We Come To Bury Gipper, Not to Praise Him....
Gene Lyons on 'The Gipper'
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Some years back, a friend attended a Willie Nelson concert to hear the opening act. A big fan of the venerable hippie bluegrass group, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, my friend arrived early to find himself sitting near the stage among a bunch of drunks emitting Rebel yells and hollering for "Whisky River." Polite efforts to quiet them proved fruitless. The show was ruined. About three songs into Willie’s set, my friend took his revenge. He stood during a quiet ballad, announced loudly that he was "all Willied out" and made a big show of walking out. Many Americans found themselves "all Ronnied out" long before the TV networks tired of eulogizing former President Ronald Reagan. Yet amid the blather, there were undeniably moving moments. Everybody wants to be loved as Nancy Reagan loved her man. For me, the sight of a much older Mikhail Gorbachev touching Reagan’s coffin, having traveled halfway around the world to memorialize his fellow Cold Warrior, had a grandeur all its own. They made history together.
Several aspects of the broadcast media’s near-worshipful approach to Reagan’s passing deserve skepticism, however. Don’t you love it when the biased liberal media can’t find any Democrats to interview for upwards of a week?
God forbid anybody mention the criminal and unconstitutional aspects of the Iran-Contra scandal. Or Reagan’s support of death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua; his refusal to criticize South African apartheid; his administration’s connection with Saddam Hussein’s using nerve-gas "weapons of mass destruction," first against Iranian soldiers, then Kurdish civilians. Shots of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand would have been instructive.
But the most pernicious myth being peddled by ideologues on the right is that Reagan’s arms buildup alone intimidated the Soviet Union into quitting the Cold War. Its purpose is to rationalize a U.S. policy of ceaseless military aggression in the "war on terror," a policy whose manifest failure in Iraq is causing many Americans to doubt we’re on the right track.
The first thing to remember is that the Cold War wasn’t really a war. Nuclear d鴥nteprevented World War III. The critical moment was probably the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, in which JFK and Khrushchev backed away from nuclear confrontation. Altogether, the struggle lasted more than 40 years, from Truman’s adoption of the doctrine of containment through the Marshall Plan, Korea, the Berlin airlift, Vietnam, the Cuban debacle, anti-Soviet uprisings in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. There was, for example, no fiercer anti-Communist than Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
It’s hard to know how to respond to adults who have persuaded themselves that Reagan brought down the U.S. S. R. by uttering the famous words, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," in a 1988 speech. Psychiatrists call such beliefs (like my suspicion that the Cubs might start hitting if I stop watching) "magical thinking." Reagan did his manifest duty like every other U.S. president after 1945.
Soviet archives now indicate that the Russian empire began its steep descent soon after Stalin died. His paranoid grip on the Communist murder machine wasn’t quite matched by his successors.
By 1979, when Russian soldiers blundered into Afghanistan, the Soviet economy and military were rotten at the core. Getting bloodied there by U.S.-armed Mujahideen (Osama bin Laden among them) helped bring about a political crisis. Arming Arab fighters was Brzezinski’s idea.
Anybody who read Soviet and Eastern European fiction, whether Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov, Josef Skvorecky or Milan Kundera, knew that belief in Marxism had all but vanished. The most underrated non-fiction book of the 1980s was Andrew Cockburn’s "The Threat," a brilliant debunking of Soviet military prowess.
Riding in a New York taxi driven by a Russian army veteran gave Cockburn the idea of interviewing some of the thousands like him living in Brooklyn. The result was an acerbic depiction of a Russian military more Groucho Marx than Karl. Russian tanks fell apart; communications systems were hopeless; drunkenness and mutiny were epidemic; bombers the CIA touted as Mach 3 titanium intercontinental threats turned out to be stainless steel duds. Cockburn resolved the paradox of how a nation that scarcely had functioning telephones could build a ruthlessly efficient military machine: It couldn’t. Why couldn’t the CIA figure this out? Partly for the same reason U.S. intelligence saw WMDs where none existed in Iraq. From the mid-1970s, a band of "neo-conservative" intellectuals, including familiar names like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, began bullying then-CIA director George H. W. Bush with an ideologically driven vision of the U.S. S. R. as 10 feet tall and bulletproof precisely when it was falling apart. Politically shielded by his anti-Communist rhetoric, Reagan ignored the neocons and trusted Gorbachev. It’s in that brilliant gamble that his greatness, and Gorbachev’s, can be found.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Some years back, a friend attended a Willie Nelson concert to hear the opening act. A big fan of the venerable hippie bluegrass group, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, my friend arrived early to find himself sitting near the stage among a bunch of drunks emitting Rebel yells and hollering for "Whisky River." Polite efforts to quiet them proved fruitless. The show was ruined. About three songs into Willie’s set, my friend took his revenge. He stood during a quiet ballad, announced loudly that he was "all Willied out" and made a big show of walking out. Many Americans found themselves "all Ronnied out" long before the TV networks tired of eulogizing former President Ronald Reagan. Yet amid the blather, there were undeniably moving moments. Everybody wants to be loved as Nancy Reagan loved her man. For me, the sight of a much older Mikhail Gorbachev touching Reagan’s coffin, having traveled halfway around the world to memorialize his fellow Cold Warrior, had a grandeur all its own. They made history together.
