Free Republic

Grove City College publishes an excellent newsletter titled "Visions and Values." Its July 2006 edition features an interview with Dr. Richard Pipes, acclaimed Russian historian and Harvard University professor of Sovietology. The interview was conducted by Grove City College professor of political science Dr. Paul Kengor. Dr. Pipes, who served on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, explained that there are actually only a few communists among academics. At first glance, that's a puzzling observation, given the leftist bias at most college campuses. Drs. Pipes and Kengor explain the puzzle in a way that makes perfect sense. While...

As president of the United States, Ronald Reagan initiated a sweeping and unprecedented program of covert actions and economic-warfare initiatives that acted to greatly weaken the Soviet economy, its support for "wars of liberation," and its hold on its power in Eastern Europe, former top Reagan administration officials said. The elements of these programs were contained in top-secret national-security directives signed by Reagan in 1982 and 1983, these sources told United Press International. "Any kind of covert-action program had to be expressed in a presidential finding," after consultations with attorneys, a former Reagan White House official explained. He said one...

Professor Richard Pipes will be on C-SPAN's Booknotes tonight, 8:00pm EST, with host Brian Lamb. Pipes will be discussing his new book Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger.Distinguished historian, Harvard professor, and White House adviser looks back on his own life and on the tumultuous twentieth century. Sixteen-year-old Richard Pipes escaped from Nazi-occupied Warsaw with his family in October 1939. Their flight took them to the United States by way of Italy, and Pipes went on to earn a college degree, join the U.S. Air Corps, serve as professor of Russian history at Harvard for nearly forty years, and become adviser...

Richard Pipes is an historian who made, as well as studied, history. An expert on Soviet and Russian history, Pipes helped change the direction of U.S. foreign policy. In the 1970s, he headed a government panel of outside experts brought in to assess Soviet nuclear strategy; his "Team B" unit (as opposed to the CIA's "Team A") concluded that the Soviet posture was more threatening than U.S. policy had assumed. In the early 1980s, Pipes worked in the Reagan administration, heading the East European and Soviet desk of the National Security Council. As such, he pushed for a hard line...

<p>Harvard historian Richard Pipes shaped the Reagan administration's aggressive approach to the Soviet Union. His support for confrontation over containment prefigured the Bush foreign policy of today.</p> <p>OVER THE PAST TWO YEARS, the Bush administration has inspired one of the more stimulating scavenger hunts in recent memory -- the search for the Ur-theorist of its bold foreign policy initiatives. With each new turn another name has emerged. "Regime change" gave us the political philosopher Leo Strauss. The "shock and awe" campaign brought forth the Cold War calculations of military strategist Albert Wohlstetter. Hints of follow-up aggression against Syria and North Korea had some consulting Trotsky's writings on "permanent revolution."</p>