CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

TIME. SOMEONE ONCE CALCULATED that God gave a person about twenty-five thousand days to spend if he lived an average life span. Each day spent was like taking a seed out of a jug containing that number and tossing it out the window as you sped down a highway. That seed was gone forever and you seldom knew if it sprouted new seed or if it withered.

Dad used his seed the best he could. He died between my time at the CIA and my return to active naval duty. Died of heart failure at the age of seventy and lay buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Mom stayed on at Virginia Beach and eventually married Dad’s old classmate, Joe Briggs, from the Naval Academy. She too was ailing from a heart problem. I made every effort to see her often. She always welcomed Barbara and me with a warm hug and that big tolerant smile of hers that she wore all her life. With her I always felt the little boy again nibbled by something in the surf, afraid to go back in the ocean until she proved to me it was all right.

“You participate when you are young,” I remember Dad saying. “When you grow old, you step back and watch others participate.”

I was over sixty years old now. I figured I had about four thousand seeds left, more or less. I was weary, had more lines in my face, my height was a bit stooped, my steps were a little more deliberate, but otherwise I was in fair shape. Sometimes I thought I was at that stage Dad talked about, no longer a participant in great events but instead an observer. Perhaps that was part of acquiring wisdom, that you could look back and make some sense of it all.

Former communist Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 autobiography Witness expressed his belief that communism would ultimately triumph because of the “intensity of faith” communists invested in their cause. He wrote that, in order to overcome the dark clouds of socialist collectivism, “the Free World must discover a power of faith which will provide man’s mind at the same intensity, with the same two certainties: a reason to live and a reason to die.”

President Ronald Reagan seemed to possess that certainty. When I shook hands with him that time, it was like shaking the hand of history itself. He had somehow been allotted more than his share of seeds and used them wisely. His bold, straightforward attack against communism shocked Americans as much as it did the Soviets. After all, we had been pussyfooting around the Russian bear and kowtowing to it since World War II and before.

“Russia’s postwar position in Europe will be a dominant one,” predicted Harry Hopkins, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. “With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces. The conclusions from the foregoing are obvious. Since Russia is the decisive factor in the war, she must be given every assistance and every effort must be made to obtain her friendship.”

“They expect us to play doggie, turn over with our paws in the air, whimper, piss on ourselves, and play dead,” I remarked to CNO James Watkins in one of our many discussions during the tense and controversial period of Reagan’s standoff with the Soviets. “Many of us are like an old whore ready to spread our legs for appeasement and peace.”

“This is a high-stakes game,” Watkins said. “The president is one tough old sonofabitch. I’m betting Gorbachev blinks first.”

All these communist leaders, from Josef Stalin right up through Mikhail Gorbachev were the same—bent on dominating the world.

The Soviet Union began aggressively building an empire from 1917 on. Under Lenin, Russia forcibly annexed the Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Stalin added Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, and parts of Bukovina and Finland. As WWII ended, new Soviet seizures were executed in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Opposition leaders and groups were imprisoned, exiled, or executed.

Communist revolutions erupted in China and Indochina. Communist-fomented civil wars broke out in Greece, Malaya, and the Philippines. Reds attempted to stage general strikes in France and Italy, while in the Balkans and other parts of Eastern Europe populations faced a choice of either fascist or communist dictatorships.

There seemed to be no stopping the Red tidal wave. The Korean War ended in a draw, with the Soviets maintaining influence over North Korea. The Red Chinese seized the helm in China, the most populous nation on earth, and promptly murdered as many as sixty million of their own people and one million Tibetans. Ho Chi Minh announced communism in Vietnam.

The United States refused to intervene in the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule. Cuba turned communist under a Castro takeover, the first Soviet-backed regime in the western hemisphere. East Germany erected the Berlin Wall. Communist regimes sprang up in South Yemen and Africa. South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos fell to communism. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fled the country while an equal number ended up executed or in labor and “reeducation” camps.

Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford’s secretary of state, proposed detente with Russia by proclaiming that “we cannot prevent the growth of Soviet power.”

Marxists came to power in Nicaragua, the Seychelles, and Grenada and initiated other “popular front” uprisings all over Latin America. The Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. Terrorism supported by Soviet Russia as well as Islamic jihad increased dramatically. President Jimmy Carter lifted the ban on travel to Cuba and North Korea.

In a speech of May 22, 1977, Jimmy Carter exhorted Americans to abandon their “inordinate fear of communism.”

Many “progressives” in the West cheered for a world communist victory. Cradling the Marxist agenda under their bonnets, they insinuated themselves into the heart of American democracy, claiming to have glimpsed the future in which, with a few breaking of eggs, an omelet could be made.

Shortly after I went with the CIA, I obtained an FBI memo that listed known contacts between representatives of the Soviet Intelligence Services and members and staff personnel of the U.S. Congress. The list included hundreds of Congressional staff members and at least thirteen senators and representatives.

Disgust for these people filled my throat with bile. We seemed to be on a downward spiral of American susceptibility to communism’s false promises of a collectivist Utopia. It spread moral uncertainty across the heartland while much of the world remained sealed behind an iron curtain of repression, an impenetrable barrier that impounded at least one billion people while untold numbers of others were killed, tortured, or imprisoned with no hope of rescue or outside help. What people seemed not to understand was that communism was the ultimate manifestation of terrorism.

