Kiron K. Skinner

Whose Ideas? Whose Words? Authorship of Ronald Reagan's Radio Addresses

O n January 5, 1975, Ronald Reagan completed two terms as governor of California, and soon thereafter he began taping his nationally syndicated radio program. Between January 1975 and October 1979, with the exception of a brief interlude to compete for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, the former governor delivered three-minute commentaries that were broadcast every week by approximately 300 U.S. radio stations, reaching an audience of between 20–30 million listeners. When a collection of Reagan’s handwritten radio commentaries was published on his 90th birthday ~February 6, 2001!, a firestorm ensued. Many scholars, statesmen, and policy analysts who read Reagan, In His Own Hand ~Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson 2001!1 were astonished to learn that Reagan had been thinking, speaking, and writing about the major domestic and foreign policy issues facing the United States long before he launched his presidential campaign in 1980.2 The newly published documents revealed that years before he took presidential office, Reagan had crafted detailed policy positions and outlined his economic and political philosophies. A further revelation was the degree to which Reagan’s performance as president, including his policies toward the Soviet Union, reflected the messages contained in these earlier radio broadcasts. Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, may well be remembered best for his contribution to ending the Cold War: “Commonly seen as a prototypical conservative, Reagan proved capable of truly radical thinking when it came to nuclear weapons, as evidenced by his apparently sincere desire to abolish nuclear arms and replace deterrence with strategic defense” ~George and George 1998!. What is perhaps most interesting about Reagan’s Soviet policy is that it was at odds with the accepted wisdom about deterrence. The U.S. strategy of deterrence during the Cold War consisted of placing strict limits on the research, development, and deployment of missile defense systems and Mutual Assured Destruction ~MAD!, the doctrine designed to prevent nuclear war by allowing the populations of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to be vulnerable to a nuclear attack. On March 23, 1983, President Reagan announced that he was authorizing a research and development program known as the strategic defense initiative ~SDI!. This program was Reagan’s explicit attempt to begin breaking out of MAD and the limits on missile defense outlined in the Anti-Ballistic Missile ~ABM! Treaty of 1972. The source of Reagan’s anticlassical thinking about nuclear policy is of interest to policy elites ~see, for example, FitzGerald 2000!. In the radio commentaries he wrote several years before he became president, Reagan criticized MAD and the ABM Treaty. During his March 23, 1977, broadcast, he remarked sarcastically that “one of . . . @the United States’# contributions to detente” included bargaining away the right to develop missile defense, as specified by the ABM Treaty. The following year, in his commentary of June 27, 1978, he spoke of the Soviets’ refusal to “subscribe to our belief in ‘mutual assured destruction’” ~Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson 2001, 79, 119!. The statistical analysis reported here takes us closer to verifying Reagan’s claim, made in a letter dated July 7, 1988, that SDI “was my idea to begin with” ~Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson 2001, 431!. Kiron Skinner, an editor of five volumes of Reagan’s writings and a co-author of this article, found approximately 679 handwritten drafts of the more than 1,000 radio commentaries Reagan delivered in the late 1970s. It is known that some of the typed radio essays were composed by aides, such as Peter Hannaford, but the absence of handwritten drafts made it difficult to determine whether Reagan was the author of most of the other 300 commentaries. We undertook a statistical analysis to determine the authorship of these remaining radio addresses ~Airoldi, Anderson, Fienberg, and Skinner 2006!. The analysis that follows is a semitechnical review of our statistical research and our results using word counts of the radio speeches. We worked with an electronic version of the Reagan speeches and, through the availability of handwritten drafts, were able at the outset to attribute 679 speeches to Ronald Reagan and 39 to his collaborators ~12 to Peter Hannaford, 26 to John McClaughry, and one to Martin Anderson!. Authorship of the remaining 312 speeches is uncertain. As Reagan’s main collaborator on the radio addresses, Hannaford probably wrote the initial drafts of those Reagan Edoardo M. Airoldi is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, affiliated with the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, and the department of computer science. His research interests include statistical methodology and random graph dynamics, with application to the social and biological sciences.

The Pitfalls of List Experiments in Conflict Zones

ABSTRACT Scholars of conflict often rely on fieldwork to study behaviours of civilians and combatants on the ground. A list experiment is a potentially useful tool for conflict scholars, as this survey methodology is designed to indirectly obtain truthful self-reports of behaviours while preserving the respondents’ anonymity. Acknowledging its advantages, this article also reviews the often overlooked shortcomings of list experiments as a survey method in conflict zones, including those limitations that cannot be corrected with better design or implementation. As an illustration, we discuss the list experiment employed to measure civilian assistance to the insurgents in the Donbas War.