Pejmanesque

IN MEMORIAM: RONALD REAGAN, 1911-2004

The election of 1980 was the first presidential election I remember (I was 7 years old, going on 8). The Iranian hostage crisis was going on, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, and the economy was going to hell in a handbasket. So naturally, applying my 7-year-old-going-on-8 mind to the situation, I conclude that with all of the problems going on in the world, it would be a terrible time to change Presidents and have to acclimate an entirely new Chief Executive to the office and its burdens. Better to keep the same experienced team in place.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, I cringe at that line of thinking, and am thoroughly ashamed of it. Because Ronald Reagan turned out to be one of my political heroes. I will go through life wishing that I cheered him on in 1980, and that I was old enough either then, or in 1984 to cast a ballot for him.

It is certainly the case that ever since the advent of the Cold War, various Presidents of the United States--both Democrats and Republicans--worked to protect the foundations of liberal democracy against a totalitarian ideology that was the successor to fascism. Victory in the Cold War is due to the efforts of those Presidents; from Harry Truman's Berlin Airlift, to Eisenhower's calm and collected leadership confronting the Soviet menace, to Richard Nixon's ability to discomfit Soviet leaders by his successful courting of mainland China into a strategic partnership with the United States. Even the properly criticized Jimmy Carter was able to make some strides against the Soviets by placing human rights on the agenda, and highlighting the plight of Soviet refuseniks and other political dissidents.

But Ronald Reagan was unique in the panoply of Presidents who confronted the Soviet Union. Why? Because he thought the Soviet empire could be rolled back and defeated:

In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West but in the home of Marxism- Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than half of what it was then.

The dimensions of this failure are astounding: a country which employs one-fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people. Were it not for the private sector, the tiny private sector tolerated in Soviet agriculture, the country might be on the brink of famine. These private plots occupy a bare 3 percent of the arable land but account for nearly one-quarter of Soviet farm output and nearly one-third of meat products and vegetables. Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year the Soviet system pours its best resources into the making of instruments of destruction. The constant shrinkage of economic growth combined with the growth of military production is putting a heavy strain on the Soviet people. What we see here is a political structure that no longer corresponds to its economic base, a society where productive forced are hampered by political ones.

The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries that are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving.

[. . .]

What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term -- the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people. And that's why we must continue our efforts to strengthen NATO even as we move forward with our zero-option initiative in the negotiations on intermediate-range forces and our proposal for a one-third reduction in strategic ballistic missile warheads.

And pursuant to the new strategy that Reagan proposed, the intelligence agencies of the United States began to redefine their mission so as to win the Cold War, instead of merely trying not to lose it:

When President Reagan took office, the CIA's hypothesis was that the Soviet economy was growing at a three-percent annual rate. To anyone who had seriously studied the numbers — or who had spent an hour walking the streets of Moscow — this was nonsense. Part of my job was to set out and explore an alternate hypothesis: namely, that the Soviet economy had begun to shrink and was on the verge of collapse. More precisely, Casey ordered me to ask this question: If in fact the Soviet economy has begun to shrink, what should we expect to see?

The career analysts responded by digging in their heels; by insisting that the Soviet economy was growing steadily and dismissing the alternate hypothesis as unworthy of serious attention. So I wrote a lengthy "think piece" memo that simply made the assumption that the Soviet economy was shrinking, then outlined what the downward spiral would look like. Casey made sure that just about everyone inside the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence community read that memo — and knew that he, personally, thought its radical hypothesis might be correct.

Now, of course, the very analysts who had scoffed at this new hypothesis started jumping in with their own ideas — often quite insightful, by the way — of what we might expect to see if the hypothesis were correct. For instance, we would see signs of discontent among the population. Moscow would start shifting military spending to the civilian sector in ways that helped the economy the most but reduced military power the least, such as by transferring steel from tank production to manufacture of (badly needed) locomotives. We would see increased efforts to purchase Western technology for civilian factories, to boost productivity without adding labor, which was increasingly scarce as birth rates plunged. We would see increased sales of Soviet oil and gas to Europe, to increase hard-currency earnings with which to purchase this technology. And so forth.

