Relevant Reading:Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship
Richard AldousReagan and Thatcher Then — and Now
Matthew Continetti in National Review
Forty years since Margaret Thatcher first became Prime Minister, there is no better time to revisit the legacy of the Iron Lady. On this special episode of the podcast, our own Richard Aldous finds himself in the guest’s chair to discuss his 2012 book Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship. Filling in as host is Matthew Continetti, Editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon. Tune in or read the transcript below to learn why the Reagan-Thatcher relationship was rockier than commonly realized, and what lessons it might teach us amid the current crisis over Brexit.Matt Continetti: Hello and welcome to The American Interest Podcast. I am Mathew Continetti, Editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon at freebeacon.com. Today I find myself in an unusual position. I’m here to interview the regular host of this podcast, historian Richard Aldous. Richard is the Eugene Meyer professor of British History and Literature at Bard College as well as a contributing editor to The American Interest. He is the author, as I’m sure you’re aware, of many books, including histories of Disraeli and Gladstone, Eisenhower and Macmillan, and biographies of the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and the conductor Malcolm Sargent.We’re here today to talk about his book Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship, a somewhat revisionist take on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s personal diplomacy with President Ronald Reagan. We’ll also explore the question of how Lady Thatcher might approach today’s Brexit debate. Welcome, Richard.Richard Aldous: Thanks, Matt. I feel as if the tables have been turned on me.MC: I know. I should actually say thank you for allowing me to fill in for you, and congratulations as well on an excellent book, which I greatly enjoyed reading. I guess I’ll just start off with this: Looking over your CV, it reveals a pattern of writing about historical pairs. I’m wondering what’s attractive and what’s difficult about this sort of history?RA: I’m very much interested overall in the question of leadership—whether it’s political, or cultural, or diplomatic. There is something I find genuinely interesting about putting two characters into contrast with each other. Obviously, Reagan and Thatcher have this very special relationship the way they describe it, but what attracted me to them was that they actually disagreed about almost every major issue. That was the kind of thing really I wanted to explore.But you’re absolutely right that there is something fascinating about seeing two leaders sparring with each other, working with each other, to some degree feeding off each other, whether that’s Gladstone and Disraeli, Reagan and Thatcher, Macmillan and Eisenhower, all interesting in their different ways.MC: Was there anything in particular that led to you this pair to writing about Reagan and Thatcher?RA: There were a number of things. I’ve written a lot about the special relationship, the Anglo-American relationship, and this is another one of those totemic relationships. It’s very often compared to that between Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. But the thing that’s always struck me about Reagan and Thatcher is that it’s always presented as a marriage: These two they may have tiffs along the way, but they were just like a married couple. That seemed fundamentally wrong to me. The real dynamic behind that relationship wasn’t President Reagan’s poodle, but, at the same time, Thatcher wasn’t the intellectual brains behind the outfit as she’s often presented.MC: You point out in the book that the first time they met both were out of power.RA: That’s right. I mean, they met in the 1970s. At that stage she seem
