The Man Who Brought Down 'That Wall'

NewsMax.com ^ | June 7, 2004 | Paul Weyrich

[CyberAnt]

This may shock you. During the eight years of the Reagan presidency I was not his biggest fan. I looked not so much at what he accomplished but what he didn't accomplish. My expectations were that government would get smaller under President Reagan. It didn't. I was disappointed.

I looked at the agencies left in place - the National Endowment for the Arts, the Legal Services Corporation (which has done so much damage) and A.I.D. - and I felt that the Reagan administration did not make a real effort to curtail them. I was disappointed.

Also there was school prayer and a Right to Life Amendment. They got lip service but little else. I was disappointed.

There was Sandra Day O'Connor, who had already begun to show her independence from the man who appointed her. I was disappointed.

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. The man, I thought, had such incredible potential and good will and yet he did not use that to accomplish domestic goals. I was disappointed.

But then, thanks to the late Dr. Robert Krieble, my colleagues and I began to travel to the far reaches of the "Evil Empire." We taught politics and small business. Ronald Reagan was already a few months out of office when we made our first trip. As I encountered people in Eastern Europe, the Baltics and in Russia itself, Ronald Reagan loomed as a larger-than-life figure to them. Several asked me in hushed tones if I had ever met him.

[CyberAnt]

Later on in the article, Paul Weyrich makes this statement: "I was so tied up with my agenda that I failed to see the big picture. Sure, President Reagan did not do everything I wanted him to do, but he changed the world."

When I read that .. it made me think of all those here on FR who have been so disappointed because President Bush didn't do the things we thought he should do, and he was doing a whole bunch of things we didn't like. I'm in hopes Paul's article will help put those "disappointments" in perspective.

[F14 Pilot]

BUMP!

[CyberAnt]

{{{{{ PING }}}}

Thought you might like to read this great article.

[Mo1]

[CyberAnt]

What a great cartoon - thanks!

[GOPyouth]

I hope the people a couple of years younger than me (I'm 27) will never forget, or come to learn that Reagan was responsible for freeing millions of people who were enslaved by communism. Ending that was his greatest deed to this earth.

[texasflower]

it made me think of all those here on FR who have been so disappointed because President Bush didn't do the things we thought he should do, and he was doing a whole bunch of things we didn't like.

I thought this needed to be said again.

[maica]

This week's ceremonies and formalities will help focus the attention of all Americans, including those younger than you and products of modern education, on the greatness of Ronald Reagan.

When the Soviet Empire dissolved, the elite media did not want to acknowledge that Communism was a failed idealogy. They could focus on the evil of Hitler, but never the horror of the Soviet Union.

This is Reagan's last effort at educating all of us. It is a blessing.

[mathluv]

'When the Soviet Empire dissolved, the elite media did not want to acknowledge that Communism was a failed idealogy. They could focus on the evil of Hitler, but never the horror of the Soviet Union. '

I am not sure they want to acknowledge the failure of communism now.

[maica]

I am sure that they don't want to.

Leftists will always excuse failure because "the idea was good, but the execution of it was bad. We can get it right the next time we are in power."

[ntnychik]

Thank you so much for this article. My daughter's college textbook (and professor) managed to discuss the ending of the Cold War with no mention at all of the role of Ronald Reagan, or Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, for that matter. Their assignments required reports and discussion based only on the text and profesor notes. No outside references permitted. She defied the rules and told the truth. She is collecting articles, and I will give her this one, to send to the professor and college officials to lobby for the inclusion of truth in the history books. Parents may want to check out what is said in their children's history books about this era and about this great President.

[CyberAnt]

Thanks for your comments. I have not been a very big fan of Weyrich's in the past few years, for the very reason he states .. he had his own agenda.

Glad this will help your daughter put out the truth and hopefully enlighten a few others.

Like I said on another thread: The democrats thought they had denigrated Reagan to the point that no one liked him and nobody would care that he passed away. But .. the people knew the truth. Reagan, even in death, gets the last laugh.

[nuconvert]

Bump

Thanx for your comment. Let's appreciate what Pres. Bush has accomplished, and realize we may not see all the results immediately.

[CyberAnt]

Thanks!

[CyberAnt]

Yes it was! And I'm so glad I have lived at a time to witness it first hand.

[CyberAnt]

Thanks!

[CyberAnt]

And .. Friday at the funeral, Lady Thatcher will be giving a 10 minute speech about Reagan. She believed Reagan alone was responsible for bringing down the Soviet Union.

The left will hate it .. but the public will hear the truth. Awesome!