Literally within days, analysts throughout the intelligence services — not just at the CIA — began coming to me with bits and pieces of information that had never before surfaced. One afternoon an analyst handed me a report on the growing number of strikes — strikes! — at Soviet factories. I asked why this information hadn't surfaced before. He shrugged and replied, "No one here was interested. It just didn't fit." That report was on Casey's desk in five minutes, and on the president's desk later that same afternoon. Likewise with an astonishing report that another analyst brought to my office one day recounting an episode in which Soviet workers literally stopped and surrounded a train that was carrying meat. Troops arrived and surrounded the workers, and the standoff had to be resolved by the Politburo itself — which decided to allow the workers to offload and take the meat, rather than risk a shootout.

Casey delivered this knockout report to President Reagan in person. Then he ordered me to meet with analysts throughout the intelligence community, not only in Washington but overseas, to make sure they knew the director and the president wanted anything that might provide more evidence of the Soviet Union's economic troubles — and we wanted it now. And Casey ran interference by making sure that no deskbound bureaucrat would sit on whatever came in, whether from some analyst in the basement or from one of our clandestine agents abroad. Moreover, he brought in new analysts to replace some of those who just didn't "get it." It made for some nasty episodes in the office, but the raw stuff started reaching us fast and we started pulling the dots together into a pattern.

As the evidence accumulated, we weaned the CIA from its original hypothesis to the new one. Well armed now with solid and growing evidence that the Soviet economy was imploding, President Reagan had the confidence to move forward with his strategy of pushing the Soviet Union to its breaking point.

The thought that the Soviets could be defeated elicited much chuckling among those who supposedly "knew better":

In 1982, the 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 systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."

This view was seconded that same year by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. [who is on the Left, and who was Counselor to the President during the Kennedy Administration--ed.], who observed that "those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge 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."

Equally imaginative was the assessment of Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the 1985 edition of his widely used textbook: "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth. . . . The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth."

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 U.S. "It is clear that the ideologies of Communism, socialism, and capitalism are all in trouble."

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, another 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 suggests that it can. . . . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."

Throughout the 1980s, most of these pundits derisively condemned Mr. Reagan's policies. Mr. [Strobe] Talbott [Ambassador at Large for Russian Affairs and Deputy Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration; now President of the Brookings Institution--ed.] 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," Mr. Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind, "it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live."

All of these Doubting Thomases were proven wrong, of course. Shortly after Reagan left office, the dominoes in Eastern Europe began to fall. The Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia kicked out the communists and brought to power Vaclav Havel--one of the most heroic figures of the modern era, and a progeny of the Reaganesque belief that communism need not be merely contained, but could be completely defeated as well. In Romania, Nicolae Ceaucescu and his bloodthirsty gang got exactly the end they deserved. After a decade of holding out against democratic reforms, Wojciech Jaruzelski and his government finally gave way to Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement (in addition to Reagan's profound influence, Pope John Paul II was supremely instrumental in helping to undermind the communist government in Poland). And who could possibly forget the joyful and unbelievable scene when the Berlin Wall came down and when Germany was finally reunited? (Reagan was interviewed that night on Primetime Live by former press corps adversary Sam Donaldson, who to his credit, warmly gave Reagan praise for the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the end of the interview, Reagan only asked for a little time to inquire about one question: While everyone was happy and overjoyed at the fall of the Berlin Wall, why would anyone be surprised that people would choose freedom over slavery? As always, the great man knew how to cut to the heart of the matter.)