Few U.S. presidents starting with Woodrow Wilson put up any significant resistance to the advance of world communism. Until Reagan, the West seemed to hunker down in fear to accept the inevitable, like Churchill’s story of the monkey who makes a deal with the crocodile on the condition that he be the last one eaten. Reagan posed the world’s first substantial challenge to communism since Lenin was a pup.

It came as no surprise to me that he faced a formidable array of critics as he continued to press the Soviet Union during his presidency’s last months leading up to the 1988 elections. He abandoned completely the “sweet talk” temerity of Cold War presidents before him in his ideological, economic, and geopolitical offensive to draw the Soviets into a battle of systems in which they could not compete and that he predicted would leave them on the “ash heap of history.” No political figure since the American Revolution had so boldly expressed the tone of what freedom meant or entailed.

Reagan was deemed “reckless,” accused of “provoking the Soviets into war.” Media described him as “dangerous … simplistic … crazy … illiberal and provocative.” American Journey, a freshman history textbook, mocked him, saying he “considered the Soviet Union not a coequal nation with legitimate world interests, but an ‘evil empire’”—which, in fact, he did. The Washington Post shouted, “McCarthyism!” The Law Center for Constitutional Rights echoed with, “A move back to the Dark Ages.”

The people who viscerally understood what he was most about were trapped behind the Iron Curtain. His “Evil Empire” speech resonated inside the Soviet gulag. Political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union and emigrated to America, recalled how Reagan’s words were “incredibly popular” among the Soviet Union’s political prisoners.

Natan Sharansky, a Jewish dissident inmate at Permanent Labor Camp 35, jumped for joy when news of the speech filtered into his cell. He passed it on to other inmates.

“Finally,” he exclaimed, “the leader of the free world had spoken the truth—a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.”

Not even John F. Kennedy understood as well the concept, principles, and practices of waging unconventional warfare as well as Reagan. Reagan was a political night fighter who played for keeps and toward a single purpose. Sovietologist Sewery N. Bialer explained it in this way: “(His) self-righteous and moralistic tone, its reduction of Soviet achievements to crimes by international outlaws … stunned and humiliated the Soviet leaders. … [Reagan seemed] determined to deny the Soviet Union nothing less than legitimacy and status as a global power [which] they thought had been conceded once and for all by Reagan’s predecessors.”

Harvard sovietologist Adam Ulam observed how the only way Soviet expansion could be blocked was to be confronted with a “power strong and determined to make Soviet adventurism too risky and expensive.”

I understood what Reagan was doing. I had practiced it myself in one form or another since the Naval Academy forty years ago. It was war “by other means.” Both clandestine and overt at varying times.

Reagan installed Pershing missiles in Europe to deter further Russian expansion. He pressured the Soviets with a massive military buildup in the United States and introduced “Star Wars,” which threatened to make Soviet nuclear weapons obsolete. He provided military support to anti-communist movements around the world and, as at Grenada, stood ready when necessary to go to war against communist encroachment. He and Pope John Paul II cooperated in destabilizing the communist regime in Poland, which led eventually to the nation’s freedom. On June 12, 1987, he delivered his famous speech at the Berlin Wall.

“We welcome change and openness,” he said, “for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is no sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to the gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

The Soviet Union’s efforts to counter the United States militarily over that past two decades had led to its economic decline and finally to this ultimate confrontation in an arms race it could not win. It was Reagan who led the final assault that wrecked the Soviet economy and overwhelmed its technological capabilities. Overextended, hampered by economic and social stagnation that set the stage for its own dissolution, it began to withdraw into itself and abandon its aspirations for world domination.

Socialism had, in fact, collapsed in Russia on a number of occasions. Whenever the State is the single producer and distributor of goods, the results must inevitably be shortages, corruption, and political tyranny. Each time before, when confronted with breakdown, it survived only because it briefly compromised and permitted the free market to make a rescuing adjustment, such as Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s.

But as soon as things were going good again, Lenin or Stalin or Khrushchev or whoever else happened to be in charge jumped back in to re-impose full-blooded socialism. This time, however, the Iron Curtain was cracking. Backed into a corner, Gorbachev blinked first and signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. While the treaty offered relief from economic decline due to fierce competition with the United States, Gorbachev still found it necessary to temporarily release the free market and the people for another “rescuing adjustment.”

“Do not be concerned about all you hear about glasnost and democracy,” he reassured the Politburo. “Those are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no serious internal changes in the USSR other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm America and let them fall asleep. We want to accomplish three things: 1. Get America to withdraw conventional forces from Europe; 2. Get America to withdraw nuclear forces from Europe; 3. Get America to stop proceeding with the Strategic Defense Initiative.”

Forced democratic reforms resulted in unintended consequences. Reagan’s victory over the “Evil Empire” became all but complete as internal USSR institutions began to fall apart and satellite slave nations declared their independence and broke away from the Soviet. The USSR was negotiating its own surrender as Reagan’s presidency drew to a close. It formally dissolved itself on Christmas Day 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev was out the door. Boris Yeltsin became the first president of the New Russian Federation.

The long Cold War was over. Ronald Reagan won. Chalk one up for the good guys.

I retired from the Navy and public service and collected the pet dog I had long coveted, a Kerry blue terrier pup. President Ronald Reagan retired to his California ranch with his horses. Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize. But then so had President Jimmy Carter and PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat.

“Miss it all?” Barbara asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “But it was a good run. Some of the seeds were good and strong and brave.”

She frowned, not understanding. “What?”

I grinned at her. “Honey, you are the best of the seeds.”