- Hi, I'm Marc Rotterman.

Coming up, a conversation with Paul Kengor, author of "A Pope and a President," and how this unique friendship between President Reagan and Pope John Paul II helped to end the Cold War, next.

- [Announcer] Major funding for "Front Row" with Marc Rotterman is provided by Robert L. Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and by.

[dramatic music] Funding for the Lightning Round provided by Nicholas B. and Lucy Mayo Boddie Foundation, A.E.

Finley Foundation, NC Realtors, Rifenburg Construction, Stefan Gleason.

A complete list of funders can be found at pbsnc.org/frontrow.

[dramatic music] ♪ - Welcome back.

Thanks for joining us, Paul.

- Hey, good to be with you, Marc.

Thanks so much.

- Why don't we start with Ronald Reagan's childhood and the impact his mother, Nelle, had on his faith and values.

- Sure, yeah, well, Ronald Reagan was born February 6th, 1911, and he was born into a family with a father named Jack, who was kind of an apathetic Catholic.

People aren't really totally sure about his faith and exactly how devout he was, but he was Catholic.

The mother, Nelle Reagan, was a Protestant, a very devout member of the Disciples of Christ denomination.

And she took her son to church every week, would take him midweek.

This is a woman who was really on fire for the Lord, taught a Sunday school class.

And Ronald Reagan just gravitated to his mother and his mother's faith.

I mean, his father, he was close to his father too.

And Jack Reagan was, I think, a loving father and a good father.

He had some alcohol problems, but he, you know, he was a loving father.

But the mother really is the one who shaped Ronald Reagan.

And you know, if she would've, Marc, if Nell Reagan would've died in the winter of 1919 from the influenza epidemic that was sweeping so much of America and came to, at that point, their little town in Galesburg, Illinois before they moved to Dixon, which was really where Ronald Reagan was raised in kind of northwest Illinois, I'm convinced that Ronald Reagan would never become president because she was that formative of an influence in his life.

- There are parallels between the pope's childhood and the president's childhood.

Talk to us about those.

- Yeah, so Karol WojtyBa was born in Wadowice, Poland in 1920.

So he was younger than Reagan, he was nine years younger.

And like Ronald Reagan, he had a small family of four people.

So he had one sibling, a brother, like Ronald Reagan did.

Ronald Reagan's brother was Neil.

And in the case of Karol WojtyBa, it's quite interesting, Marc, he actually lost his mother.

He lost his mother, and he lost his brother as well.

So he was left to be raised, it was just him and his dad.

And when the father died quite unexpectedly in 1941, which was just a few months away from when Ronald Reagan's father died, he just mourned.

He came home, found his father dead, and he said, "I'm all alone.

I'm all alone."

But to back up a little bit, the father, who in Karol WojtyBa case, John Paul II's case, the father was very devout, a very devout Catholic.

And when Karol WojtyBa lost his mother, his father took him to the famous Our Lady of Czestochowa, to the Marayong Shrine in Poland and said to him, he said, "This is now your mother.

So the blessed mother, the Virgin Mary, is now your mother."

And he would dedicate his papacy many years later to the blessed mother who was considered the queen of Poland.

So yeah, that would be a profound influence on his life when he was left with no parents at all.

- You know, Paul, I wanna talk and jump forward to 1939 and the invasion of Poland by the Nazis and the impact that had on the future Pope.

- Yeah, so it was August 1939, sometime during the night of August 23rd or 24th, 1939, that Hitler and Stalin signed a pact.

In fact, Hitler was not there.

He had sent his diplomat, Ribbentrop, so the pact is known as Molotov-Ribbentrop.

Molotov was the foreign minister for Stalin, and Ribbentrop was the foreign minister for Hitler.

- But they came together- - It shocked the world, that pact, it shocked the world, didn't it, that pact?

- It was absolutely stunning, absolutely stunning.

You know, American communists, especially American communists who were Jews felt really betrayed by that because, you know, they were completely against Hitler.

And the American Communist Party had vilified Hitler, as Hitler should have been vilified, right?

