Bedtime for Bolshevism
Beston, Paul
H e is a "firm and unbending politician for whom words and deeds are the same," stated a Soviet intelligence report on Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign. Rare is the political...
...No such imperative pertains with Nazism...
...Twenty years later, that's about where we are...
...Jimmy Carter was even more defeatist, believing that the American loss in Vietnam was a just punishment for national hubris, and that American fear of Communism was "inordinate...
...Schweizer is brief in his treatment of Reagan's meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, and appropriately so...
...This Reagan did for forty years until...
...Whether unreconstructed liberals will be swayed by anything so pedestrian as factual evidence is another matter...
...It is the beginning of wisdom, goes the Chinese proverb, to call things by their right names...
...And it was in his first term that Reaganimplemented his long-envisioned plan to "unhinge" the Soviet system with a staggering military buildup...
...It takes wisdom to cut through what Reagan called the "fetish for complexity...
...And yet more than twenty years after he first took the oath of office, too many American intellectuals have yet to understand what the Soviets grasped from the beginning...
...This is the audience that needs convincing and to whom such books should be addressed...
...About the only worry Carter had about the Soviets was that Leonid Brezhnev might see him as "antagonistic toward the Soviet Union," a concern the future Nobel Peace Prize winner confided to his diary...
...Schweizer's consistent theme is that Reagan saw Communism with piercing clarity...
...The principal cause of this blindness is an atavistic need to defend the purported "ideals" of Communism...
...Reagan's War presents the most powerful evidence yet for that conclusion...
...Schweizer is not immune...
...Only time will tell if Schweizer's celebratory tone will diminish his book's impact among non-conservatives...
...Was Eisenhower a coward...
...Gorbachev's rise to power was, it is now clear, the beginning of the endgame...
...Inside information like this is the heart of Reagan's War...
...But at other points the author's tone veers into sentimental triumphalism, as when he describes Gorbachev's respect for Reagan after their first summit meeting: "The Young Tiger left Geneva with a strange new respect for the Aging Lion, who still apparently had plenty of fight left in him...
...It was in his first term that Reagan's belief in counterinsurgency movements was put into practice...
...That missing element is wisdom...
...Of Reagan's role in defeating the Soviet Union, conservatives can now say with confidence: You can look it up...
...With each arms control deal and each American retreat—from Vietnam, from confronting Soviet aggression in Angola—the tone in Moscow became more jubilant...
...Inhuman though it may sound, shouldn't we throw the whole burden of feeding the satellites on their slave masters who are having trouble feeding themselves...
...Excerpts from Politburo meetings make devastatingly clear that the Soviet Union saw détente as the strategic imperative for victory over the United States...
...By 1963—eighteen years before he became president—Reagan had already formulated a radical strategy for winning the Cold War: If we relieve the strain on the shaken Russian economy by aiding their enslaved satellites, thus reducing the danger of uprising and revolution, and if we continue granting concessions which reduce our military strength, giving Russia time to improve hers as well as shore up her limping industrial complex—aren't we perhaps adding to the Communist belief that their system will through evolution catch rip and pass ours...
...He needn't have fretted...
...Drawing upon these sources expansively, Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War makes the conservative version of the Cold War—and Reagan's role in winning it—much harder to refute...
...Carter's comes closer to a sin of conscience, the transgression he has been confidently accusing others of for over twenty years...
...At points, Reagan's War becomes an uncomfortable hybrid of scholarship and hagiography...
...Leebhaert reaches essentially the same conclusions as Schweizer, without the occasional idolatry...
...Certainly the Soviet archives present a compelling enough chronicle of how often he was correct, and when Schweizer keeps the focus on the historical narrative the book is profound...
...Ask a citizen of North Korea, China, or Cuba...
...The main argument—that Reagan was chiefly responsible for the American victory over the Soviets—has been made previously by others on the right (including Schweizer...
...The Communist sources provide devastating support for a host of Cold War assertions that Reagan and many on the right had long maintained: that most of the various "peace" movements, particularly those advocating a nuclear freeze, were supported in some way by Moscow...
...that the Soviets, working with Nicaragua's Sandinistas and Fidel Castro, did have expansionist designs on Central America...
...But throughout Reagan's presidency, the most accurate assessments and the most grudging tributes would come from behind the Iron Curtain...
...The question is absurd...
...Nixon and Kennedy together lacked a host of virtues, but courage was not among them...
...But neither were they as wise...
...his words combined with his deeds—"one and the same"—could be borne no more by the enemy...
...This latter point may take decades for thinking people to concede, yet objective evaluation cannot hold out against such a conclusion forever...
...Even today, fifty years after the death of Stalin, a substantial portion of the American population continues to view Communism as a far lesser evil than Nazism...
...Reagan's confidence and foresight presents particular challenges to conservative historians who seem unable to avoid being swept away by it...
...planes on aggressive maneuvers, "buzzing" Soviet ships in the Mediterranean and conducting provocative war games...
