TOO FOXY BY HALF:

Saint Ronald, Part 2: Richard Pipes' new memoir adds ballast to CBS's miniseries. (Timothy Noah, Nov. 6, 2003, Slate)

Richard Pipes is an eminent scholar of Russian history who taught at Harvard for many years. In the early 1980s Pipes served on President Reagan's National Security Council staff, where he successfully pushed for a hard line against the Soviets. Pipes has recently published a memoir, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger, in which he recounts his years in Cambridge and Washington. Sam Tanenhaus, who profiled Pipes in the Nov. 2 Boston Globe, alerted Chatterbox that Pipes' book was quite blunt about Ronald Reagan's lack of mental and emotional engagement during his presidency, a subject made newsworthy by the cancellation of CBS's miniseries The Reagans, which reportedly portrays the 40th president as a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

"Reagan," Pipes writes,

was a poor judge of people; he basically liked everyone, which was part of his charm but also a source of weakness, for a politician must be able to distinguish friend from foe. … Reagan was remote: even his children complained they could never get close to him. His amiability served as a shield that protected him from more intimate relationships. He drew on his inexhaustible reservoir of anecdotes to avoid serious conversation. …

Unquestionably, Reagan's political and economic ideas were in some respects simplistic: I once heard him say that one million Sears Roebuck catalogues distributed in the Soviet Union would bring the regime down. …

Pipes goes on to say that Reagan nonetheless "instinctively understood, as all great statesman do, what matters and what does not." Pipes resolves this seeming contradiction by arguing that in dealing with Soviet Russia, "you must have a simple mind," because "the USSR was a crude system, based on force and the exploitation of fear." Reagan apparently fit the bill.

This not only fits the Hedgehog/Fox analysis below, but demonstrates how little the foxes comprehend the hedgehog. One needn't argue with Mr. Noah's apparent assumption that Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce in order to recognize how he pushes his point to far. Note the prominent mention of Harvard and then the assertion that Mr. Pipes "successfully pushed for a hard line against the Soviets". Pushed who? Obviously not Ronald Reagan, who, after all, hired him. In fact, Mr. Pipes had been a rather lonely voice, crying in the wilderness, until Mr. Reagan--the graduate of Eureka--put him in a position to influence policy.

As for the excerpt from Mr. Pipes, it would seem a perfect instance of hedgehog wisdom. One recalls the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate, in which the premier of the Soviet Union had so little comprehension of Western life that he refused to believe that a basic set of appliances could possibly be accessible to the average American family. He assumed he was being shown our version of a Potemkin village. How big a stretch is it to say that if the Soviets had understood just how far behind us they really were in terms of affluence it would have destabilized their system?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 10, 2003 6:14 PM