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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 1/29/11

Reagan's 'Tear Down This Wall' Myth

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The campaign hit a bump, however, when Reagan's "authorized" biographer Roger Morris produced a less-than-flattering portrait of the 40th president in Dutch. Not only did Morris paint a self-absorbed Reagan who lived in a fantasy world of made-up facts, but Morris questioned Reagan's Cold War role.

Morris gave respectful treatment to the argument that the Russians were driven to perestroika -- their restructuring -- not by Reagan's hard-line military strategy but by the technological revolution that was sweeping the rest of the world and by pent-up consumer demands behind the Iron Curtain.

"Since at least the time of Brezhnev, Soviet realists had been aware that the West was computerizing itself at a rate that threatened to advance the millennium, while Russian shopkeepers in central Moscow were still using the abacus," Morris wrote.

"When one factored in the coefficient that computers improved themselves at a compound rather than a simple rate, the arithmetic grew truly frightening. By the turn of the century, if Soviet sciences continued to lag, Moscow's world power might prove to have been as transitory as that of Manueline Lisbon."

Contrary Views

In the book, Morris also described a conference that pitted Reagan loyalists who argued that Reagan's "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative had won the Cold War against academics and diplomats who cited the inept Soviet economy and the allure of Western consumer goods.

"A German historian named Ullmann argued that " the USSR collapsed because of its own economic despair, and would have done so anyway, no matter who was President of the United States," Morris wrote.

"[A] former American envoy, Arnold A. Saltzman, said he 'didn't believe that SDI helped the peace process one minute.' Computers not 'imaginary lasers' had won the Cold War: the Soviets had felt themselves increasingly isolated from the Western technological revolution.

"Gorbachev had personally told him that a generation was growing up there who felt starved of the consumer benefits young Westerners took for granted."

As heretical as these analyses were to Reagan loyalists -- and to much of Official Washington -- the observations did not stand alone. Even former State Department official George F. Kennan, whose seminal analysis of the Soviet system in 1947 helped launch the Cold War, objected to the Republican claims of "winning" the Cold War.

In his book, At A Century's Ending, Kennan wrote that "the suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish."

Kennan noted that by the late 1940s and the early 1950s, "it was visible to some of us then living in Russia that the Soviet regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns and hopes of the Russian people. "

"It was quite clear, even at those early dates, that the Soviet regime as we had known it was not there for all time. We could not know when or how it would be changed. We knew only that the change was inevitable and impending.

"By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many members of the Communist Party had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous, and unnecessary."

Slowing the Inevitable

In Kennan's view, the escalation of U.S. military pressure delayed, rather than accelerated, the demise of the Soviet dictatorship.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
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