Dupes

  Hugs and Kisses from the Ayatollah

  The year 1979 brought two foreign-policy disasters—not only the Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan but also the fall of the shah in Iran, which led to the overnight radical Islamization of Iran and the seizing of more than fifty Americans as hostages. The United States suddenly went from being Iran's best friend to Iran's “Great Satan.” It was another horrible embarrassment for America, and for Jimmy Carter.

  It hadn't started that way. On December 31, 1977, President Carter stood aside the shah, a close and dependable American ally, and raised his glass to give a toast: “Iran, because of the great leadership of the shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.”30

  One year later, that island of stability erupted into a volcano. Militant demonstrations exploded throughout Iran, as a fanatical Shiite cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini led an Islamist uprising against the shah. The shah turned to the U.S. government for assistance in this crisis. But on December 7, 1978, when a reporter asked Carter whether he thought the shah “could survive,” the president gave a waffling, weak response that deserves infamy:

  I don't know. I hope so. This is something that is in the hands of the people of Iran. We have never had any intention and don't have any intention of trying to intercede in the internal political affairs of Iran.… We personally prefer that the shah maintain a major role in the government, but that's a decision for the Iranian people to make.31

  To say this was a sudden sea change in American policy toward Iran is insufficient. Carter had casually delivered a jaw-dropper. And no one was as surprised as the Iranian extremists, who read Carter's words—properly so—as a sign that Uncle Sam would not, this time around, save the shah.

  Within only weeks of that Carter statement, by February 1979, the shah was gone, the ayatollah was in, and the birth of modern Islamic terror had begun—more than twenty years before the catastrophe of September 11, 2001.

  Thus, Jimmy Carter's record is marred not only by the fact that he did nothing to facilitate the collapse of Communism but also by the reality that the eventual successor to Communism as an international menace—radical Islam—was largely set in motion during his presidency.

  Carter's dubious connections to both militant Communism and militant Islamism were not confined to his presidency. As we shall see, even well after he left the White House he would continue to be duped by these destructive “isms.” In this sense Carter would serve as a twisted bridge between America's two chief foes of the past hundred years.

  19

  DEFENDING THE “EVIL EMPIRE”: STOPPING RONALD REAGAN'S “ERRORS” AND “DISTORTIONS”

  The foreign-policy fiascoes of the late 1970s, from Afghanistan to Iran, were major reasons for Jimmy Carter's crushing defeat at the hands of anti-Communist crusader Ronald Reagan in the November 1980 presidential election (Reagan claimed forty-four of fifty states, winning the Electoral College by a vote of 489 to 49). Indeed, it is hard to imagine the nation electing Ronald Reagan without the mess—foreign and domestic—left by Carter.

  With Reagan triumphant, and supremely confident, he now had a chance to carry out a plan he had outlined to his foreign-policy adviser Richard V. Allen four years earlier. During a private lunch together in Los Angeles in January 1977, at the start of the Carter presidency, Reagan told Allen: “Dick, my idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?”1

  This was a stunning (and in retrospect prophetic) statement—an impossibility to the vast majority of experts and analysts at the time. For years as a private citizen and candidate, Reagan had fiercely opposed the accommodationist policy of détente and spoken frankly about the true nature of Soviet Communism. In the White House he would do the same. He continued an unrelenting rhetorical-moral assault against the foundations of Marxism-Leninism—an assault invigorating to those languishing inside the Iron Curtain.2 And now, as president, he had the power of policy to put behind his rhetoric. He had the power to try to end—and win—the Cold War, especially through his “peace through strength” military-technological challenge to the USSR via efforts like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

  For taking this stance, Reagan earned the undying enmity of the American Left—from the media to academia to Congress. Liberals demeaned Reagan from the very first weeks of his presidency, castigating him as a “nuclear warmonger,” a primitive anti-Communist, a simpleton, a babbling buffoon, one lacking any semblance of intellectual fiber—lazy, senile, preferring old movies to books. The Left's caricature of Reagan was so vicious that anyone born after the 1980s would be astonished to go back in time and see the appraisals of a man who is now regularly ranked as one of America's top presidents,3 and who, in one extensive poll of 2.4 million participants, was voted “the greatest American of all time.”4

  Even the most rudimentary historical knowledge of Marx, Lenin, the USSR, and the Cold War showed that Reagan rightly understood Communism as expansionary, cruel, and militantly atheistic. These were precisely the points that Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office, including Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, had made. But apparently the American Left no longer had an appetite for such pronouncements. So when Reagan made his now historic, prophetic predictions that Communism would end up on the “ash heap of history,” many liberals judged him out of his mind—literally bordering on senility.

  Even when Reagan was shot and nearly killed just two months into his presidency, the most radical quarters of the Left responded not with outrage over an attack on the American president, but rather with delight.