Was Reagan responsible for the end of the Cold War? Not solely. Again, Democrats and Republicans worked together to defend American security and the security of our allies against the threat posed by the Soviets. But Reagan was the only President who realized that the Soviets need not merely be contained. They could be completely defeated and left "on the ash heap of history." And to the credit of Reagan's adversaries, they recognized that he was perhaps the prime player in the victory of the West:

The general response among America’s chattering classes has been that Reagan was the political equivalent of the millionth customer at Bloomingdale’s. He was the guy lucky enough to walk through the door as the prize was handed out, as if everything was pre-ordained and would have happened the same way no matter whether the White House had been occupied by Michael Dukakis or George McGovern or Susan Sarandon. An alternative theory posits that Gorbachev was some sort of Jeffersonian kamikaze pilot, taking his whole nation over the cliff for the thrill of being proclaimed Time’s Man of the Decade.

Oddly, that’s not the way the Russians see it. Says Genrikh Grofimenko, a former adviser to Leonid Brezhnev, "Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that you won the Cold War because of your president’s insistence on SDI," the Strategic Defense Initiative, as Star Wars was formally called. Grofimenko marvels that the Nobel Peace Prize went to "the greatest flimflam man of all time," Mikhail Gorbachev, while Western intellectuals ignore Reagan -- who, he says, "was tackling world gangsters of the first order of magnitude."

[. . .]

As early as 1963, Reagan argued that the arms race should be not reined in but accelerated. "If we truly believe that our way of life is best, aren’t the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged, so the contrast is apparent?" he asked in a speech that year. "In an all-out race our system is strong," said Reagan, "and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause."

He wanted to use American technology to leverage an arms race that would force Moscow’s wheezing command economy into a Hobson’s choice between guns and butter. Either way, Reagan believed, the Soviets would lose: They could never keep up with the United States in an arms race, but abandoning it would be suicidal for a state that conducted all its business at gunpoint.

Reagan finally got to test his theory when he entered the White House in 1981. His defense team drew up a plan, later expanded into National Security Decision Directive 11-82, that explicitly made U.S. defense spending a form of economic warfare against the Soviets. The United States would "exploit and demonstrate the enduring economic advantages of the West to develop a variety of [arms] systems that are difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment or employ sophisticated strategic options to achieve this end." The objective was to make arms spending a "rising burden on the Soviet economy."

In retrospect, Reagan’s point that the Soviet economy was on life support seems obvious to the point of banality. In fact, that’s one of the arguments his critics use against him: that the Soviet economy would have imploded anyway, even without Reagan’s defense buildup. But that’s not the way foreign policy intellectuals saw it in 1982.

[. . .]

Reagan nonetheless persisted. He boosted production of conventional arms and borrowed a play from the Soviet book by backing anti-communist insurgencies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most controversially, he poured billions of dollars into his missile defense program.

Whether SDI will ever work (20 years later, it’s still mostly theoretical) and whether, even if it does work, it’s a wise strategic choice in a world where America’s most implacable enemies are not superpowers with hundreds of ICBMs but terrorists with suitcases, are arguments for another time. But what has largely been overlooked in the debate is that the Soviets had no doubt whatsoever that it would work.

At arms summits, Gorbachev frantically offered increasingly gigantic cuts in strategic missiles -- first 50 percent, then all of them -- if Reagan would just abandon SDI. Schweizer, mining Soviet archives and memoirs still unpublished in the West, shows that Gorbachev’s fears echoed throughout the Politburo. SDI "played a powerful psychological role," admitted KGB Gen. Nikolai Leonev. "It underlined still more our technological backwardness." Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko understood exactly what Reagan was up to: "Behind all this lies the clear calculation that the USSR will exhaust its material resources before the USA and therefore be forced to surrender." Most tellingly of all, the East German-backed terrorist group known as the Red Army Faction began systematically murdering executives of West German companies doing SDI research.

