From Powerline blog dot com and produced by Ricochet dot com. This is the
power Line Show with your host Steve Hayward. Well, hi everybody, and
welcome to a classic format edition of the podcast featuring me in conversation with a
special guest. And today May First turns out to be Victims of Communism Memorial
Day. I guess we're trying to steal one from the comedies from their old
May Day Maypoul celebrations. In any event, several months ago I sat down
with Elizabeth Spalding, who was the chairman of the board of the Victims of
Communism Memorial Foundation, which has opened a fabulous museum on Cold War history right
in downtown Washington, d C. And so it's a project I have followed
for many years. And Elizabeth walks us through the story of how the museum
was founded, how it was designed, why it's important to keep the independence
of the museum away from you know, people like the smith Sonyan Her Congress
and so forth, even though it is a congressionally chartered museum. And then
just a couple months ago, I was asked by the Victims of Communism Memorial
Foundation to give a talk at an annual conference about Reagan and Churchill on the
Cold War, since I'd written a whole book comparing the two great statesmen.
And so this episode comes in two parts. It's my conversation with Elizabeth and
then a recording of my talk given in March. So with that, mark
your own celebration with a sack dance in the end Zone of Communism, with
this conversation beginning right now. So, Elizabeth, the Victims of Communism Museum
has been a project I know that's been a long time in the making.
So I guess sort of ticket from the top and tell us a little bit
about its origins, what it's doing now, what the ambitions of it are
for, and then I'll have a bunch of follow up questions about things.
Sounds great, Well, it's good to be with you, Steve. Always
right. We've been listeners. We've been talking about doing this for what two
years now, and we keep not making it happen because we're lame anyway.
But the background is interesting. It's a museum that was about thirty plus years
in the making because it goes back to a unanimous Act of Congress when the
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was authorized in the end of nineteen ninety three and
signed into law by President Bill Clinton. And so stop right there. I'm
not sure I realized that there was actually an official government role in getting it
started, right, No money, no federal money. That might be a
good thing, yeah, right, okay, exactly, No, not at
all. So, uh, the idea for VOC came about because of people
forgetting what the Cold War had been and what communism had meant in terms of
the Soviet version. Uh, and and then people didn't realize there was still
communism right right, and and so there were various people who were in politics,
both in terms of Congress but also outside saying let's go ahead and do
some sort of educational institution. And it was determined, you know, have
a nonprofit educational institution. And the it wasn't called VOC then that was it
was incorporated as that after. But the the the authorization for it was that
it was supposed to be focused on educating about the Communist Holocaust, so that
people would un understand that there hadn't just been one holocaust but two. Correct,
and more than one hundred million people have been killed by communist regimes.
So this is a huge figure that people don't realize that it's more than those
who have been killed by World War One and World War Two combined. Right,
So fast forward a bit. The first part of what VOC was authorized
to do after it got incorporated and started was to build a memorial, and
so money had to be raised for that, and that was dedicated in two
thousand and seven by President George W. Bush. So we always VOC are
very proud of being non partisan, bipartisan, and that you know, education,
you have to educate everybody. So that took a long time, right
to raise the money we had. We were given a small plot of federal
parkland that is at at New Jersey and Massachusetts Avenues and people can go and
see that. And then programming, you know, educational programming was part of
what VOC was supposed to do. But there was always this idea as well
for a museum because of what the Holocaust Museum had been able to do,
but no federal money. So now fast forward another fifteen years, and it
took a long time, but we finally raised enough money to do what we
call our Jewel Box Museum, which is located in Washington, d C.
On McPherson Square. Ah, So you actually got a physical location people can
come, and that's right. It's not a virtual museum. We have things
online and we encourage people to go online, and we are building more online
to go with our Jewel Box museum. But we wanted something that was bricks
and mortar. And it's in the space where originally it was a university club
location first many many moons ago, and then it was the United Mine Workers
Association building and they were anti communists. So it's actually appropriate that VOC has
its museum right in that space. Well, you make an important point,
and of course, to reiterate what I put in the introduction. You've written
a lot on the Cold War over the years, including you know, one
of the greatest Cold warriors of all Harry Truman. Right. I know some
people on our team, so to speak, maybe forget that sometimes I'm not
sure. Certainly, Ronald Reagan never did you love Truman? Right? And
talked about Truman, and they talked about him, and you and I are
out here for the Age of Reagan conference, the first one that the Reagan
Library and the Foundation and Institute have held, right as far as I understand
from you know, major bringing together this many scholars and so what was interesting
for me, and I want to hear about your panel. What was interesting
for me is in my paper by the time I had submitted what my topic
was, and then I came here and I did some research. My topic
is still the same, but I went back farther and farther because I was
supposed to be focusing on March nineteen eighty three and the Evil Empire speech and
the SDI speech. But because of having done all that work on Truman,
and I'm really interested in the connections and how Reagan does talk about Truman.
