After President Obama shook hands with Libyan leader Qadhafi earlier this month at the G8 summit, I tried to imagine what President Reagan would have done had he been in Obama's shoes. My initial reaction was probably the same as most -- there is no way Reagan would have shook...

Reading the recent report by Ryan Grim, "Kristof Asks Readers: Should US Legalize Drugs?" I instantly thought of what President Reagan told his advisers in his first NSC meeting as President of the United States. According to the recently declassified NSC meeting minutes, published on www.thereaganfiles.com, Reagan said:

President Reagan ordered strikes against Iran if any of the American hostages held by the terrorist group Hezbollah were killed. The order, made during a January 18th, 1985 meeting of the National Security Planning Group, came on the heels of a threat by the terrorists to "try the American hostages...