Richard Pipes's Cold War

...But in Vixi, Pipes also knows that he must ask the crucial question: "How did it happen that this man, regarded by the intelligentsia as an amiable duffer, grasped that the Soviet Union was in the throes of terminal illness, whereas nearly all the licensed physicians certified its robustness...

...Haig didn't last...

...His oft-proffered resignation was offered once too often, and after Haig had served for a year and a half, Reagan finally accepted it...

...Nevertheless, Pipes's appointment (thanks to Richard V Allen, head of the National Security Council and himself a leading anti-Soviet strategist) was felicitous: a president who believed that the Soviet Union was not here to stay, a national-security chief who shared that view, and a Polish-American intellectual who agreed wholeheartedly...

...The book is also an informal history of the last days of the Cold War, documented in dramatic fashion by someone who was most assuredly not a belonger in official Washington...

...Pipes's complaint about mistreatment by Allen—who, he says, looked upon Pipes "as a potential rival and hence kept me in the background"—is unattractive...

...Gorbachev, tear down this wall...

...Pipes came to America in 1939 as a sixteen-year-old refugee from Poland...

...The man against whom Pipes directs a good deal of his fire is Secretary of State Alexander Haig, whose behavior he compares to that of "a harried animal" and whose "principal concern was not with the substance of the country's foreign policy but with his personal control of it...

...He felt "muzzled because I was sufficiently highly positioned so that every word I uttered could be interpreted as representing the administration"—but why shouldn't the media consider an interview with a famous historian about German and Soviet foreign policy, conducted in the Executive Office Building across the road from the Oval Office, as reflecting the views of the president who appointed him...

...One thing is clear from Vixi: Pipes simply didn't or wouldn't understand the principles of a town where a bureau chief frequently has more power than his cabinet-secretary superior...

...Far more significant is Pipes's assertion that Nancy Reagan and Michael Deaver took a dim view of Allen "since they were determined to tame Reagan's anti-communism and draw him closer to the mainstream," the mainstream being the anti-anti-communism which, I assume, they favored...

...Pipes also misjudges Reagan as a thinker...

...Henry Kissinger wrote a number of highly influential foreign-policy books as a Harvard professor...

...Deaver and James Baker, says Pipes, "seemed to treat [Reagan] like a grandfather whom one humors but does not take seriously...

...That's an undeserved putdown for a man who had been secretary of labor, director of OMB, secretary of the Treasury—three major posts—and dean of the University of Chicago's graduate school of business...

...Reagan, he says, "was troubled by her husband's reputation as a primitive cold warrior...

...That was why Reagan made his "evil empire" and Westminster speeches, and why later in 1987, over the hysterical objections of the State Department, he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall behind him, to utter his dramatic apostrophe to the Soviet Union: "Mr...

...Brzezinski as national-security adviser to a waffling Jimmy Carter, and Pipes as a national-security desk officer to Ronald Reagan...

...He once heard Reagan say that a million Sears Roebuck catalogues distributed in the Soviet Union would bring the regime down—from which Pipes concludes that Reagan's ideas were simplistic...

...He instinctively understood, as all great statesmen do, what matters and what does not, what is right and what wrong for his country...

...But his new auto-biography—Vixi, Latin for "I lived" —is of interest not just for his academic work but also for his service as a White House adviser...

...He was accorded respect and attention, he says, "not for what I did, said or wrote but for what I was or at any rate was perceived to be"—but why should exposure to the universal condition of mankind be a shock...

...Much of what Pipes complains about in Washington ought not to have come as a surprise to him...

...As for Pipes, now professor emeritus, and his two years in Washington during the Reagan Revolution, he can repeat the words of the Abbe Sieyes—who, when asked what he had done during the French Revolution, replied, "J'ai vecu": I survived...

...But the only sure way to achieve that influence is through political power...

...Others before him—Edmund Morris, for example—have made the same misjudgment...

...Pipes says of these revisionists, "They write bloodless history about a time that drowned in blood...

...His books on Russian and Soviet history have been among the most influential and (at least as far as the academic left and Russian nationalists like Alexander Solz-henitsyn are concerned) among the most controversial...

...What Reagan understood about the Soviet Union was intuitive rather than intellectual, Pipes tut-tuts...

...Moving from his longtime Harvard to Washington during the first two years of Reagan's presidency, Pipes was able to apply his knowledge and sense of strategy to the formulation of policies that helped bring down the Soviet Union...

...And they were all blessed with such superb speechwriters as Tony Dolan and Peter Robinson, and their successors who shared their clients' anti-Sovietism...

...His influence, however, only became measurable when he went to work for President Nixon as national security adviser, a post from which he made his great leap forward to become secretary of state...

...A Warsaw-born predecessor in the White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was already in Canada with his family when World War II broke out—and one wonders what the Kremlin thought when two anti-Communist Poles became White House foreign-policy advisers: Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a columnist for the Washington Times...

...That very day Reagan appointed George Shultz, about whom Pipes comments drily that he "knew less about foreign affairs than Haig but had a steadier personality...

...A good part of Pipes's memoir deals with Sovietology and its practitioners, many of whom are "revisionists," a pejorative term applied to academic apologists for the Soviet Union—who blame the United States for instigating the Cold War, deny Stalin's genocidal history, regard communism as a great idea that got diverted, and believe the Communist Party USA membership consisted of idealists who had nothing to do with Soviet espionage...

...Anti-Communists like Allen and Pipes did not fit into the Nancy Reagan-Deaver world...

...As Pipes, the Harvard professor, describes it: "Such vanity as I possess was and remains that of an intellectual who wants to influence the way people think and feel rather than one who enjoys power over them or craves the status of a celebrity...

...Survived, indeed, to write a fascinating memoir...

...And the answer he comes to is that Reagan "possessed to a high degree the imponderable quality of political judgment...

...Unfortunately, this experience didn't prepare him for the kind of stealth needed to win Washington's battles...

...He had had some earlier experience with Washington as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and later as head of an official group that audited the CIA's analyses of the Soviet econ-omy—and found the CIA work to be woefully inadequate...