Ronald Reagan: It Was a Wonderful Life

[thedrifter]

Ronald Reagan: It Was a Wonderful Life
by John O'Sullivan
Posted 02/06/2007 ET

When President Reagan was a young man, serving his local town as a lifeguard, he saved the lives of 19 swimmers. Supposing he had tried to save the life of a 20th who, struggling wildly, momentarily knocked out the future President so that he too started to drown and, losing consciousness . . .
When Ronnie came to, he found himself in the company of a mild-looking elderly man and a tall lanky youth of his own age. The latter introduced himself:

"Hello, Ronnie, we don't know each other yet, but we'll become great friends in later life -- that is, if you have one. Talking of which, let me introduce my friend, Clarence, who's by way of being a guardian angel. But he'll explain."

At that the young man disappeared and Ronnie found himself alone with Clarence in a large deserted avenue lit only by two or three sputtering lamps. He was about to ask where he was when Clarence said:

"This is Broadway in New York, Ronnie, in 1986 on the anniversary of the American Revolution. They were going to have celebrations, but they had to be canceled owing to the energy shortage."

"What on earth happened to darken Broadway?" asked Ronnie.

"Well, they had an energy crisis beginning in the mid-1970s," explained Clarence again. "The second Carter administration, knowing that oil and energy resources were running out worldwide, imposed strict controls and limits to growth. You weren't around to persuade the nation that American enterprise and the free market would solve the problem in a few years if we freed them up. So the energy crisis got worse and worse. People adapted. They don't go out much these days and they travel during the day to avoid the muggers."

Just then the scene changed to an even more depressed landscape in which ill-dressed men and women, with permanently anxious expressions, hurried along fog-bound streets. Around the corner came a striking woman with piercing blue eyes. The others stepped aside respectfully for her, but they also shamefacedly avoided her gaze.

"That's a woman called Margaret Thatcher," explained Clarence, again before Ronnie could ask. "She's a retired head-teacher. She was Prime Minister here in England for three short years in the early 1980s. But she fell from power when Britain lost the Falklands War."

"I find it hard to imagine that women losing anything, let alone a war," said Ronnie.

"You're right to feel that," replied Clarence. "In fact the British almost won even though they were operating eight thousand miles from home against an enemy only two hundred miles from home base. But the second Carter administration couldn't see much difference between a reactionary conservative like Thatcher and the Argentine junta. They remained neutral and the British never had the modern weapons that would have given them victory -- and that you would have given them. So Britain lost, Thatcher fell, and the British never abandoned socialism to become the fourth largest economy in the world."

Ronnie gazed around sadly at the mean streets and impoverished hurrying crowds.
Interpreting his thoughts again, Clarence added: "At least they remained a democracy unlike the rest of Europe. You see, the left-wing peace movement won in Europe and handed victory in the Cold War to Soviets. Thatcher wasn't there to rally Europeans and save Europe because you weren't there to save Thatcher. Europe today has been Finlandized into an informal Soviet protectorate."

"Is there no resistance?" asked Ronnie.

The scene changed again. Ronnie found himself in a square looking at a solitary lighted window in a vast basilica.

"That's Pope John Paul II praying for the salvation of Europe," Clarence said quietly. "He's been known as the Prisoner of the Vatican ever since Italy went communist in the mid-eighties. But Catholic power had been broken in Europe four years before when the Polish communists crushed Solidarity. You see, Ronnie, you weren't there to help the Pope keep Solidarity alive after the martial law crackdown."

"Are these things that must be," asked the future President, "or only things that may be."

Clarence replied: "You're coming up for air for the last time in a few seconds, Ronnie, and if you want to change things . . ."

Ronnie suddenly realized he was spluttering and coughing. He took a deep breath and, seizing his companion in distress, headed for the shore. But as he clambered onto dry land, he felt his dream shattering into fragments that he couldn't quite catch.

Late in life, Ronald Reagan told his biographer than none of the 19 people he had saved ever came back to thank him. Let's not make the same mistake.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

As time goes by, Reagan looks like a giant
James P. Pinkerton

February 6, 2007

As with any historical figure, Ronald Reagan's reputation has been riding both the up escalator and the down escalator.