And so anyway I with Reagan, I kept going back farther and farther in
the archive here and finding things from the nineteen sixties and going back to the
nineteen forties. And so I did in my panel presentation talk a little bit
about nineteen eighty three, but it was more what made Reagan Reagan, you
understand this kind of thing. It's your approach to and how he got to
nineteen eighty three. Well, let's back up for a minute about because you
know you've emphasized now that no federal money for the Victims of Communism Museum and
Memorial was that by choice by the founders of it or was that by you
know, oh, yeah, well, we'll give a federal charter, but
we really don't want to give you any money because I don't know, indifference
or apathy, ignorance. I think it was a combination of factors. Some
of it was that the founders of the organization didn't want federal money and didn't
want federal intrusion possible control. But also the sponsors in Congress said, well,
we can give you something, you know, with no money. We'll
give you the land for the memorial, but if you know, if we
don't have to give you money, then this will go through. Yeah,
right, And so I think that was on that side, and there were
actually some very strong Republican members, anti communists, who didn't want the project
to receive federal money, so they wouldn't have voted for something that they believed
in if it had received federal funds. From time to time, we on
the board at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation have discussions about whether we should
take federal money for the museum, but so far that hasn't happened, and
we have accepted donations from formerly communist countries that are now democracies. All right,
and the people that fought communism and helped to tear down the wall,
so to speak, they get rid of the Iron curtain. They to use
both presidents, since we're talking about both Truman and Reagan. They really want
to have this museum flourish, and it's been very rewarding to take dignitaries and
others from from those countries through the museum for special tours. Right, Yeah,
I mean I've noticed what where if I've been overseas, Prague, Budapest,
a couple of places in Poland, they all have Reagan statues in Reagan
squares, in Reagan streets. You know, it's on their minds. You
can see why they would be keen. We have a sorry on this.
We have a map film in Gallery three at the museum, and I did
the content for the most part of the museum, worked with other scholars,
but I was primary on it. And so and we as a team worked
with a couple of different firms that have done design work for the Holocaust Museum,
the Spy Museum, the World War II Museum, Normandy Museum over in
Front and so what was interesting is in giving them content, writing things for
them, including scripts for these films, they sometimes wouldn't know the subject.
I mean they really didn't know the subject right. So it was educating these
designers. And so I said, well, how about you know, you've
got this concept for a map film, and we have to make sure we
have both the part about the repression, so people understand why there were victims
of communism created as soon as the Soviet Union starts right well even before because
it's not called the Soviet Union right away, as soon as the coup happens,
the Bolshevik Revolution. But I also wanted to make sure we were showing
the resistance right from from behind the Iron Curtain, behind the Bamboo curtain elsewhere,
but also the outside pressure. So we had to have tear down this
wall in the in the map film, and so there's a there's a brief
part with clip from Reagan on tear down this wall. And then I wanted
to make sure there was a passage from Truman and so that there's no there's
no video, but we were able to do audio voiceover so you'll like this.
I have a passage from from the Iron Curtain speech, the famous one
from from the passage you can imagine from Churchill while the map is going red
right right, and then it segues the next speaker that you hear is Truman
from the Truman Doctrine speech talking about the two ways of life and all too
often the choice is not a free one. And then it goes from there.
But by the time we get to we have immersive moments in the map
film. But by the time we get to the John Paul the Second and
the Pope, you can I mean John Paul the Second and Reagan you can
use the footage, right, you have really good footage to show. So
it's good to have both the resistance part, the outside pressure, and then
the repression part. Right. So I'm not quite sure how to post this
question. What's on my mind is this, to my mind lamentable. I
could use a stronger or more pejorative term than that, or several of anti
anti communism. This goes back decades, right. It was no matter how
solidly you could document the crimes of Stalin, the body count and so forth,
there's always just been this resistance from the left. I guess I just
have to be direct about this for giving it the equal emphasis of the Holocaust
of under the Nazis and I don't know. This drives me crazy. Is
that has that been sort of in the ether as you press forward with this
project, have you have you encountered some either indifference or even opposition because of
this old strain of anti anti communism. So one one story that might help
on this. We had a reviewer from PBS, from the local DC affiliate
w E t A. And she's the person that does their short little reviews
of things around town. Right. So this woman finds the museum and she
contacts the director of communications at VOC, who then contacts me, can you
do a special tour of the museum for this interviewer? And I said absolutely,
So she comes first to do a look sie and we end up spending
about two hours together. She's an art professor. She's clearly an old liberal
type, right, and she was a little bit I mean, she might
have been a sixty something so, but she's you know, she's younger than
old liberals, right, And so she was almost exercised annoyed. She says,
I looked you up. I looked up victims of Communist Memorial Foundation,
and there are a lot of conservatives affiliated with this organization. And I said
yes, and she said, but this isn't about conservatism and said no,
and she said everybody should come and see this museum. She did, she
did, and she said, I you this is this is correct. What
you were putting in this museum is correct. The information is correct, the
images are correct. And so we went through and she asked me questions,
but she was reading what was on the walls, she was looking at the
films. And then we also have we're very fortunate to have the Nikolai Getman
art collection. It's this is a Gulag collection. It's the only one of
its kind. And it's been called the the visual analog to the Gulag Archipelago.
Interesting visual analog to the Gulog archipelago. And so this is do you
know about this artist? So he was in the Gulag. Of course he
was sent for no good reason. He survived the Gulog. He did.
