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The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union - Lecture 6 Transcript

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Verbatim transcript supplied by Anthony for Lesson 6, “Conservative Unity,” on 2026-09-28. It has not been checked against the video. Transcription errors and unsupported historical assertions may be present; see the linked course note for selected source checks.

Transcript

But not every escape from East to West Berlin met with such tragic circumstances. Take the story of Heinz Meixner. He was 20 years old, a lathe worker, and he was an Austrian who commuted from West Berlin to East for work. And he fell in love with a girl from East Germany named Margarete. He knew he had to get her out and his future mother-in-law for good measure. Now, Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous crossing point between the two Berlins. So Meixner borrowed a scooter. He went there to cross and, distracting the guard who was checking the passport, he measured the height of that steel beam that lifted up to allow cars to pass through. It was approximately a yard off the ground, which is enough to prevent almost any car from going through, almost any car.

Meixner found an Austin Healey Sprite sports car for rent. And without the windshield, it was 90cm tall. Room to spare. He took off the windshield and then he let out some of the air from the tires for good measure. He put his fiancé in the space behind the driver. Mother-in-law is in the trunk. He surrounded her with bricks in case the guards opened fire. And on the morning of May 5, 1963, he drove to the guard from East Berlin and showed him his passport. And this time he floored it, instead of going on to the customs inspection.

He drove around the vertical bars, ducked his head, and easily drove under the steel beam before the guards could register what was going on. He was long out of their sight before they realized what that little red sports car was up to. And Heinz and Margarete were married in due course. Two months later, a young man named Norbert Konrad attempted to do the exact same thing with his East German girlfriend. He rented the same exact car and he left the windshield on so as not to arouse the guard’s suspicion. And it worked.

But not every attempted escape to West Berlin ended in joy or such extreme tragedy as Peter Fechter. Journalist Anna Funder interviewed a woman named Miriam who had attempted to scale the wall in 1968 at the age of 16. And by then the Berlin Wall had become a massive edifice indeed. In its completed form, the wall was 104 miles long, including 66 miles of reinforced concrete slabs. It was built of the hardest concrete to withstand ramming, and each slab was six inches thick and weighed two and a half tons. They were cemented together, topped with asbestos piping, and extra protection was provided by over 300 observation towers, 65 miles of trenches, 250 dog runs, and 20 massive concrete bunkers. Next to the wall was a death strip of constantly raked sand, which was 100 yards wide and equipped with hundreds of mines and automatic firing devices.

So Miriam got over the barbed wire fence, she transversed the concrete strip, and then pressed herself against the kink in the wall. And she’s wondering why no one has spotted her. Then she turned and locked eyes with the one guard who was there, a German shepherd dog who was chained to the wall. “I don’t know why it didn’t attack me,” she said. The dog looked at her, she looked at the dog, and the dog walked away. Perhaps even a dog had the decency to understand that it shouldn’t attack a harmless teenage girl. She then climbed the second barbed wire fence. She could see the Western guards. She only had a little bit more to go. And then she triggered the tripwire.

The sirens began immediately. The Western guards lit her up with a searchlight to save her from being blasted by East German weapons. As the border guards grabbed her, they made it a point to call the teenage girl a piece of shit. She was taken and imprisoned in a 6.5 by 10-foot cell without any contact with the outside world. For 10 days, the process was the same. Go to bed at 8pm, get woken up at 10pm, six hours of interrogation, and then bed at 4am before being woken up at 6am again to repeat the process. If she fell asleep, the guards banged on the door or physically shook her and eventually they took her mattress away.

The questions remained the same. Who put you up to this? Who conspired with you to make this foolish attempt to escape? A collective society needs collective punishment for its crimes. And surely no 16-year-old girl is going to take it upon herself to defy the government of the German Democratic Republic. Eventually she made up some ridiculous story about a man with little feet who went to a bar that she knew.

Now, the strategy for these interrogations was almost universally the same. The classic scenario was the corner-to-corner interrogation room. The rooms on the second floor overlooked the edge of the prison and allowed a glimpse of the outside world. Interrogator’s chair and desk were situated at an angle to this window corner facing into the room. And when the prisoners are brought in, he, or in Miriam’s case, she, was placed on a small stool in the far interior corner of the room, so that he crouched there, facing the interrogator, who was a good 10ft away. The psychological effect, and this was done through research, was to make the prisoner feel uncomfortable and apprehensive, subject to an animal-like unease, which the interrogator could increase by simply staring at them and saying, “I have plenty of time. I have nothing but time.”