But it's interesting today, on what would have been the 40th president's 96th birthday, to note that Reagan is being increasingly praised by onetime enemies and increasingly criticized by ostensible friends - who at least call themselves conservatives.

For most of Reagan's life and career, the liberal/media establishment contented itself with phrases such as "right-wing cowboy" and "amiable dunce" to describe the Gipper.

But now, the judgment is changing. For example, Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, quoted Leslie Stahl as admiring Reagan's "gallantry." Stahl, who covered Reagan for CBS News, certainly rarely had anything nice to say about him when he was in office. But in the nearly two decades since, even many liberals have admitted that Reagan's leadership succeeded in the Cold War against the Soviet Union and in the economic war against inflation and economic "malaise."

And now comes an approving book from John Patrick Diggins, well-known historian of the left, "Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History," which argues that Reagan "deserves to be regarded as one of our three or four greatest presidents."

Diggins lauds Reagan for ending the nuclear arms race and moving America away from welfare-state dependency, but then he takes his praise in a direction many traditional Reaganites might not agree with: "Far from being a conservative, Reagan was the great liberating spirit of modern American history, a political romantic impatient with the status quo."

The author is on to something. Reagan, after all, declared many times on the stump that Americans "have the power to begin the world over again" - not exactly a conservative thought. In fact, Reagan was a New Dealer back in the '30s and '40s; as he often said, he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. So Diggins' book will make some conservatives uncomfortable - precisely because the author has articulated an additional facet of Reagan's persona.

But that's the way it goes with the great actors of history. On the occasion of Abraham Lincoln's death in 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton declared, "Now he belongs to the ages." Stanton might have said, "Now he belongs to the historians" - who have been writing about Lincoln ever since. And so it goes, as well, for Reagan, who died in 2004.

Interestingly, many "friends" of Reagan have turned into ex-friends. One such is the prominent neoconservative Norman Podhoretz. As early as 1983, he accused Reagan of "appeasement by any other name" - this being the same year that Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative.

But the neocons have their specific reason for disliking Reagan: They accuse him of being weak in the Middle East. The clearest statement of this view has come from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said back in 2003, "The terrorists declared war on America ... many years before Sept. 11, 2001." She cited, among other incidents, "the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985, the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988" - all of which occurred during the Reagan presidency. Yet, Rice continued, until the George W. Bush administration, "the terrorists faced no sustained, systematic and global response."

These days, of course, the wisdom of the Bush administration's "response" to terrorism - specifically, the Iraq war - is under, shall we say, close scrutiny. And so maybe Reagan's response doesn't look so bad in comparison. Nobody thinks of his Marine mission to Lebanon as a success, but at least the Gipper knew when to cut his losses.

So happy birthday, Mr. President. You've gone up to that Great Ranch in the Sky, leaving liberals to like you more and some conservatives to like you less. But this onetime staffer of yours - and forever an admirer - sees you as the gold standard for presidents.

James P. Pinkerton's e-mail ad- dress is pinkerto@ix.netcom .com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Reagan, the Crusader
By Bill Steigerwald
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 7, 2007

In his second book on Ronald Reagan, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, Grove City political science professor Paul Kengor documents Reagan’s lifelong crusade against communism and how hard he worked as president to dismantle the Soviet Empire. Kengor, who earlier wrote God and Ronald Reagan, relied on Soviet media archives, declassified presidential papers and interviews with administration insiders to reveal what the Soviets thought of Reagan and what secret actions Reagan ordered to undermine the Soviet economy, assist Poland’s Solidarity movement and aid the Afghan rebels.

Q: What exactly does it mean that you have reassessed Ronald Reagan’s life and presidency through the lens of his anti-communism?
A: Well, you could see Ronald Reagan’s life as preparing and then ultimately taking on Soviet communism. Ronald Reagan was born in 1911. The Bolshevik Revolution took place in October of 1917. The demise of communism really comes from 1989 to 1991; 1989 was the final year of Reagan’s presidency; 1991 was the actual disintegration of the Soviet Union. So really the rise and fall of Soviet communism are the bookends of Reagan’s life.

