Author Interview: Professor Paul Kengor on ‘The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism’

Paul Kengor teaches foreign policy and twentieth century history in the department of political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, a history of the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) from World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Paul Kengor at CPAC, February 2011

Kengor also wrote The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, which examines how Ronald Reagan planned for and stimulated that collapse.

At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor spoke to me about The Crusader and how he came to write that book.

The process of researching and writing The Crusader “began when I realized that a lot of people in academia – and, really, generally -- didn’t realize, didn’t know, didn’t understand that Ronald Reagan actually intended to undermine the Soviet Empire,” Kengor said.

In a sense, he explained, “they knew from his rhetoric and his speeches,” such as the June 1982 Westminster address, the May 1981 Notre Dame speech, and the so-called “Evil Empire” speech before the religious broadcasters in March 1983 that “he thought that Soviet Communism was evil. They knew that he predicted it would end up on the ash heap of history.”

At the same time, however, these observers “thought that might have been rhetoric” rather than an expression of intention.

“What they didn’t realize,” Kengor went on, “is that behind all of that was a very specific campaign on multiple fronts, probably about a dozen to maybe two dozen different things, where Reagan actually intended to peacefully undermine the USSR.”

To back up his thesis, Kengor looked directly at recently declassified government documents, particularly NSDDs, or national security decision directives.

He contrasted his research with that of other academics who have not availed themselves of these documents.

“If academics are going to be scholars,” he complained, “they need to read primary sources, like they tell their students to do. But they don’t. They read each other and they cite each other. They don’t learn anything.”

The proof of Reagan’s intentions is in these documents, Kengor said.

“All this information has been declassified. You look at NSDD 32, NSDD 66, NSDD 75, and you see here a clear intent to roll back, undermine, and as one of the documents says, bring political pluralism – [it] actually uses that word, pluralism – to the Soviet Union.”

The collapse of the Soviet empire, Kengor asserts, “was intended and there’s a paper trail to prove it.”

His research did not end with the documents, however.

“Beyond the paper trail,” he explained, “all the people who were involved in this are either still alive or died in the last 10 years” and were available to tell the story.

“I’ve interviewed all of those people,” he said. “I mean everybody that I could find: Bill Clark, Cap Weinberger, George Shultz, Richard V. Allen,” naming, respectively, the director of the CIA, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor of the Reagan administration.

Those people, he noted, “will tell you this, that [undermining the Soviet system] was the intention.”

The title of the book, The Crusader, emerged from research Kengor did in the Soviet archives.

As Kengor was reading the Soviet documents, he explained, such as Pravda, Izvestia, and transcripts of a TV program called Studio 9 (“the Moscow version of 60 Minutes”), and memoirs of Soviet officials like Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, he discovered “they called Reagan ‘the crusader.’”

The Soviets, he said, “understood better than American liberal academics that Reagan, beginning in the 1950s, had signed up for groups like General Lucius Clay’s Crusade for Freedom [and] Dr. Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.”

Reagan himself, Kengor noted, “had been using that word. He didn’t mean it in a religious sense, although Reagan was religiously inspired to undermine this viciously atheistic empire. (As Gorbachev said, the Soviets pursued a war on religion.) But Reagan meant the word crusade in the sense of crusade for freedom, a crusade to undermine” the USSR.

The now-declassified documents that Kengor used in his research were not kept hidden from the Soviets during the 1980s.

“They were classified at the time,” he explained, “but there was some leaking. I think it might have been intentional leaks, to get out some of the NSDDs” into the Soviets’ conversation.

According to interviews released a few years ago, NSDD 75, which was written by Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes while he served on the staff of the National Security Council in the White House, was intentionally but only partially leaked.

“When the Soviets heard that that was out, they were apoplectic. They wanted to find out, what’s in that document? They badly wanted to know what was in that document because the Soviets knew that Reagan had drawn crosshairs on their empire. They were in the crosshairs of the crusader,” Kengor said.

The Soviets, he continued, “were hungry to find out what specifically the Reagan administration was doing and they knew that Reagan was coming at them from multiple angles,” something that became clear to Kengor through interviews with former Soviet officials.

Beyond the history analyzed in his book, Kengor said, he wanted to express a criticism about scholarship.

“I would tell young people, in particular,” he said, that “if you run into a liberal professor who denies that Reagan had anything to do with the Soviet Union [collapse], that professor needs to know that the Soviets disagree with him, that the Poles disagree with him, that the people behind the former Iron Curtain disagree with him.”

That professor, he pointed out, “needs to know he is in a very tiny minority and doesn’t have evidence for his assertions.”

Kengor offered the theory that “maybe that’s why they avoid the primary source documents. They’re afraid that it will dispel a lot of their sacred cows about how Reagan allegedly had nothing to do with” the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

(This blog post has been adapted from two articles previously published on Examiner.com on February 23, 2011.)