Reagan, unmoved, stiff-armed the Soviets on SDI while winning huge concessions on other weapons. When Gorbachev complained, Reagan needled him with jokes. (Sample: Two Russians are standing in line at the vodka store. Time passed -- 30 minutes, an hour, two -- and they were no closer to the door. "I’ve had it," one of the men finally snarled. "I’m going over to the Kremlin to shoot that son of a bitch Gorbachev!" He stormed up the street. Half an hour later, he returned. "What happened?" asked his friend. "Did you shoot Gorbachev?" Replied the other man in disgust: "Hell, no. The line over there is even longer than this one.")

The arms buildup (and a little-appreciated corollary, Reagan’s jawboning of the Saudis to open their oil spigots and depress the value of Soviet petroleum exports) quickly took its toll. The Soviet economy began shrinking in 1982 and never recovered. By Schweizer’s accounting, the various Reagan initiatives were costing Moscow as much as $45 billion a year, a devastating sum for a nation with only $32 billion a year in hard-currency earnings. Meanwhile, Reagan’s rhetoric (the "evil empire" and "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speeches in particular) emboldened opposition movements in Eastern Europe. Less than a year after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet Union itself disappeared a little later.

Of course, Reagan's legacy should not end by just being measured by its Cold War accomplishments (though those accomplishments are surely the defining feature of the Reagan legacy). After three failed Presidencies and one caretaker government--that of Gerald Ford's--Reagan proved to a doubting public that the Presidency could be made to work again. His tax cuts (the top rate was hovering at around 70% at the time Reagan took office) stimulated the economy, and gave the United States one of the longest peacetime expansions in history. He restored the general sense of hope and optimism that Americans had lost since the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. And Reagan will be remembered as well for challenging the New Deal ethos of expanding government by putting forth a vision of smaller government, one that trusts people and private enterprise more than it does a disconnected governmental coterie in the nation's capital. No one believes that the people who work for the Federal Government are bad people. But conservatives and libertarians had to struggle for decades before Reagan to put forth the message that when it came to analyzing the problems of states and localities, the people best in the position to do that were the ones living in those states and localities.

There were, of course, mistakes and shortcomings in the Reagan Revolution. The legacy of the New Deal and expansionist government is still with us, so it proved much harder to roll back government than Reagan must have initially thought. The withdrawals from Lebanon and the arms sales to Iran were terrible policy mistakes that undermined Reagan's--and America's--credibility for a while. No Presidency is perfect, particularly not one that serves for eight years and is thrust in the midst of history-changing events.

But when the history is finally written, Ronald Reagan will be remembered as one of the best and most consequential Presidents of the 20th Century. His impact was, overwhelmingly, a positive one. He helped us prosper at home, and he helped free others abroad. His most controversial statements--remember the "Evil Empire" speech?--which elicited derision from those who regularly looked down their noses at him (former Defense Secretary and Democratic eminence grise, Clark Clifford, once called Reagan an "amiable dunce") were cheered by those seeking freedom abroad. If history is just, in the end, Reagan will be lauded for his beliefs. Those who mocked him--many of whom are discussed brilliantly and unsparingly here--will be the ones laughed at in the end.

Job well done, Mr. President. We'll miss you. And I'm sorry for rooting against you 24 years ago. Chalk it up to the mistakes of youth.

UPDATE: Some more excellent links and tributes:

Tacitus has a superb remembrance up.

Quoth Joe Katzman:

Some Americans like Reagan, some do not. Regardless of how one feels, the fact remains: Reagan played a leading role in the global demise of an empire that had slain over 40 million people in its bloody history, and of an ideology whose democide count has topped 100 million. The fact that millions and millions of people around the world will mourn in the next few days - because what this man did hugely changed their lives for the better - ought to inspire a certain level of respect

Jon Henke:

One of the seminal memories of my childhood was the day Ronald Reagan was shot. At the time, I only knew my afternoon cartoons had been pre-empted. I called into the kitchen..."Mom, the President was shot", not knowing the full import of what I'd said. For some reason, child though I was, I stayed around for quite a bit of that afternoon, watching the news, upset that my cartoons were gone, but knowing that - whatever was happening - it was Important.

