9

LIBERALS IN LOVE:
MASH NOTES
TO THE KREMLIN

Reagan came to power announcing that the last chapter of Communism was then being written. He said the West would “transcend” the Soviet Union, which would soon be remembered as only “a sad, bizarre chapter in human history.”¹ The sophisticates said he was out of his mind and would blow up the world. Then when he won, Reagan was no longer frightening, merely nongermane. Columbia University history professor Alan Brinkley said the belief that Reagan “won the Cold War” (his quotes) was an “article of faith among many Reagan admirers.” But “historians,” he said, believe the end of the Cold War had “more to do with the grave internal weaknesses in the Soviet system.”² Patton didn’t “win” the Battle of the Bulge: It had more to do with Hitler running out of gas.

And that’s why every college professor, editorial writer, and Hollywood activist in America was howling about Reagan’s Cold War policies throughout his eight years in office. That’s why they were screeching that “Ray-gun” (get it?) was leading us to the brink of nuclear holocaust. That’s why they were demanding unilateral nuclear disarmament—and passing out Nobel Peace Prizes to one another for their piercing conclusions that Reagan was scaring the Soviet Union and must be stopped. All that was because the Soviet Union was a dreary old collapsing wreck of an empire anyway. Just kidding about our hysterical jeremiads. If the Soviet Union was disintegrating under the force of its own “grave internal weaknesses,” as Professor Brinkley summarized the modern view, no one seemed to know it at the time. That theory first emerged after the Soviet Union collapsed when and how Reagan said it would.

In 1994, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift explained why liberals had been completely wrong about everything they ever said about the Cold War. Apparently, there was a vast CIA cover-up during the Reagan administration that cunningly concealed facts only from liberals: “People who want to give Ronald Reagan the entire credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union ignore the fact that the Soviet economy was collapsing and the Reagan Administration covered it up. . . . The CIA concealed what was happening over there so they could keep the defense budget over here high.”³ The CIA will not cease its infernal efforts to conceal information about Communist dictatorships from Eleanor. Discussing whether Elian Gonzalez should be sent back to Cuba on April 12, 2000, she said, “Frankly, to be a poor child in Cuba may, in many instances, be better than being a poor child in Miami.”⁴

If Reagan was just the night watchman for an empire in decline, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble if liberals had told us that at the time. Quite the contrary, liberals were in a state of hysterical paranoia at the totemic symbol of Ronald Reagan. President Jimmy Carter’s principal campaign theme against Reagan was to repeatedly use the words “dangerous” and “disturbing” in connection with Reagan’s foreign policy. In its typical sanctimony, the Economist praised Carter for accusing Reagan of offering “extremely dangerous” ideas “in a quiet voice.”⁵ That “scored well” according to the Economist. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times and the rest of the elite press endorsed President Jimmy Carter and then Walter Mondale over scary warmonger Reagan—on the express grounds that Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union put the world in imminent danger.

Strobe Talbott—Time magazine’s Washington Bureau chief, arms control expert, U.S. deputy secretary of state under Clinton, and pompous octogenarian blowhard before he was nineteen years old—analyzed American foreign policy just one month into Reagan’s presidency.⁶ He began by noting that the Soviet Union was “stronger and bolder than ever before.”⁷ This was Reagan’s first year in office, when—as we are now told—the Soviet Union was collapsing of its own “grave internal weaknesses.” Stronger than ever! Thus, Talbott advised, “The U.S. must learn to live with parity. Whether America likes it or not, Leonid Brezhnev is quite correct in describing any U.S. quest for nuclear supremacy as misguided. The U.S. cannot get there from here—not against a Soviet Union that is ready and able to match America in any kind of arms race.”

Again in 1982, Talbott wearily proclaimed that it was “wishful thinking to predict that international Communism some day will either self-destruct or so exhaust itself in internecine conflict that other nations will no longer be threatened.” As Talbott explained it, “The Soviet Union still has plenty of resources” and Communism is “deeply entrenched in Eastern Europe.” Moreover, the Soviet Union was “peculiarly constituted” and “well designed to be impervious to the consequences of the economic failure.”⁸

A widely cited 1983 study conducted by thirty-five Soviet experts from Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and other elite institutions predicted, “The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government. . . . We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system.”⁹ In 1983, Walter Laqueur, chairman of the International Research Council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, announced that “there is no real solution in sight for the dilemma facing East and West alike.” He, too, confidently stated that “the Soviet Union is now stronger” than in the past.¹⁰

The Soviet Union was certainly not behaving like a power in decline when Reagan entered the Oval Office. Soviet hegemony had been steadily advancing for sixty years. More than a billion people lived under Communism. The USSR had nuclear weapons pointed at U.S. soil and outnumbered the United States in conventional arms by a ratio of about 3:1. Unaware of the revisionist history liberals would someday be trying to pawn off on an unwitting public, in the early years of the Reagan presidency the Soviet Union carpet-bombed Afghanistan, smashed Solidarity in Poland, shot down a civilian plane with Americans aboard (KAL 007), and then decorated the pilot who did it. There is powerful evidence that the Soviets, working through the Bulgarians, put out a murder contract on the pope—who was collaborating with the Reagan administration to support Solidarity.