And so, all of a sudden, for Hitler to be in a pact with Stalin.

And they called it a non-aggression pact, well, it was a non-aggression pact, a promise between Germany and the Soviet Union not to fight one another, which the Nazis would violate two years later in June 1941.

But in a quite non-aggressive manner, they agreed to mutually invade Poland.

They agreed to give over to the Soviets Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Baltic States.

But one week later, on September 1st, 1939, in keeping with the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Germans invaded Poland from the west.

And then, two and a half weeks later, September 17th, 1939, the Soviets invaded Poland from the east.

Everybody forgets about that part.

I mean, I remember World War II started, and Marc, you probably did too, we learned this in our schools.

World War II started when the Germans invaded Poland, September 1st, 1939.

It did, but it really started when these two devils, Hitler and Stalin, signed an agreement with each other a week earlier.

And as everybody in Poland remembers, that month of September 1939, they got in invaded by both sides, from the German fascists from the west and the Soviet communists from the east, and World War II was on.

- Well, that's a natural segue for me.

I want to talk about your book, chapter three, when you talk about fighting communists in Hollywood and in Poland.

Talk to us about that, Reagan and the future Pope.

- Yeah, so John Paul II, well, Karol WojtyBa at that point, he is 19 years old, and he really experienced it firsthand, you know, right then and there.

And in fact, a number of people in Poland when the Soviets invaded thought, "Oh, they're coming to help us."

And Karol WojtyBa said, "No, no, these guys are bad too.

And in fact, they probably hate the church and hate religion even more than the Nazis do, even more than Hitler does."

Back in Hollywood in the United States, Ronald Reagan was a liberal Democrat.

He called himself a hemophiliac liberal, a bleeding-heart liberal.

- He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at that time, right?

- He was, well, he became president of the Screen Actors Guild a little bit later, you know, 1940s into the 1950s.

But as an actor, he was already, in 1945 and 1946, he was giving after-dinner speeches.

He was very political, very political.

And he would give these after dinner speeches where he would just, you know, lambaste the Nazis and the fascists and World War II.

And he had this very pivotal moment in his church where this pastor named Reverend Cleveland Kleihauer comes up to Reagan after this talk that he gave to the men's club of the church and he said, "You know, Ron, great speech.

I'll tell you that you're right.

Those Nazis, they were monsters.

But, you know, Hitler's dead.

World War II is over, and it's good to be vigilant.

It's good to remind people all the time.

But, you know, we're now facing, as Winston Churchill has talked about and others, this threat from the Soviet Union, from communists.

And maybe, at the end of your speech, you ought to make mention of that new threat too."

And Ronald Reagan, Marc, said, "Well, that's good advice and maybe I'll start doing that."

- Well, the '50s were a very pivotal time for President Reagan then.

Then, he was not in elective office, but he became the host of "GE Theater."

Talk to us about that.

That was one of the most popular shows in the '50s.

And also, talk about his relationship with RFK and JFK for me.

- Yeah, I mean, "GE Theater" was a top-of-the-shelf program.

I mean, it was rated number one.

And, you know, Ronald Reagan did that after his acting career in movies was kind of washed up.

And people oftentimes sort of make fun of him, "Oh, you know, he failed at movies and then he went into TV."

No, TV was huge at that point in time.

I mean, if you look at the literal cast of actors, actresses who did the "GE Theater" broadcasts, I mean, it's extraordinary.

I mean, really, the top people in Hollywood were doing that show.

And so this, for Ronald Reagan, you know, this put him on screen and literally brought him into everybody's living room via their TV sets for about eight years.

And he became known as this affable, likable, host of "GE theater."

He was on the cover of "TV Guide."

That's when Ronald Reagan became a household name.

And, you know, as late as the 1970s, 1980 campaign, when certain people tried to vilify him on the political left, you know, calling him a war monger and whatever else, a lot of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, said, "No, no.

This is Ronald Reagan, the host of 'GE Theater.'

I know him.

I watch him every week."

- Not to interrupt, but talk to us how he lost his job, how RFK called the GE Executives, and how he protected RFK.

