JAY: --this idealization of Reagan as a hero. Like, and you get it not just from the Republicans but from the Democrats, this whole narrative of Reagan as one of the great presidents.
WILKERSON: Well, you get it from the Democrats because the Democrats are so weak on national security, so to speak, and Reagan wasn't, and so they have to find someone that they can claim was, you know, a strong person in this regard for whom they can have some respect.
JAY: But Bob is saying that there's a specific -- like, the quote I read earlier, that a lot of the catastrophes we're facing now have their origins in Reagan policy.
PARRY: But the point I'm just trying to make was that in some cases, for instance with the case of Pakistan, for instance, Pakistan was interested in building a nuclear bomb at this point. Reagan took a position in 1980 during the campaign that nuclear nonproliferation was not a big issue. It was Carter's issue; it was not Reagan's. And so when Reagan comes in and he wants to ratchet up the war in Afghanistan as a way to pressure the Soviets on that front, he cuts deals with the Pakistanis, and basically in exchange for them delivering the weapons to the mujahideen, and ultimately people like Osama bin Laden, who was working with the mujahideen coming from Saudi Arabia, the deal is that the US government will look the other way as Pakistan develops its nuclear bomb. And there have been many cases. People in the CIA were purged over this because they were warning that the Pakistanis are moving forward. The White House did not want to hear it. Those people were pushed out and silenced. Pakistan went ahead with getting the nuclear bomb. This was a major national security mistake on the behalf of the United States. The one thing that everybody agrees to today about the situation in that region is that the real national security fear is that the Pakistani nuclear bombs will fall into the wrong hands. And that, I think, people on the left or the right or the center would agree would not be a particularly great thing to happen. And that was allowed to happen because Reagan put the battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan ahead of all other issues. And we're dealing now with the consequences of that mistake.
JAY: There's another part to it, too, which is, if Nicaragua and other examples in Latin America -- that this exaggeration of the Cold War and the strength of the Soviet Union was kind of a cover for what in fact was a fight against national liberation movements and various attempts of different countries to break free from American control of -- start with Latin America. Is that a fair critique?
WILKERSON: You have to go case by case, I think. You have to look at each incident, each -- whether you're talking about Kissinger and Nixon in Chile and [Rene] Schneider and Allende. We may have been complicit in Schneider's death, the latest scholarship shows. Four weapons were found that the CIA had furnished, and two of the weapons, as I understand it, had serial numbers matching the serial numbers of the weapons that were used to kill Schneider. He was the chief of staff of the Chilean armed forces who refused to obey the CIA instructions to overthrow his government. He wanted to be a good military man. So, I mean, you can take any one of these incidents or time frames and find what he's talking about and basically be accurate. My only point is it's much bigger, broader, and deeper, and therefore going to be a hell of a lot more difficult to fix, if we can fix it, than simply saying, let's don't have any more Reagans or let's don't have anymore LBJs, or even let's don't have any more wars, though that'd be my first wish.
JAY: I understand. Tell -- given that we are talking about Reagan, I take your point. This -- the Reagan presidency was not an anomaly. It's a systemic -- it's a product of a systemic [inaudible]
WILKERSON: I agree with you that it exacerbated it mightily. It exacerbated the situation on war.
JAY: And it was a very important comeback from Vietnam War, where it was very difficult for the United States to get anything going in terms of projecting military power around the world. Reagan helped reverse a lot of that public opinion.
WILKERSON: I served a man for eight years who told me story after story, vignette after vignette, about how Ronald Reagan resurrected the Armed Forces from their malaise post-Vietnam.
PARRY: I mean, that was very intentional. I mean, also, if you go back over the documents that came out during the Iran-Contra scandal, what you see is that there was an obsession on the part of the Reagan administration to get rid of what they call the "Vietnam syndrome." And the Vietnam syndrome was their sense that the American people would not support more foreign adventures. And they had to get them back into line there. So there were various strategies used. One was to go after the CIA analytical division and make sure they didn't provide information that undercut the White House propaganda. They went after the Washington press corps very aggressively to make sure there weren't too many, you know, Sy Hershes out there that would cause them trouble. They also then began to work the American people back into this idea that war could be kind of fun. It wasn't a mistake that we started off with something like Grenada, which was an easy war. I happened to be down there with Dick -- I was down there with -- .
WILKERSON: It started off with a disaster in 1982 and '83 in Lebanon.
PARRY: Well, okay. But in terms of getting the American public back into this game, it was Grenada, which actually came right after the disaster in Lebanon, partly to cover it up in some ways. But -- so you had this idea that war could be fun, it was easy, it was relatively safe. And that led through what we saw later with Bush I, where he began to move the country further into that line with Panama and the first Persian Gulf War, where he -- his -- first words out of President George H. W. Bush's mouth after the 100-hour ground war was we kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. So this was an obsession they had. They also looked at how do you control the press, how do you control the message. And they had people from the CIA, someone like Walter Raymond Jr., a top intelligence officer in terms of propaganda, they put him over at the National Security Council and put him in charge of an interagency task force to figure out: how do you make these things happen? How do you control the perceptions of the American people in this regard? So there was a lot of things that we now have to take sort of for granted, in terms of how the public is manipulated with information, that you can trace back to those early Reagan years. Yes, it wasn't original to all this, there are aspects of this you can trace back, you know, centuries if you like, but Reagan really made an effort to push that, or at least his people around him did, and they were very effective, and they changed the nature of how the US government deals with its public, where you bring in much more sophisticated propaganda into play, and ultimately getting the public back into line behind the idea of foreign intervention.
WILKERSON: Let me just say one thing. You missed one of the most important things, and this is one of the things that -- and this was Nixon, but Reagan certainly loved it -- galls me even to this day -- is the modern voluntary military, the fact that we abolished conscription -- almost abolished the selective service system, but thought better of it and kept it in place, at least. But we have a foreign legion now, and we have a foreign legion whose enlisted ranks, which after all is the predominant number of people in it, are determined primarily by socioeconomic or for socioeconomic reasons. And it makes it--
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