American policy toward the Soviets had gone from “rollback” to “containment” to “detente,” and was rapidly approaching acceptable defeat. In 1980, Soviet expert Adam Ulam of Harvard remarked, “For the last three or four years [the Soviets] have been led to believe they can get away with anything.”¹¹ (That’s how Carter won the Cold War.) About the same time, former president Richard Nixon published a book, The Real War, in which he announced that World War III had already begun and the Soviet Union was winning. The Soviets’ relentless expansionism and prodigious military buildup, Nixon wrote, would force Americans to face “two cold realities for the first time in modern history” in the coming decade: “The first is that, if war were to come, we might lose. The second is that we might be defeated without war.”¹²

To be sure, Communism’s capacity to produce goods and services was not without flaw. Even liberals were beginning to question whether the Soviet farmer had really suffered seventy years of bad weather. But the Soviet Union was never a superpower because of its booming economy. It was a superpower because of its military might.

The experts browbeat the public into believing nuclear war was imminent. Citing a “variety of recent opinion polls,” the New York Times reported that “a substantial plurality of Americans believe a nuclear war will occur within the next few years.”¹³ In 1984, Leslie Gelb, then national security correspondent for the Times, said the prospect of nuclear war was “becoming less remote all the time.”¹⁴ There was no nuclear war and now there is no USSR. So powerful was the liberal instinct to surrender that many liberals can’t shake their Cold War cowardice even long after Reagan vanquished the Soviet Union. In 1996, a writer in Foreign Policy darkly intoned that winning the Cold War “would have been a great deal less glorious . . . if a few more of those nuclear weapons had actually been used.”¹⁵ The “fact that these things did not happen does not establish that they could not have happened.”¹⁶ So Reagan deserves no credit for winning the Cold War without firing a shot, because what liberals frantically said might happen didn’t happen, but it could have happened. Oh, okay.

The opinion cartel was not just wrong: It was selling a bad product. To be sure, the world stage might not have permitted much hope that the Soviet Union was headed for the “ash heap of history”—as Reagan had said. But liberals weren’t angry at Reagan’s policies; they were angry at his objectives. Judging by their positions at the time, rather than their post hoc allegations, Democrats adored the Soviet Union. Congressional Democrats repeatedly opposed funding anti-Communist rebels, they opposed Reagan’s military buildup, they opposed developing a shield to protect America from incoming missiles, they opposed putting missiles in Europe. As a rule of thumb, Democrats opposed anything opposed by their cherished Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union did not like the idea of a militarily strong America. Neither did the Democrats! In 1982 Senator Edward Kennedy said, “The arms race rushes ahead toward nuclear confrontation that could well mean the annihilation of the human race.”¹⁷(Run, natives of Swaziland, run!) Former secretary of state Cyrus Vance said Reagan was not “dealing seriously with the problems” but was engaging in “needlessly provocative . . . bear-baiting.”¹⁸ Walter Mondale—whom the Democrats considered presidential material—steadfastly opposed defense spending. In the 1984 presidential debates, Mondale explained that he had opposed the F-14 fighter, the M-1 tank, the B-1 bomber—even an increase in military salaries—because he wanted “to make certain that a dollar spent buys us a dollar’s worth of defense.”¹⁹ Democrats are never so penurious about taxpayer money as when it comes to the defense of the nation.

Celebrated windbag George Kennan had been haranguing Americans for over a decade to unilaterally reduce nuclear weapons by 10 percent, be nice to the Soviets, drop our demands for human rights improvements in Russia, and cut America’s “external commitments to the indispensable minimum.”²⁰ There was a surefire path to victory! Sophisticates hailed Kennan as the “designated intellectual of the postwar foreign policy establishment and the most celebrated Foreign Service officer of his time.”²¹ He was praised in the Washington Post for his “intelligence and integrity” and the “sweep” and “cogency” of his arguments.²² In 1982, Kennan was awarded the Peace Prize of the West German book trade, with $11,000 in award money to help him carry on his important work.²³ Stanley “Kutler” of the Derisive Quote Marks school of thought cites George Kennan as another hero of the Cold War.²⁴

As Kennan continued to promote his Surrender Doctrine throughout the Reagan years, toadying articles cited his despair at Reagan’s “hard line against the Kremlin” and especially Reagan’s “evil empire” delusion.²⁵ The Washington Post hailed Kennan as the “Cold War guru in Washington” and the “reluctant prophet”²⁶—“prophet” meaning “left-wing gasbag.” The prophet denounced Washington policy-makers for “failing to heed his admonition that communism was not monolithic.” He argued that it was not Marxism, but the “permanent characteristics” of the Russian national character that guided the Soviet Union.²⁷ In a remark calculated to make the sophisticates swoon, Kennan snippily remarked, “A great many people in an official position in this country don’t seem to know that Stalin is dead.”²⁸ In his typical, unassuming style, Kennan declared in his 1983 book about Soviet-American relations, The Nuclear Delusion, that nuclear war with the USSR was nearly inevitable: “The clock is ticking; the remaining ticks are numbered; the end of their number is already in sight.”²⁹ For a “prophet” with his batting average, Kennan wasn’t reluctant enough.