And then I wanna talk about "A Time for Choosing," one of the defining moments in the president's career.

- Yeah, RFK and JFK, RFK was very protective of his brother, of his big brother.

And it really wrinkled him that Ronald Reagan, in 1960, wasn't endorsing JFK or didn't seem to be endorsing JFK.

but Reagan went through a process between Truman and Eisenhower and then to the Nixon campaign in 1960 and JFK, that's right when he's making his transition from Democrat to eventually becoming a Republican.

And he really makes his complete switch with the Goldwater campaign in 1964.

But for RFK, he had, as he had about everybody, suspicions about the motivations of why somebody wasn't supporting his brother.

I mean, he felt that way about LBJ as well.

And, you know, there's an extraordinary moment where Ronald Reagan and RFK debated each other on national television in 1968, and, you know, right before RFK was shot and assassinated.

And that happened in California too.

Ronald Reagan was governor of California at that time when RFK was assassinated on the one year anniversary of the Six-Day War, which is the reason why Sirhan Sirhan assassinated RFK, for his support of Israel in the 1967 war.

So Ronald Reagan went on "The Joey Bishop Show" that night and expresses condolences to the Kennedy family.

So he had this kind of unique love-hate relationship, or at least RFK did too, with Ronald Reagan.

- Well, let's talk about the '76 campaign, the role that North Carolina played and the president, then Governor Reagan, on his way to Kansas City to the convention.

- Yeah, so Ronald Reagan in 1976 violates what he called his own 11th commandment, which is thou shall Not Speak ill of a fellow Republican, and he challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination for president.

And he came very, very close, very close to unseating Ford.

I mean, Ford never won a presidential election.

And in 1975, '76, Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, Jr. and "National Review," they were really fed up with Gerald Ford, including the way that he treated Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he came in the United States.

And in fact, "National Review" and William F. Buckley Jr. almost considered endorsing Jimmy Carter in 1976, they were that upset and frustrated with Gerald Ford.

So Reagan challenged him, and it came right down to the convention in August 1976 in Kansas City, and Reagan almost, almost won that.

- Almost, by 100 votes.

- Almost unseated Gerald Ford and got the nomination.

- But prior to that, North Carolina did pole vault him back into the race in '76 during the primary.

Isn't that correct?

And then when he won several other primaries?

- Yeah, that's exactly right, and in fact, Reagan had said that his campaign had urged him, you know, "Governor, we just don't think you're gonna be able to cut it."

And he said, "We're gonna do it.

We're gonna win this state, and then we're gonna win a bunch of others and we're gonna take this all the way to the convention."

And that's exactly what he did.

And he very nearly won.

And a lot of people thought, including people in his own family, that he was gonna be too old to run again in 1980.

And Reagan told his daughter, Maureen, and here, this comes back to his mother, Nelle Reagan, who told him, "You know, Ronnie, God has a plan for you.

God is involved in your life and everyone's life."

And Reagan told people in 1976, "God has a plan."

And in Reagan's view, that plan was for him to be there in 1980, to run in 1980.

And by the way, Mike Reagan frequently points this out, Ronald Reagan's adopted son with Jane Wyman, that if Ronald Reagan had won in 1976, rather than winning in 1980 and winning two terms, I mean, Mikhail Gorbachev didn't come into power until 1985.

- What I wanna do- - The Pope comes in '78.

- In the interest of time, I want to skip forward to the '80 election.

He wins the '80 election.

Talk to us about his inner circle, and then I want to get to the attempted assassinations of both the President and the Pope, if we could quickly, 'cause we've got about 10 minutes left.

- Yeah, well, inner circle, I could probably spend too much time on that, but I'll fast forward a little bit here.

Key people in that inner circle that would relate to what happened with the pope and that relationship, Bill Casey, who ends up becoming CIA director under Ronald Reagan, Bill Clark, who was Reagan's chief of staff in California, along with Ed Meese, and serves on the Supreme Court for California, appointed by Reagan in the 1970s.

He ends up becoming Reagan's National Security advisor after Deputy Secretary of State for 1982 and 1983.