He had about a seven year sentence. He and he gets out and he's
Ukrainian uh. And he then paints in secret because it's still the Soviet Union
when he gets out. He's an artist and he has to hide what he's
doing, even from his wife. I think I have heard the story,
but keep going. So he has his easel right, and he works on
landscapes of where he was in the Gulag, and he can put up a
landscape when somebody comes into the studio room. But he has fifty paintings that
he did all from based on his Gulag years, and there are a handful
of landscapes, but there over half the collection is very stirring, strong,
difficult pieces. And so this art professor who says, I'm going to say
I'm going to come back. I'm going to do my PBS piece and it's
going to be positive about why people should come to this museum. She's looking
at this art and she says this is fabulous art, and she's able to
tell me more about the art. But it was fascinating to meet with her.
And she didn't understand why people couldn't be anti tootalitarian, and so I
kept saying, I'm anti Tootalitarian. And obviously, you know Reagan, I've
been very struck going through the archives this week. He was he would interchange
use of totalitarian and communist. He knew what totalitarian and totalitarianism was, and
then communism and Nazism were forms of it, right, were types of it.
And so this woman she ended up doing a really great This professor,
she ended up doing a really great to three minute piece, and she talked
about how it was. In her piece, she said, this is both
anti Nazi and anti communist. Ah, And I thought to myself, if
we could have everybody understand that, including academics right right who are teaching the
rising generations, then we would finally say, Okay, I'm anti tootalitarian,
that includes being anti communist. And what's the problem, right, Yeah,
you know, I wonder. I mean, obviously, the reason I brought
all that up is I'm very cranky about anti anti communism and the double standards
of moral judgment. We bring up the intensity of moral judgments right. On
the other hand, you know are you may have seen some of the surveys
about this. Our Jewish friends are rightly worried about that. As we put
more and more time between US and World War two. First of all,
the people who the number of people who still know about it from firsthand,
not many left right. And more time goes on and you're starting to hear
people history has not taught very well as one of the problems. But there
is this worry that seems to be valid that well, it's going to be
not exactly normalized, but it's not going to be fifty years from now the
big deal that it's been in the post war years. So maybe we might
reach a new equilibrium where somebody liked this PBS art critic, who's probably a
conventional liberal other ways comes along, and that might actually actually rescue in the
long term historical memory of what's in common of both genocides. Right, you're
making you're you're making me bringing out my optimism and hopefulness. And this is
also this year is actually the seventieth anniversary of the big totalitarianism conference that was
done in Boston, and you know where you had all the big names,
including Hannah Rent and I mean it was it was historic cultural freedom people or
something else. It's where you get the totalitarian model really comes out of it,
and and Friedrich and eventually Brzhinski who put together that, and others,
but the Harvard School of thought on this comes out of that conference. And
so I've actually been thinking a lot about the about totalitarianism. Not that I
wasn't in making the museum, I was immersed in it, but I think
this is something that as as we get farther along, students are looking at
Reagan's ancient history. Now, right, It's not just it's not just that
the Bolshevik Revolution and the start of victims of communism is ancient history. It's
that forty years ago is ancient history to college students and high school students and
younger. So, how do we look back on this whole period, both
the short century of the twentieth century as well as this first part of the
twenty first century where you're still dealing with so much that is really fallout from
the twentieth century, And it does all go back to this ism, right,
and that's going to be that's what we have to teach, right,
And so I think that getting this right and ending up having students understand that
they want to be anti tootalitarian both you know, anti Nazi, anti communist,
anti fascists, the whole you know, just you want to be anti
right, Yes, yes, right, exactly, And I think I think
there's some room to do that. But of course then we've got all sorts
of disturbing things going on. Well, I well, that actually leads me
to my next question. Although I'm going to move this microphone. Your microphone
looks like it's gone off. I don't know why leave it alone though,
And I'll do that because the mine's working. Okay. So three two one.
That brings me to my next question, which is a few minutes ago
you mentioned the bamboo curtain, you know, the iron curtain in the Eastern
Europe, the bamboo curtain. So how do you handle China, either presently
or or how are you planning to handle it in the future? Right,
So in the museum, the Mao is the mass murder. That's the panel
on Mao Mao as mass murder in the Map film. He you know,
he's standing there looking like he's gonna repress people. The next the next part
of the map film is about Tibet in nineteen fifty that's one of the They
haven't even secured themselves. I mean, they've won, the communists have installed
themselves in nineteen forty nine in the PRC, but they that's not enough.
They got to go and take Tibet the next year. And the peaceful Tibetans
already repressed. So it's clear. And the panel on nineteen eighty nine is
Miracles and tears because I always want people to understand that you've got all these
great things that happen in Eastern and Central Europe in nineteen eighty nine, but
it's also the year of the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests, and which
were not just protests in Tienanmen Square. A lot of students don't know that.