After Reagan won the Cold War by doing precisely the opposite of everything George Kennan had been demanding in the illustrious pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and other elite publications, it turned out that love of tyranny was not a native characteristic of the Russian people after all! The beautiful mosaic of Eastern European Communism, Central American Communism, and African Communism vanished without a trace. Why are people never ruined by subsequent revelations proving that they were completely wrong?

Indeed, all organs of elite opinion were in hysteria about Reagan’s military buildup—the very buildup that ultimately defeated the Soviets. In 1980, the New York Times self-righteously sniffed that Reagan “seems genuinely to believe that the vain pursuit of arms superiority will bring the Russians begging to the bargaining table.”³⁰ (It did.) The Times sneered at Reagan’s “bluster, bravado and refusal to recognize that America is no longer, if it ever was, king of the world.” (We weren’t, but thanks to Reagan, now we are.) Reagan “is easily caricatured as a bellicose ideologue,” lacking “depth,” “complexity,” and “subtlety.” And yet, the Times said, Reagan was “dangerous.” (What danger? The Soviet Union was on its last legs.) In a follow-up editorial the next day, the Times again reminded its readers for the four billionth time that Reagan was dangerous and stupid: “Mr. Reagan still pretends that a rapid buildup of nuclear weapons could frighten the Russians with the specter of American ‘superiority.’”³¹ (It did.) Without Reagan, we would still be listening to Helen Caldicott drone on about nuclear winter.

Throughout the Reagan administration, there was no tin-pot Communist dictator who did not instantly become the latest celebrity accoutrement in Beverly Hills and the Hamptons. Nicaraguan despot Daniel Ortega was the ne plus ultra dinner guest in Hollywood—forcing him to cut back on denouncing “Zionists” for a while. Hollywood entertainers formed the pro-Ortega Committee of Concern, chaired by actor Mike Farrell, whose wisdom in foreign policy was, reassuringly, shaped by his years as a costar on TV’s M*A*S*H. They held lush poolside fund-raisers at celebrity homes for this Man of the People. Mrs. George Slaff, wife of the former mayor of Beverly Hills, hosted one of the star-studded events for Ortega. She explained to a reporter that she was not bothered by the Marxist enthusiasm for eradicating the rich, because that’s “their business. I don’t regard them as a threat to my way of life, or to the United States.”³² Mrs. Slaff was insulated from Communist tyranny herself, but she thought it might be nice for the little brown brothers. There was no reason to imagine anyone else might want to live in a Beverly Hills estate, with the rhododendrons, and the pools, and Juanita the maid serving bottled water.

Other Hollywood Celebrities for Communist Dictators included actors Ed Asner, Michael Douglas, Susan Anspach, Diane Ladd, Robert Foxworth, Elizabeth “Bewitched” Montgomery; singer Jackson Browne; director Bert Schneider and his wife, Greta; and producers Haskell Wexler, David Hanna, Daniel Selznick, and Joan Keller Selznick.³³ Following protocol, the celebrities were duly praised for “risking their careers by taking a public stand on a politically controversial matter.”³⁴ It was a display of raw courage not seen since George Washington’s shivering troops endured the winter at Valley Forge. All the pot they were smoking in those Beverly Hills haciendas must have made them think they were huddling next to the horses for warmth. If Reagan didn’t win the Cold War, did Ed Asner win it?

Famous blowhards were constantly impressing other famous blowhards with the greater calamity they could predict resulting from Reagan’s support for anti-Communist guerrillas. Joan Didion hysterically berated the Reagan administration for the “wreckage” it was leaving in Nicaragua. Eventually, she said, it would be necessary to talk about Reagan’s Latin American policy—and “when the levers would again be pulled and the consequences voided.”³⁵ The “wreckage” left by the Reagan administration, referred to by Didion, is that Nicaragua is a free country that now holds elections. But at the time, Didion was incoherently rambling that it was “time to talk about runaway agencies, arrogance in the executive branch, about constitutional crises,” blah, blah, blah. Since Reagan won the Cold War, apparently it has never again been time to talk about Reagan’s Nicaraguan policy. Years later, having completely forgotten about her eight-year postmenopausal rage at Reagan, Didion mocked the “dream notion that a U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, had himself caused the collapse of the Soviet Union with a specific magical incantation, the ‘Evil Empire’ speech.”³⁶ The “Evil Empire” speech was important, but also central to Reagan’s victory over the Soviets were all of his policies that had Joan Didion frothing at the mouth.

Showing all the fortitude of his ancestral forebears, Cornell University history professor Walter LaFeber said Reagan’s Latin American policy was “the diplomatic counterpart of trying to use gasoline to extinguish a gasoline fire.”³⁷ (The Creative Writing Department’s loss was the History Department’s gain!) Whatever Reagan was doing, it was not inconsequential. Reagan had his position and liberals had theirs. Reagan said he was going to fight the Soviets and America would win. They said if we fought Communism, it would be like “using gasoline to extinguish a gasoline fire.”

