Free Republic

The ninth of November marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, probably the most important historical event since World War II and the most important lesson about human freedom experienced within the living memory of most of us. Presumably, next year there will be more of a commemoration, but the salient question now is how this lesson is being taught in the nation’s classrooms. For while those of us in our forties and older remember the fall of communism and its causes, today’s teenagers are wholly in the dark. What, then, are the high-school students of...

Why does it matter to the rest of us what happens in Georgia and environs? Answer: if the West cannot help an aspiring ally with dreams of joining Nato and the EU, cannot even protect it from Russian hegemony, what are we doing meddling in the Middle East or anywhere else? And if we can’t help Georgia, then what is left of the West’s victory in the Cold War? I reported on the national elections in Tbilisi, Georgia, last October. On one occasion, I was shown a text from a politician of the party that won the election to a...

When a course is entitled “History of the U. S. for Policymakers, Activists, and Citizens,” you can bet that the target audience is the second group of constituents. According to the Kennedy School at Harvard, “This is a course intended for policy students, both from the U.S. and from abroad, who would like to enlarge or shore up their knowledge of U.S. history. The course will deal with the major themes, issues, and turning points in the evolution of the modern U.S. (largely post-1900) with an eye towards developments that are likely to be relevant to understanding current and future...

Chris Matthews appeared on “The Colbert Report” Wednesday night to promote his new book, “Tip and the Gipper,” saying that it’s going to be hard for President Obama to beat Ronald Reagan’s legacy. “Do you think Reagan was a better president than Obama is?” Stephen Colbert asked the MSNBC host. “In the end, yes,” Mr. Matthews responded. “In the end. Because he ended the Cold War. “That’s hard to beat,” he said, adding that he believes the government shutdown “is going to go on weeks.” The pundit also took a jab at Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly. Mr. Colbert asked Mr....

The easiest point to make about Tom Clancy, who died on Tuesday at the age of 66, is that he was a mediocre writer who penned books with noxious political messages. But he was more interesting than that, even if only as a totemic cultural figure. I haven't read any of his nonfictional output, which mostly deals with military matters, especially the physical details of American military hardware. (Sample title: Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship.) But Clancy will be best remembered for the series of books he wrote about Jack Ryan, the C.I.A. agent from his creator's...

Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character— has been attacked, not from the Left but from prominent pundits who identify themselves as conservatives. “Why did the U.S. and Britain not prevent the totalitarian USSR from taking over Eastern Europe after it had defeated the totalitarian Nazis?” Ronald Radosh wrote on frontpagemag.com. “It had nothing to do with the Rubik’s Cube of diplomatic and military considerations, a calculus that had to take into account the willingness of the American and British publics to continue to sacrifice and their soldiers to die. No, it was a...

Spies & Secrets: 4 True Stories From Tom Clancy's Novels Sometimes truth may be stranger than fiction, but for best-selling author Tom Clancy, the two are often more closely paralleled. Clancy died Tuesday (Oct. 1) at the age of 66, but his thrilling, espionage and military-inspired novels helped him become one of the most well-known American authors. From a dramatic Soviet-era defection to a high-profile assassination plot, here are four true stories from Clancy's novels. • The Hunt for Red October Clancy's first novel, "The Hunt for Red October," was published in 1984. The book introduced Clancy's most famous fictional...

At 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1959, an hour when there never were commercial flights from Havana, David Atlee Phillips was lounging in a lawn chair there, sipping champagne after a New Year's Eve party, when a commercial aircraft flew low over his house. He surmised that dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing because Fidel Castro was arriving. He was right. Soon he, and many others, would be spectacularly wrong about Cuba. … In 1972, the Bay of Pigs made a cameo appearance in the Watergate shambles, which involved some Cubans and Americans active in the invasion. On the June 23...

The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show featured a fearless flying squirrel and his slow-witted moose sidekick. They did battle with two scheming but incompetent Soviet spies named Boris and Natasha. The cartoon is an American classic, beloved for a wry sense of humor that appeals to kids and their parents. It originally aired from 1959 until 1964, but has been in syndication ever since, most recently on the Cartoon Network and Boomerang. June Foray was the voice behind Rocky the Squirrel, and the evil Natasha. Now 95, she's receiving the prestigious Governor's Award Sunday at the Creative Arts Emmys. Foray is...

President Barack Obama said he welcomes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s involvement with Syria, in an interview that aired Sunday. “I welcome him being involved,” Obama said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I welcome him saying, ‘I will take responsibility for pushing my client, the Assad regime, to deal with these chemical weapons,’” he continued. “This is not the Cold War. This is not a contest between the United States and Russia.” The president, responding to Putin’s op-ed in the New York Times, said he doesn’t “think that Mr. Putin has the same values that we do.” Obama added that Russian influence...