And then the first visiting exhibit we had at the museum, because we
have a room, a large room for visiting exhibits. The first, the
very first one was Timan nineteen eighty nine. It was a fabulous, fabulous
exhibit that was put together by students who had formed, students who had survived
Tianman Square, and it brought together materials that were already here in the States
and also materials that they got out of Hong Kong when the National Security Law
went in and the only museum about Timan Square was there, and it was
you know, they were told you're going to be shut down, We're going
to confiscate things, and so they get addled, and so we had the
best of the best in this exhibit. So you know, China was communist
and at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, the CCP is still communist and
so like we do with every other country, we distinguished between the people who
were repressed and the regime the government. So for me, I will always
talk about, you know, the Russian people and other peoples that were held
under the Soviet you know regime. And for China were very careful about talking
about the Chinese people and all the different ethnic groups and religions and everything else
going on as opposed to the Chinese Communist Party. Uh so there's plenty of
evidence that it's communist, it's doing communist. I can't believe we have to
have these kinds of conversations. People don't realize what Xijingping is doing. And
and then VOC one of its research areas is China Studies, and we are
the place that has the Xingxiang police files. And that's the largest hack that
was It was given to the VOC, but somebody went in and hacked into
the Chinese system and got downloaded their files about all these wigurs that they've imprisoned,
and so we have You can go and look at up Xingxiang police files
at VOC and the you see page after page essentially of all of these people
who are being held prisoner from you know, teenager up through senior citizen.
Yeah, you know it. We right, they celebrate the Berlin Wall coming
down in nineteen eighty nine, in November nineteen eighty nine, and very few
people to be a while to start doing this. Very few people stopped to
think for a moment about China crushing the protests. That was June of nineteen
exactly. So we have this the beginning of a very happy outcome in Eastern
Europe in the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union.
And there was China in the middle of those unfolding events. And I
don't think we gave serious attention to the fact that China's saying that is not
happening here, that's right. And yet we went along and decided, oh,
we're just you know, let's put you in the World Trade Organization.
Where's let's put all our factories in your country. And Okay, that's a
big, long subject. Unless you want to say more about that, I
don't know. Well, I think it's also worth noting that part of why
the Eastern and Central Europeans decided to keep accelerating what they were already doing in
nineteen eighty nine is because they were in support of what was going on in
China. And then you know, the students in China saw what was going
on in Eastern and Central Europe and they were so there was there was like
this this good kind of symmetry going on and symbiosis going on, and the
and the the Chinese Communist Party said no, right, they said, what
how it's happened, It's never going to be that way. We are going
to crush it. And and they did and uh, and so many people
don't don't think about the timeline. So I think that's a really important thing
to do. And then they don't realize that some of that was rooted in
in real democracy. Right, the in Tiananmen Square, some of the students
wanted real democracy, but some of the people there just would have been happy
to have had some sort of better reform. Right. There was a range
of opinion, and so it's very difficult to penetrate in China. That's that's
part of the reason that some of the movements that are going on now.
I mean, you know, tank Man will always be that I image from
nineteen eighty nine. But the White Paper movement is so very important because this
is something that's been going on more recently in China, and it seems to
be more. You know, we want to speak, we want to be
free, we don't want to be shut down. We want There's another something
going on right now in various places in China, and we can hope that
it will it will bear fruit over time. But also we're here at a
conference on Reagan. What would be a Reagan strategy for China? Acknowledging all
the stuff that's intertwined economically, but what would you at least do in terms
of the rhetoric, the meaningful rhetoric. You and I don't believe that words
are just words. We actually think that there's meaning, especially for Reagan in
what he said. And I do think that there's more that the West could
be doing. There's more that the United States could be doing. And I'm
concerned about that because one of the things that the best Cold War presidents got
right, so including trim and and Reagan, is is they knew we're going
to go ahead and define it, we're going to talk about it, and
then we're going to talk about it again. They didn't just say it one
time, yes, right, And I don't think there's enough of that going
on. Yeah, all right, last question a more mundane one. But
you mentioned you guys have a lot of resources online, and you already mentioned
the painting collection. But what are some of things people can find on the
website, what kind of talking documents, reading lists, interview with Robert Conquest.
I don't know what are the kind of What are some of the things
people can find that that would be of interest. So there are some things
that are quite contemporary, for example, the jing Xiang police files, which
are current. There are some great documents on I guess I shouldn't say great,
but there's information on the China, on the Cuba prisons, which is
communist, you know, and is real, and you can go and find
reports on that and other things about Cuba. Cuba is not a lot of
people think that the Castra's retired, died and retired and therefore Cuba isn't communist
anymore, but it's still communist too, so you can find that kind of
thing. But one thing you really can find is we have curriculum, so
please go look at our website for that, and we are in the midst
of expanding our high school curriculum, and so we have an existing one,
but now you can go and find more and there are resources. So it's
not it's the curriculum lesson for each particular subject, but that lesson will also
have links. We've really you know, teachers said I want to note,
you know, what's the three minute thing I can show in my classroom?
Or I have ten minutes? What can I show in ten minutes? We
have all that kind of stuff too as part of each lesson. And then
we're in the midst of doing a middle school curriculum, and so people will
be able to at least do six through twelve. Now, of course I
would like to figure out how to do K five on this too, and
maybe there will be that one day I'm chairman of the board, though I'm
not. You know, I can't. I can't make them do everything right,
right, Lizabeth, Thanks very much. Best of luck to the Victims
of Communism Memorial Foundation and museum team. Come see the museum when you're next
in Washington, d C. I will. And now let's go have a
drink at the bar. That sounds great, all right. Let's have a
brief interlude here with a few remarks from Reagan himself reminding us of the connection
between him and Churchill and their view of the Cold War, and then we'll
get onto my talk that explains the whole scene more fully. Sir Winston Churchill
refuse to accept the inevitability of war, or even that it was imminent.
