Books


How Reagan Won Cold War


. . . by invading Grenada — one of the smallest islands in the Caribbean.


Turning Point: How Reagan Liberated Grenada and Won the Cold War By John Bachman Humanix Books 256 pages, $34.99


O BY MARISA HERMAN


vershadowed by the Vietnam War, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and a string of failed military opera-


tions aimed at stopping the spread of communism in America’s backyard, the liberation of Grenada in 1983 was a major contribution to the end of the Cold War. In Turning Point: How


Reagan Liberated Grena- da and Won the Cold War, award-winning journal- ist and Newsmax anchor John Bachman details the events leading up to and following one of the most successful invasions in modern American history that sent a blunt message to Moscow and Havana: The U.S. would defend its own hemisphere. While the media downplayed the operation, Bachman points out that out of all the military activities the U.S. was involved in dating back to the 1950s in Central and South America,


Operation Urgent Fury was the only one that succeeded. Between 1970 and 1980, more than


a dozen countries fell to communist or socialist regimes. “That didn’t stop until Grenada happened,” Bachman said. “We liber- ated a country, returned it to democ- racy, and we never had to go back in.” Bachman’s interest in the often- overlooked invasion stemmed from a conversation he had with Sal Russo, a political consultant who used to drive Ronald Reagan to speaking engage- ments in California. Russo recalled that the president


was deeply concerned about the need to keep his strongest ally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in the dark about his plan to invade the tiny Caribbean island nation, which is part of the British Common- wealth and whose head of state to this day is the British monarch. The self-governing island,


100 miles off the coast of Venezuela, had a population of 92,000 at the time. “Reagan knew it would


BACHMAN


cause Thatcher a lot of politi- cal damage in the U.K.,” he said.


While Thatcher is credited with


praising Reagan for winning the Cold War “without ever firing a shot,” Bachman said the reality is the “com- bat was intense” and 19 American service members died over four days. At the time, Grenada’s Marxist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop had


invited dozens of Cuban workers, many of them military reservists, to the island to help in the construction of a new airport with a 9,000-foot runway, long enough to accommo- date Soviet troop-carrying aircraft. Constantine Menges, the CIA’s


national intelligence officer for Latin America before becoming special assistant to Reagan, came up with the idea to go into Grenada not just to save Americans studying at a medi- cal school on the island, but to use the operation as a “launch pad that America wasn’t going to tolerate having communism in the Western Hemisphere.” As Reagan weighed the decision


to invade, he wasn’t in the Situation Room. In the days leading up to the operation, he was on a golf vacation at Augusta National with Secretary of State George Shultz, a member of the prestigious club. Reagan was on the 16th hole


when a man named Charlie Harris drove his truck through the gate, took seven people as hostages in the pro shop, and demanded to speak


While Thatcher is credited with praising Reagan for winning the Cold War “without ever firing a shot,” author John Bachman said the reality is the “combat was intense” and 19 American service members died over four days.


58 NEWSMAX | OCTOBER 2025


LUCAS MILES/FACEBOOK


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