Useful Idiots

The American Left has had a history of being on the wrong side of issues. Throughout the Cold War they fervently resisted all American attempts to hold in check the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism. During the 1930's the American Left covered up or overlooked Stalin's genocides. Americans like Ford, Lindbergh, and Joseph Kennedy who supported Hitler were rightly criticized for their views, yet those who supported Stalin have escaped such opprobium. Mona Charen's new book is reviewed in the Claremont Review of Books. Interestingly, the criticisms of the President who finally confronted the Soviet Union - Ronald Reagan - are strikingly similar to the criticisms of President Bush and the current War on Terror.

The American president who confronted all three of these Soviet nonpareils was, of course, Ronald Reagan, and it goes without saying that he suffered in comparison with all of them, in the eyes of contemporary liberals. When, in March 1983, he described the Soviet Union as "an evil empire," their reaction was little short of hysterical. Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at Amherst, condemned Reagan's speech as "the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all." Hendrik Hertzberg, later editor of The New Republic, protested that "words like that frighten the American public and antagonize the Soviets. What good is that?" Time's Strobe Talbott, later President Clinton's deputy secretary of state, made the same objection: "When a chief of state talks that way, he roils Soviet insecurities." George W. Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, sounded a somber warning: "Mr. President, you have set us on a dark and ominous course. For God's sake, let us refix our compass before it is too late."