He said, I do not believe that Soviet Rush desires war. What they
desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.
But what we have to consider here today, while time remains, is
the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as
rapidly as possible in all countries. Well, excise me, I get my
Church of Glasses on here. Well, thank you for that kind of deduction.
I'm really thrilled to be here. I mean, I've known about this
project in being for quite a long time, but then I've been gone from
Washington for almost fifteen years now, so I hadn't been around to the step
by step progress to get here, and so it's really thrilling to see it
in the flesh and war. From here. Let's set the scene though for
a moment. It's now thirty five years on since the Berlin Wall came down
thirty thirty two years since the Soviet Union ended its existence, and so it's
kind of faded into the mists and is really unappreciated by younger generations. I
think that the conventional view of the Cold War, including during and all the
way to the end of that climactic last decade, is that Cold War was
a permanent feature of the world. Soviet Union was here forever. It wasn't
going to be going away. We had to figure out some way to manage
it. And that was true across the political spectrum. There some differences between
the parties and schools of thought, but Kissinger certainly thought that the Soviet Union
was around forever. It was ludicrous to suggest that this could be ended or
that the Soviet Union would be defeated. And of course Kissinger, who just
departed us recently, was always under just suspicion that he thought the job was
to lose slowly. A lot of conventional might say Chamber of commerce Republicans didn't
really have the right appreciation of things, and the great words of Norman pot
Hertz, you're basic Chamber of commerce Republicans thought the Soviet Union was the federal
trade Commission with nuclear weapons. Among more liberals, they clung to a theoretical
idea of convergence, which was, yeah, they're sort of mean and bureaucratic
and tyrannical, and they have the Gulag, but sooner or later they'll mellow
and we'll sort of have a convergence between the two countries and the enmity and
differences will disappear. From which came the idea that the way to solve our
problems was to try to convert our political differences into technical differences. That's the
premise of arms control. If we just do numbers of launchers and types of
warheads, that's how we'll reduce Cold War tension. And the core insight of
Reagan and Churchill almost alone is that, no, that's completely wrong. This
is fundamentally a moral struggle, and until you make that the first principle of
policy, there will be no progress of any kind. And in the course
of doing research for you know, ended up being a seven hundred page book
on the Reagan presidency, I got curious that, Gosh, Reagan quotes Churchill
an awful lot, and not by the way just the quip suggests, I
mean quoting Churchill, as has been observed as a bipartisan requirement of American politics,
presidents of both parties do it. I remember Pamela Harriman saying, remember
who was Randolph Churchill's first wife, Pamela Harriman saying that Bill Clinton reminded her
of Churchill, and I thought, well, it's true. Neither one of
them served in Vietnam. I guess there's that in common. But otherwise it
was kind of a reach, you know, but Reagan quoted a lot of
the substantive things that Churchill said, not just the familiar things that we know
about, some very obscure. And then, with the magic of modern word
searches, I discovered that Reagan quoted Churchill more often than every other American president
combined. And that goes back to Hoover, who was the first American president
to quote Churchill. That's before, of course, Churchill's famous prime minister.
And by the way, if you're curious, we know John F. Kennedy
was very fond of Churchill. I extrapolated a Churchill quotation rate over a theoretical
two terms of John F. Kennedy, and Reagan still beat him by quite
a bit. So I thought well, that's interesting. And then the more
I looked, and then Lee has already hinted at something the remarkable similarities between
the two of them. And it's not just in their insights, which I'll
come to at the core of things here, but also certain aspects of their
character and even really their family stories. Now very different family background, Churchill
from an aristocratic family, Reagan from a dowardly mobile, struggling working class family.
But and you think Churchill the lifelong statesman and Reagan an actor most of
his life who came to politics later on. Of course, on the other
hand, from his earliest days in politics, Churchill's friends and his critics would
say, Winston, you missed your calling in life. You should have been
an actor. And you may know that. Reagan, in one of his
final interviews in nineteen eighty nine with David Brinkley, said that he didn't know
how anyone could be president who was not an actor. In other words,
they both understood the dramatic requirements of modern democratic, mass media politics. By
the way, Churchill was fascinated with the movie business. He spent some time
with Charlie Chaplin in nineteen twenty nine and proposed writing some movie scripts for him,
so maybe not so far apart in certain ways. Between these two men,
you may know the family story. Both adored their fathers but were considerably
distant from them. Both talked about their mothers as being the most important influence
in their life. Churchill say, my mother's showing for me like the evening
star, but from a distance less distance for Reagan. Both of them talked
about their spouses in the same way. The last sins of Churchill's book My
Early Life says, I married Clementine Hoser and lived happily ever afterward. And
maybe you've seen this very thick book of letters from Winston and Clementine that's out
a few years ago, very sentimental and romantic. Reagan, we have some
of his notes to Nancy been published through the years. And Reagan liked to
say at dinners and things. I'll quote him here, along came Nancy Reagan
and saved my soul. Or think about their fondness for horses, expressed in
similar ways, both remember of the Army cavalry. Keep in mind Churchill wrote,
no one ever came to grief except honorable grief through riding horses. No
hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle, and Reagan is
famous for saying, there is nothing quite so good for the inside of a
man then the outside of a horse. Reporters all thought that Reagan came up
with that. It's actually from Xenophon's Art of Horsemanship, but doesn't matter.
