Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  The impish Zorin then put Reagan on the spot by asking: “So, I would like to ask you what works of Lenin did you read, and where were those quotations that you used taken from?” Reagan held his ground. Though he was not forthcoming about specific sources, he wisely turned the discussion to the gist of Marxist-Leninist ideology, where he was dead-on:

  Karl Marx said your system, Communism, could only succeed when the whole world had become Communist. And so, the goal had to be the one-world Communist state.

  Now, as I say, I can't recall all of the sources from which I gleaned this, and maybe some things have been interpreted differently as in modern versions, but I know that Lenin expounded on that and said that must be the goal. But I also know—and this didn't require reading Lenin—that every leader, every General Secretary but the present one had, in appearances before the Soviet Congress, reiterated their allegiance to that Marxian theory that the goal was a one-world Communist state. So, I wasn't making anything up; these were the things we were told. For example, here in our government, we knew that Lenin had expressed a part of the plan that involved Latin America and so forth. And the one line that sounded very ominous to us was when he said that the last bastion of capitalism, the United States, would not have to be taken; it would fall into their outstretched hand like overripe fruit.69

  Reagan felt no need to list sources, because this material was second nature to him. His explanation to his Soviet interrogators could have come straight out of one of his GE speeches in the 1950s, right down to the use of the older colloquial “Marxian” instead of “Marxist.”

  Zorin may have been eager to trip up Ronald Reagan on the eve of his pivotal summit meeting, but the president would not be disturbed so easily.

  When Fiction Becomes History

  In time, the Soviet propaganda push against Reagan acquired not only sympathetic liberal American journalists but liberal American academics as well. Not surprisingly, given the New York Times’s sacred status among American liberals, pieces like the one by Karl Meyer live on in the works of liberal academics, especially those who upbraid Reagan for his “reactionary” views on the Cold War and Soviet Communism.

  Many academics still use the Meyer piece as a catch-all to demonstrate that Reagan employed a vast reservoir of Soviet “quotes of uncertain origin.” For instance, Garry Wills, in his book Reagan's America, accepts Meyer's verdict as ironclad, concluding that Reagan “used a fake quote from Lenin, taken from Welch's” book.70

  Going much further than Wills is Raymond Garthoff, whose work The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War credits Gorbachev, not Reagan, with ending the Cold War. Published by Brookings Institution Press, the book received the Left's imprimatur as one of the most authoritative works on the end of the Cold War. It became required reading in graduate schools across America in the 1990s, billed by some as the definitive judgment on how the Cold War ended.71

  Garthoff depicts Reagan as both a simpleton and a political zealot, and he cites Meyer's New York Times piece to substantiate his claim that Reagan displayed a “notorious disregard for concrete facts.”72 Garthoff points readers to an outside source that is supposedly an authoritative guide to Reagan's many “egregious errors of fact in public statements”—a 1984 book called Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error, coauthored by the liberal activist Mark Green.73

  Where might America's fortieth president have gotten such inaccurate ideas? “Apparently,” Garthoff explains, without providing evidence, “their origin was a Nazi propaganda fabrication that had made its way by professional anticommunists into right-wing publications of the kind read by Ronald Reagan.” This “odious” reality, notes the historian, is quite an “insult.” Just imagine that such could be “part of the personal intellectual baggage of the president of the United States.”

  With Garthoff's historical explication, bad reporting on Reagan in the 1980s has become bad history.

  Most puzzling about Garthoff's swipe at Reagan is that the historian's explanatory notes at times actually back up Reagan. For example, in the main text of his book, Garthoff writes that Reagan's use of the name “Nikolai” for Lenin “presumably” originates from the Bolshevik's “early writing under the pseudonym ‘N. Lenin.’” The text does not mention that Lenin published not solely under “N. Lenin” but also under “Nikolai Lenin.” In his notes, however, Garthoff explains that, yes, Lenin published under the pseudonym “Nikolai.” And yet the historian, like the New York Times before him, leaves readers with an image of a president who employed Nazi misinformation in his press conferences.

  Many liberal scholars and journalists maintained that the conservative Reagan was misled, when it's possible that they themselves had been misled by Soviet disinformation.

  What “Evil” Empire?

  Nothing so outraged the Soviets and the American Left as the president's description of the USSR as an “evil” empire.

  President Reagan first used this description during a speech in Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 1983. In it he called the Soviet Union the “focus of evil in the modern world” and an “evil empire.”

  This blunt language was a major departure from the discourse used by President Jimmy Carter and even by his Republican predecessor, Gerald Ford. Such frank talk was, of course, part of Reagan's larger strategy to include strong rhetoric as a weapon against the USSR. Reagan's description also happened to be accurate.

