Reagan and Thatcher

By Richard Aldous

Norton, 342 pages, $27.95

How genuinely close were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher? In the popular imagination, of course, they were as close as were Churchill and Roosevelt, or Kennedy and Macmillan, or George W. Bush and Tony Blair—possibly even closer since their political ideologies coincided as well. Yet as Richard Aldous shows in "Reagan and Thatcher," a well-researched, well-written and revisionist double portrait, very often the day-to-day policies they pursued diverged significantly. The result was "a more complex, testier relationship" than we might hitherto have thought.

It is clear from the outset that Mr. Aldous, a distinguished British-born professor of history and literature at Bard College, is not some ax-grinding academic with an animus for the two greatest giants of postwar Western statesmanship. He obviously admires both leaders but merely wishes to point out, often through the use of recently declassified documents, that theirs was on occasion "a fractious alliance" rather than what Mr. Aldous calls "the merely love-struck political marriage of contemporary myth."

In the 1990s, Sir Nicholas Henderson, the former British ambassador to Washington, said to the Labour Party politician Tony Benn: "If I reported to you what Margaret Thatcher really thought about President Reagan, it would damage Anglo-American relations." The prime minister and president certainly seemed to have had at least one major clash every year of the eight they shared in office.

In 1981, when Poland cracked down on spreading protests by declaring martial law, the recently elected President Reagan responded by ordering U.S. companies to stop work on a Siberian gas pipeline to Western Europe—a massive project that was worth $381 million to British companies. Prime Minister Thatcher joined her counterparts in Germany and France, Helmut Schmidt and François Mitterrand, in criticizing this "unacceptable interference" by "one very powerful nation" into the affairs of the European Community.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher meeting in Venice in 1987. Peter Jordan//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Over the brewing war over the Falkland Islands in 1982, Mrs. Thatcher was deeply disappointed when Reagan told her that his administration would maintain "a policy of neutrality on the sovereignty issue" and later when he described the islands as a "little ice-cold bunch of land down there." Behind the scenes, his roving ambassador Gen. Vernon Walters told the head of the Argentine junta, Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, that if he seized the Falklands, Britain would "huff, puff, and protest and do nothing."

Argentina did invade the Falklands, in April 1982, and Britain chose to do something rather more than merely protest. Reagan told Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who was trying to resolve the conflict with shuttle diplomacy, that any compromise needed to "meet the test of equity with our Latin neighbors," while Mrs. Thatcher complained to Haig that "the U.S. is doing less for us than we deserve" but that anyhow: "The fleet must steam on!" This decision forced the Reagan administration to decide between the antagonists, and it came down heavily on Britain's side, with Caspar Weinberger's Pentagon and John Lehman's Navy Department providing vital equipment and intelligence that brought forward the hour of the islanders' liberation.

Yet the next year, Mrs. Thatcher declared herself "dismayed and let down" by Reagan's 1983 invasion of Grenada. The Caribbean island was a British Commonwealth country with a British governor-general in residence, but it had been taken over in a bloody coup by Cuban-trained troops, who killed Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe had assured the House of Commons that he "was in the closest possible touch with the U.S. and Caribbean governments" and had "no reason to think that American intervention is likely."

That was a full 48 hours after Ronald Reagan had given the invasion go-ahead. The day after Howe spoke, the invasion began. Reagan gave Mrs. Thatcher only four hours' notice because, as he told Sir Anthony Kershaw of the Commons foreign-affairs select committee: "I didn't want her to say no." Later Reagan privately expressed himself "deeply disappointed" that Mrs. Thatcher had not supported him over Grenada after the logistical and other help he had given her in the Falklands.

In 1984, Mrs. Thatcher did not believe that Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was technologically feasible and never truly grasped that the elaborate antimissile project was aimed at Soviet morale more than operational viability. She was also angry over the Iran-Contra revelations in 1985, since they undermined her policy of never dealing with terrorists, and she was flabbergasted by Reagan's suggestion in 1986, at his summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, that nuclear weapons—which she regarded as the ultimate guarantors of global peace—could be abolished. She generally chafed at Reagan's blunt way of dealing with the Soviets, with whom she played the good cop while Reagan effectively played the bad.

Mr. Aldous's subtle and thought-provoking book amply shows that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher clashed over individual matters. But the two leaders remained steadfast in pursuing together their most important goal: the destruction of Soviet tyranny. That they succeeded means that their names will be linked indelibly in the most glorious pages of Western postwar history. To that extent, the "special relationship" of Britain and the U.S. showed its strength and durability. It is ever-ready to be called on, even as the politicians who preside over the relationship come and go.

—Mr. Roberts, the author of "The Storm of War," is a trustee of the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust.