AFRAID OF AN ABERRATION:

The Ronald Reagan I Did Not Know (James Pinkerton, 06/08/2004, Tech Central Station)

In a 2001 book, Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America, the Hoover Institution's Kiron Skinner dredged up the handwritten scripts that Reagan used for his radio commentaries in the 70s, plus other of his private writings. They show a man who was not a puppet, but rather a mind. In May 1975, for example, just days after Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese communists, he boldly declared that it was communism, not capitalism, that was doomed. Communism, he maintained, was "a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature." Not bad for a time when the Great Minds mostly agreed that the Reds were winning. [...]

...his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), launched with a controversial speech in 1983. It was wildly controversial at the time; Amherst College's Henry Steele Commager spoke for many when he snapped, "It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all." The dovish Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of its nuclear "doomsday clock" to just three minutes to midnight, the most ominous "time" in three decades.

But years later, in 1991, Vladimir Lukhin -- once a top diplomat for the USSR, then the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian Duma -- told me how Reagan's SDI speech was received on the other side. In '83, upon hearing of Reagan's SDI speech, then-leader Yuri Andropov ordered two different studies -- one from the Red Army, one from the Soviet academy of sciences -- to analyze the new American initiative. Two years later, in 1985, the reports came back to the Kremlin, both bearing the same basic message: "We don't know if the USA can succeed with this missile-defense plan, but we know that the USSR cannot." This forced the Politburo into an agonizing reassessment: something, Lukhin recalled, had to change. And that change, the Russian gerontocrats hoped, would come in the form of a young new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who took power in 1985. Gorbachev had no intention of unhitching the communist system in Russia, but in the course of trying to compete with the Americans, that's exactly what happened; "Gorby" was an accidental liberator. As Lukhin told me, "Reagan accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union by five to ten years" -- which was fine with Lukhin. And if that single step shaved so many years off the lifetime of the evil empire, that's pretty good in my book.

Mr. Pinkerton claims later to have learned the lessomn that Reagan taught, but if so it's been within the last few months, as he's opposed the democratization of the Middle East. Imagine Ronald Reagan's response to this bit of Realism? Bush Should Cool Democracy Sell (James Pinkerton, 12/26/03, Newsday)

You know the old saying: don't wish too hard for something, because you might get it. Someone should tell President George W. Bush that democracy in the Arab world might be great in theory, but maybe not so great for America in practice.

Why does the Bush administration seem so eager to upset the pro-American apple cart by talking up democracy? On Nov. 6, the president described liberty as "both the plan of heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth." It's hard for me, at least, to know what heaven wants, but I'm pretty sure, sadly, that liberty in Jordan would not spell progress for the United States.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 9, 2004 1:54 PM