Michael Reagan to Newsmax: Dad Needed Thatcher to End Cold War

Ronald Reagan needed Margaret Thatcher to fulfill his world-wide accomplishments and without her the Cold War may never have ended, his son Michael tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview.

Thatcher, the last of the triumvirate of Communist-bloc defeating world leaders — which also included Pope John Paul II — died on Monday of a stroke. She was 87.

“Without them, the Berlin Wall would still be up, Poland would still be being held, and freedom wouldn’t be reigning in that area of the world, if those three had not existed,” said the younger Reagan.

“One couldn’t have done it without the other. And that’s the important thing.”

He said no-one should forget the placard that was on Ronald Reagan’s desk that read “No telling what man can accomplish if he doesn’t worry about who gets the credit.” That spirit embodied the Reagan-Thatcher axis.

“We have too many people today trying to take all of the credit and nothing gets done; neither one of them worried about who got the credit, they just got it done.

“That was what’s so special about either one of them. Their legacies are tied together in the fall of Communism and freedom breaking out in that part of the world — as is Pope John Paul.

“Now the three of them are gone, but the three of them are probably all still together.”

Michael Reagan noted that 2013 marks the 30th anniversary of the invasion of Grenada, a former British colony that remains part of the Commonwealth. He said his father was playing his plans “close to his chest” and had told virtually no-one.

“One of the staff members came in and said ‘Mr. President, (Mrs.) Thatcher’s on the phone,’ and my father remembered, ‘oh my gosh, we’re flying through her air space and I forgot to even tell her,’” says Reagan, adding, “So he gets on the phone with Lady Thatcher — and hopefully sent her a dozen roses — and says he can make up for it and is very sorry he didn’t tell her.”

Reagan says he remembers Thatcher on the day after his father’s funeral in 2004. She was already ill and there head been doubts that she would make the trip from London to California.

The “Iron Lady” came over to Michael and said it would have been wonderful if his father had won the 1976 election, in which Gerald Ford defeated him in the Republican primaries.

“I said to her, ‘Lady Thatcher, we would still be fighting the Cold War had he been elected in 1976,’ and she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Where were you? Where was Pope John Paul?’

“She just looked at me and I said, ‘Had you not been there when my father was elected in 1980, had Pope John Paul not been there when he was elected in 1980, he may not have accomplished anything.

“‘It took all of you working together, and you needed that leader in the western hemisphere who was going to stand up and stand strong with you and you would stand strong with him.’

“She said, ‘I never thought of that.’"

Reagan said his father “always had a deep respect and deep feeling for" Thatcher. He says that he will attend Thatcher’s funeral if asked.