They hated him from the beginning. He was in their elitist view an amiable dunce, a Hollywood has-been, a prisoner of an innocent past incapable of grasping the nuances and intricacies of modern foreign and domestic policy. And, because the truth is not in them, they still cling to that view despite massive evidence to the contrary.
Recall President Reagan’s speech in which he horrified the intelligencia when he called the evil empire an evil empire. When he uttered that line which electrified the American people who knew evil when they saw it, Thomas McDill, then president of the Evangelical Free Church looked down at the White House press corps seated below. As Paul Kengor reported in his book “God and Ronald Reagan,” McDill stared at reporter Sam Donaldson and watched as “the most unbelievable smirk,” came over Donaldson’s face. Mention evil to the media gods and the smirk is the immediate response. After all, everybody knows there is no such thing as evil. In this permissive society, people simply make mistakes.
The great mass of the American people loved the Gipper, a fact that infuriated the media and still does. In the face of the massive outpouring of grief the media sophisticates have held their forked tongues as America goes about the business of mourning Ronald Reagan. But, as Peggy Noonan has remarked, once this week ends, watch out. Expect an explosion of malice and resentment as the media gods strike back.
In some instances, the campaign to take Ronald Reagan’s reputation down a peg or two began almost immediately. The target: the fact that this giant of a man won the Cold War. This one fact in itself proves the falsity of the caricature the media created during and after his White House years. Amiable dunces don’t rescue the world from the greatest threat the West had faced since the Attila the Hun sacked Rome.
And so they have already begun to nibble away at the edges, claiming as the despicable New York Times has told us, that Ronald Reagan was merely lucky enough to come along at the very time when, as everybody who was anybody in their world knew the Soviet empire was tottering along towards its collapse. So there, the Gipper just lucked out.
But that was NOT the current wisdom among the liberal intellectuals. They saw the Soviets as ten feet tall, earning hard currency by selling oil at three times what it cost them to produce and selling weapons to oil rich nations such as Iran, Iraq and Libya. They had gas and oil projects with Japan and Western Europe that could more than double their hard currency earnings. Moreover, Western Europe was lending the USSR at half the normal interest rates.
Militarily the USSR had three times as many tanks than the West had, their new SS-20 missiles threatened Europe with nuclear strikes, and they were stealing Western technology at an alarming rate. Wrote Norman Bailey in “The Strategic Plan That won the Cold War,” By 1981, the Soviets had shrunk a 15 year (computer) techology gap to 3 or 4 years.”
In recent days I’ve heard old lefties like the Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson and new lefties like NPR’s Juan Wiliams and blabbermouth Chris Matthews parrot what is now the elitist left’s party line.
And it is a flat out lie.
From his days as president of the Screen Actor’s Guild Reagan had battled the Communists, who infested every nook and cranny of Hollywood in the late 1940s. As Paul Kengor relates, Reagan faced such threats from the communists of having acid splashed on his face. So serious were the threats that for months he packed a .32 Smith & Wesson as he went about his days.
From those days onward, Ronald Reagan was a Cold War warrior, determined to wage war against the evil he had seen first hand in Hollywood.
He took that determination into the White House and from the very moment he took the reins of government he set out to bring down the Soviet Union. In an extraordinary recollection of the Reagan administration’s sustained drive to crumple the Soviet Union “How the United States Won the Cold War” published in The Intelligencer, a journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, Warren Norquist followed the progress of Reagan’s sustained assault on the soft economic underbelly of the Soviet Union.
In the face of the common wisdom that the Evil Empire was a colossus towering above the U.S. in economic resources and military hardware, Reagan set out to dismantle what he knew was really a rotten apple waiting to be plucked from a dying tree.
Wrote former CIA director Robert Gates “Reagan, nearly alone, truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable … right then.”
Echoing Gates, Reagan’s first national security advisor Dick Allen wrote that Reagan “never believed as did many Western observers – including alleged experts – that the Soviet economy had the capacity to extract from its citizens limitless sacrifice for the sake of maintaining invincible military power.”
With the enthusiastic help of CIA director William Casey, Reagan mounted an eight-year long attack on the Soviet economy. Casey who had a White House office and cabinet rank, met privately twice a week with the president and discussed the progress of their secret war on the Soviet system. “Push. Push. Push. Casey [continually forwarded his ideas and] those of others – for waging the war against the Soviets more … effectively” Gates wrote.
Casey’s analysis of intelligence data revealed that rather than spending 12 percent on their military in 1980, it was actually draining its economy at a rate of 33 percent on the military – a fact that showed that Reagan and Casey were correct in believing the Soviet economy could not sustain that rate of spending. That understanding led to the arms race in which the Soviets could not afford to compete without bringing down their economy.
Reagan realized as early as 1981 that Poland was the Achilles heel of the Soviet empire. In that year the U.S. warned both the Polish and Soviet governments against acting to repress the Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa. And when they imposed martial law and drove Solidarity underground, the U.S struck back, delaying financing of the construction of an oil pipe vital to the Soviet economy, as well as halting subsidies and technology transfers.
Then, on June 7, 1982, President Reagan met with Pope John Paul II. In secret sessions, the two men agreed to “undertake a clandestine campaign to hasten the dissolution of the Communist empire,” Norquist wrote. He quoted Dick Allen as calling this “one of the greatest secret alliances of all time.”
Both the Pope and Reagan helped keep Solidarity, a dagger pointed at the heart of the Iron Curtain system, alive with financial aid. The U.S. alone spent $8 million a year to keep the anti-communist underground alive.
“[Casey] was convinced the Soviet system was failing and doomed to collapse … and Poland was the force that would lead to the dam breaking. He demanded constant CIA focus on the major front, Eastern Europe,” wrote Carl Bernstein in his book “The Holy Alliance – Ronald Reagan and John Paul II.”
By 1983 the Reagan-Thatcher policies were hitting home. Wrote National Intelligence Council head Henry Rowan “We have simply got to sustain our military challenge to Moscow and cut off its Western life support because in this decade we are going to see the combined weight of that burden cause such stress on the system that it will implode.”
Reagan took other steps that hastened Moscow’s fall – he emphasized building weapons that would make obsolete what the Soviets had built in huge quantities at greast expense, halted transfer of technology by clamping down with tighter export controls in 1982, and cutting off transfers of hard currency to the Soviets.
One of the more intriguing strategies involved Saudi Arabia. “The crowning factor in cutting the USSR’s hard currency earnings [from the sale of their oil] was the sudden increase in production by Saudi Arabia. As production went up from 2 million barrels a day in August of 1985 to 9 by fall, the price of oil dropped from $30 a barrel to $12 a barrel. This was a catastrophe since Soviet oil exports would be [sold] at a loss. ” Norquist wrote.
Then came Reykjavik and Reagan’s bold challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev over the Strategic Defense Initiative which the leftist press derisively dubbed “Star Wars.” In the wake of the Iceland conference Gorbachev said “The U.S. wants to exhaust the Soviet Union economically through a race in the most up-to-date and expensive space weapons. It wants to create various kinds of difficulties for Soviet leadership, to wreck its plans … of improving the standard of living of our people, thus arousing dissatisfaction among the people with their leadership. ”
Reagan’s relentless attack on the Soviet economy succeeded. Said Gorbachev’s foreign minister Edward Shevarndnadze “The Kremlin’s expansionist military first policies throughout the Cold War made our people, the whole country destitute.”
Reagan didn’t win the Cold War? Poppycock.