But congressional Democrats hung on Frenchy LaFeber’s every word. The Democrats repeatedly rebuffed Reagan’s request to fund the anti-Communist Contras fighting Hollywood celebrity Daniel Ortega. In 1984, the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives sent a “Dear Comandante” letter to the Soviet-backed Marxist despot in Nicaragua, commending Ortega for his efforts to bring democracy to his country and expressing regret that relations between Nicaragua and Washington were not better.³⁸ While Reagan called Nicaragua a “totalitarian dungeon,” the Democrats saw Ortega as an indigenous reformer.³⁹ Democrat Senators Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) flew to Managua to meet with Ortega and returned claiming Ortega was “a misunderstood democrat rather than a Marxist autocrat.”⁴⁰ In the end, the Democrat-controlled House voted down even humanitarian aid for the Contras in a vote of 248 to 180. Havana Radio hailed the vote as a “‘catastrophic defeat’ for Reagan.”⁴¹ Communists in Havana and the United States Congress had barely recovered from their victory party when, on April 29—less than a week after Democrats had voted down even humanitarian aid for the Contras—Ortega flew to Moscow to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Still, the Democrats put on a brave face. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said glibly, “Where does a Marxist go? Disney World? West Palm Beach?”⁴²

While Democrats were all but offering their daughters to Ortega, Reagan called the Contra rebels the “moral equals of our Founding Fathers.” The Los Angeles Times complained that Reagan was practically “accusing Democrats of favoring a Soviet takeover of Central America.”⁴³ The New York Times leapt in to defend the pro-Communist Democrats, saying, “The President’s rhetoric notwithstanding, there is nothing unpatriotic about this resistance to the contra war.”⁴⁴ Any statement in the Times that begins, “There’s nothing unpatriotic about,” is sure to end with rotten, treasonable behavior.

Reagan was so desperate to get aid to the anti-Communist rebels in 1985 that at the last minute he even agreed to sweeten the pot for Democrats by limiting the aid to humanitarian purposes—“food, medicine, clothing and other assistance.” Then–Senate minority leader and former Klansman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) complained that the “other assistance” phrase was “big enough for an Amtrak train to go through” and “could very well involve trucks and earth-moving equipment.” That’s how much Democrats hated the Contras. No trucks.

The general theme of the Democratic opposition to aiding the Contras was to keep prattling about Vietnam. They wistfully longed for a Democratic president who could lose wars for America. Any aid granted the Contras was treated as the functional equivalent of putting American boys in “body bags.” Senator John Glenn (D-Ohio) compared the paltry $14 million Reagan had requested to President Lyndon Johnson’s expansion of the war in Vietnam: “It’s an advanced Gulf of Tonkin resolution if I’ve ever heard one.” The Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), said, “There is a better way to deal with our problems in Nicaragua than by fighting this nasty little war.” Evidently sending money for food and medicine was not among the unspecified “better” ways. The Democrats always had mysterious objections and secret “better” ways, which they would never tell us. Then they would vote whichever way would best advance Communist interests.

The next year, Reagan again pleaded with Congress to fund the Contras. White House communications director Pat Buchanan said Congress could vote with the Contras or vote with the Communists. The reaction was predictable. The Washington Post’s Mary McGrory instantly denounced Buchanan for such “ugly” tactics. Was a refusal to aid anti-Communists a vote against the Communists? Democrat Congressman Tony Coelho (Cal.) proposed that Democrats vote against the Contras to punish Pat Buchanan, saying a vote for the Contras would be “a ratification of Buchanan’s red-baiting tactics.”⁴⁵ Liberals think they should be able to root for the reds without anyone being so uncouth as to point out they are rooting for the reds. Telling the truth about Democrats is an “ugly” tactic.

In one of the most stirring episodes in U.S. history, faced with the Democrats’ refusal to fund anti-Marxists in Nicaragua, members of Reagan’s staff devised a brilliant plan to support the Contras with private donations.⁴⁶ Funds were collected from patriotic Americans, various foreign countries, the Sultan of Brunei, and private organizations. In addition, Israel sold arms to Iran and a portion of the proceeds was diverted to the beleaguered Contras. Israel had its own reasons for wanting to sell arms to the Iranians, then at war with Iraq. Israel worked with moderates within the Iranian government, who offered—as a bonus—to pressure Islamic Jihad to release American hostages recently kidnapped in Beirut. But that was icing on the cake. The main operation consisted of helping two heinous regimes bleed each other a little longer while getting money to anti-Communists battling totalitarian tyrants in Nicaragua. This is what could be accomplished by bypassing the sedition lobby in Congress. As the MasterCard commercial says, Priceless.

When the Democrats got wind of the fact that men on the president’s staff had been secretly promoting the national interest, they were blind with rage. They would have been fine with a private operation to fund needle exchanges for drug addicts. But diverting money to anti-Communist rebels was a “constitutional crisis.” Democrats raised a hue and cry, alleging a technical violation of “the Boland Amendment,” which no one could ever understand.⁴⁷ There were hearings and indictments and millions of dollars spent on a special prosecutor. Democrats had not felt so alive since they used Watergate to abandon Vietnam in the dark of night, relinquishing Southeast Asia to totalitarian monsters. In retelling the glorious story of how the Democrats won the Cold War, let it never be forgotten that the indictment in the Iran-Contra case charged: “In or before the middle of 1985, the defendants Oliver L. North, Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim and others commenced an enterprise (the ‘Enterprise’) that was intended, among other things, to support military and paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by the Contras and to conduct covert action operations.”⁴⁸ Democrats thought it should be a criminal offense to give aid to anti-Communists. President George Bush did not agree and, years later, would pardon the Iran-Contra participants who stood accused of conspiring for freedom.