The fundamental point is the important thing. We all know, of course,
that Reagan survived the assassin's bullet very bravely. In nineteen eighty one, when
he finally came clear of anesthesia, really a couple of days later, still
with a respiratory tube in his mouth, he scribbled on the notepad Churchill's famous
line, There's nothing more exhilarating than being shot at without result, Although not
quite literally true, there was some result from that. He nearly died,
right, It took months recovering in great pain. Churchill, of course,
nearly killed by being hit by a car on Fifth Avenue in nineteen thirty two.
I think Jim, when he looked the wrong way around that time thirty
one, I knew you would know. You could probably tell them the day
and time of day. Of course, a tough crowd, as they say
in the comedy clubs. All right, remember that both men were party switchers,
and for the same reason and the fact throughout a lot of Democrats which
parties in the eighties, and Reagan often had a ceremony at the White House
to welcome a new Republican Party member, and he would always quote Churchill saying,
some men change their principles for their party. Other men changed their party
for their principles. But then as you get deeper into politics, you start
to say that some of these seemingly superficial things, certain parallels of their life
stories and character may have a relation to their political practice and political insight.
I don't know, can't be proven. But one other I think really important
parallel to keep in mind is that neither man was the choice of their party
to be their leader at moments of crisis. In nineteen forty, Churchill was
the last person the Conservative Party wanted as Prime Minister, and it was really
only the Labor Party that put him over the top by most accounts. And
in nineteen eighty, if we'd had the old smoke phil room, surely the
Republican establishment would have picked Gerald Ford or Howard Baker or George Bush ahead of
Reagan. Charles Percy said that when Reagan was nominated that this was a foolhardy
idea. He said, Reagan's nomination will signal the beginning of the end of
our party as an effective force in American political life in nineteen forty. My
favorite quote from this is the Cabinet secretary John Colville. He said this in
May nineteen forty. The mere thought of Churchill as Prime Minister sent a cold
chill down the spines of the staff working at ten Downing Street. Seldom can
a prime minister have taken office with the establishment so dubious of the choice and
so prepared to find its doubts justified. And other senior members of the Tory
Party were saying church was not going to last five months my other things,
they said, he's too old at sixty five, his time has passed.
Reagan's case was equally shocking. I like to quote the late John P.
Roach, an interesting man, a thoughtful liberal, former head of the Americans
for Democratic Action who later became quite admirer of Reagan. By the way he
wrote quote, Reagan's election was an eight plus earthquake on the political Richter scale,
and it sent a number of eminent statesmen, Republican and Democratic into shock,
and I've got a whole lot long list I won't go through, and
the how of all the people saying there's no way he can possibly succeed,
and all the reasons why, among which were He's going to be seventy years
old in a couple months. It's way too old to be president. Just
kind of a ironic and amusing just now. But I think what set them
apart from the rest of their party was, I guess you'd put it this
way, their iconoclasm, one of the fact that they had utterly independent minds.
They always dissented, not just from liberal orthodoxy, but from their own
parties orthodoxy. As I say, on the Cold War. It emerged later,
of course Reagan's saying my view of the Cold War is we win and
they lose. But she never articulated publicly because I think he understood how radical
that would sound, maybe even frightening. I mean, he went as far
as saying several times that, you know what everyone says, we should be
afraid of an arms race. I'm paraphrasing here, But why be afraid of
a race that we're going to win and that they're going to lose? You
can't say that you couldn't say that then that was just heresy. But he
wasn't willing to go that far in as public statements because I think he thought
it was necessary to start sending those signals to the Soviet Union that we're not
going to play the game by the old rules. You can think of other
things by the way. I mean. Another parallel I think on politics was
in the early thirties, late twenties, early thirties, Churchill opposed the dominion
status for India, which caused a very big breach with his party that looks
very much like Reagan's opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty in the nineteen seventies,
a big breach with his own party also, and they split their parties over
those issues. Right, So what accounts are their unusual and independent imagination?
I think the first thing to bring to mind is they were both self educated
in an important way. I've always thought that one of the most important accounts
of Churchill's own education is from him from his book My Early Life, the
chapter called Education in Bangalore. Because he'd gone to Sandhurst, the military academy,
he learned all about military strategy and tactics, but he hadn't read the
classics, he hadn't had a liberal arts education, and he knew this,
and he understood that if I want to be a political success in the world,
I need to know more. So, he might say, he gave
himself his own graduate course, and he describes in that chapter all the books
he read Plato, Aristotle, Scopenhower. Hegel, oh, my god,
historians know McAuley Gibbon, right, long long list. Jim, of course
can tell you every single one, and I'm forgetting a lot of them.
He did leave out Machiavelli, who for prudent reasons, and he wrote something
interesting. He said, you know, I got to read it on my
own and form my own views. I didn't have some professor telling me,
oh, you should think this way about it, or so and so is
better on this subject. So he said, my own views, and what
I bit I took. And I think a similar a thing happens with Reagan.