So when Ronald Reagan won in 1980, 44 out of 50 states against an incumbent, this is really the core team that, with Reagan, is gonna start to develop this strategy, which, in their view, is intended to take down and peacefully defeat the Soviet Union, reverse Soviet communism, and win the Cold War.

- Talk to me about the day the president was shot, March 30th, 1981.

- He's walking out of the Washington Hilton about 2:26 PM.

He had just talked to the AFL-CIO, a union audience, and he walks out to his car, and waiting there is a young man named John Hinckley who, not part of any great conspiracy, Marc, right?

He's just there to try to get the attention of the actress, Jodie Foster.

And he shot Ronald Reagan and Reagan went down.

He's pushed into the car by one of his Secret Service agents.

Jerry Parr lands on Reagan in the back of the car.

Reagan says, "Jerry, get off me.

I think you've broken one of my ribs."

Parr propped him up, saw these like frothy blood bubbles coming out of his lips.

And he said, "Mr. President, that's a lung wound.

You've been hit."

And he ordered the driver right away to go straight to George Washington University Hospital.

Reagan tried to walk out of the car, went right down.

They got him inside, got him on the table and realized that he was bleeding to death.

In fact, if you moved that bullet just a few centimeters over to the main aortal valve, Ronald Reagan might not have even walked or gotten into that hospital.

He might have bled to death in the car on the way to the hospital.

- Two months later, the pope was shot.

- Yeah, May 13th, 1981, which religiously speaking for Catholics and for John Paul II, the Feast Day of Our Lady of Fatima, which has very special meaning to the people of Poland, John Paul II and the Catholic Church.

And he was shot right smack in the middle of St. Peter's Square by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Muslim Turk.

He very nearly bled to death.

They got him in a car, sped him off to Gemelli Hospital.

It's almost miraculous that they were even able to get through traffic in Rome at like 5:30 in the afternoon at that time.

They got him there, they got him on the table.

The aide, Cardinal Dziwisz, he's actually Cardinal today but he was just a Polish priest then, who caught John Paul II, and when he fell, when he was shot, in the Popemobile, they asked him to anoint the Pope.

And he said, "It was tearing me up inside, but I did it."

And like Reagan, he got massive blood transfusions.

They didn't think he was gonna make it.

You bring that bullet slightly over a few centimeters in his stomach where he was hit and it would've hit in a key vein there.

He could have bled to death as well.

But he survived.

- Go ahead.

Excuse me.

I wanna get this in 'cause we're short on time, but '82, they have their first meeting at the Vatican.

They have a unique bond at that time.

- Yeah, June 1982.

They had wanted to meet all along, as soon as Reagan was elected actually, in November of 1980.

So they met at the Vatican Library for about 50 minutes, one on one.

And the official Vatican notes on this, Marc, are classified for 75 years, so we can't read 'em until the year 2057.

I'll be 90 if I make it that long, all right?

But they confided in one another that they believed that God had spared their lives for a special purpose, which was to work together to take down the Soviet Union.

And Reagan looks at this Polish pope and says, "You know, God has a plan, you and your country, you and your country are part of that plan.

You can be the instrument for taking down and defeating Soviet communism."

So people expect that kind of religious resolution from a pope, maybe not from a president.

But again, that was the kind of thinking that Reagan had learned long ago from his mom.

- Well, they dedicated their lives to defeating communism.

Talk to me quickly about the "Evil Empire" speech and the fall of the Soviet Union.

- Yeah, in March 1983, Ronald Reagan calls the Soviet Union an evil empire.

And he was just demonized for that by a lot of people in the West.

"New York Times" ripped him in editorials and op-eds.

But one guy who agreed with that totally was John Paul II.

He had seen that sort of evil dating back to the 1940s when he was Karol WojtyBa, a priest in Poland.

So he got that, he understood that language.

And as George Will put it at that time, Reagan sought to really kind of re-moralize the Cold War battle.

Reagan said this idea that the Soviet Union and America are both equally at fault for the Cold War, that was called moral equivalency.

Reagan said, "That's rubbish."