Sad to say, Reagan never knew about the Iran-Contra plan until his attorney general, Edwin Meese, discovered it and informed the press. The principals of the operation promptly resigned or were fired. Reagan was hopping mad about Iran offering to pressure Islamic Jihad to release American hostages: That was too close to negotiating for hostages, something Reagan said he would never do. But even if corners were cut, it was a brilliant scheme. There is no possibility that anyone in any Democratic administration would have gone to such lengths to fund anti-Communist forces. When Democrats scheme from the White House, it’s to cover up the president’s affair with an intern. When Republicans scheme, it is to support embattled anti-Communist freedom fighters sold out by the Democrats.

Fascinatingly, the one event during the Reagan administration that shook the Soviet leadership more than any other was the invasion of Grenada—opposed by liberals. The New York Times matter-of-factly reported that the Grenada invasion was “seen as a setback for the Democrats.” The media compared the liberation of Grenada to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. There were literally dozens of hysterical op-eds in the New York Times denouncing the invasion. The Times raged that Reagan was “Making the World ‘Safe’ for Hypocrisy” for having the audacity to free Grenada from Soviet stooges. The Times also reminded readers that Reagan was a “cowboy, ready to shoot at the drop of a hat.” College protesters openly rooted for the other side. While the liberated people of Grenada greeted American troops with open arms, liberals saw the invasion as American imperialism.

The Soviet press simply demeaned the Grenada invasion as a meaningless nonevent. TASS, the official newspaper of the Soviet government, smirked that the Pentagon successfully seized “the tiny island with the help of a whole armada of naval ships, helicopters, planes, artillery and detachments of Marines.” The New York Times, the unofficial newspaper of the Soviet government, smirked that the so-called “heros” had triumphed over “some 750 Cubans and their Grenadian allies” on what “is, after all, only a tiny island.” This was, the Times said, not a “major gain.”

The party that lost China was not exactly in a position to be complaining about the square footage of the territory Reagan won back, but, in any event, Grenada was more significant than its size. Grenada marked the point at which Reagan had unquestionably broken the defeatism of Vietnam. When informed that the United Nations had condemned the Grenada invasion, Reagan said, “It didn’t upset my breakfast at all.” Despite daily harangues in the New York Times, polls showed Americans overwhelmingly supported the Grenada invasion. The Soviets were shocked and disheartened to discover that the editorial positions of the New York Times did not accurately reflect the sentiments of the American people.

Even as Reagan’s policies were working, liberals denied it. New York Times columnist Flora Lewis scoffed at Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “remarkable” claim, made during the 1984 Republican National Convention, that “the Russians had nearly taken over until the Reagan administration.” Where? Lewis demanded to know.⁴⁹ As Ambassador Kirkpatrick said in her speech—just a sentence or two later—in the decade preceding Reagan’s inauguration, the Soviets had expanded their influence into South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Yemen, Libya, Syria, Aden, Congo, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Nicaragua, and Grenada. Other than that, no place really.

In addition to the military offensives, Reagan directed an unremitting stream of rhetorical attacks at the Kremlin. Liberals acted as if Reagan had launched a first strike every time he had a cross word for their beloved Soviet Union. Walter Laqueur condemned Reagan’s “bluster” as “counterproductive” and counseled the president to “find an occasional word of praise for the great and talented Russian people.” Laqueur described as “eloquently argued” the contention that the West should “cease to demonize the Soviet people and their leaders.”⁵⁰ As Sting summarized the views of the intellectuals, “the Russians love their children, too.”

Periodically, congressional hearings would have to be convened to allow progressives to denounce Reagan’s rhetoric more fulsomely. At a 1982 congressional hearing, former Senator and segregationist J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.) said Reagan’s tough language toward the Soviet Union was “a form of psychological warfare.” He said Reagan was playing “a dangerous game” that threatened “the stability and soundness of our domestic economy.”⁵¹ Playing to the media, Fulbright added, “If it is a psychological game, it is a complex and delicate operation requiring experience and subtlety in its execution—qualities which are hardly the hallmark of this administration.”⁵² Calling Reagan stupid was a surefire hit with the self-identified smart set.

Liberals were horribly embarrassed by Reagan’s bellicose anti-Communism. In the 1984 presidential campaign, Mondale said Reagan’s support for anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua had “embarrassed us.” Supporting the Contras, Mondale said, had “strengthened our opposition and undermined [America’s] moral authority.” Apparently, it made our enemies mad. You wouldn’t want that in the middle of an epic struggle with Communist totalitarians. Mondale said Reagan was “oversimplif[ying] the difficulties of what we must do in Central America.”⁵³ Typically, Mondale had complicated long-term solutions that required doing short-term what our enemies would like us to do.

Even newspapers that endorsed Reagan claimed to be embarrassed by him. The Chicago Tribune endorsed Reagan over Mondale in 1984, but criticized the president for his “ignorance about the Soviet Union and his air-headed rhetoric on the issues of foreign policy and arms control.” Reagan’s policies, the Tribune said, “have become an embarrassment to the United States and a danger to world peace.”⁵⁴ The left’s idea for winning the Cold War was a nuclear freeze, opposing anti-Communist guerrillas all over the world, opposing the liberation of Grenada, opposing a missile defense shield, and engaging in sweet talk with the Kremlin. They never explained how their plan would work—but the French were impressed.