For him, it's later in life. It's in the nineteen fifties when
he's touring the country for General Electric Theater and he's traveling by train. You
may know that Reagan was afraid to fly and very seldom got an airplane,
so to to our ge plans in thirty eight states, he set out from
Los Angeles on the train, and that's long trips, and he would have
a pile of books. And we know among those books were a lot of
the early modern classics of conservatism, like Whittaker Chambers Witness Hi X, Road
to Serfdom, Henry Haslett's Economics, and one lesson charter subscriber a National Review
when it launches a nineteen fifty five and he's scribbling notes on his note cards
and working them into his speeches. And Reagan later on said, people say,
who converted me from being a liberal democrat to a conservative? He said,
well, I did it myself to my own reading and study, and
no one who would ever take him literally or seriously about that, but it's
true. And then, of course allow both men to say what to the
conventional mind were outrageous things. So my favorites are again parallels is in nineteen
seventy six and again in nineteen eighty Reagan said, you know, fascism was
really the basis of the New Deal. This horrified everyone. And my favorite
response was the Washington Post news story that said the Washington Post contacted several historians
of the New New Deal who have no idea what Reagan is talking about,
which I thought, just you know, a nice barometer of the ignorance of
Washington Post reporters or of New Deal historians. They kind of overlapped and in
a Reagan instead of I'm sure his campaign advisors have said, you've got to
say you were misunderstood, it's out of context, just make it go away.
Of course, he didn't do that. He defended it straight up in
September of nineteen eighty saying I hadn't mind. You know, if you look
at the New Deal theorists and he named if you forgotten names to everybody,
and their view was, you know, you want government of private resources.
That's the economic theory of fascism. He didn't back down on it at all.
In Churchill's case, the parallel was in it's June of nineteen forty five.
Isn't that the famous speech Jim the Gestapo speech. Yeah, June of
nineteen forty five. The war in Europe's over. If there's an election called,
and Churchill says of the party that he's been in coalition with for six
years, you cannot have socialism in England without some form of castopo the Labor
Party, in which our civil servants will no longer be civil and no longer
servants. And he went on to say, I'm sure they'd be horrified to
hear that, but it's the logical consequence of the chain of thought that they
have of any economic system, depending on central planning, it'll just have to
go that way, whether they mean to or not. Well, where'd he
get it? You got it in the same place Reagan did, probably from
Hyex Road to served him, certainly in Reagan's case, but probably in Churchill's
case too. In fact, I've lost it here in my notes there it
is. Hayak himself later wrote to Paul Addison, who wrote a very good
book about churchill domestic policy. Hiak said, I'm afraid that there can be
little doubt that Winston Churchill, somewhat unfortunately phrased Gestapo's Beach, was written under
the influence of the Road to serve them. So no respectable people would quote
these books. Doesn't matter, they're best sellers, but they would, right,
all right, So then you get to the Cold War. I started
out by saying a conventional view as well as Soviet Union's weird, but it's
you know, it's a durable form of rule, Churchill said early on,
as early as the Russian Revolution in nineteen seventeen. But then in later years
he'd say the problem with communism is it's against human nature. It's unnatural.
And Reagan said the same thing in the nineteen seventies. It's against human nature,
it's unnatural. It goes against the fundamental human yearning for human freedom.
Not many people talk that way at that level of politics. Not many people
talk that way. And we all know that Reagan's one of the slogans that
was used as peace through strength. It really came from Churchill. That was
his strategy, starting with as Lee made reference to the famous Fulton speech that
announced the coming of the Iron Curtain, that's the speech where Churchill said,
we need to stand up diplomatically to the dictators and we have to arm ourselves
for deterrent purposes. And looking back, and in his memoirs, Churchill said
World War two would have been the eavisst war to prevent if we adopted that
strategy. He said, we could have prevented World War two without the firing
of a single shot that was Churchill's famous phrase. And then remember in the
nineteen nineties, what did Margaret Thatcher say. She said, Ronald Reagan won
the Cold War without the firing of a single shot. Not quite literally true.
There were some shots fired in Grenada, you know, our bombing rate
on Libya, Libya being at least an adjunct partner of the Soviet enterprise.
But she wasn't literally counting bullets. She understood. I think the Iron Lady
had the Iron Curtain speech in the back of her mind when she made that
statement, because she understood the grand strategy involved. And Wyatt departed. But
there's another part of this, which is, you know, the criticism of
Reagan throughout those years was, oh, gosh, you're going to be a
Cold War moralist. That's going to strengthen the Hawks and the Kremlin and make
things worse. It's going to risk war, and it's going to make it
harder to make a deal. And Reagan, and especially i think one of
his most important supporters in the Advisors of William Clark, said, we think
the opposite. We think by being tough, it's going to make it more
likely we will get more cooperative Soviet leadership. Which does come along with Gorbachev.
That's a long, unentangled story, but still the general storyline there is
correct, I think. But in both cases Churchill and Reagan, they weren't
warmongers seeking confrontation and then going home. They thought that would be how you
would get a settlement. What Churchill said in the Iron Curtain speech was what
is needed is a settlement, a good understanding on all points with Russia.
And if you know this, part of anybody in America knows the story.