Mercifully, his mind lasted just long enough to comprehend the Cold War victory and defeat of communism. His letter informing the world that he had Alzheimer’s came in November 1994, so he had that short window from 1989 to 1994 where he could savor the victory. In fact, what historically never gets talked about is that Reagan even made a trip to the Berlin Wall and a trip to Poland in the early 1990s. The parish priest of Lech Walesa handed Ronald Reagan a saber and said, "We are giving this to you for helping us to chop the head off of Soviet Communism.”

Q: So what is it that Reagan had against communism?
A: It was really multifaceted, but I’d say three different areas: One, it was the shear brutality of the Soviet system. You’ve got these basic human rights transgressions -- freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of assembly. The Soviet Union repressed if not snuffed out all of those rights. Add to that the Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people -- anywhere from 30 million to as high as 60 million to 70 million.

Also add the fact that this was an expansionary ideology. Marx talked about world communism. So did Lenin, so did Stalin, so did Stalin’s foreign minister. There was a Comintern (Communist International), whose goal was global communism. Then you add into it the third factor -- and this is the one that everybody missed: Ronald Reagan was appalled by the institutionalized atheism of the Soviet system. What Mikhail Gorbachev called “the war on religion” was indeed a war on religion. And it was that that for Reagan convinced Reagan this was not just a bad place, this was in fact an actual “Evil Empire.”

Q: What are the most important discoveries of your book?
A: Well, there are a lot of them. That’s not just PR hype; it’s really true. One, generally speaking, no one has really presented the Soviet point of view on all of this, as I have. I spent all of the 1990s, including graduate school at Pitt, reading through old translated media archives of Pravda, Izvestia, the Moscow Domestic Service, and Tass, the official Soviet news agency. I also got transcripts of all of the Soviet news programs on TV and radio.

For example, there was a show called “Studio Nine,” which was the Soviet equivalent of “60 Minutes,” where you had basically three or four Soviet propagandists, all working for the KGB, sitting around a table, analyzing what Ronald Reagan was doing. Here I found them calling him “The Crusader” over and over and over again. I thought, “Wow! Where’s that coming from?” The Crusader? It was because they realized that Reagan had targeted them as part of what he called his “Crusade for Freedom.” Speaking of discoveries, I did not know that as early as 1950, Ronald Reagan joined a group called “The Crusade for Freedom,” which called for the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet communism.

Q: What was the most surprising thing that you learned about Reagan while doing this book that you didn’t already know?
A: I guess it would be how early he was committed to this goal of undermining Soviet communism. I did not expect it to go back as far as it did. Also, how every single step or policy action or initiative that was directed toward undermining Soviet communism is traceable to Reagan.
There was always this view that Reagan was the product of these smart advisers who sort of tugged at his strings and manipulated him and told him what to do. By the way, the people who say that never tell you who these smart advisers ever were. But what I found was it was truly Reagan.

Q: What specific policies or actions did Reagan do to undermine the Soviets?
A: First of all, I should say there are at least 12. The three most important things: One would have been keeping alive the Solidarity movement in Poland, which had tentacles everywhere -- all the way to the Vatican. Two would have been aiding the Afghan rebels in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviets there, which also has a whole bunch of additional implications. Three would have been economic warfare, under which a bunch of different things fall, including trying to sabotage the Siberian pipeline.

Q: From what you know or can guess, would Reagan have gone to war in Iraq?
A: It’s impossible to know, just impossible. I would point this out: Reagan, despite the hawkish reputation, very rarely used military force. He invaded Grenada. He bombed Libya in retaliation for a terrorist bombing. But that was it. There was the deployment of Marines in Lebanon, but he really only used force twice: Grenada and Libya. So, he was not prone to do that.