Needless to say, liberals reacted to Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech with apoplexy. After asking the Evangelical audience to pray for those who lived under totalitarian rule, Reagan said that as long as the Kremlin continued to “preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” Liberals now brush off Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech as slightly ludicrous and utterly irrelevant. They were not so complacent at the time—and as we now know, neither were the Russians. The New York Times alone ran more than a dozen articles on Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, enraged at Reagan for criticizing their pet totalitarian dictatorship.⁵⁵ Invoking the “Evil Empire” speech became a standard laugh line on college campuses—matched only by the similarly hilarious invocation of Reagan’s name. By contrast, Sting’s insight that the “Russians love their children, too” really struck a chord with Sting’s intellectual peers in academia.

Anthony Lewis berated Reagan for calling the USSR an evil empire, saying Reagan was using “sectarian religiosity to sell a political program.”⁵⁶ It was a “simplistic theology—one in fact rejected by most theologians.” Reagan was applying a “black-and-white standard to something that is much more complex.” Whenever liberals start droning about “complex issues” for which there are no “simple solutions,” hide Grandma and the kids: Rancid policy proposals are coming. Lewis’s method of eschewing simplistic black-and-white characterizations was to call Reagan’s speech “outrageous” and “primitive.” Pushing all the hot buttons of the average New York Times reader, Lewis said Reagan could “easily call it a sin to teach evolution” and suggested with horror that Western European leaders may have reacted badly to Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech.

Liberals were appalled at Reagan’s churlish words toward their beloved Soviet Union as well as his simplistic assumption that we could “win” the Cold War. Thus, Lewis wrote, “Can the concept of good and evil determine whether 10,000 nuclear warheads is enough?” It could and it did. We spent them into the ground. Liberals can never grasp why resistance works better than surrender. As Lewis blathered in utter incomprehension, “The terrible irony of that race is that the United States has led the way on virtually every major new development over the last 30 years, only to find itself met by the Soviet Union.” What was “irony” to liberals was “strategy” for America. The Soviet Union wouldn’t have collapsed anyway.

James Reston, also writing for the Times(!), was similarly baffled by the “objective” of “violent criticism of Russians as an evil society.” The Russians love their children, too. He threw a little regional snobbery in with the anti-God bigotry, saying Reagan “went down South the other day and denounced the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’”⁵⁷ Reston said our European allies were shocked—shocked—by Reagan’s unsophisticated rhetoric. He confided to readers of the Times’s op-ed page, “Secretary of State Shultz is talking quietly to the allies, and indirectly to the Russians, about how to get out of this dilemma.”

Tom Wicker denounced the “Evil Empire” speech as evidencing a “dangerous doctrine” inviting a “repetition of the Vietnam experience.”⁵⁸ Wicker also strenuously objected to Reagan’s opposition to the spread of Communism in Central America. The “greater danger,” he said, “lies in Mr. Reagan’s vision of the superpower relationship as Good versus Evil.” He slipped in the standard liberal disclaimer: “Most of what I know about the Soviet regime I find repellent.” Good for you, Tom! In a long-standing liberal tradition, foreign despots must be pronounced “repellent” or “despicable” before urging a policy of appeasement toward them.

In case readers of the New York Times were not yet stockpiling cyanide pills in raw terror at Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, still a fourth editorial writer weighed in on the speech. Russell Baker said Reagan offered only a “bleak, bankruptive vision of the American future.”⁵⁹ Showing the prescience that has come to define the New York Times op-ed page, Baker said Reagan’s Cold War policies raised the specter of “the next century” consumed with war against “the ‘evil empire’ of Communism.” Baker, like his wildly diverse colleagues on the editorial page, confidently asserted that “most sensible people expect these war preparations to go on forever.” There was “no happy ending in the cards. No ending of any variety. Just eternity stretching on and on with the bills coming in forever.” A few years later, a Democratic Congress would be cheerfully blowing Reagan’s “Peacetime Dividend” on laughably useless domestic programs.

Further obscuring the idea that the Soviet Union was a moldering old corpse of a country, when Reagan made a joke about the Soviet Union in August 1984, the entire liberal cult went ballistic. The jokester Reagan warmed up his radio mike before a presidential address by saying, “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” From the panic in the media, you would have thought it was 1914 and Reagan had accidentally shot the Austro-Hungarian crown prince.

The New York Times rushed to print with a thousand-word article on “Reagan’s Gaffe.” The article earnestly detailed the grave threat to world stability that Reagan’s joke had provoked. A Mondale strategist—“speaking in private”—told the Times “that Mr. Reagan had undercut diplomatic efforts of recent months.”⁶⁰ John B. Oakes, former senior editor of the New York Times, warned that Reagan’s joke “reflects an instinctive feeling that the only good Russian is a dead Russian, which is a rather dangerous sentiment to be boiling along under the Presidential skin in this hair-trigger age.”⁶¹ Serving the same function as the Times’s man-on-the-street interviews, anonymous “Republican strategists” and “high officials” in the Reagan administration admitted to the Times that they had “winced over the remark.” Unnamed State Department and White House officials called the incident “an embarrassment.” In general, there was a lot of indignation about a country that was—as we are now told—teetering on the brink of collapse completely independently of anything Reagan said or did.

