Posted on 06/11/2004 1:51:08 PM PDT by agenda_express
WHAT THEY SAID: In honor of president Reagan's funeral, here's a useful corrective to the notion that his legacy was always celebrated. Today, almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn't what was said at the time. Here's a smattering of commentary from the 1980s.
"A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today." - Arthur "Always Wrong" Schlesinger, Washington Post, May 1, 1988.
"I wonder how many people, reading about the [Evil Empire'] speech or seeing bits on television, really noticed its outrageous character… Primitive: that is the only word for it. … What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology – one in fact rejected by most theologians?... What must the leaders of Western Europe think of such a speech? They look to the head of the alliance for rhetoric that can persuade them and their constituents. What they get from Ronald Reagan is a mirror image of crude Soviet rhetoric. And it is more than rhetoric: everyone must sense that. The real Ronald Reagan was speaking in Orlando. The exaggeration and the simplicities are there not only in the rhetoric but in the process by which he makes decisions." - Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 10, 1983
"Something like the speech to the evangelicals is not presidential, it's not something a president should say. If the Russians are infinitely evil and we are infinitely good, then the logical first step is a nuclear first strike. Words like that frighten the American public and antagonize the Soviets. What good is that?" - Rick Hertzberg, New Yorker macher, quoted in the Washington Post, March 29, 1983.
"President Reagan has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign policy, rattling arms from El Salvador to Saudi Arabia, frightening our friends from Japan to West Germany. He proposes a 50 percent increase in ‘defense expenditures.’ Much of it will be dissipated in the self-defeating spiral of an open-ended nuclear-arms race that poses a greater threat to our own internal and external security than all the Communist propaganda that ever emanated from Moscow. Already, the cost of Reagan policies is devastating to our country in economic strength, in diplomatic influence, in national security, in moral stature." -- John B. Oakes, former senior editor, New York Times, November 1, 1981.
"All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Sovietphobia… a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union." — Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, 1983.
"'We've really got to start talking,' says George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. 'The fact is we've let these fellows get away with murder, and the situation now is much too serious for that.' To ideological men like Ronald Reagan, new information is only useful if it confirms old prejudices. Though he is shrewd enough to bend and budge under pressure (hence, for example, his abandonment of old positions on Taiwan), in his heart Reagan knows he has always been right about the nature of the world, of communism, of America's proper role." - Robert Kaiser, Washington Post, October 30, 1983.
"Are we rushing headlong into the next step of those 40 years of progressions by which we do something then they do something, by which we pretend that we're going to build this and it will somehow strengthen our deterrent then they do it, and low and behold, the next thing we know is, the President of the United States is addressing the nation saying, ‘My fellow Americans, I hate to tell you this, but the Soviet Union is deploying more of these, and we have to respond, and I'm asking the Congress for more money in order to respond.’ Star Wars is guaranteed to do that, and it's guaranteed to threaten the heavens -- the one line we haven't yet crossed with weaponry: the heavens." – Senator John Kerry, on SDI, the program that brought the evil empire to its knees, August 5, 1986.
"In his distaste for bilateral efforts to manage the superpower rivalry and his instinctive predilection for unilateral ones, Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end. The most striking, and questionable, theme in his star wars speech was his apparent belief that the U.S. could mobilize its scientific community and its economic resources in quest of an impenetrable antiballistic-missile shield over the entire nation without triggering perilously destabilizing countermeasures, both offensive and defensive, on the part of the U.S.S.R. Reagan's views notwithstanding, there is little reason to hope that the many handicaps of the Soviet economy will be decisively advantageous to the U.S. in the long run, allowing the U.S. to ‘beat’ the U.S.S.R. in an arms race." -- Strobe Talbott, Time, April 18, 1983.
"Ronald Reagan came to Europe to persuade people that he is not the shallow, nuclear cowboy of certain unkind assessments. Said White House spokesman David Gergen, on the eve of departure, ‘Some in Europe do not know or understand him.’ But now that the president has been among them for over a week, Europeans may think they got him right the first time. In Rome, he made a stab at identifying himself as a ‘pilgrim for peace.’ But by the time he got to London he had reverted to type as a cold warrior. And yesterday in Bonn, he reiterated his commitment to ‘peace through strength’ – which is fancy talk for continuing the nuclear arms race." - Mary McGrory, Washington Post, June 10, 1982.
Rest in peace, Mr President. And know that after all these years, you were right - and all these people were clearly, emphatically, embarrassingly, wrong.
History will show what most of us already know - what he is doing is RIGHT.
"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything." - Alexander Hamilton
That's actually a very fascinating quote, because it's wrong on two fronts - both Reaganism and the youth rebellion of the 1960s, instead of fading away, instead crystallized into the two main political forces in this country today - conservatives, and post-Vietnam liberals who pine for the good old days of long hair, pot and protests.
hmmm...speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Gotta love it.
Nothing like seeing a bunch of self-hating Ameriphobes proven by the test of time to be idiots.
It does put things into stark perspective. It sounds like a pretty good philosophy to me, but it sure reverted Professor Cohen into a bedwetter...