[maica]

And the ones who still refuse to see it are as silly as kids who put fingers in their ears and yell "I can't hear you."

[maica]

Your daughter will find a lot of important information in this article from June 7 WSJ.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110005181






JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL
Freedom's Team
How Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II won the Cold War.
Monday, June 7, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Ronald Reagan died just one day after President Bush bestowed the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, on Pope John Paul II for his heroic efforts to topple communism. Those two men, together with Margaret Thatcher, deserve much of the credit for the West's success in the Cold War.

As the nation mourns Ronald Reagan we should also pause to reflect that in the space of 27 months between 1978 and 1981 three such extraordinary leaders--each with the belief that evil must be confronted--should have come to power. Together they changed the world.

Containment had been the cornerstone of U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union since George Kennan articulated it in 1947. Reagan decided to add an active effort to undermine the props supporting the Soviet empire. Former CIA director Robert Gates says that "Reagan, nearly alone, truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable . . . right then." In his famous speech to the British House of Commons in 1982 he stood with Mrs. Thatcher and declared, "It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. . . . The march of freedom and democracy . . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." Last year, President Bush openly emulated Reagan's approach when he also went to Britain last year to issue a challenge that free nations unite to eradicate terrorism.



Few like to recall the feelings of resignation or even despair that many in the West felt in the 1970s as countries from Angola to Nicaragua became Soviet proxies. Mrs. Thatcher says that the West was "slowly but surely losing" the Cold War, and she eagerly embraced Reagan's strategy to win it by becoming "his principal cheerleader" in NATO.

That strategy rested on six pillars: support internal disruption in Soviet satellites, especially Poland; dry up sources of hard currency; overload the Soviet economy with a technology-based arms race; slow the flow of Western technology to Moscow; raise the cost of the wars it was fighting; and demoralize the Soviets by generating pressure for change.

On June 7, 1982, the day before Reagan gave his "ash heap" speech at Westminster Abbey, he met alone with the pope in the Vatican. Richard Allen, Reagan's first national security adviser, says the two men "agreed to undertake a clandestine campaign to hasten the dissolution of the communist empire." Until it was legalized in 1989, Poland's Solidarity union was kept alive by the U.S. and the Vatican. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, who later became president of free Poland, has said that "we owe our freedom to their unstinting efforts."

A new book by former Air Force secretary Thomas Reed reveals that the Reagan administration allowed a Soviet agent to steal gas-pipeline software that had been secretly designed to go haywire on a catastrophic scale. The ruse led to a June 1982 explosion in the Siberian wilderness that Mr. Reed says was "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." It crippled the Soviet's secret techno-piracy operation because they could longer be sure if what they were buying or stealing was similarly booby-trapped. They had reason to worry: Contrived computer chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines were installed on a gas pipeline, and defective plans disrupted chemical plants and tractor factories.

Reagan's arms buildup also unhinged the Kremlin. His clarion call for a missile-based defense system against nuclear weapons in 1983 helped convince the Politburo to select Mikhail Gorbachev as a less hard-line Soviet leader in 1985. "Reagan's SDI was a very successful blackmail," says Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry's top spokesman during the 1980s. "The Soviet economy couldn't endure such competition." Mr. Gorbachev himself agrees the U.S. exhausted his country economically and acknowledges Reagan's place in history. "Who knows what would have happened if he wasn't there?" he told the History Channel in 2002.

It's certainly safe to say that no other president would have made two famous speeches that drew a sharp moral distinction between the West and communism and lifted countless spirits behind the Iron Curtain. The State Department fought desperately to take out Reagan's reference to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" as well as his challenge to Mr. Gorbachev: "Tear down this wall." But Reagan's candor undermined Moscow's legitimacy. "Reagan's truth-telling--together with the examples of Mrs. Thatcher's economic success and Pope John Paul's moral strength--gave millions of people courage to rise up when the opportunity for change came," says President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic.




After Reagan's death on Saturday, Sen. Ted Kennedy graciously saluted him as "the president who won the Cold War." Historians know the reality is more complicated, but they will no doubt remark on the world's extraordinary good fortune that he, Pope John Paul II and Mrs. Thatcher were able to work as a team for a full eight years.

Joseph Stalin once dismissed the Vatican's influence by asking, "How many divisions does the pope have?" In the end, that didn't matter. The pope and two stalwart Western leaders helped topple the entire Soviet empire without moving a single division across a border. As Reagan himself said in his 1989 Farewell Address. "Not bad, not bad at all."

[CyberAnt]

Exactly!