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War. At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St. Martin's), is a hard- hitting critique of the strategy toward the Soviet Union pursued in the 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt, his top assistant Harry Hopkins, and various of their colleagues. Ms. West in particular stresses the infiltration of the government of that era by...

Survive the apocalypse in style: Home that boasts a luxury bunker 26 feet underground with fake grass and simulated night and day • House constructed in 1970s underground with three bedrooms and a 'fake' outdoors • 'Outside' landscaping consists of trees, grass, rocks, a pool and even scenery with rolling hills and meadows in the distance • House for sale for $1.7 million after it fell into forclosure From the street, number 3970 Spencer St. near Flamingo Road looks like any other American home. It's what lies beneath that would pique your interest. During the Cold War, there was a...

(CNN) -- The idea that Soviet fighter jets would shoot down a Boeing 747 airliner seems shockingly unbelievable. Two-hundred sixty-nine innocent people died in a largely forgotten Cold War attack that took place exactly 30 years ago this weekend. On a sultry August night in 1983 at New York's JFK airport, Alice Ephraimson-Abt, a brilliant, 23-year-old, blue-eyed blonde, was about to board Korean Air Lines Flight 007 for Seoul, South Korea, halfway around the world. For one last time, she held her father, New Jersey businessman Hans Ephraimson-Abt, before saying goodbye. "There were hugs and I-love-yous," her father, now 91,...

MOSCOW — A Western military attack on Syria will only create more problems in the region, lead to more bloodshed and result in the same sort of “catastrophe” as previous Western interventions in Iraq and Libya, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Monday. “Hysteria is growing and confrontation is incited,” Lavrov said in what he portrayed as an emergency press conference. He said the United States and its European allies have condemned the regime of Bashar al-Assad without any evidence that it actually used chemical weapons in an assault on a Damascus suburb on Aug. 21. China's president aims to...

National Security Archive / AP ***************************************************** Newly declassified documents, obtained by George Washington University's National Security Archive, appear to for the first time acknowledge the existence of Area 51. Hundreds of pages describe the genesis of the Nevada site that was home to the government's spy plane program for decades. The documents do not, however, mention aliens. The project started humbly. In the pre-drone era about a decade after the end of World War II, President Eisenhower signed off on a project aimed at building a high-altitude, long-range, manned aircraft that could photograph remote targets. Working together, the Air...

A newly declassified CIA history from 20 years ago spills the story about Nevada's Area 51 and its secret mission — which was not to study UFOs, but to test the U-2 and other spy planes. The CIA's story about the legendary test site is contained in "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: the U-2 and Oxcart Programs." The document was approved for release in June, with just a few remaining redactions, in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by George Washington University's National Security Archive back in 2005.

During an August 8 appearance on CNN's The Lead, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said Russia's recent actions toward the U.S. have "reset" relations and put the two countries back on Cold War footing. According to McCain, "The Russians have reset, they've reset alright--back to about 1955."

In an appearance on the Tonight Show, President Barack Obama criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin for what he labeled a “cold war mentality.” At issue was Putin's grant of asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden and his refusal to allow the US to extradite him. “The whole idea of the 'reset button' was that our two governments would cooperate with each other,” Obama lamented. “Now, instead of doing what we ask the Russians have suddenly developed scruples against spying on citizens. They invented spying on citizens. They're such hypocrites.” The fact that the US has granted asylum to many defectors...

"There have been times when they slip back into Cold War thinking," said President Obama in his tutorial with Jay Leno. And to show the Russians that such Cold War thinking is antiquated, Obama canceled his September summit with Vladimir Putin. The reason: Putin's grant of asylum to Edward Snowden, who showed up at the Moscow airport, his computers full of secrets that our National Security Agency has been thieving from every country on earth, including Russia. Yet there are many KGB defectors in the United States, and Russia has never used this as an excuse to cancel a summit....

Edward S. Miller, a lifetime FBI man of high rank and stature, recently passed away at the age of 89. A good man and good American, Miller, who was also a veteran of World War II (Okinawa), faithfully served his family, country, and God. He also faithfully served the agency that hired him in 1950, as well as the longtime head of that agency, J. Edgar Hoover. I was fortunate to spend a long Saturday afternoon with Ed Miller back in March, at long last meeting him after previously only corresponding with him. (He was an alumnus of Grove City...