It was clear to the prisoner that just outside their line of vision, a window revealed the world they had lost in exchange for a lonely, silent cell. Often the prisoner had an urge to talk, to make something happen, to get him off that stool and get out of there. Miriam was sentenced to a year and a half in prison. The very first day, the guards gave her introduction. They stripped her naked. They took her to a room with a deep bathtub. One guard held her legs, the other her hair, and they kept dunking her into ice-cold water over and over. When she was allowed to catch a breath, the guards began to call her names. “Filth, bitch, traitor.” She started to think they were killing her, which was precisely the point.

See, what was happening to Miriam was not unique because Miriam had fallen into the hands of the Stasi. The name Simon Wiesenthal lives on to this day. As a Nazi hunter, he spent decades trying to track down those members of the Third Reich who escaped justice by fleeing abroad. His analysis of the East German secret police was a very blunt one. As he himself put it, the Nazi hunter, “The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, Hitler’s Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people.” The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 people to control only 17 million. Roughly 2% of the German population were informants, which is a huge percentage if you stop to think about it.

We tend to think that if we were forced to inform on our neighbors, it would have to be under duress. Something’s happening to our kids, our loved ones, our job’s on the line. In fact, this was not the case. There was no shortage of people who tripped over themselves to inform on their countrymen without any pressure or even reward, other than some sort of status or a sense of, hey, I’m doing my part. Some quite literally just had nothing better to do. One Stasi recruiter said, “Some of them were convinced of the cause, but I think it was mainly because informers got the feeling that they were somebody.” Someone was listening to them for a couple of hours a week, taking notes. They felt they had it over other people. It was an easy way for low status, obedient people to become more important than they otherwise would have been. The recruiter said, “It was pitiful, actually. They were hardly paid at all.”

After the Stasi files were opened, Germans were allowed to learn who had informed on them and what they had said. And everyone in the former East Germany had to ask themselves, “Do I want to know what they had on me? And do I want to know who told?” There were people whose job it is to prepare people to read what had been in their files. There’s one woman named Frau Trumpelmann who explained the nature of the files and then was at hand to comfort the people as they read. But the strain on her was very great. How do you work with poison every day and not yourself become poisoned?

One of her recent readers had been imprisoned for five years under the East German regime for attempting to escape into the West. She had found out by reading her file that it was the man who she was living with who had denounced her to the Stasi. And they still lived together. Just that morning, he had told her to have a great day at the archive. She collapsed into Frau Trumpelmann’s arms.

It was with the rise of Walter Ulbricht’s successor, Erich Honecker, as the head of East Germany, that the decision was made to lessen the Stasi’s use of brute terror and focus on mental warfare. The term for it, the very German term, was zersetzung. It’s a word that’s translated into English as disintegration or corrosion. But what they were disintegrating or corroding was the human minds of their targets. It worked by, say, coming home and finding your socks on the pillow for no reason. OK, maybe I forgot, you know, brain fart, so on and so forth. But the next day, and the day after that, finding your socks on your own pillow, Nothing was stolen from your house. Why is someone putting their socks on the pillow? But who can I complain to? And what can I complain about? That there’s socks on my pillow?

They often took things, the Stasi often took things even further. They would want the target to know that they were being watched. They would intentionally produce noises when someone was making a phone call. They would stop the target repeatedly and search them every time. A target might find their bicycle’s tires slashed not once, but over and over and over. Obviously, this wasn’t a coincidence. But the police wouldn’t slash bicycle tires, right? Or would they? And if not them, who else is doing it? And why? And why weren’t they being arrested? In fact, the Stasi perfected techniques for breaking up groups which were a threat in their minds to the East German regime.

All it took was one Stasi operative in an organization urging its members toward increasingly radical and aggressive actions. And then all the members could be arrested for associating with aggressive radicals or not turning them in. And the Stasi could then truthfully say the group had been an audience to illegal conversations. Yet as sinister and feared as the Stasi were, East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, was still not the most hated figure in the GDR. That honor would probably belong to the woman who became his third wife and his long-time partner in crime, Margot Honecker. Unusually in communist circles, Margot had become a prominent politician in her own right before hitching her wagon to Honecker’s.

