Thom, as a historian you are probably familiar with (or can get your hands on) Frances FitzGerald's book on Reagan (2000), "Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War" in which she debunks the mythology around the concept that Reagan "bankrupted" the Soviet Union and thus "won the Cold War" by promoting Star Wars and forcing the Soviets to try to keep economic pace with a high tech and very expensive arms race, hastening Soviet economic collapse. This book will come in handy for rebutting the likes of Terry Jeffrey and his Reaganite crowd who repeat this false history over and over.

I don't have the book in front of me right now (read it several years ago; FitzGerald by the way is no slouch -- also author of "Fire on the Lake" about friendly fire in Vietnam) but here's an excerpt from a review (http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/05/rush-to-failure.html) that summarizes the core of FitzGerald's research in her Reagan book which you can get your hands on easily at library or Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Way-Out-There-Blue-Reagan/dp/0743200233/ref=sr_1_1...) :

Even if "Star Wars" failed to produce a usable defensive weapon, its advocates often argue that it helped drive the final nail in the coffin of the "evil empire." Fitzgerald goes to some lengths to debunk the claim that "Star Wars" hastened the Soviet collapse--an article of faith among U.S. conservatives. She points out that the Soviet Union never really responded to "Star Wars": Soviet defense allocations did not increase significantly following Reagan's speech, and Moscow never accelerated its own efforts to develop its own defenses or to perfect new countermeasures. The Soviet Union collapsed, Fitzgerald writes, because of "the failures of the system created by Lenin and Stalin--not from any effort on the part of the Reagan Administration.... It was [Mikhail] Gorbachev's efforts to reverse the decline and modernize his country that knocked the props out from under the system."

I'm surprised the legend of Reagan's "bankrupting" and causing collapse of the Soviet Union continues to be promoted without challenge by Reaganites like Terry Jeffrey and other conservatives when FitzGerald's research has not been proved wrong so far as I know. Politically she stands on a more liberal side of the equation and we know what that means when it comes to major media coverage. Nevertheless she obviously did the real research (the book is crammed with footnotes) but it's an arcane field and not a lot of researchers have been able to dig into what was going on inside the Soviet Union at that time, so it's probably not surprising that FitzgGerald's core finding (only one feature of her enormous book) about the truth of why the Soviet system collapsed (as opposed to the Reagan myth that he "bankrupted" the Soviet Union -- in fact he came closer to bankrupting the United States by massively increasing the national debt with a huge US military buildup to the great benefit of the American corporate military-industrial complex) has been lost in the shuffle of mainstream media owned largely by conservatives (as you rightly point out) who want to control and propogate the Reagan myth without challenge.

Finally, given your observation (correct I believe) that Reagan helped to dismantle the middle class, you might appreciate the irony that the fall of the Soviet Union was aggravated and accelerated by events in Gdansk, Polish union leader Lech Walensa and Solidarity movement inspired by an activist Polish Pope, with Gorbechev refusing to act when the Poles went on strike, which set up an internal economic domino effect that ended the Cold War and "tore down that wall." In other words, at least one factor in the fall of the Soviet Union was the democratizing effect of a union movement within the Soviet system at that time, ironic especially if one recalls that the first act of Reagan when he came into office in 1980 was to fire the entire labor union of air-traffic controllers.

Thanks for your always great show.