President Ronald Reagan’s son Michael has revealed that when Joe Biden was a senator during Reagan’s terms as president, he warned him that he would leak any covert action Reagan had planned.
Biden’s opposition to Reagan covered many fronts, from foreign policy to the judicial branch of government.
“After my father was out of office he shared with me that Sen Joe Biden confronted him and told him if he disagreed with my father on a Covert action he had planned he would leak it to the media to stop it,” Michael Reagan noted.
After my father was out of office he shared with me that Sen Joe Biden confronted him and told him if he disagreed with my father on a Covert action he had planned he would leak it to the media to stop it..
— Michael Reagan (@ReaganWorld) January 23, 2023
On June 12, 1987, Reagan made the most famous speech of his presidency, as he referred to the Berlin Wall and insisted to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Three days later, Reagan wrote in his diary that Biden was a demagogue, asserting, “[There was] some talk about Sen. Biden — now candidate for Pres. I saw him on CNN last night speaking to the John F. Kennedy school at Harvard U. He’s smooth but pure demagog[ue] — out to save Am[erica] from the Reagan doctrine.”
Biden harshly opposed Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars,” which was a plan to develop a space-based missile defense program that could protect the country from a large-scale nuclear attack. “Privately, Reagan was quite adamant that the goal of U.S. defense research should be to eliminate the need for nuclear weapons, which he thought were fundamentally immoral,” the State Department has noted.
In 1993, the general who supervised the department of strategic analysis in the Soviet Ministry of Defense recalled telling the Soviet Politburo in 1983: “Not only could we not defeat SDI, SDI defeated all our possible countermeasures.”
Biden slammed SDI’s funding, saying, “The president’s continued adherence to [SDI] constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
In 1986, when Reagan Reagan nominated William Rehnquist to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, Biden was the Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member. Reagan wrote in his diary of Biden and his fellow leftist senators on the committee, Ted Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum, “The 1st meeting was last evening—highlighted by vitriolic attacks on TV by Sens. Kennedy, Metzenbaum & Biden. They really are a lynch mob.”
By 1987, Biden had become the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Reagan nominated the brilliant conservative jurist Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Biden’s partisan treatment of Bork was so brutal that even The Washington Post wrote that his “swinging reflexively to the other side of the question at the first hint of pressure, claiming the leadership of the opposition, doesn’t do a whole lot of the senator’s claim to be fir for higher office.” The Post added that Biden had “already cast himself in the role of the prosecutor instead of a juror …”