In ‘49, she became the youngest member of Parliament at the age of 22. The two crossed paths and began an affair, even though he is 15 years older than her and already married. Walter Ulbricht encouraged Honecker to get divorced and marry Margot, and being a dutiful communist, Honecker followed orders and agreed. She became minister of national education in 1963, and Honecker, her husband, replaced Ulbricht as East German leader in 1971. And while Honecker and his regime dominated the adult citizens in the German Democratic Republic, it was Margot’s role to come for the children.

This earned her the German nickname of “die hexe,” the witch. She was a bit of a fashionista at a time in a place where wearing conspicuous clothing was more than a bit suspect. Her job was to make sure that East German children grew up to be loyal, obedient citizens, or else. Part of her plan was to make sure that children had reliable homes to grow up in. And reliability, of course, was a degree to which parents were in line with the reigning communist ideology. The GDR took thousands of kids from unreliable parents and gave them to good communists to raise as their own. Any further contact between parents and their children was impossible. They had no idea where their kids went.

Sometimes the government wouldn’t even bother to wait a week before taking newborn infants away, a situation that was even worse than what happened to those women in the Gulag. It was a devious way to ensure that parents were obedient. Every single East German child was effectively a hostage of the government at all times, an extreme measure even by communist standards. Some parents spent decades trying to track down what happened to their kids, with different degrees of success. Sometimes they learned their adult children were no longer interested in seeing them, for whatever reason. And others met and stared at each other, two strangers who had only had their biology in common. Those crucial bonds made when a child is very young are almost impossible to reestablish at a later date.

Yet these forced adoptions weren’t Margot’s most horrific technique. The most notorious tool for her control was held in Torgau, which is a two-hour drive south from Berlin. It was at Torgau that Margot ran the worst of the “Jugendwerkhof” in East Germany. The term means youth workshop. But the reality is, Torgau was a prison for children. We can argue about whether the conditions at Torgau are worse than a standard prison or merely the same. But what is indisputable is that 12-year -olds are not very compatible with being held in solitary confinement. One teenage survivor described being locked up after her stepfather molested her, driving her to attempt suicide. She was nevertheless imprisoned, like all the others.

The children at Torgau were locked in with no possibility of escape, without any contact with their families, with no hope of letting them out of the 65-foot-square room. No matter what they did, they knew that if they panicked or acted out or screamed for help, that would only make conditions worse. And if they didn’t know, they learned very quickly. Margot’s staff was there to make sure of that. When they first arrived at Torgau, the kids would be held in holding cells. They had to wait several days for the director to bother seeing them. And while they waited, they weren’t allowed to sing or to whistle, to make any noise at all. They couldn’t even look out the window. That was a whole other world, one that did not concern them any longer.

The goal was not to save these imprisoned children, but to break them. As with any other environment, the predators knew to go where the prey was. And the more helpless the prey, the easier it was for the predators. Not only could the Torgau caretakers assault the children who were ostensibly under their care, they were permitted to take the children home with them on weekends, to use however they saw fit in the privacy of their own homes. As one German newspaper reported that “not everyone, of course, could handle the conditions.” One 17-year-old escaped and drowned himself. Others used shirts to hang themselves, drank grease, swallowed needles. One boy locked himself in his room, poured wax all over his body, and set himself on fire. Another teenager tried to kill himself so there would be distraction for his friends to escape. He survived, and they did not manage to escape.

In a sense, Torgau can be an extreme metaphor for all the people on the far side of the Berlin Wall, or even the far side of the Iron Curtain. They were trapped, literally and figuratively, with no hope of escape, living in countries where human life was nothing, less than nothing. And they knew it. Indeed, what possible argument for hope could you give them? And there had been attempts over the years to try to liberate themselves from the shackles of the Soviet Union.

Imre Nagy was Prime Minister of Hungary from 1953 to 1955, and when Stalin passed away, he attempted to soften his government’s authoritarianism, and this displeased the Kremlin, and he was pulled away from his position. After Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, this led to widespread Hungarian unrest. Nagy was returned to power in an attempt to mollify the population. It did little to ease the tensions. For 13 days, Hungary was in full revolt against being a Soviet satellite, and he announced that his country would be withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact, and that was a bridge too far for Khrushchev. On November 4, 1956, the Soviets launched a full invasion of Hungary. Nagy was arrested alongside many others who took part in the uprising, and a new administration, one in lockstep with Moscow, was installed in his place. He was imprisoned and tortured for almost two years and was hanged in 1958.

