e.
             Soon after he took office, Reagan was the target of an unsuccessful assassination attempt. While seriously injured, he was able to return to work after one month. Following his release from the hospital, President Reagan turned the focus of his administration to foreign policy, with the spotlight being on the Communist nations of the Soviet Union. He believed that as an economic base, Communism would most assuredly not survive (Reagan, 224). He saw the Soviet Union as a nuclear threat to the United States that was destined to collapse under its struggling government. The Reagan Administration thought it imperative to attempt to decrease Soviet nuclear power through long-term arms reduction programs. Although he believed this was the path to take, Reagan knew that it would not be easy to implement a policy of this nature, and made the Russians aware that the U.S. would spend whatever it would take to stay ahead of them in the arms race, and we (Americans) could never accept second place. He believed that the Russians could never win the arms race, because the United States could outspend them forever (Reagan, 271).
             The leader of Russia at the time, Leonid Brezhnev, was the initial target of Reagan's diplomatic attempt at a peaceful end to the military build-up. He wanted to reach Brezhnev on a personal level through a hand-written letter and try to convince him that, contrary to Soviet beliefs, America wasn't a nation that was trying to take over the world. Reagan tried to explain to the Soviet leader that he didn't want to destroy the Soviet way of life, but he wanted to send a signal to Brezhnev that America was interested in reducing the threat of nuclear annihilation. In this excerpt from his hand-written letter, Reagan tried to persuade these ideals on Brezhnev:
             It is often implied that such things have been made necessary because of territorial ambitions of the United States; that we have imperia...