  Wayne Allyn Root, who today is a prominent Libertarian Party politician, was then a (rare) Republican student stumping for Reagan at Columbia University. Root recalls sitting in a political-science course on March 30, 1981, when a breathless student ran into the room yelling, “President Reagan has been shot! They've assassinated Reagan!” Not knowing that Reagan was still alive, Root's Columbia classmates erupted into applause. They were “cheering,” says Root, “celebrating.” There were “high-fives all around,” “hugging and screaming with glee, ‘Yes! Reagan is dead!’” As he recounts, these classmates literally “rooted for the death of a conservative president.”5

  Columbia University was as unhinged as it had been in the days of John Dewey and Corliss Lamont, and in the ’60s, when Mark Rudd, David Gilbert, John Jacobs, Ted Gold, and comrades took over the campus. Though Dewey had long since passed on, his prize student, an aging Corliss Lamont, was still around. Indeed, he was still chair of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, where he publicly condemned the “shocking hypocrisy” of Reagan foreign policy.6

  The Soviets would have been as delighted by Lamont's swipes at the new American president as they were by his work decades earlier. And in the 1980s, of course, plenty of liberal voices joined the chorus.

  The USSR's state-run media made sure the Soviet people heard the Americans’ attacks.

  The Soviet Side

  In the 1980s Americans could catch the Left's attacks on Reagan any time they opened newspapers and news weeklies or watched the evening news. What Americans did not see were Soviet newspapers and news weeklies and television. If they had, they would have been intrigued by what they saw: there was a bracing similarity between what the American Left and Soviet propagandists were stating about President Reagan.

  This is not to suggest that the two sides coordinated. It is simply that both sides were moving along leftward tracks, and both looked to alternately ridicule and demonize their common political adversary—a conservative Republican and vocal anti-Communist. They jointly portrayed Reagan as a trigger-happy troglodyte who should not be trusted and most assuredly ought not to be president.

  In the course of research for this book and several previous books on Ronald Reagan, I have read thousands of transcripts from Soviet media archives—from Pravda, Izvestia, TASS, Studio 9 TV bro
adcasts (once the leading “news” program in the USSR), and dozens of lesser-known Soviet government publications. These broadsides were often filled with encomiums to American liberals who excoriated Reagan.

  Here are only some of the liberals whose statements against Reagan and his policies the Soviets frequently quoted: Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory; New York Times columnist James “Scotty” Reston; New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis; Senator Howard Metzenbaum, Ohio Democrat; Democratic presidential candidate and civil-rights activist Jesse Jackson; nuclear-freeze activist Dr. Helen Caldicott; President Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis; Dr. Carl Sagan; Phil Donahue; Senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, both Massachusetts Democrats; reporter Helen Thomas; CBS News anchor Dan Rather; Senator Patrick Leahy, Vermont Democrat; Congressman Edward Boland, Massachusetts Democrat; 1984 Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro; 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern; House Speaker Tip O'Neill, Massachusetts Democrat; Senator Alan Cranston, California Democrat; Madeleine Albright, a leading foreign-policy voice among Democrats, having served on President Carter's National Security Council; and 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale.

  The Soviets also looked to leading American newspapers, which were dominated by liberals who typically opposed Reagan's policies and did not respect the president's mind. Among the Soviets’ commonly cited sources were the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, the Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, and the Los Angeles Times. Over and over, Pravda and other Soviet publications would go to these sources, typically employing a tack that went something like this: If only the imperialists in the Reagan White House would listen to the wisdom of this enlightened American.… It was not surprising for TASS in the 1980s to take, say, a Washington Post op-ed from editor Robert Kaiser—such as Kaiser's lengthy November 1, 1983, op-ed blasting the Reagan administration's invasion of Grenada—and excerpt it into basically a press release disseminated throughout the Soviet empire.7 Indeed, an examination of these old media clips shows that it was probably a daily occurrence for a Soviet commentator or “reporter” to authoritatively cite a liberal columnist or politician to buttress the case du jour against Reagan.

  When I first began researching these archived transcripts of Soviet media, I was amazed to see the similarity between what the Soviet state-run media were reporting about Ronald Reagan and what American liberals were saying. I truly felt at times like I was reading talking points from the 1984 Democratic National Convention. This remarkable overlap has never been fully acknowledged or appreciated.

  To be fair, these liberal Americans did not intend for their material to become handy propaganda for the Kremlin, and they probably had no idea that they were feeding the ever-churning Soviet propaganda machine. Most of them were (quite properly) engaged in political criticism or dissent. They were playing their part in a free political system that allows open discourse. In that sense, their actions could not have been more quintessentially American.