But Churchill was always pushing, perhaps imprudently, perhaps too soon, that we
need to reach a settlement with the Soviet Union, otherwise we do risk World
War three. At the end of nineteen eighty one, Reagan said the following
in an interview. I've always recognized that ultimately there's got to be a settlement,
a solution. The other way. If you don't believe that, then
you're trapped in the back of your mind the inevitability of conflicts. Someday that
kind of conflict is going to end the world. So this was a man
who had peacemaking at the front of his mind, but he departed from all
the conventional wisdom. I call it if you want to use political theory jargon,
modern neo Kantian wisdom that all we need to do is have warm,
fuzzy feelings and that will work. He knew that toughness is what would work,
not warm fuzzies. And that's one reason why when Reagan would say I'm
for nuclear disarmament, nobody believed him. They thought he was lying or you
know something right, So let me give you two more parallels between the two
men. It jumped out of me. In nineteen forty eight, Churchill said
the following in a speech, What do you suppose would be the position this
afternoon had been communist Russia instead of free enterprise America, which had created the
atomic weapon. Instead of being a somber guarantee of peace, it would have
become an irresistible method of human enslavement. Okay, better us than them,
then, if you know the story. In nineteen sixty seven, Reagan appeared
as governor. First year as governor, he appeared on a television debate on
CBS News with Robert F. Kennedy, and Reagan said the following. In
the course of that debate, By the way, this debate, you couldn't
find a transcript of it. For years, CBS buried it. Why because
by all acknowledgments, including Kennedy's people, Reagan wiped the floor with Kennedy.
You don't find any acknowledgment of this in the great Kennedy biographies and so forth.
In later years, you can now see it on YouTube if you want,
But for years you couldn't find it. I had. It was great
difficulty. I finally was able to track down a transcript of it with help
from ed Nist more than twenty years ago. Now here's what Reagan said in
the middle of that debate. At the end of World War two, one
nation the world had unprecedented power. We had the atomic bomb. The United
States made no effort to oppose its will on the rest of the nations.
Can you honestly say that had the Soviet Union been in a comparable position with
that bomb or today's Red Chinese, that the world would not today have been
conquered with that force? Baud be the same understanding that Churchill had about the
matter. And by the way, Reagan brought that up a few times with
Garbachev in their summits, much to the annoyance of the Soviet delegation that was
fun. Finally all trought to a conclusion this way. In later years,
both in the case of Churchill and Reagan, a lot of grudging admirers,
maybe not ad myers, but people who grudgingly acknowledged their success and greatness would
say, well, they were men out of the past, and yeah,
it worked well for their time. And in Churchill's case this especially the thesis
of William Manchester in his very popular three volume biography, is that well,
Churchill was this holdover from the Victorian era, and that's why those particular virtues
were useful and necessary then but kind of obsolete otherwise a museum piece. And
a similar thing is said about Reagan that well he's sort of a person out
of the fifties. Or the joke was, you know, he'll make movies
for eighteenth century fox or something like that. Right, there was the little
joke, but an anachronism of an older America. And I think that's wrong
in both cases. Actually, what I say is, I don't think they
were men of the recent past. I think there were men of the distant
past. They're both classical men. I like the way John Lukatch, late
Hungarian historian that Jim and I knew a little bit. He wrote the following.
Contrary to most accepted views, we ought to consider the Churchill was not
some kind of admirable remnant of a more heroic past. He was not the
last Lion. He was something else. Now, Lukax didn't say what the
something else is, but I will. They were the great sold men right
out of the pages of Aristotle, I think. And so there's a broader
point of this that I always try to bring to students. By the way,
I'll just say it's a personal matter. It's a matter of great frustration
to me when I hear young conservatives just coming up. I mean, Reagan's
thirty five forty years behind us now, and they say, well, Reagan
has no relevance to us today. Sometimes, I'm sure some of you have
heard these phrases. They attack what they call zombie Reaganism, and I sometimes
I have a long conversation about what do you exactly mean by that? Because
it's usually wrong or incorrect and inaccurate, but above all thoughtless. The point
is is that the kind of large sold statesmanship greatness I'm trying to draw to
your attention here of these two men is the kind of thing that you can
learn from any great statesman Lincoln, Washington, and it on a level of
thought, it refutes the historicist hypothesis that were all just corks bobbing on the
sea, driven by the waves of history. And so another answer to the
question why were they different from their peers is that they transcended their environments in
their time, as only great men can do, and thereby they bent history
to their will, rather than succumbing to the supposed will of history itself.
So close to two things quickly, there's the British historian Jeffrey Elton wrote,
I think one of the best phrases about Churchill. He said, whenever I
meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men great men moreover
in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian. And
there are times when I I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of
Winston Churchill, whether they can see that no matter how much better the details
often damaging of the man and his career become known, he still remains quite
simply a great man. And I think the exact same thing can be said
of Reagan and so the two last sendoffs is One of Ronald Reagan's principles that
he learned from the show business was always leave your audience wanting more. That's
why his speeches were shorter than the average politician. In my case, I
have a whole book about the side by side of Reagan and Churchill that began
us an accident. It was a spin off of my longer book. Is
what I thought would be three paragraphs about Reagan and Churchill grow to twenty thousand
words, which didn't work, and the publish said, make it a separate
book. So I've done that, available at fine Amazon's everywhere, And as
my mentor Stan Evans liked, say, my time is up and I thank
you for yours. Ricochet Join the conversation.