And while a whole nation worried, Ronald Reagan - bullet near his heart - was telling jokes.

I'm not sure why I relate that particular incident. It's certainly not the most important of his life, or even his Presidency....but it was indicative of the man. And it was important to me.

When the Gipper opens his eyes again, there will be angels holding his hand. I think Nancy knows about them. I hope they're all Republicans.

Ken Summers answers an imbecile who decided to dance on a dead man's grave. Whatever your politics, I would think that we could agree that the Presidents of the United States that have served in our lifetimes were men of good faith. Even if you think they were wrong, they meant well. Crowing about the deaths of others should be reserved for the truly hateful (and I mean the Osama bin Laden/Saddam Hussein variety).

Instead, we have disgusting displays of schadenfreude over the death of a former President via one of the most tortuous and painful deaths imaginable. And there are--and will be, sad to say--more in the Blogosphere, either via posts or comments. I hope that there is a Hell so that the maggots who refuse to show any kind of human decency on a day like this burn in it. Otherwise, I trust they won't object if anyone dances a jig on their deaths.

Assuming anyone even bothers to take notice, that is.

Perhaps the most comprehensive obituary can be found here.

Bill Hobbs is to the point.

Damian Penny:

I was terrified of Ronald Reagan when I was a child. Today, for his role in bringing down a politcal system that murdered over 100 million people in 70 years (and brought unimaginable misery to millions more), I believe he was a hero.

Cacciaguida:

I was the only student at my high school to support him in 1976. I volunteered on his campaign in 1980, in the New Hampshire primary and in the general election. I cheered him on as an opinion journalist, 1984-86, and I was a political appointee in his administration as a speechwriter, 1986-89.

To me, he alone is, forever, The President.

Roger Kimball's post is very much worth reading.

A continuation on a theme: "Reagan the Prophet."

Boi From Troy:

I cannot say that Reagan made me a Republican--but he was the first candidate I ever volunteered for. At ages 5 and 9, I demanded that my parents take me to the local polling place so I could encourage our neighbors to elect the Gipper.

As a third grader I sent President Reagan all I had left of my allowance one week--a quarter--because I wanted to see him re-elected. A few weeks later, I got a note from the President, with a shiny new quarter in the envelope. Never since has a politician been so gracious.

Ben Domenech, as expected, has a superb post.

Tim Blair has an excellent collection of links.

Excellent coverage from MaroonBlog. Just start here and scroll up.

Libertarians should be sure to check out this interview with Reagan, where he says the following:

If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are travelling the same path.

Considering my own call for libertarians and conservatives to work more closely together based on what they have in common, this discussion resonates with me.

See Andrew Sullivan's posts here and here.

Fabio Rojas:

It's hard for Westerners to believe this, but the clarity of Reagan's message had a profound effect on those behind the Iron Curtain. People will notice when an American president unapologetically calls the Soviet Union what it was - an evil empire. This is a simple moral judgment that was lost on so many intellectuals in the West. To hear this message must have been inspiring to those who experienced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and Hungary and other Soviet crimes. To this day, many in Eastern Europe are grateful that Reagan was not afraid to say something that was so obvious and so important.

Alex Tabarrok:

Reagan was the first, and so far the only, politician who I have ever found inspiring. I came of political age during the Reagan years when I was a high school student in Canada. In political science class we learned that the essence of the Canadian philosophy of government could be remembered with the mnemonic POGG - peace, order, and good government. I preferred life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and hearing Reagan speak was always a thrill for me.

Juan Non-Volokh chimes in with his Sunday Song Lyrics. Appropriate.

Michael Rappaport has a very impressive tribute here.

Nota Bene: Whatever your views on Ronald Reagan, this is not the time or place to flame or attack him. A former President has died. Be respectful in your comments. If you feel you must critique, keep it from getting personal. Nasty remarks will be deleted.

Posted by Pejman Yousefzadeh at June 5, 2004 05:29 PM | TrackBack