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'With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War'

This book review appeared originally in The Washington Times on Friday, February 4, 1983.  It was also published in The News World (a New York City newspaper) on Tuesday, February 15, 1983.


RICHARD SINCERE / BOOK REVIEW
Shoveling appeasement

With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War.
By Robert Scheer, Random House, $14.95, 124 pages + 155 pages of 
notes and appendices.

Eugene Rostow’s resignation from his post as head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency underlines the pressures inherent in the arms-control process. Battered by both the right and the left, the Reagan administration has spent the past two years trying to bring order out of chaos, attempting to achieve sensible balance in the competition between the superpowers.


In “With Enough Shovels,” Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Scheer shamelessly accuses Reagan and his advisers of wild (just stopping short of insane) views of nuclear war. Resting his accusations on unproven assumptions, Scheer pulls no punches in advancing his theory that the present administration is the puppet of a conspiracy called the Committee on the Present Danger.

Scheer is disturbed, and sometimes amused, at Reagan’s determination to stem the threat of communism. Scheer considers the Soviet threat a hallucination — or more accurately, he finds it a puzzling anachronism that lives on only in Reagan’s memories of Communist subversion of Hollywood trade unions. The few readers who could share Scheer’s conclusions are those who share his fundamental and wrongheaded assumption: The Soviet Union is a benign and defensive superpower.

Despite the many hours of extensive interviews with nuclear weapons specialists and civil defense experts, Scheer closes his eyes in this book to the possibility that there is a defense against nuclear weapons. T.K. Jones, deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, is portrayed as a wild- eyed maniac, a man with no human sensibilities. Scheer ignores the extensive empirical data gathered by Jones which demonstrate that, with proper preparations, the devastation from nuclear weapons can be significantly mitigated. He brushes it off with mockery rather than criticism of Jones’s case.

Clearly Scheer has fallen into the trap of believing in the apocalyptic premise preached by Jonathan Schell in “The Fate of the Earth” and by other doomsayers. Nothing will alter his assumptions. All challengers are dismissed as madmen, no matter what their qualifications.

In his criticism of the Committee on the Present Danger, Scheer carefully documents how this group of intellectuals — established in 1976 to study American defense needs and promulgate their findings that a dangerous imbalance in military preparedness exists — has moved its members into influential government off ices. Scheer calls it their “seizure of state power.” He reserves special disdain for committee members because so many of them are former (or present) Democrats from the Hubert Humphrey wing of the party. Scheer argues that they have betrayed their roots.

Yet it is no accident that people like Max Kampelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Michael Novak support U.S. military strength. They have observed firsthand the usurpation of political and social influence by muddle-headed utopians. They remember the lessons of Munich and are willing to take risks to prevent another global conflagration. A commitment to the liberal values of the Democratic Party — even to the values of Norman Thomas and Eugene V. Debs — requires a commitment to preserve those values against totalitarianism.

Thus the founders of the Committee on the Present Danger were willing to face public criticism when they rebutted CIA studies on Soviet military power. In asking, “Is the United States No. 2?” they answer an emphatic yes; their purpose was to influence the public debate on how to rectify that dangerous situation.

By concentrating exclusively on how members of the Committee on the Present Danger now are influencing the U.S. government, Scheer begs the question as to whether there is some sort of conspiracy at work. Since committee members helped to get Ronald Reagan elected, have advised him for many years, and since he agrees with most of their views, it is hardly surprising they are now in positions of influence. But to read that as a conspiracy is equivalent to saying that the Brookings Institution exercised conspiratorial control over the American economy during the Johnson and Carter administrations. It smacks of political naivete and fundamental distrust of American democracy.

And that is the root of Scheer’s attack on the Reagan administration’s nuclear weapons policy. A policy designed to fight and survive a nuclear war, even one designed primarily to deter war (as the Reagan policy clearly is), must — in Scheer’s view — be misguided, because there is nothing worth fighting for. American institutions are not superior to Soviet institutions. American government is as corrupt as Soviet government. Freedom is not preferable to slavery. Scheer’s repugnant view is not unique — it has been expressed in the recent appeasement demonstrations in both Europe and America.

On balance, “With Enough Shovels” presents a strikingly biased, negative view of the Reagan administration. Its only positive value is documentary: Scheer prints informative interviews with several present and former government officials. Unfortunately, Scheer is incapable of interpreting that information in a manner conducive to rational discourse. That would make a worthy addition to the literature of nuclear policy.

Richard E. Sincere Jr. is president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Defense Association, a nationwide public education group.

'Law and the Grenada Mission'

This review appeared originally in the New York City Tribune on Monday, March 18, 1985.

Legal lessons learned from Grenada rescue
By Richard Sincere


Law and the Grenada Mission, by John Norton Moore. (Center for Law and National Security and Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1984.) 129 pages, $9.45.