This should be the entire content of a 60 second soundless tv spot in this summer's campaign.
Right on.
Thanks for the ping. I especially enjoyed the one from Mr. Kerry, who thinks he should be our next President.
Reminds me of the quote: "Nietzsche: God is dead.......God: Nietzsche is dead."
They mocked Reagan during his presidency in much the same way that they now mock George W. Bush. The never ending flow of derision is intended to marginalize their successes and minimize each of their great strengths. While the sheer volume of it all may seem to obscure the truth for a time, history tends to burn away all that is irrelevant and simply expose the true man and his deeds.
Well - beyond being on it's face a stupid remark - you have to remember that Cohen was one of those professional "sovietologists" - famous as a talking head on McNeil Lehrer - someone who in theory should have known more about the Soviet Union rather than less. But, evidently he was a fraud.
Thanks to Sullivan for printing these. There are many egos in Washington and in the press that need to be deflated. And this is one way to do it.
My recollection of the 80's and the criticism of Regan was that it was extremely viscous. I'm still looking for some of the Knoopaki cartoons that used to run in The Capital Times in Madison Wisconsin in that time frame. He was depicted as this sinister, bloodthirsty creature - preying on the poor and endangering our country. The caricature was downright nasty. Someone needs to dredge some of that material and reprint it today. Time to call out those who demagogue'd Ronald Wilson Reagan.
And .. it will be interesting to see them revert to the old statement this coming week.
I'm really curious how the public is going to react to their obvious about face.
Probably first time writer was right in his life.
And remember...this is the "progressive" party in America. Reading this, it looks like they haven't progressed much in two decades.
^
Lewis managed to be wrong on about three levels, simultaneously. Oh, so pretentiously wrong!
Anthony Lewis = NYTimes mentality.
By Dinesh D'Souza
The Indianapolis Star, Tuesday, November 9, 1999
In 1987, Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Two years later, in what may be the most spectacular political event in our lifetime, the wall came tumbling down. Soon the Soviet empire disintegrated, the ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism was settled, and America entered a new era of peace and prosperity.
As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's demise today, we do well to remember that it was Reagan's policies that were instrumental in ensuring America's Cold War victory. Margaret Thatcher has said that history will remember Reagan as the man who "won the Cold War without firing a shot."
Yet, strangely enough, many historians and pundits refuse to credit Reagan's policies with helping to bring down the Soviet empire. Rather, they insist that Soviet communism suffered from chronic economic problems and predictable collapsed, as Strobe Talbott, a journalist at Time and later as an official in the Clinton State Department, put it, "not because of anything the outside world has done or not done...but because the defects and inadequacies in its core."
If so, it is reasonable to expect that the inevitable Soviet collapse would have been foreseen by these experts. Let us see what some of them had to say about the Soviet systems during the 1980s. In 1982, they learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true system crisis, for it boasts enormous reserves of political and social stability."
This view was seconded that same year by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who observed that "those in the United States of economic and social collapse" are "wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves."
John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote in 1984: "That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene...One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets ...and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters and shops ... Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."
Columnist James Reston of the New York Times in June 1985 revealed his capacity for sophisticated even-handedness when he dismissed the possibility of the collapse of communism on the grounds that Soviet problems were not different from those in the United States. "It is clear that the ideologies of communism, socialism and capitalism are all in trouble."
But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, an MIT economist and well-known author, who, as late as 1989, wrote, "Can economic command significantly ... accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggest that it can ... Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievement bear comparison with those of the United States."
Through the 1980s, most of these pundits derisively condemned Reagan's policies. Strobe Talbott faulted the Reagan administration for espousing "the early fifties goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe," an objective he considered misguided and unrealistic. "Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end," Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind, "it is a permanent, institutional crisis which the USSR has learned to live."
Perhaps one should not be too hard on the wise men. After all, explains Arthur Schlesinger in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, "History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes. No one foresaw these changes."
Wrong again. Reagan foresaw them. In 1981, Reagan told the students and faculty at University of Notre Dame, "the West won't contain Communism. It will transcend Communism. We will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."
In 1982, Reagan told the British Parliament in London: "In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis ... But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union." Reagan added that "it is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of human history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens." He predicted that if the Western alliance remained strong it would produce a "march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."
In 1987, Reagan told the crowd gathered in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, "In the communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards ... Even today, the Soviet Union cannot feed itself." Thus the "inescapable conclusion" in his view was "freedom is the victor."
The collapse of the Soviet empire is not just an event that Reagan predicted. He intended the outcome. He implemented policies that were aimed at producing it. He was denounced for those policies. Still, in the end his objective was achieved.
Perhaps it is too much to ask the wise to admit their errors. But it's only right that we who are enjoying the benefits of living in a safer, more prosperous world should give Reagan credit during his lifetime for his prescient statesmanship.
Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader by Dinesh D'Souza
Thanks for posting this. I was beginning to worry that my memory was deceiving me - because I knew that all the people gushing over Reagan now hated his guts then. (And they were also particularly vicious towards Nancy.)
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