...According to General Vladimir Slipchenko, "We understood that [SDI] could be realistic due to the economic and financial capabilities of the United States:' The Soviet assessment of SDI was that it was probably not possible for at least twenty years, but that the United States would eventually achieve at least a limited form of missile defense...
...You should expect anything from him:' Sometime in 2004, President Bush will deploy an embryonic missile defense system for the United States...
...Schweizer appropriately devotes the bulk of his attention to Reagan's first term, when the groundwork was laid for the triumphs that would follow...
...A dispassionate approach, such as that taken by Derek Leebhaert in The Fifty Year Wound: The True Price of America's Cold War Victory, is more effective...
...When a society does not see an evil or is unable to recognize it, something besides courage is required...
...It was in the years 198184 that Reagan imposed punitive economic policies on the Soviets, limiting Western capital flows to Moscow and curtailing high technology exports...
...Reagan triumphed over the Soviet Union...
...Nixon's error was a mistake of strategic vision...
...He once defined a Communist as "someone who reads Marx and Lenin;' and an anti-Communist as "someone who understands Marx and Lenin...
...He was immune to the appeals of peaceful coexistence, to say nothing of the peculiar self-hatred that gripped so many American liberals after the Second World War...
...As Schweizer writes, "Archives in the former Soviet bloc settlethese debates...
...If we truly believe that our way of life is best aren't the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged so the contrast is apparent...
...Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were convinced that the best the United States could do was maintain strategic parity...
...Eventually, with the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, he engineered a mid-eighties plunge in oil prices that left the Soviets gasping...
...And never has a surrendering leader been more lauded with acclaim...
...Reagan himself, when asked a similar question, answered that everyone knew the truth about the Soviet Union all along, but was simply afraid to say it...
...They resisted the Soviets and at times they took chances, but never did they go where Reagan went because they could not imagine that destination...
...When Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, the Soviets reacted in the way they had become accustomed: they took it seriously...
...Schweizer offers plentiful evidence that the Soviets were unnerved and ultimately fearful of the Reagan strategy...
...The idea for this began with Reagan, of course, and may end up as his most enduring legacy...
...None, as Schweizer would argue, was as brave...
...they were uncertain in their actions...
...Rhetorical arguments for Reagan's importance are all well and good, but Peter Schweizer has provided something much more potent...
...Nevertheless, his ingrained public image as a dimwit presents a nearly insurmountable obstacle to those brave enough to keep an open mind...
...He was unafraid of both the disapproving opinions of the policy elite and the real dangers his hard line presented...
...Rare is the political leader who receives such a tribute from his allies, and rarer still from his adversaries...
...With the assistance of his ubiquitous CIA director Bill Casey, Reagan supplied money, arms, or both to movements in Poland, Central America, and Afghanistan...
...Sun Tzu's dictum that the best general wins before a battle can take place was never more applicable...
...When a society sees an evil and is afraid to act against it, courage is required to overcome fear...
...American liberals alternately derided the plan as a fantasy or fretted about its effect on superpower relations (never explaining why a fantasy should cause so much distress...
...The Reagan-Gorbachev meetings were not summit conferences but surrender negotiations...
...These men were not afraid to act...
...Why did so few people see Communism as clearly, why did none of the men who preceded him in the White House...
...Probably they were all more intelligent than Reagan...
...The Soviets had Reagan pegged early on...
...according to Schweizer, the Soviets hoped for his election in 1976, and the KGB even recruited a Democratic Party worker with access to the candidate...
...In early 1981, for example, Reagan sent U.S...
...And Schweizer's subtitle is a bit over the top, as well as historically dubious...
...The Soviets, on the other hand, saw an unambiguous challenge from a man they had come to know much better than had editorial writers for the New York Times...
...Communism, though dealt a grievous blow, lives on...
...As Schweizer puts it: "How did a C student in economics from Eureka College envision all this...
...But tone aside, Reagan's War is a formidable weapon against liberal resistance to the historical record of the Cold War...
...Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB and eventually Soviet general secretary, confided to the USSR's American ambassador, "Reagan is unpredictable...
...and that detente and arms control were part of the Soviets' master plan to achieve superiority and weaken the West...
...But conservative historians seem to be caught between their devotion to the historical record and their emotional identification with the heroism of Ronald Reagan...
...Schweizer makes clear that Reagan's vision for defeating the Soviets was the result of half a lifetime of reflection...
...One should not be too optimistic: witness the supreme arrogance of Carter who continues to pronounce upon world affairs about which he should be disqualified from offering counsel...
...Their failure to do so is even more damning now that so much classified material has been made available from the Soviet bloc...
...It was courage, writes Schweizer, that "made all the difference, an important lesson in an age when supreme importance seems to be placed on the intelligence of our leaders rather than their courage:' Without question, courage was an enormous factor in Reagan's success...
...Schweizer's use of Soviet sources is particularly illuminating in the chapters covering the 1970s...
...Reagan seems never to be wrong...
...Ever so slowly, respect is building for what Reagan achieved...
Vol. 36 • January 2003 • No. 1
