Editorials/Let Us Give Thanks/Hill-Jack Bugaboos
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS LET US GIVE THANKS I n my library I have almost an entire 1 wall of books absorbed with one aspect or another of that parlous feud that has divided the West and the Soviet bloc for four...
...Let us be grateful for America's greatest secretary of state, Dean Acheson, whose diplomatic career was crucial to establishment of the Truman Doctrine, Point Four, the Marshall Plan, NATO, the end of the Berlin airlift, and the pursuit of the Korean War...
...EDITORIALS LET US GIVE THANKS I n my library I have almost an entire 1 wall of books absorbed with one aspect or another of that parlous feud that has divided the West and the Soviet bloc for four decades, haunting private life and dominating all sense of national purpose...
...Let us be grateful for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, who kept the United States on an internationalist course...
...Army Major Arthur D. Nicholson, Jr...
...Now Chancellor Kohl has expressed his gratitude...
...Let us also express thanks to Arthur Koestler, whose Darkness at Noon exposed Stalin's show trials, and to Whittaker Chambers, who in Witness exposed Communism's versatile evil and who died in despair for the West...
...Communist totalitarianism...
...the intelligence agents and military personnel, some of whom paid the final price that U.S...
...10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1990...
...Not one of those books envisages the dissolution of totalitarianism now being witnessed by the agape citizens of the West...
...The prose of these writers paved the way for the deeds of the Cold Warriors...
...and even the Communist leaders who now seem to realize that their opposites in the West only want peace and prosperity for all—which includes the people of China, Cuba, and the sorely pressed Nicaraguans and Salvadorans...
...Then in the 1980s Ronald Reagan faced the renewed challenge of Brezhnev and his successors and demonstrated that an arms race is a race the United States could and would win...
...For more than forty years the United States has waged cold war despite ceaseless deprecation from many who benefited from American sacrifices without ever pausing to say thanks...
...Millions deserve gratitude, for instance: the voters, who supported the aforementioned leaders and paid the bills...
...But of course no one person can be cited for bringing to an end so epic a conflict...
...Through the decades we have been portrayed as inept diplomats, trigger-happy rogues, imperialists, and, in the 1980s, cowboys—Hollywood cowboys, not even real cowboys...
...And so let us give thanks for the Cold Warriors themselves, beginning with Winston Churchill, who despite so many years on the firing line, first as the derided Jeremiah of the 1930s then-as wartime prime minister, still had the grit to notify the world in his March 5, 1946, speech in Fulton, Missouri, of the Iron Curtain drawn across Europe and of the dangers ahead...
...When the Englishman Malcolm Muggeridge returned from Russia in the 1930s to refute such celebrated defenders of Stalin as the playwright Shaw, Muggeridge lost his job, leaving his wife and four children on hard times...
...Gratitude is a wondrously appropriate sentiment, and we who may now enjoy the benefits of peace should be grateful to many veterans of the Cold War, many of whom were Europeans and even Russians...
...And a remarkable collection of American diplomats implemented the policy, among them Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, George Marshall, and two men who endured so much abuse, John Foster Dulles and that singularly honorable man, Dean Rusk...
...West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl picked up the telephone and called President Bush to acknowledge that the peaceful end of the Cold War was made possible only by a resolute United States...
...George Orwell was not accorded a much friendlier reception for blowing the whistle on the Communists in the Spanish Civil War and for satirizing Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...If there was one politician who brought the Cold War to an end it was Reagan...
...And if there was one writer to rouse the West to a final awareness of the horrors behind the Iron Curtain it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose pitiless One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich began the tolling of the bell on Marxism...
...The academic treatise of George Kennan gave the United States a scheme for pursuing the East-West conflict, namely: "containment...
...There are the writers who braved abuse and poverty by exposing the brutal nature of Communism...
...the dissidents in the Iron Curtain countries, many still incarcerated...
...Thus it should not surprise us that only one national leader's words have done justice to this historic occasion...
...paid on March 24, 1985, when he was shot in cold blood while on duty in East Germany...
...Sophisticated Europeans such as General Charles de Gaulle made us out to be reckless one minute and faithless the next...
...Through the years every President from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon paid an onerous price for waging the Cold War...
Vol. 23 • January 1990 • No. 1