Nor was that the only example. January 5, 1968, witnessed Alexander Dubcek taking on the leadership role in communist Czechoslovakia. He began to implement a series of reforms that he regarded as socialism with a human face. The idea was having socialism to make sure that people were happy, healthy, fed, and had jobs, not this sort of authoritarianism that helped no one other than those who were in power. Freeing political prisoners became a topic of discussion, as well as some modicum of free speech and possibly even democratic reforms. This period became known as the Prague Spring. It was a renaissance of civil society blooming throughout every aspect of the Central European country.

As spring turned to summer, word came down from Moscow that Dubcek was moving too quickly. And the final straw came when Dubcek started to distance himself from the Warsaw Pact, just like Imre Nagy had tried to do a decade prior. On July 16, 1968, Dubcek was given a written warning by other members of the Warsaw Pact that he was playing a dangerous game, pointing out that “the peoples of our country won a victory over Hitlerite fascism at the price of immense sacrifices.” What became known as the Warsaw Letter went out to state that “the strength of our ties depends on the internal strength of our system of each of our fraternal countries.”

And thus was born the Brezhnev Doctrine, named after Khrushchev’s successor. The policy was that the socialist nations, and the USSR especially, had an obligation to defend the goals that socialism had made. If a given nation were to turn against socialism in a counterrevolutionary manner, the other nations had a duty to intervene in order to prevent that, by force if necessary. It wasn’t only Russian citizens who could not escape the USSR. Neither could those countries allied with the Soviet Union.

One month after the letter, forces from Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia with support from East Germany. Prague’s citizens witnessed firsthand whether it was true that the city’s cobblestone streets were there in place to make sure it’s easier for Russian tanks to move. Dubcek was arrested, but he was scared of Nagy’s fate. He got expelled from the party and shuffled off to some crappy job deep in Slovakia. President Lyndon Johnson, his Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to the UN all refused to do or say anything.

So where would someone trapped behind the Iron Curtain look for hope? What possible reason would they have to think the totalitarians would ever give up on their absolutist ideology? Why would their rulers ever voluntarily renounce their power? And who could possibly stop them militarily? The Korean War was a draw. The Vietnam War was a disaster for the West. The Soviet Union clearly wasn’t going anywhere. Thus became the era of détente, starting under President Nixon and heavily associated with his adviser Henry Kissinger, who just passed, détente was a semi-official policy of being realistic and acknowledging the world would be forever divided into a communist east and a liberal democratic west for decades, if not centuries to come.

People need to accept that this is how things are, not how you wish them to be or how you imagine them to be. And pretending to be otherwise is both utopian and naive and dangerous to boot. We would just have to figure out a way to live with one another. Working with this concept of détente was the idea of MAD, mutually assured destruction. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had enough nukes at this point to blow up each other dozens of times over, almost certainly destroying life on Earth in the process. Therefore, it was necessary to take steps to avoid the Cold War escalating into open warfare, as has happened several times over the previous decades.

The bipartisan American foreign policy consensus was tethered to the view that the Soviet Union was not going anywhere. Experts agreed that only a lunatic playing a dangerous game with nukes would think differently. As Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign ad said, “We must either love each other or we must die.” It took the pairing of one woman and one man to throw this consensus into the trash. Her view was that consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies. So it is something which no one believes and to which no one objects. As for him, in 1977, he said, “My idea of American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this. We win and they lose.”

What’s gone down in history as one of the great political romances of all time, in retrospect, might be better viewed as a Hollywood buddy comedy. Though their worldviews were highly compatible and often identical, the relationship between President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher emphasized the cliche that politics makes for strange bedfellows. He was a smooth operator, always with a joke on hand, relying on anecdotes instead of data to get across his point of view. She was strident, serious to the point of being a scold, someone who didn’t hesitate to lecture whoever happened to be in earshot. Neither of them took the traditional path toward heading the governments of their respective countries.