Now, on the other hand, Reagan was very, very fearful of what he called “A Middle East madman” one day getting a hold of nuclear weapons. Which is why, even after Gorbachev offered to basically scrap the entire Soviet nuclear arsenal, Reagan said he still needed the Strategic Defense Initiative because even if the Soviets didn’t have nuclear weapons, one day Reagan foresaw one of these nuts in the Middle East getting them.

Q: So, "Reagan the Crusader" was on a crusade against communism, not on a crusade to bring democracy to the people of the world -- the kind of criticism leveled against George W. Bush.
A: Yeah, but this is very interesting. Reagan, in his 1982 Westminster address, used the words “march of freedom.” He said what he was going to do was extend this march of freedom into Eastern Europe and basically the Soviet Communist empire. People haven’t noticed this, but George W. Bush’s favorite Reagan speech is that speech. Bush has said many times now that he would like to continue Ronald Reagan’s march of freedom from the former communist world into the Middle East. Bush actually sees himself as sort of extending Reagan’s vision and taking it to the part of the world that has been the most resistant to democracy. Reagan would at least be hopeful of what Bush is doing. Would he have signed on to it? We can’t possible know and I can’t possibly say. Reagan would have at least said, “Yeah, I hope this works.” But as far as would he have sent the troops into Iraq? We just can’t know.

Q: Your book has not been reviewed in too many mainstream places. Do you know why?
A: That’s a good question. I’m not sure, but I will say this -- and this is not sour grapes: I’m really disappointed in how many people on the Left and in mainstream publications just seem closed-minded. They don’t seem willing to read things that are going to conflict with their view of history. I can’t get this KGB memo story on Ted Kennedy into a single mainstream source.

Q: What is the memo about?
A: It’s crazy. There’s no reason to doubt it. It was actually first reported in The Times of London, in the Feb. 2, 1982, edition, and it never made it across the Atlantic back then. It’s a May 14, 1983, KGB memo, written by the head of the KGB, Victor Chebrikov, and sent to Yuri Andropov, arguably the two highest people in the Soviet system. It concerned an offer from Sen. Kennedy to Yuri Andropov, because Kennedy was fearful of Reagan’s nuclear policies.

And Kennedy, according to this document, thought the aggressor here was not the Soviet side but Reagan. So, Kennedy sent a contact, the former Sen. John Tunney, and Tunney relayed Sen. Kennedy’s request to meet with Andropov to talk about this “Reagan problem” and how the Soviets and the United States could maybe come together to lessen nuclear tensions, which Kennedy believed Reagan was exacerbating.

This document was first found by this London Times reporter, Tim Sebastian, who also was a BBC reporter. They had a little picture of the upper-left corner of the document in The Times. Now I’m presenting it again. Kennedy’s office has not denied the document. And I can’t get anybody in the mainstream press to talk about it.

I wrote an op-ed piece on it and sent it to David Shipley of the New York Times. Shipley said he liked it, responded right away, but told me he wouldn’t be able to get it in the paper. I then sent it to another mainstream liberal op-ed page editor on the West Coast. This guy is really fair. We went back and forth and back and forth…but finally, in the end, he said, “I’m sorry but I just can’t believe that Kennedy could have done this." I said his office has not denied this. Then I said to him, “Well, OK, let’s make news together. Why don’t you or someone on your staff call Kennedy’s office and confirm it?”

He didn’t respond and that was it. I haven’t heard from him since. They won’t touch it.

Q: Is there still stuff that we don’t know about Ronald Reagan -- surprising stuff? Book-worthy stuff?
A: Oh, yeah. There’s still information out there. Certainly in the Soviet files -- the KGB files, the Central Committee archives. They have not been completely opened. So there is a lot in there on Reagan, strictly from the Soviet side, that we don’t know about.

Also, Reagan’s competence and intelligence and work ethic -- because of the biases of these people in journalism and these historians -- are still unappreciated. It looks like he probably produced the largest collection of presidential letters of any president since Thomas Jefferson.

He wasn’t sitting there watching “Bedtime for Bonzo.” In fact, he had remarkable energy for somebody in his 70s trying to run the world. There’s a lot about him that we still don’t know.

Ellie