The United States might have its problems, or Reagan even said in the "Evil Empire" speech, "Slavery, racism, bigotry, antisemitism.

But we're still far superior to that system and that country."

And for Reagan, that was part of framing for the American public a kind of just war, that this was a country worth confronting in a peaceful way in trying to defeat.

- The decline of the Soviet empire happened.

Nancy Reagan at the time, or at some point, said that Pope John Paul II was Ronald Reagan's closest friend.

You verified that, didn't you?

- Yeah, it's an extraordinary statement.

And I interviewed Nancy Reagan about it, always through email, several times.

When I went back and I put the book, "A Pope and a President" together, I think, Marc, I found six or seven emails where I had asked that question over and over and over again.

And yeah, so Ronald Reagan was sitting in his office, and I was told this, man, about 15 years ago by some polls who visited with Ronald Reagan after the presidency.

And Ronald Reagan had a picture in his office of John Paul II, and they were struck by that.

And he said, "He's my best friend."

He said, "Yeah, I know I'm Protestant and he's Catholic, but he was my best friend."

And he meant there, Marc, I don't think that he was his best friend in the sense of two buddies who would go fishing together or call up and talk about the ball game.

But in this Cold War battle against Soviet communism, Reagan had no closer friend, no better friend on the world stage than John Paul II.

And Nancy Reagan verify that.

- What lessons can we learn today from their friendship, and are we in a new Cold War?

We have about two minutes left.

- Well, I would invoke here the words, kind of the motto of John Paul II, "Be not afraid."

And these were two very courageous men who were not afraid to take on this country and what they saw as a battle between good and evil.

John Paul II's first country that he chose to visit was to Poland.

He was told by his aides, "You can't go there.

You can't go there."

He said, "I'm going to Poland."

Ronald Reagan was told not to say those words evil empire.

He was told not to say, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

But he said, "No, we're gonna say it.

It needs to be said."

And after all, these two men took bullets, right?

If you couldn't take them down with bullets, I mean, their lives had already been threatened.

They survived assassination attempts.

So I'd say that kind of moral courage in the face of evil, somebody like a Putin today, you know, that's needed- - Is Putin, excuse me for interrupting.

- Among our leaders.

- Excuse me for interrupting, but do you think that Putin is trying to recreate the old Soviet Union?

- Well, he doesn't want all of the countries that made up the old USSR, but he gave a speech in April of 2005, effectively a state of the union speech for Russia, where he said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

And he's not a communist, he is not a Marxist or Leninist, but he's an old, aggressive Russian nationalist who's willing to invade the Ukraine, to march right into Kiev.

You know, but Mikhail Gorbachev regretted that the Soviet Union had collapsed, he had tried to hold it together peacefully, but he wasn't going to invade the Ukraine.

So Putin, in many ways, is a throwback to some of the old Russian nationalist dictators of the Cold War, and maybe even pre Cold War.

he's a definite threat.

He's a real threat.

- Do you think we should, quickly, we've got about 40 seconds left, should we be involved in helping Ukraine, you think?

- Well, it's a much more complicated situation.

I think, yeah, we should, but not in any way that's gonna get us in, you know, a nuclear exchange with Russia, not in any way that's, you know, gonna get us in a direct hot war with Russia.

So it's a very delicate situation, not an easy one for Joe Biden to deal with.

And I don't mean this so much as a criticism of Biden, but I think we're lacking great leaders today like we had in the 1980s with Reagan.

- Paul, thanks for being with us.

That's it for us.

We've gotta roll.

Thanks for watching.

See you next week on "Front Row."

Have a great weekend.

[soft dramatic music] - [Announcer] Major funding for "Front Row" with Marc Rotterman is provided by Robert L. Luddy.

Additional funding provided by Patricia and Koo Yuen through the Yuen Foundation, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and by.

Funding for the Lightning Round provided by Nicholas B. and Lucy Mayo Boddie Foundation, A.E.

Finley Foundation, NC Realtors, Rifenburg Construction, Stefan Gleason.

A complete list of funders can be found at pbsnc.org/frontrow.

[dramatic music] ♪