The woman who would become the second Mrs. Dennis Thatcher was born in 1925 above her father’s grocery store in suburban Grantham, the incarnation of bourgeoisie that Lenin so despised for the small-minded provincialism. She was always a daddy’s girl, and Margaret Roberts’ interest in politics was sparked at an early age by her father’s local career. He served at the Grantham town council starting in 1927, became alderman in 1943 and mayor in 1945, and was voted out when Labour took over, a quiet trauma that Margaret witnessed firsthand. She got a chemistry degree at Oxford, though her classmates universally agreed that she was unexceptional and possessed little of the future charm and charisma that would make her a politician.

Already well spoken, with strong ideas, young Margaret made three attempts for parliament between 1950 and 1954 and lost all three. Marrying Dennis Thatcher in 1951 gave her some financial freedom to study law and pass the bar, as well as the resources to balance focusing on her political career while raising a pair of twins. In 1959, Margaret Thatcher was given the nomination for the safe Conservative seat of Finchley, and she was elected to Parliament five days before her 34th birthday.

Reagan’s path was a very different one. He was born in 1911 under President Taft in a rural Illinois town, and became a lifeguard and graduate of Eureka College, not quite as impressive as Thatcher’s Oxford degree. He was tall and handsome, became a radio broadcaster, learning the skill of running his mouth for hours without having anything to say, a very useful skill for any politician to have. A lucky trip to Hollywood earned Reagan a contract as an actor, and eventually he became President of the Screen Actors Guild, thereby becoming the first union leader to become President of the United States.

When he once gave a speech to a citizens’ group denouncing fascism, Reagan also added a line condemning communism. And the dead silence from the audience made him realize just how prevalent Stalinist infiltration of Hollywood had become. The media claim was that investigating Communist Party activity in the 1950s McCarthyism was all a witch hunt. But as the playwright Molly Day Thacher put it, no relation, “Those witches didn’t exist. Communists do, here and everywhere in the world. It’s a false parallel witch hunt.” That phrase would indicate that there were no communists in the government, none in the big trade unions, none in the press, none in the arts, none sending money from Hollywood to 12th Street. No one who was in the Communist Party and left uses that phrase. They know better.

Reagan’s brief marriage and divorce to fellow actor Jane Wyman led to him going on a date with a young starlet named Nancy Davis. She had reached out to him because she shared the same name as an actress who had been identified as a communist. And the two were inseparable ever since. By the 1960s, his acting career began to dry up. He started spending time criss-crossing America under the auspices of General Electric, speaking about issues from a conservative perspective. Then and to the day he died, a huge FDR fan, Reagan remained a Democrat despite his political views. As he put it, “I was still saying the same things that I’d said for six years during the Eisenhower administration, but I was suddenly being called a right -wing extremist.”

He was campaigning for Nixon during the former vice president’s 1962 run for governor when a registrar in the audience stood up and challenged him as to his party of choice. He changed his party affiliation to Republican on the spot before continuing with his speech. Nixon’s 1962 campaign for governor was bitter and divisive. When the results came in, his opponent, Pat Brown, was reelected by a five-point margin, 52% to 47%. Two years prior, Richard Nixon had almost been elected President of the United States over JFK. And now he was humiliated and disgraced and very famously gave that press conference when he said, “But as I leave you, I want you to know, just think about how much you’re going to be missing. You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” saying this was to be his last press conference, one of his many, many lies.

On a national stage, things are about to get even worse for the Republicans. The argument was that since Herbert Hoover, the Republicans have simply nominated a me too candidate for the White House, that the voters had not had a choice but an echo. By nominating a strong conservative, the Republican Party would have a path to victory on their own terms and not merely a watered-down version of the left. President Lyndon Johnson had been inaugurated on November 22, 1963, and the Republicans nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater to fight him in 1964, less than one year after JFK had been so tragically assassinated. One of the very few celebrities to pitch their wagon to the Goldwater campaign was Ronald Reagan. And he gave a speech where he talked about what was called a time for choosing.

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro. And in the midst of his story, one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had some place to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.

Despite Reagan’s best efforts, Lyndon Johnson won reelection with 61% of the vote, a record since James Monroe was reelected without opposition in 1820. The Democrats managed to pick up two more Senate seats, giving them a 68 to 32 lead in the Senate. And the House results were even worse. The Democrats had a 295 to 100 seat lead, something that hadn’t been seen since FDR’s heyday. The Republican Party was effectively powerless in Washington. Goldwaterism was dead and buried. Conservatism was done for. Yet Reagan’s speech was very well received and did more for his career than it did for Goldwater’s. And thus Reagan set his sights on the California governor’s mansion.

