What individual was most responsible for America’s victory in the Cold War? The case for Buckley.
Ihave been out speaking about my friend Buckley — most of the invitations having been excited by that marvelous WFB at 100 issue of National Review put together at year-end by Ramesh Ponnuru and Company.
The older folks I meet remember WFB fondly, more of them from his television appearances, perhaps unsurprisingly, than from any of his cornucopiacal print publications. The younger folks, students many of them, seem open to learning about him as a historical figure, his being one of those names from the outer fame-ring of a George Marshall, say, or a Hilaire Belloc. WFB is somebody they know they should know.
At the end of the evening, during the Q&A, one question arrives with metronomic regularity: Who was the individual most responsible for America’s victory in the Cold War?
I have given the question some thought and am comfortable with this answer (settled upon following a bit of stutter-stepping early in my rounds):
Some might say that it had been George Kennan, the architect of the West’s strategy of containment. George Kennan, a man of soaring self-regard, might have said that. Some might say that it had been Giovanni Paolo Secondo, the implacably anti-Communist leader of the Roman church. But the great John Paul II would have dismissed the notion with a flick of the wrist. He was a determined foe of papal overreach. Some might say that it had been Ronald Reagan. But not Ronald Reagan. The soul of midwestern modesty, Reagan deflected credit to his own mentor, a man 14 years younger than himself who had begun serial training in the arts of ideological warfare while he was still a schoolboy. In Reagan’s judgment, it had been Bill Buckley who, year after year, decade after decade, had reified the hard spiritual case against Communism.
That judgment works for me, but of course in their lively custom NR readers should feel free to improve my understanding of the matter in the comments section.
And let not the central point about Ronald Reagan be obscured. He was not important to the end game of the Cold War. He was indispensable. For eight years he leaned on the Soviet Union with the full weight of the American enterprise — with our economic power, with our technological power, with his (almost superhuman) rhetorical power, and, of course, with our military power. His great wartime ally, Margaret Thatcher, intending to compliment him roundly, once said that Reagan had won the Cold War without firing a shot. A nice flourish, that. But for some young people, especially, her memorable quip seems to have had the perverse effect of diminishing the magnitude of Reagan’s contribution, reducing his end game in the historical imagination to a kind of protracted bureaucratic tussle. So, please, let it be recognized in all quarters that over the course of those eight long years Ronald Reagan had fired a thousand shots — even if none of them had been mounted atop a ballistic missile headed for downtown Moscow.
Let the WFB at 100 celebrations prosper — and multiply. Next month — March 20–21, to be exact — NRI will host the mother of all Buckley fests at the Ideas Summit in Washington, D.C. You know you should be there.