Oddly, the New Republic, in its editorial endorsing Walter Mondale for president (October 22), credited Ronald Reagan with invigorating U.S. foreign policy. Reagan, the magazine said, “dispelled the post-Vietnam jinx on the successful use of American military force. The invasion of Grenada not only left the people of that island indisputably freer and safer than they were before the troops landed, it also made the salutary announcement to the world that the United States is once again prepared to use force when it deems the cause necessary and just.”

In October 1983, in response to a request for help by the independent states of the eastern Caribbean and an urgent plea by the head of state of Grenada, the U.S. government deployed its troops to bring an end to anarchy, rescue American civilians quarantined by a thuggish military regime, and restore peace and security to a small island nation of 110,000 people. In Law and the Grenada Mission, Ambassador John Norton Moore, a distinguished professor of international law at the University of Virginia, has compressed the facts and opinion about the case into a slim volume designed to affirm the author’s belief in the rule qf law as a means to peace, stability, and security. He writes:

“Fidelity to law is and should be an important element of foreign policy. Americans were thus puzzled by the cacophony of voices instantly heard in the aftermath of the Grenada mission urging variously that the action was lawful, that it was unlawful, or that law was irrelevant. .. Perceptions about lawfulness can profoundly influence both national and international support for particular actions. In the long run only a principled policy rooted in law can ensure the international peace and justice so importantly a part of the national interest of the United States and of all nations.”

Bizarre analogies
Even after last December’s first free elections in Grenada since Maurice Bishop suspended the country’s constitution in 1979, Americans draw bizarre analogies to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan five winters ago or of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968. The differences are numerous, as Ambassador Moore shows. We all know that after five years of occupation, Soviet troops are still engaged in combat am terrorism in Afghanistan; U.S. combat troops left Grenada in December 1983. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan to replace a government which the Kremlin felt it could no longer adequately control; the United States and the eastern Caribbean democracies acted to restore order in a country that had no functioning government. Afghan refugees continue to crowd neighboring states, such a Pakistan; today refugees from the Bishop regime are able to return home to Grenada with a sense of honor and optimism for the future.

Ambassador Moore notes: “The Soviet action in Afghanistan is completely counter to self-determination for the people of Afghanistan and can never permit free elections or other forms of political freedom.” The Soviets claim that the Afghan people, by implementing a Marxist revolutionary system, have made the doctrine of self-determination no longer relevant. In contrast, “91 per cent of the people of Grenada welcomed the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States mission, 76 percent said they believed Cuba sought control of their government, and the OECS states are pledged to free elections.”

The “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which undergirded the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, states that once in the socialist camp, no nation may leave it. Moore calls it “a blatant violation of the non-use of force, self-determination, and human rights provisions of the United Nations Charter.” Unlike Grenada -- where the people praised the rescue mission led by the U.S. military -- “in no country where the Brezhnev Doctrine has been applied have the people who lived there welcomed its application.”

Kirkpatrick’s analysis
The comparisons of these events shed light on a statement made by U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in another context. At a dinner in 1993 honoring Polish labor leader Lech Walesa, she said: “Though Marxism itself had some roots in the European liberal socialist tradition, Marxism-Leninism and Soviet state power and the political organization ruled in their name are to the liberal-democratic tradition as antithesis is to thesis. Marxism-Leninism does not incorporate either the theory or the practice of liberalism, democratic nationalism, or socialism; indeed, it denies al1 the essential elements of Western liberal-democratic, democratic-socialist, tradition.” In short, there is not respect for law, international or otherwise, in the Marxist-Leninist order, unless it furthers the cause of Communist expansion. Thus, there are no moral or ethical restraints to prevent more numerous and more brutal takeovers of small but strategically placed nations like Grenada, Nicaragua, or Vietnam.

In his monograph, John Norton Moore furnishes the documents which make the legal case for U.S. participation in the Grenada mission. Among them are letter from Sir Paul Scoon, governor-general of Grenada, to the prime minister of Barbados formally but diplomatically requesting assistance “in stabilizing this grave and dangerous situation;” the statement by the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States explaining the decision to take military action “to remove this dangerous threat to peace and security;” and statements by President Reagan and Prime Minister Eugenia Charles of Dominica announcing the action after it had taken place.

In an editorial the day after the successful :invasion, the New York Times challenged the legal basis for the U.S. participation, saying that Secretary of State George Shultz “strained the language” of the OECS treaty and that the law binding on the U.S. was in fact the 1947 Rio Treaty. Yet Professor Moore amply demonstrates that the U.S. role was “in full accord with the United Nations, OAS, and OECS Charters and United States national law: Most importantly, by serving human rights, self-determination, and international peace and security, by the mission serves the core purposes of these great Charters.”

If the lessons of Grenada still need to be studied, this book is a good place to begin the examination. History will show that the prompt legal action taken in October 1984 was a blow struck for freedom and against the American malaise of the past decade.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.