To have a washed-up, has-been actor become governor of California would have been a joke if it wasn’t so ridiculous. When Reagan was criticized for having no experience, he had a quick retort. He said, “The man who has the job has more experience than anybody. That’s why I’m running.” Even though his election seemed improbable, his margin of victory was a surprise. He trounced Pat Brown 58% to 42%, winning 55 out of California’s 58 counties. Yes, including LA, and by double digits. Now his ascension to the governor’s mansion in California was paralleled by Thatcher climbing the ladder in Britain.

Under the British system, the opposition party has a shadow cabinet consisting of members of parliaments who serve as parallels to the current members of Her Majesty’s government. So when Labour is in power, the Conservatives have a shadow health secretary and so on and so forth. And in 1927, Margaret Thatcher was recommended to Ted Heath, who was leader of the opposition, for just such an assignment. He was looking for women to appoint and he had few female conservatives to choose from. The Tory whip, Willie Whitelaw, recommended Margaret Thatcher, and he’d said, “Willie agrees that she’s much the most able, but he says once she’s there we’ll never be able to get rid of her.” And he was right.

She became shadow secretary of state for education and science in 1967, an affirmative action hire. And after Conservatives took control of parliament in 1970, she became education secretary. In 1968, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. In 1970, Reagan was reelected governor of California. And in 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected as president over George McGovern by 61 to 38%, a margin almost identical to how badly LBJ had beat Goldwater just eight years prior. The American population was vacillating between Republican and Democrat at swings that we have not seen in our lifetime.

Now the volatile American political situation was paralleled in the UK as energy costs went through the roof under the Conservatives. Starting on New Year’s Day 1974, commercial usage of electricity in the United Kingdom was limited to three days a week and working overtime was illegal. Television companies were ordered to stop broadcasting after 10:30pm. Under Queen Victoria, it had been said that the sun never sets on the British Empire because it truthfully stretched across the globe. By the time of Queen Elizabeth II, however, the British couldn’t even keep the lights on at home.

In the aftermath of the introduction of a three-day week, Ted Heath, the Tory, called an election for February 1974. It was basically a draw. Labour had 301 seats. The Tories had 297. The new Labour government immediately increased the wages of miners by 35%, which sounds crazy until you realize that British inflation was 16% in 1974 and would almost hit 27% the following year. Now it was Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s turn to call an election to kind of break the stalemate. He needed 318 seats to get a majority and he got 319 seats.

With Tories and the Labour in close ideological alignment, it became impossible to persuade swing voters to choose anyone other than who they had chosen last election because there was no effective difference between the two parties. This was the era of the middle of consensus. As Thatcher later put it, “Consensus doesn’t really give you any direction in life.”

Now, in January of 1975, Ted Heath put himself up for a vote for his own party to validate his leadership. And Thatcher decided that she was going to throw her hat into the ring to challenge him for the leadership of their party. Now, this was regarded as a bit of a joke. So she was kind of a Karen. Her whole shtick is, “I’m the working mom who’s got two twins at home, and I got to worry about the budget and putting food on the table. But also, I’ve got these political views.” But, like, that’s cute. But like, you’re gonna be leading the Conservative Party? Let’s be serious. When the votes were cast, the sitting leader of the Conservative Party, Ted Heath, got 119 votes and Thatcher got 130 votes. He withdrew before the second ballot. And even though three new men entered, she got the victory.

For the first time in history, a major Western political party would be headed by a woman. And not just a woman, but that woman, or as she became known, TBW, that bloody woman. And it was Red Star, which is a Soviet army newspaper, they gave her the nickname that stuck with her for the rest of her life, the Iron Lady. The American economy was not doing much better than the British. Under the presidency of Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon after he resigned from Watergate, unemployment hit 8.8% and inflation reached over 12% in 1974 alone. Ford was increasingly viewed as incompetent to fight these issues. His campaign to “whip inflation now,” with little WIN buttons, was seen as both clueless and pointless. And Reagan decided to challenge him for the nomination in the 1976 election.