  An honest observer could hardly disagree that the Soviet empire was a pernicious place. Since the Bolshevik Revolution the Communist regime had a horrifying record of human carnage, killing anywhere from twenty million to seventy million innocents. The USSR refused to allow citizens to leave the Communist empire, and even erected walls to keep them captive. It suppressed the most basic civil liberties. The atheist regime carried out a comprehensive “war on religion,” in Gorbachev's apt description. And from the beginning, Communist leaders had spoken openly of “crushing” and “conquering” the “disgusting” bourgeoisie in a worldwide revolution. Again, Reagan was simply acknowledging what Democrats like Woodrow Wilson had noted from the very start.

  Nevertheless, many Americans were aghast at Reagan's statement of the obvious.74

  The first line of resistance came from “pragmatists” within the Reagan White House. These establishment Republicans repeatedly crossed out the “evil empire” section when the speech was in draft form. Particularly upset was aide David Gergen, who would go on to work for the Clinton White House. Gergen, much like Colin Powell later with the “tear down this wall” line in the Brandenburg Gate speech,75 was troubled by what he called the “outrageous statements” in the speech and tried to tone it down.76

  But the speech survived the White House pragmatists. Speechwriters Tony Dolan and Aram Bakshian knew the address was a winner. They also knew that this was exactly what Reagan wanted to say; the president had written nearly half the speech himself.77 Dolan refused to make the cuts Gergen and others were pushing. He called for the president to make the final decision. Reagan rejected the advice of the pragmatists and chose to leave in the language. Reagan adviser Ed Meese remembered, “He really insisted on it and kept it in.”

  When Reagan delivered the address as is on March 8, America's progressives responded with righteous indignation, even before Pravda got its chance to torch the speech.

  Over at the New York Times, columnist Anthony Lewis dashed to his typewriter to denounce the speech as “dangerous” and “outrageous.” To Lewis, the speech was “sectarian” and “simplistic.” More than that, he said, it was simply “primitive—the only word for it.”78

  Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen began his response with this odd Q & A: “Question: What does Ronald Reagan have in common with my grandmother? Answer: They are both religious bigots.”79 Reagan, said Cohen, lacked “tolerance,” dividing the United States and USSR into categories of “us” versus “them” over matters of religion.

  This was a strange criticism. In
reality, the Soviet government was the divisive force on religion. Starting with the Bolsheviks, the regime had long attacked belief, shutting down churches, erecting museums to atheism, and deriding religion through such organizations as the League of the Militant Godless. Reagan merely spoke candidly about the incontrovertible atheism of the Soviet system—just as John F. Kennedy, among other Democrats, had done in the past. The president pointed out the distinctions between the U.S. and Soviet systems—one promising religious liberty; the other, antireligious tyranny.

  Cohen insisted that Reagan “likes to see things in black and white.” He did not mention that in the Orlando speech, Reagan paused to carefully underscore that America was far from perfect, with its own legacy of sins and evil, from slavery to racism.

  In truth, Cohen's analysis of Reagan's speech—and Lewis's analysis, for that matter—was more black and white, more simplistic, than what the president said. What Reagan said was factual. What Cohen said was a stereotype.

  Over at The New Republic, which more than fifty years earlier had published John Dewey's “impressions” of the USSR as a utopian empire, the editors were scandalized by Reagan's depiction. In the April 4, 1983, issue, TNR ran an editorial titled “Reverend Reagan.”80 It claimed that the president had “left friends and foes around the world with the impression that the President of the United States was contemplating holy war.”

  The editors were particularly offended at Reagan's story of a friend who said he would rather see his little girls die in America now, still believing in God—and thus able to go to heaven—than watch the girls grow up under Communism not believing in God. Although the folks at TNR probably did not know this, it is interesting that TASS likewise took special offense at this anecdote, blasting away (in English) in its March 11 response to the speech.81 The editors at The New Republic were in lockstep with the editors over at TASS.

  Here, TNR’s editors complained that in the area of foreign policy, this anecdote about God was hardly the “question at issue.”

  Actually, in Ronald Reagan's mind, this was the question at issue. That the Soviet state could become so intrusive that it would actively deny the right to faith was an outrage that should concern every person and every nation. Yes, this was a theological concern to the Christian Reagan, but it was also a matter of basic human liberty.

  To TNR, however, it seemed that Reagan “profoundly misunderstands” the “nature of secularism.” Overall, the editorial declared, the speech was a “deeply divisive” “orgy of cheap shots,” and “very poor history” to boot.

  Like the magazine that published Dewey's pro-Soviet writings, Dewey's alma mater was disturbed by Reagan's speech, as was the professoriate as a whole. Renowned Columbia University/Amherst College historian Henry Steele Commager judged that Reagan's address “was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all.” Why? Because, said Commager, of Reagan's “gross appeal to religious prejudice.”82

  Liberal politicians expressed outrage as well. The leader of the Democrats and the Congress, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, was so incensed at Reagan's display of anti-Communism that a year and a half later, at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, he declared that the evil did not truly reside with the Communists in the Kremlin: “The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America.… He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood.”83

  Kindred Spirits

  The Soviet Union's Marxist-Leninists certainly appreciated the American Left's analysis, which they echoed in their own speeches and writings.