The argument that Reagan didn’t know what he was doing when he won the Cold War proves nothing more than that liberals will lie about anything. There is not a shred of evidence to support it, other than the left’s all-consuming hatred for Ronald Reagan. For a man who was buffeted on all sides with contradictory advice for eight years in office, Reagan certainly had a knack for always choosing to take the right advice at just the right moment.

When an advance copy of Reagan’s “Berlin Wall” speech was circulated, it was vehemently opposed by “virtually the entire foreign-policy apparatus of the U.S. government,” according to the draft’s author, speechwriter Peter Robinson.⁶² The sophisticates said it was “crude” and “unduly provocative.” Robinson says, “There were telephone calls, memoranda, and meetings. State and the NSC submitted their own, alternative drafts. . . . In each, the call for Gorbachev to tear down the Wall was missing.” Right up until the moment Reagan boarded Air Force One for Berlin, the State Department and National Security Council were faxing over alternative drafts.

The problem was, Robinson says, Reagan liked the speech. He especially liked the part about the wall. When initially asked for his comments on the speech, Reagan said, “Well, there’s that passage about tearing down the Wall. That Wall has to come down. That’s what I’d like to say.” So that’s what he said. The phrase remained, Robinson says, “solely because of Ronald Reagan.” Moments before giving the speech, Reagan was told that a crowd of East Berliners gathered on the opposite side of the wall to hear his speech had been scattered by the East German police. So when he came to the passage about the wall, he pounded out each syllable: “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 this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Reagan not only ignored the liberal elite throughout his administration but, when necessary, he ignored his conservative base, too. He did so rather famously in 1987, when his apocryphal senility should have been in full bloom—if that hadn’t been a vicious lie. A little more than a year after Reagan walked away from the negotiating table in Reykjavik, he suddenly switched course and began playing good cop with Gorbachev. He even agreed to sign a treaty banning medium-range missiles from Europe. Conservatives went bananas. They finally thought maybe liberals were right about Reagan’s encroaching dementia.

William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review called the prospective treaty a “catastrophic” venture in “utopianism.” The Wall Street Journal criticized Reagan for making “a bad deal” and subjecting our European allies to Soviet intimidation.⁶³ Conservative Caucus Chairman Howard Phillips ridiculed Reagan as “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda,” saying he was “little more than the speech-reader-in-chief.”⁶⁴ This was one of the rare instances when the New York Times allows the likes of a genuine conservative like Phillips to grace its editorial page—to attack Reagan. Conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie called Reagan an “apologist” for Gorbachev.⁶⁵

Reagan ignored his fellow conservatives. He knew he had already won at Reykjavik and that it was time to make overtures to Gorbachev. Once again, Reagan was right and others were wrong. But this time, those who opposed Reagan were his own conservative allies. This was at the very end of Reagan’s presidency, when liberals claim he was losing his grip on reality. But the doddering old figurehead disregarded his closest allies. By pursuing his own course, Ronald Reagan achieved the final triumph over Soviet Communism.

If liberals wanted to attack conservatives, this was the one brief moment at the end of the Cold War when virtually all conservative opinion was wrong. Liberals would sooner believe that it was pure dumb luck—or that trusty old Harry Truman’s containment policies had finally kicked in—than they would believe that Reagan knew what he was doing. They would pass on the chance to attack Richard Viguerie and William F. Buckley simply to avoid admitting Reagan was right. If Reagan won the Cold War, liberals had been monumentally wrong on the matter of America’s national security.

After Reagan brought down the Iron Curtain—by steadfastly ignoring everything liberals said—you would think erstwhile Soviet enthusiasts would stay mum on the subject of their prior positions. Instead they tell wild, bald-faced lies about how they had recognized, early on, the true nature of Soviet Communism. As Norman Mailer remembered it, he had been dubious about the Soviet Union all along. In 1996, he claimed he had always seen that the Soviet regime was “endlessly hollow.”⁶⁶ Strangely enough, there is no record of Mailer ever having said that until after Reagan vanquished the evil empire.

To the contrary, in 1984, Mailer was cheerfully extolling the USSR as a free, churchgoing, middle-class haven. He said the Soviets had created an “inexpensive working economy” in which only one class was visible in Moscow, “and that is the middle class.” Somewhat like Six Flags. Religious freedom reigned, Mailer said, with churches “filled to capacity.” Indeed, he wrote, “I do not know if I ever attended a Catholic service that was more intense.” Mailer denied the existence of a police state, recounting how he “would leave the hotel and walk around for miles” without surveillance. Mailer jeeringly criticized American propaganda that portrayed the Soviet Union as “an evil force.”⁶⁷ The truth, he explained, was that the Soviet people “do not necessarily decide in advance that they are working for a doomed and evil machine.” The Russians love their children, too.

But the way Mailer remembered it years later, it was conservatives who had been the naive ones because they “bought” the idea that the Soviet Union “was an expanding empire.”⁶⁸ What did these conservatives have to go on, really? Sure, there were little telltale signs like the Soviets marching through Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Mongolia, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kirgizia, Poland, Moldavia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Cuba, South Yemen, Congo-Brazzaville, North Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Cambodia, Laos, South Vietnam, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, the Seychelles, Grenada, and Afghanistan. But one could hardly call this a pattern.