The last time an incumbent had been denied his party’s nomination had been Chester A. Arthur in 1884. And just like Ford, Arthur had been a vice president who only succeeded to the Oval Office when his president, James Garfield, was assassinated. One of the biggest issues separating Reagan and Ford was their attitude toward the Soviet Union. Now, according to Ford’s idea of détente, any act that could be perceived as hostile should be avoided because it would be seen as a provocation. But there were cracks that were beginning to appear in the Russian society for a very specific reason, and that is the growth of technology.

The Soviet bloc witnessed the rise of something called samizdata, which were blurry photocopies of texts that were illegal to possess. Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, revealed the practices of the Soviet Union’s prison system both to citizens in the USSR and abroad. Citizens in these communist countries understood this work was true in all its essentials, quite unlike what they learned to read in the newspapers.

Ford barely managed to squeak out a win against Reagan in the 1976 convention before going on to lose his reelection to Jimmy Carter in 1976. Late 1978 saw the Winter of Discontent, which was Britain’s greatest labor stoppage since 1926. First, there was a strike by the Ford Motor employees, and that was supported by the Transport and General Workers Union. Then came the lorry drivers, which were the version of the Teamsters. Gas stations closed down, distribution channels were crippled. And then the railway men had their turn.

On January 22, 1979, there was a day of action. Over 1.5 million workers went on strike. Schools shut down, airports were closed. The ambulance drivers struck, even though they responded to some emergency calls. 1,100 hospitals under Britain’s socialized system were reduced to only treating emergencies. For a couple of weeks, even the gravediggers went on strike. The sick weren’t getting help. The dead weren’t getting buried. And when the trash collectors went on strike, the garbage in London’s famed Leicester Square stood taller than the people. The UK was fast becoming a dystopian novel.

On March 28, 1979, Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Opposition, stood on the floor of Parliament and said, “Mr. Speaker, I beg to move that this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.” Now Labour needed a majority of the vote to avoid being forced to call an election. And there were plenty of seats from minor parties that the Prime Minister could cut deals with to maintain his hold on office. But when the results came in, Labour had a total of 310 votes. But 311 members of parliament had expressed no confidence in the government. It was the first time a British government had been forced to stand down over 50 years, and for the first time ever, a woman would be leading the Tories into the general election.

Thatcher very famously went on television and said, “I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t. We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free when otherwise it would be in chains, and look at us now.” She worked with the agency Saatchi & Saatchi on an ad campaign that was very simple and very clear. Labour isn’t working. 44% of the voters agreed with her, enough to give Conservatives 339 seats to Labour’s 269. Margaret Thatcher was going to become the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister.

Jimmy Carter’s presidency was not regarded as a big success, to put it mildly. And the GOP saw a golden opportunity to retake the White House. But the 1964 Goldwater campaign was still very fresh in the minds of the Republican establishment. And if Goldwater could only carry six states, his successor, Ronald Reagan, didn’t seem like he was going to be able to do much better. He was too old, he was too out of touch, he was too conservative, he was too extreme. Polling in January of 1980 had Carter leading Reagan 62% to 33%, an even bigger landslide than what LBJ served to Goldwater in 1964.

Then, as now, Iowa was the first state for Republican voters to weigh in on who they wanted to be the nominee. There was a Stop Reagan campaign by Republican voters and establishment members who did not want to give up what they saw as an easy win. And their chosen candidate was George H.W. Bush, who had been director of the CIA, head of the Republican Party, ambassador of the UN, and a two-term member of Congress. And sure enough, Bush won Iowa. Next would be New Hampshire. If Reagan lost New Hampshire to Bush as well, it was effectively going to be the end of the Reagan campaign.

His campaign sponsored a debate to be hosted by a local newspaper. He invited all the other Republican candidates, while Bush had been under the impression that the debate would just be between the two of them. So there was a big interaction, there was a big kind of blow-up on stage, and the moderator, Jon Breen, asked the sound guy to cut off Reagan’s mic. It was one of the few moments where Reagan lost his cool and snapped at him. “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green,” getting the man’s name wrong. The other candidates all applauded him from the stage. The audience erupted into enormous cheers, and Reagan got accolades for putting a journalist in his place.

