An Indispensable Historian

...But Pipes, with his knowledge of the Soviet mindset and the Leninist political tradition, demonstrated that Soviet strategists believed that a nuclear war could be fought and won, and were in the process of creating a nuclear force-structure with an offensive, war-winningcapacity...

...He served as speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and to Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle...

...This conviction lead to his growing political involvement—first with Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a leading critic of the Nixon-Kissinger policy of detente...

...Looking back on a long and productive life, Pipes believes that the secret of happiness is to "decide early on what we want to do and then do it...

...FEBRUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 BOOKS IN REVIEW eign policy, and the relationship between property and freedom...

...He is currently working on an intellectual history of Russia, which he expects to finish in several years...

...Team B's conclusions—confirmed nine years later by Soviet authorities during the final, glasnost phase of Soviet history—were widely ridiculed by the usual liberal critics, but they deeply influenced Ronald Reagan's critique of detente...

...Having done what he could to help President Reagan defeat the Evil Empire, Pipes returned to Harvard, where he produced his magnum opus, a two-volume study of the Russian Revolution, along with other important works on communism, American forHe came to regard many of his colleagues as hopeless pedants in the thrall of "group-think...

...Although many critics, both on the left and the right, argued that it was impossible for the United States to compel the Soviets to alter their system, Pipes believes that the strategy outlined in NSDD 75 succeeded: Reagan's ideological offensive and his military build up rattled the Russians, robbing them of their confidence, acquired in the 1960s and 1970s, that they had the United States on the ropes...

...Nine months later, they disembarked from a Greek ship in Hoboken, New Jersey...

...Pipes took it upon himself to articulate the president's understanding into a specific set of policy directives...

...CIA analysts took it for granted that Soviet strategists, like their American counterparts, regarded nuclear weapons as defensive tools designed to deter a potential attack...

...distant father and a doting mother, Pipes was a precocious adolescent with pronounced intellectual and aesthetic interests, and a marked indifference to Poland's enigmatic Soviet neighbor...

...Now 80 years old, Pipes has devoted his professional life to deciphering Russia's past and illuminating its present...

...Richard Pipes was born in 1923 to an assimilated Polish-Jewish family...

...Over time, Pipes grew increasingly disenchanted with Harvard, which "changed profoundly" for the worse after the 1960s...

...Formally issued in January 1983, NSDD 75 endorsed regime-change as the ultimate goal of U.S...

...But even the happiest situation has its downside...

...He concluded that while Reagan "was altogether incapable of thinking abstractly," he "understood very well—intuitively rather than intellectually—the fundamental weaknesses of the Soviet regime...

...He came to regard many of his colleagues as hopeless pedants in the thrall of "group-think...

...His engaging autobiography, Vixi (Latin for "I have lived"), demonstrates that even in an age dominated by science and technology, the ancient and honorable discipline of history retains its centrality...

...Members of PFIAB had grown increasingly uneasy about the CIA's complacent evaluation of the Soviet Union's massive nuclear buildup of the 1970s, and Team B was tasked with developing an alternative analysis...

...As his exemplary autobiography makes clear, this is precisely how Pipes himself attained personal happiness, while simultaneously serving his country and bringing honor to his profession...

...Virtually all their friends and relatives were subsequently murdered by the Nazis...

...and then as the chairman of "Team B," a group of scholars created in 1976 at the behest of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board...

...then with the conservative Stanford Research Institute...

...policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and laid out a relentless campaign of military, economic, and political pressure as the means by which the U.S...

...The net result of this methodology," argues Pipes, "was to depict communist societies as not fundamentally different from democratic ones: a conclusion that reinforced the policy recommendation that we could and should come to terms with them...

...The result was a document known as National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 75, which Pipes regards as his "main contribution" to Reagan's foreign policy...

...Although Pipes, "for the sake of my sanity and positive attitude to life," tries not to think about the Holocaust, it played a decisive role in his choice of a career...

...Since scholars have written enough on the Holocaust, I thought it my mission to demonstrate this truth using the example of communism...

...And during the closing decades of the Cold War, no writer was more important to an understanding of Soviet aims and ambitions then Harvard historian Richard Pipes...

...The only son of a Joseph Shattan is the author ofArchitects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War...

...p IPES AND HIS FELLOW TEAM MEMBERS concluded that the CIA—though highly well-informed about the quantity and quality of Soviet weapons--understood next to nothing of Soviet intentions...

...With his newly acquired proficiency in Russian, however, he went on to earn his doctorate in Russian history at Harvard...

...In our current war with Islamic terrorists, for example, the most indispensable writer by far is Princeton historian Bernard Lewis...

...And he was horrified by the growing popularity of the ahistorical and amoral field of "Sovietology," a pseudo-discipline which, in its bizarre efforts to appear "scientific," treated both democratic and communist societies as though they were nothing more than machines designed to achieve identical ends...

...Pipes believed that the Sovietologists who dominated Soviet studies were no better than the British appeasers of the 1930s...

...complacency in the face of these offensive Soviet deployments, Pipes warned, risked "potentially catastrophic consequences...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW An Indispensable Historian Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger by Richard Pipes (Yale University Press, 264 pages, $30) Reviewed by Joseph Shattan LTHOUGH MOST PEOPLE would say that the main reason we study history is to understand ourselves, I think a better reason is that history helps us understand—and defeat—our enemies...

...army, which inducted him into its air corps in 1943 and taught him Russian in the expectation that it would prove useful in maintaining three American air bases located on Soviet territory...

...As he writes: I felt and feel to this day that I have been spared not to waste my life on self-indulgence or self-aggrandizement but to spread a moral message by showing, using examples from history, how evil ideas lead to evil consequences...

...And when Harvard 56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 BOOKS IN REVIEW offered him tenure in 1958, he writes, "I gained lasting happiness...

...But the bases were soon dismantled, and Pipes never left the United States...

...In October 1939 the entire family, traveling on false papers, miraculously escaped Warsaw aboard a German train carrying troops on home leave...

...During his two years of service on the NSC, Pipes had many occasions to observe President Reagan at close quarters...

...When he was 16 years old, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany, and Pipes lived through the terrible, round-the-clock German bombing of Warsaw...

...would force the Soviet Union to change...

...And when Reagan was elected president in 1980, Pipes was asked to join the National Security Council as the head of its East European and Soviet desk...

...That loss of self-confidence was a major factor in the mistakes they committed in the late 1980s...

...Pipes's determination to make his mark as a morally committed historian was inadvertently furthered by the U.S...