Elite opinion did not part company with Reagan on his methods alone. They disagreed with the goal of winning the Cold War—or “winning,” as sophisticates put it. Appallingly, after Reagan defeated the Soviet Union, America was the world’s sole remaining superpower. And worse: America was going to win the war on terrorism. In 2003, Joan Didion morosely complained that “the collapse of the Soviet Union had opened the door to the inevitability of American pre-eminence, a mantle of beneficent power that all nations except rogue nations—whatever they might say on the subject—were yearning for America to assume.”⁶⁹ As Didion saw it, the United States was going to harass the Taliban and Saddam Hussein for no reason whatsoever. America’s imminent military victory over terrorism, Didion said, was “a dream from which there is no waking.”⁷⁰

On MSNBC, Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian and fact checker for Joe Biden, also rued Reagan’s triumph over the Soviet Union. She hearkened back to the good old days when we all lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation: “At least with those two superpowers there was a balance, there was a recognition that if one acted the other would react, and there was some rationality in the minds of people. You know, but now the reaction against America being this superpower, launching itself around the world, the anti-Americanism is probably higher than it’s ever been.”⁷¹ America’s victory in the Cold War had taken all the sport out of global thermonuclear brinksmanship.

After having been proved spectacularly wrong in everything he ever said about the Cold War, Cornell professor Walter LaFeber felt his counsel was desperately needed in the war on terrorism. Calling American intervention abroad a “disorder” that has been “glorified, especially since the American triumph in the Cold War”—a triumph he said was impossible—LaFeber predicted “a continual war . . . to ‘lead the world’ to continual peace.”⁷² Without the highbrow sneer of sarcastic quote marks, Walter LaFeber would be unable to communicate. Liberals expect everyone to forget not only what they said during the Cold War, but the fact that there was a Cold War and that they were rooting for the other side.

During Reagan’s magnificent prosecution of the Cold War, the Nobel Peace Prize committee unerringly awarded its prizes to Reagan’s most maniacal opponents. In 1982, the prize went to Alva Myrdal and Alfonso Garcia Robles for—as the Nobel Foundation put it—“their magnificent work in the disarmament negotiations of the U.N., informing world opinion and of arousing among the general public an acceptance of its joint responsibility for disarmament.”⁷³ Accepting her award, Ms. Myrdal said, “The crimes of violence committed on the streets are to a large extent a result of the spread of arms.”⁷⁴ In 1985, the Nobel Peace Prize went to the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War for their insistence that “both” the Soviet Union and the United States abandon nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union liked the idea since they wouldn’t disarm and could execute anyone who made a fuss about it. In 1988, the Nobel Peace Prize went to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces. Ronald Reagan never won a Nobel Peace Prize. Mikhail Gorbachev did.

Twenty years later, in the war on terrorism, the Nobel Peace Prize committee would again do itself proud. One month after the 9-11 attack on America, the peace prize was awarded jointly to the United Nations and Kofi Annan—who had once gushed that Saddam Hussein was “a man I can do business with.”⁷⁵ As America prepared to attack Iraq in 2002, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Jimmy Carter for his absurd objections to his own country’s policies in the war on terror. Earlier peace prize–winner Mikhail Gorbachev responded to the war on terrorism by calling President George Bush and Tony Blair the true threats to world peace. Osama bin Laden apparently came in a close second. Gorbachev was particularly critical of the “unilateral” policy of the United States and Britain: “Important and serious political decisions should not be taken unilaterally.”⁷⁶ That policy worked pretty well in defeating him.

Whittaker Chambers wrote, “Other ages have had their individual traitors—men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by the million in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.”⁷⁷

All of elite opinion was in a state of high anxiety throughout the Reagan years. At every turn, Reagan’s policies and statements were said to be “dangerous,” promising a “bleak” future, frightening European leaders, and putting “the world’s survival” at risk. Reagan was accused of engaging in “lethal leapfrog” with his “simplistic” view of the world. The New York Times even took shots at Reagan in the sports pages, referring to his “macho myth of American supremacy.”⁷⁸ But now we’re supposed to believe that these same policies were completely immaterial since the Soviet Union was collapsing with or without Reagan. For an irrelevant empire in decline, the Soviet Union sure prompted a lot of pointless hysteria.

It cannot be that Reagan’s approach to the Cold War was both horribly frightening and completely irrelevant. If the Iron Curtain was crumbling, American academics, reporters, editors, and the entire New York Times staff perpetrated a vast conspiratorial fraud on the American people throughout Reagan’s presidency. Either that, or they were wrong and Reagan was right.

Liberals said Reagan was dangerous and his rhetoric scary. They ridiculed him as an idiot for believing the Soviet Union could be toppled. They opposed him on every front—strengthening the military, aiding and arming anti-Communist rebels around the world, invading Grenada, preparing to win a nuclear war, building a nuclear shield, and waging a spiritual crusade against Soviet totalitarianism. Reagan said the Soviet Union was an evil empire and we would prevail. He called the ball, the shot, and the pocket, and he won the game. But now we’re supposed to believe he was lucky. Liberals lie about Reagan’s victory because when Reagan won the Cold War, he proved them wrong on everything they had done and said throughout the Cold War. It is their last defense to fifty years of treason.