RONALD REAGAN: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader
by Dinesh D'Souza

THE WISE MEN AND THE DUMMY

Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy. Consider the dinner that took place in mid-1985 at Republican grande dame Glare Boothe Luce’s apartment in Washington, D.C. Conservative luminaries George Will and Michael Novak were there, and they were taken aback when their president, Ronald Reagan, who was scheduled to meet in Geneva with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, revealed his naiveté to them in the following way. “I only wish that I could get in a helicopter with Gorbachev,” Reagan said, “and fly over the United States. I would ask him to point to people’s homes, and we could stop at some of them. Then he would see how Americans live, in clean and lovely homes, with a second car or a boat in the driveway. If I can just get through to him about the difference between our two systems, I really think we could see big changes in the Soviet Union.” At this point, Novak recalled, his glance met Will’s across the table, and both of them rolled their eyes and sighed.

“Our view,” Novak recently told me, “was that it was foolish bordering on suicidal to think that the Soviet leaders would respond to personal initiatives. We thought in terms of a totalitarian system. The particular leader of the Soviet Union didn’t matter, because it was the system that dictated policy. It was a bit of a shock, and an unpleasant one, to see that Reagan didn’t share our view at all.” Novak permitted himself a nervous chuckle. “It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What did he know that we didn’t?”

Wise men from the fields of politics, economics, and divinity issued Solomonic pronouncements about the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s that now make for informative reading. Here is the Reverend Billy Graham, commenting on material conditions on returning from a 1982 trip to the Soviet Union: “The meals I had are among the finest I have ever eaten. In the United States you have to be a millionaire to have caviar, but I have had caviar with almost every meal.”

Perhaps this eminent clergyman, possessed by a religious afflatus, was misled by his Russian hosts, so let us consult a more objective source. 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 historian and eminence grise Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 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 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.”

James Reston, the renowned columnist of the New York Times, in June 1985 revealed his capacity for sophisticated evenhandedness when he dismissed the possibility of the collapse of communism on the grounds that Soviet problems were no different from those of the United States: “It’s clear that the ideologies of Communism, socialism and capitalism are all in trouble.”

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, 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 it is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.”

Wise men tend to be impatient with dummies, and thus we can understand the tone of indignation with which Strobe Talbott, a senior correspondent at Time and later an official in the Clinton State Department, faulted officials in 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, institutionalized crisis with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live.”

Equally scornful was Sovietologist Stephen Cohen of Princeton University, who wrote in 1983: “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.”

Finally, a wise man gets something right. But then he spoils it by condemning Reagan for pursuing a wrongheaded and suicidal objective, one that revealed that the president was suffering from “a potentially fatal form of Sovietophobia ... a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.”

Perhaps one should not be too hard on the wise men. After all, explains Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse: “History has an abiding capacity to outwit our certitudes.” The wise men may have been wrong, Schlesinger concedes, but then “no one foresaw these changes.”

But here is the problem with this view. The dummy foresaw them! Consider what he said long before the wise men issued their pronouncements. In June 1980, Ronald Reagan met with a group of editors at the Washington Post. As reporter Lou Cannon, who arranged the meeting, recalled the incident to me, his colleagues expressed grave concerns that Reagan was escalating the arms race. Reagan told them not to worry: “The Soviets can’t compete with us.” Everyone around the table was astonished, because no one shared Reagan’s presumption of Soviet economic vulnerability. Yet Reagan assured them, “I’ll get the Soviets to the negotiating table.” Cannon recalls, “When he said that, nobody believed him.”

In 1981, Reagan told the students and faculty at the University of Notre Dame, “The West won’t contain Communism. It will transcend Communism. It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” He repeated this theme, in almost exactly the same words, in a subsequent speech in Orlando before the National Association of Evangelicals.

How dumb can you get? From the wise men’s point of view, Reagan’s rhetoric was too inane and outlandish to take seriously. But Reagan wouldn’t stop. In 1982, he addressed the British Parliament in London. “In an ironic sense,” Reagan said, “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 Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.” Reagan added that “it is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens,” and 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.”

The wise men could hardly contain their derision: Give the man a brain transplant. In 1987, Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. “In the Communist world,” he said, “we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards.… Even today, the Soviet Union cannot feed itself.” Thus the “inescapable conclusion” in his view was that “freedom is the victor.” Then Reagan said, “General Secretary Gorbachev.... Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Not long after this, the wall did come tumbling down, and Reagan’s prophecies all came true. The most powerful empire in human history imploded. These were not just results Reagan predicted. He intended the outcome. He advocated policies that were aimed at producing it. He was denounced for those policies. Yet in the end, his objective was achieved.

If Reagan was such a fool, what does that make the wise men? What does that make us?

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