Several aspects of the broadcast media’s near-worshipful approach to Reagan’s passing deserve skepticism, however. Don’t you love it when the biased liberal media can’t find any Democrats to interview for upwards of a week?
God forbid anybody mention the criminal and unconstitutional aspects of the Iran-Contra scandal. Or Reagan’s support of death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua; his refusal to criticize South African apartheid; his administration’s connection with Saddam Hussein’s using nerve-gas "weapons of mass destruction," first against Iranian soldiers, then Kurdish civilians. Shots of Donald Rumsfeld shaking Saddam’s hand would have been instructive.
But the most pernicious myth being peddled by ideologues on the right is that Reagan’s arms buildup alone intimidated the Soviet Union into quitting the Cold War. Its purpose is to rationalize a U.S. policy of ceaseless military aggression in the "war on terror," a policy whose manifest failure in Iraq is causing many Americans to doubt we’re on the right track.
The first thing to remember is that the Cold War wasn’t really a war. Nuclear d鴥nteprevented World War III. The critical moment was probably the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, in which JFK and Khrushchev backed away from nuclear confrontation. Altogether, the struggle lasted more than 40 years, from Truman’s adoption of the doctrine of containment through the Marshall Plan, Korea, the Berlin airlift, Vietnam, the Cuban debacle, anti-Soviet uprisings in Budapest, Prague and Warsaw to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. There was, for example, no fiercer anti-Communist than Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
It’s hard to know how to respond to adults who have persuaded themselves that Reagan brought down the U.S. S. R. by uttering the famous words, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," in a 1988 speech. Psychiatrists call such beliefs (like my suspicion that the Cubs might start hitting if I stop watching) "magical thinking." Reagan did his manifest duty like every other U.S. president after 1945.
Soviet archives now indicate that the Russian empire began its steep descent soon after Stalin died. His paranoid grip on the Communist murder machine wasn’t quite matched by his successors.
By 1979, when Russian soldiers blundered into Afghanistan, the Soviet economy and military were rotten at the core. Getting bloodied there by U.S.-armed Mujahideen (Osama bin Laden among them) helped bring about a political crisis. Arming Arab fighters was Brzezinski’s idea.
Anybody who read Soviet and Eastern European fiction, whether Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov, Josef Skvorecky or Milan Kundera, knew that belief in Marxism had all but vanished. The most underrated non-fiction book of the 1980s was Andrew Cockburn’s "The Threat," a brilliant debunking of Soviet military prowess.
Riding in a New York taxi driven by a Russian army veteran gave Cockburn the idea of interviewing some of the thousands like him living in Brooklyn. The result was an acerbic depiction of a Russian military more Groucho Marx than Karl. Russian tanks fell apart; communications systems were hopeless; drunkenness and mutiny were epidemic; bombers the CIA touted as Mach 3 titanium intercontinental threats turned out to be stainless steel duds. Cockburn resolved the paradox of how a nation that scarcely had functioning telephones could build a ruthlessly efficient military machine: It couldn’t. Why couldn’t the CIA figure this out? Partly for the same reason U.S. intelligence saw WMDs where none existed in Iraq. From the mid-1970s, a band of "neo-conservative" intellectuals, including familiar names like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, began bullying then-CIA director George H. W. Bush with an ideologically driven vision of the U.S. S. R. as 10 feet tall and bulletproof precisely when it was falling apart. Politically shielded by his anti-Communist rhetoric, Reagan ignored the neocons and trusted Gorbachev. It’s in that brilliant gamble that his greatness, and Gorbachev’s, can be found.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
posted by A. J. Franklin @ 08:20
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