What was even more astonishing was the near total change that has occurred in the attitude of the American media toward Ronald Reagan. It was hard to forget the ferocity with which this same media once attacked him. The generally liberal US media depicted him then as the worst kind of dangerous fool, a man who would risk a nuclear conflagration because he was unable to understand (as President George W. Bush is now being accused) the nuances of foreign policy, power balances, the need to accommodate dictatorships for the sake of world peace.

“An amiable dunce” was how Clark Clifford, the doyen of the Beltway establishment, once dismissed him. Now that we know what this dunce achieved, how right he was and how deadly wrong his critics were, their silly criticism calls their own judgment into question.

Consider further how the media and establishment economists treated his belief in supply-side driven growth, in cutting the role of government, and in unleashing the tremendous enterprising energies of the American people by tax cuts and deregulation as outrageous nonsense. Even the man who was to become his vice president, George H.W. Bush, called his program voodoo economics.

But Reagan’s program became a tremendous success with momentous consequences. It provided the wealth that helped mitigate many of America’s social problems, which before him seemed to threaten the integrity of its society. It provided the means for rebuilding America’s military strength. It gave America the capacity to challenge a nuclear parity, which had enabled the Soviet Union to subvert and blackmail the West unhindered.

How history now mocks those who mocked Reagan. What calumny and contempt were not heaped on the head of the man who they said was a danger to world peace, who would waste billions on Hollywood fantasies which they contemptuously dubbed “Star Wars.” Yet this man understood better than all the experts that the USSR was a hollow giant and that by challenging it, fatal Soviet weaknesses would be exposed, and it would either retreat or collapse.

He was right, of course.

THERE WAS something interesting to be learned from the belated confessions of some of those who opposed Reagan’s healthy instincts. His former chief of staff, later secretary of state James Baker, relates how he too joined the very vociferous and powerful chorus of the foreign policy establishment that fought Reagan tooth and nail to have him eliminate from his speech at Brandenburg gate in Berlin the history-making phrase, his call to the Soviet leader, “Break down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev.”

“I was wrong,” Baker admitted with the hindsight of history. What this very tough secretary did not admit or even address was why the foreign policy establishment, certainly the European, but the American too, tends to go easy on the West’s enemies. Why do they bend over backwards not to offend dictators and mass murderers? Why at the same time do they have no qualms about pressuring allies and friends to give way to the demands of these aggressive dictators for the sake of “stability” or a putative “world peace”?

The same ethos that drove the heads of the State Department bananas over a phrase that might offend the Soviet dictator still reigns in the corridors of Foggy Bottom. From there comes the insistence that Yasser Arafat must not be touched, lest it displease America’s Saudi friends – and worse, provoke a conflagration in the Muslim world that might threaten American interests. Just as they feared Reagan’s call would provoke a horrendous response from a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, or the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin would throw the whole Middle East into paroxysms of rage, so too do they fear touching Arafat.

As for Israelis, they mostly share the attitude of their media that still treats Reagan with hostility. Mentioning Reagan’s achievements to my bright university students, I elicited mostly blank stares or condescending smiles or sneers.

Little wonder. Shortly after Reagan was elected, Irving Kristol, who provided the intellectual inspiration for Reagan’s revolution, visited Israel and met with senior Israeli editors. Hanna Zemer, then editor of Davar, turned to him and said: “Prof. Kristol, I understand that your newly elected president, Ronald Reagan, is not exactly a brilliant intellectual.”

“Indeed,” came his immediate response, “if you put Reagan in one room with your Shimon Peres, you would have no doubt who the intellectual was. But all it goes to prove is that a man who is not a brilliant intellectual but has the right ideas is far superior to a man who may be brilliant but mostly has the wrong ideas.”

Amen.

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