The year 1956 witnessed several of the defining moments of the Cold War: Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous secret speech denouncing Stalin's crimes; the Suez Crisis ushered in decades of superpower rivalry in the Middle East; and an anti-Communist uprising in Hungary was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks. I was born in the United States in 1956, and was indoctrinated to believe that the Soviet Union intended to destroy my country's way of life and abolish its personal freedoms. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Soviet children were being schooled to believe that the United States sought to corrupt their souls with the selfish ideology of capitalism. The two superpowers divided the world between them and constructed immense psychological barriers to mutual understanding and reconciliation. To sustain popular support it was necessary to demonize the enemy as an implacably hostile foe. Ronald Reagan voiced this imperative by repeatedly referring to the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire" during his presidency.