  Nonetheless, these individuals often unwittingly aided Soviet purposes. Some American reporters helped the Kremlin even more by crossing the line between news reporting and opinion writing, which only strengthened Moscow's talking points. Moreover, the journalists, academics, and policymakers who condemned Reagan's anti-Communism as primitive and simplistic were themselves displaying ignorance, for, as noted, even a cursory examination of the proclamations of Marx and Lenin, or of the bloody record of the Soviet Union and other Communist regimes, should have revealed that the threat of Communism was nothing to dismiss. But in the 1980s many American liberals were simply duped by the Communists—just as a young actor named Ronald Reagan had been decades earlier.

  Certainly not all liberals or Democrats were snagged in the Communists’ net. Millions of of Democrats crossed over to vote for this conservative Republican, becoming known as “Reagan Democrats.” And some conservative Democrats in Congress, such as Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, joined Reagan in blasting détente.

  But in the 1980s the Soviets did find fertile ground for dupery, as the Democratic Party, on the heels of Vietnam and Watergate, had drifted notably leftward. The crop of extremely liberal Democrats that had come to Congress just prior to Reagan's election was bold and aggressive. Likewise, the campus protesters of the 1960s had gone into journalism and academia; they knew how to be rebellious. By the 1980s the Democratic Party was producing presidential front-runners like Walter Mondale, Ted Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson; these were not Cold Warriors in the mold of Harry Truman and JFK. As President Reagan's United Nations ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, herself a former Democrat, had put it, this was now the party of the “San Francisco Democrats.” It was a party, said former Democrat Ronald Reagan, which he didn't leave, but which had left him.

  Ronald Reagan and other former Democrats may not have been pleased with the party's leftward direction, but the Soviets were nothing short of enchanted with the liberals who provided grist for the Kremlin propaganda mill.

  The Duped: The American Press

  So who, then, was duped in the 1980s? In which areas did the duping occur?

  The examples from the Reagan years could fill this book. It was difficult—due to space constraints—to exclude some of the more delectable areas, like the nuclear-freeze campaign, which depended on dupes to a shocking extent. In this book I will focus on just a few examples, mainly involving the American media. That is a fitting place to start, as the nation's most celebrated liberal journalists—highly condescending in their take on Ronald Reagan—had no idea that Reagan was right and they were wrong about the nature of Soviet Communism. Moscow was more than happy to tap their arrogant ignorance.

  Given that liberals, including in the press, had long viewed strident anti-Communists as unsophisticated, it drove them nearly mad to watch one get elected to the Oval Office—especially a former actor not seen as an intellectual. Worse, the new president spoke unapologetically about the dangers of the USSR, its inherent “evil” and expansionary tendencies—rooted, so he said, in Marxist-Leninist doctrine—while also predicting its demise.

  Reagan had strategic reasons for doing so.8 He wanted to declare a just war against the very foundations of Marxism-Leninism, which formed the basis of the Communist state and the underlying rationale for Moscow's successful expansion of a dehumanizing, destructive ideology. Reagan, despite the Left's demeaning portrayal of him as a lightweight, understood Communism because he had studied it since the 1940s and had engaged in “hand-to-hand combat” (his words) with Communists when he headed the Screen Actors Guild. The new president wanted Americans to have a better grasp of precisely what they were facing a continent away, so he pounded the point that the Soviets were committed to a one-world Communist state,9 as he had done on the campaign trail in the 1970s.10

  Reagan's warnings about Soviet expansionism jolted the sensibilities of the American Left, including liberal journalists. Imagine the astonishment felt by liberals who had been educated in American universities where uncompromising anti-Communism was depicted as a greater threat than uncompromising Communism, where Joe McCarthy was a bigger demon than Joe Stalin. Liberals in the press went after Ronald Reagan every time he dared to negatively quote Vladimir Lenin or insist that the USSR was pursing something as brazen as global Communism.

  They Lie, They Cheat, They Steal …

  Left-leaning journalists began their attacks on President Reagan as early as his first press conference, held on January 29, 1981, barely a week after he took office. When the new president was asked about Soviet aims and intentions, he calmly explained to the Washington press corps that the Soviet leadership had “openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.”

  The assembled press responded with what one observer, National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen, described as “an audible gasp.”11 Reagan had left no doubt that
Jimmy Carter was out of the White House.

  And the president was not finished. He explained that the Soviets considered their relativistic behavior “moral, not immoral,” and that this was something the United States needed to “keep … in mind” when doing “business” with Moscow.12

  Of course, what Reagan said was no different from what many Cold War Democrats had always said, from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman to JFK and even to liberals like Adlai Stevenson.13 In fact, it may have been mild by comparison. His words read almost verbatim like the text of the esteemed George F. Kennan's most famous of writings, his 1947 “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which became the cornerstone for the launching of containment.14 But many liberals either were unaware of this history or blissfully cast it aside for partisan reasons. Reagan's remarks sent reporters “rushing to their telephones” the moment the press conference ended, Allen remembered.15