RONALD REAGAN TELLS A JOKE. STALINGRAD IS NOT AMUSED.

RONALD REAGAN

TELLS A JOKE

STALINGRAD IS NOT AMUSED

It was August 11, 1984, the summer of the last year of Ronald Reagan's first term, a time of a Cold War newly heated up,
before Nancy Reagan helped convince him that peace made a more useful historical legacy.

It was the summer of the Los Angeles Olympics and the Soviet tit-for-tat retaliatory boycott of those Olympics (we had devastated the Soviets by boycotting their 1980 Moscow Olympics after the invasion of Afghanistan).

In the warm-up to that Saturday's radio address, President Reagan made a 'joke' declaring 'Russia' an outlaw nation, and announcing that the bombs would fly "in five minutes."

Ah, well, it was explained, he did not know the microphone was on.

Ronald Reagan had begun his career, half a century before, as a radio announcer.

I was that summer wandering around the Soviet Union for seven weeks by myself, exploring and taking photographs. By the time I arrived in Volgograd -- formerly known as Stalingrad, I was quite cut off from the outside world.

So it was left to an angry woman in this city in which, as the Soviets saw it, they helped save the world from the Nazis, to inform me that President Ronald Reagan had threatened to bomb the USSR.

More to come in

RUSSIA REDUX