And from then on, it was a straightforward path for him to get the nomination. So eventually, Reagan forced President Carter to agree to a debate. Carter came off as miserable and peevish, didn’t even think to smile, while Reagan, Mr. Hollywood, stood there effortlessly and seemed horribly unthreatening compared to the caricature that had been made of him in the press. His home run moment was when Carter criticized him for having previously been against Medicare. Reagan smiled, looked at him and goes, “There you go again.” As politely as possible, calling the President of the United States a liar to his face in front of a captive national audience.

And Reagan ended the debate with a very simple question to the voters. “Next Tuesday, all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place, and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?” When the election results came in, it was Goldwater in 1964 all over again, but only it was Jimmy Carter who only took six states. Reagan was elected in a landslide, and his coattails ushered in a Republican Senate for the first time since Eisenhower.

As 1981 began, what had seemed an absurdity five years prior was a reality in both the U.S. and the U.K. Both governments were now under the control of members of the right-wing half of each nation’s respective right-wing party. Popular music had a field day with this, and as one song by the British band Fun Boy Three put it, “The lunatics have taken over the asylum.” So this clip is how Reagan ended the 1980 debate against Carter.

Next Tuesday is Election Day. Next Tuesday, all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place, and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?

Now a couple of weeks after he was inaugurated on March 30, 1981, a gunman named John Hinckley Jr. managed to shoot President Reagan, his press secretary, a Secret Service agent, and a cop before being apprehended. One of his agents immediately covered Reagan as a human shield when he saw that he was being shot. Reagan began to spit up blood, which led both him and the agent to think that the President had been shoved so hard that he had broken a rib. The decision was swiftly made to reroute Reagan’s limo from the White House to a nearby hospital. He insisted on walking into the hospital to demonstrate to the Americans that all was well. But he swiftly collapsed once inside.

It was when the medical team started examining Reagan that they realized that the President had been shot. His wife, Nancy, distraught, arrived just as Reagan began being prepped for surgery. He looked at her and said, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” His nonstop wisecracking must have been reassuring and maddening. He wrote down to his nurse, W.C. Field’s quip that, “All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” And when he was in the operating room, Reagan took a second to take off his oxygen mask, look at the surgical team, and tell them, “I hope you’re all Republicans.” “We’re all Republicans today,” the surgeon said, who was a Democrat.

And the year 1981 was a difficult one for Margaret Thatcher as well. Under the British system, the Prime Minister’s cabinet is composed of members of Parliament. Now there are plenty of moderate and liberal Tories, and she appointed several of them to various positions, and she referred to them as the “wets”, in the same way of saying that someone is all wet. As opposed to this were the Thatcherites who were the “dries.” She would never have a strong dry majority throughout her entire prime ministership. As Thatcher anticipated, her monetarist approach to the economy in the short -term caused a worsening of economic conditions as a means of eventually resolving the problems of both rising unemployment and of inflation. Not only was Labour not working, neither was the Conservative approach.

As she acknowledged it, she said, “Yes, the medicine is harsh, but the patient requires it in order to live. We did not seek election and win in order to manage the decline of a great nation.” By 1981, the worst economic news was beginning to pass and her political hand was strengthened. And that September, in a bid to reassert control of her government, she had a very public reshuffling of her cabinet, which became known as the purging of the wets. Nevertheless, Thatcher was still regarded largely as a transitional figure. It was cute that this kind of housewife was going to be the Prime Minister, but let’s get serious. At some point, this stunt is going to go away and we’re going to have a real person in charge, running the government.

There’s a movie that some of you might know called King Ralph, and in this movie, the entire royal family is killed in a freak accident, and therefore the person who’s like, 300th in line to the throne, John Goodman, becomes King Ralph. And it was basically this kind of thing. It’s like, really, you’re the Prime Minister? It’s cute, you know, this lady. But let’s move on and become adults.

Well, things came to a head in 1982. On April 2, 1982, Argentina invaded the nearby Falkland Islands, which had been a loyal British—which had been a loyal British colony for over a century. Thatcher had withdrawn military protection the year prior, and this led the Argentinians to believe that if they reclaimed the islands, the British couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it. Everything was now on the line, including her government and Great Britain’s dignity itself.

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Verbatim transcript supplied by Anthony for Lesson 6, “Conservative Unity,” on 2026-09-28. It has not been checked against the video. Transcription errors and unsupported historical assertions may be present; see the linked course note for selected source checks.

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