“Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'”

American historian and author

H. W. Brands is an American historian and author. He holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, and earned his PhD there in 1985. He has written more than thirty books on U.S. history. His work has twice been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist, reflecting a career focused on American political and historical writing.