  The day after the “evil empire” speech, Soviet despot Yuri Andropov, who compared Reagan to Hitler84—eliciting no outpouring of protest from the American Left—called Reagan's remarks deliberately “provocative.” The comments, Andropov said, revealed that Reagan and his administration “can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”85

  Reagan clearly had touched a nerve in Moscow, as TASS attacked the president's speech in multiple press releases.86 In one statement, TASS bristled at the president's “McCarthyism.” The Soviet “news” agency said that “the White House boss” was “quite prepared to sacrifice [American children] in the name of his rabid anti-Communism and militarism.”87

  Pravda condemned Reagan's “latest provocative speech,” saying that it betrayed his administration's “extreme militarism,” and confirmed that the president could “only think in terms of confrontation and militant, unbridled anti-communism.” Worse, the Soviet paper said, Reagan had offered no “evidence” of any misdeeds by the USSR.

  Typical of Soviet propaganda techniques, Pravda cited the negative reaction among American liberals as proof of the universal outrage over Reagan's “bellicose” and “hysterical” anti-Communism. The paper reported that “UPI called attention to Reagan's pathological hatred of socialism and communism, noting that his statements resurrected the worst rhetoric of the cold war era.”88 (Also underscoring the UPI statement was the Red Army flagship, Krasnaya Zvezda.)89 Pravda cited the three American TV networks for support as well, including an ABC News commentary that, said the Soviet government newspaper, “made special note of the fact that [Reagan's speech] had an ‘openly militaristic bias.’”90

  On Soviet TV, reporter Gennady Gerasimov reiterated a common complaint of American liberals when he blasted Reagan's religious references and alleged laziness of the mind. It sounded, said Gerasimov, as if the president thought “he were God's vicar on earth.” Of course, added the Soviet reporter, this was “not the first time the President has used similar moral categorizations: on the one side good, which naturally means him and America, which is the embodiment of this good, and on the other side evil.” Gerasimov said this was “an easy scheme of things for those too lazy to think.”91

  Georgi Arbatov was put on the case a few days later, writing a typical hatchet piece in Pravda. Arbatov leveled many of the same criticisms employed by The New Republic: “[This is] outright medievalism,” he opined. “And all this is covered up by hypocritical talk about faith and God, about morality, eternal good and eternal evil.”92

  Moscow saw another propaganda opportunity here, surely at least in part because the liberals that dominated the American media were excoriating the speech.

  On Reagan's Side

  This was quite a cacophony. Did President Reagan have any defenders?

  Yes: those who resided within the evil empire, under the jackboot of Communist totalitarianism. Only years later, however, once these captives were free, could they respond to their captors and to American liberals.

  One of them, Natan Sharansky, had a chance to do just that near the end of Reagan's presidency. He had been an inmate of Permanent Labor Camp 35, a Jewish dissident jailed for his beliefs. Once released, he told the president and his staff of how his prison guards had informed him of Reagan's “warmongering” statement about the evil empire, underscoring what a dangerous, unstable man occupied the White House. They flashed him Truth itself, Pravda’s front page, which derided Reagan's speech.

  This “truth” alert, however, backfired on Sharansky's tormentors. Once they left, Sharansky leapt for joy in his cell. Someone—indeed, the American president, the leader of the free world—had finally spoken the truth about this undeniably evil empire. Sharansky tapped the news in Morse code to a fellow prisoner on the other side of the wall, who received it with equal elation and in turn tapped the message along to his neighbor, and so on. Reagan had spoken for those in the gulag, who now rang out the words “evil empire.”93

  When a freed Sharansky—let out of prison with Reagan's help—eventually met the president, he thanked him. “I told him that his speech about the evil empire was a great encourager for us,” Sharansky said of himself and his inmates. Reagan had “understood the nature of the Soviet Union” and had called “a spade a spade.”94

  That
sentiment was shared by Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent twelve years in the Soviet gulag. Bukovsky said the Reagan speech had been a “major event” to political prisoners and dissidents, who “greeted” it warmly. The phrase “evil empire” had the worst possible effect on those running the USSR, noted Bukovsky: it became “incredibly popular” behind the Iron Curtain.95

  Similar testimony came from Jan Winiecki, who was an economic adviser to Poland's Solidarity underground. Once able to travel to America, Winiecki said of Reagan's colorful description of the Soviet empire: “To us, it was, of course, true. The leftist intellectuals in the West thumbed their noses at it, but we said ‘What's the big deal?’ What he said was a statement of the obvious. This was not [a] mystery.”96