He embodied an America that would spread freedom by living up to its promise.
He embodied an America that would spread freedom by living up to its promise.
M ichael Ledeen was a brilliant historian who dedicated his life to freedom, the lamp of liberty lit by the Judeo-Christian tradition of America and that West. His signature cause was vigilance against the threat to freedom posed by totalitarian regimes.
Always far-seeing, always three steps ahead in connecting the dots, Michael spotted in Iran’s revolutionary jihadism, in its patrons as well as its proxies, the threads now weaved into what may be the most formidable alliance ever arrayed against the United States. What knits our enemies together, he knew, is their fear of freedom. Michael understood that it was their kryptonite. That’s why he was its tireless champion.
He was also a wonderful man and a loyal, learned friend.
His family was the center of his life. When he died over the weekend at 83, it was at home, surrounded by Barbara, the love of his life, and his children — all dazzling, remarkably accomplished, and deeply patriotic in their own right, inspired by the example of their intrepid parents.
I can’t improve on Eli Lake’s stellar recollection of Michael in the New York Sun, detailing his remarkable life as a scholar of Italian fascism, an academic, an intellectual of great range and depth, a champion bridge player, and above all a freedom fighter. He and Barbara, for years an indefatigable Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, made their home an oasis of friendship, erudition, and good cheer. I was privileged to cherish time there in the years after the 9/11 attacks, when Washington was deeply at odds over how to grapple with a new kind of threat to our nation.
Except as Michael understood, it wasn’t new at all. It was just a different iteration of the same old fascism — an ugly, authoritarian belief system spurring fanatical groups of antisemitic, anti-Western mass murderers, backed and guided as weapons by rabidly anti-American regimes. It had to be fought comprehensively. Not just prosecuted in court but confronted on the battlefield, on the campus, in the arenas of international diplomacy, in financial channels, in the media, and in every institution of opinion.
No one was more fit for that fight than Michael. And he didn’t just give at the office. As Eli recounts, Michael and Barbara’s sons Gabriel and Daniel put promising careers on hold to serve as Marine officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their daughter Simone served the Defense Department in key roles combating international terrorism, rising to the vital post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East.
There was a trope in the post-9/11 years that success in the amorphously labeled “War on Terror” could be achieved by going about our ordinary lives — “If we don’t go to the mall, the terrorists win.” It was an exercise in self-delusion.
A murderous ideology has to be taken head on and discredited. That’s the work Michael did every day, even as most of the bipartisan Beltway feared that confronting a totalitarianism rooted in an interpretation of Islamic scripture would tar every Muslim as a terrorist — a paralysis that, naturally, enabled the monsters in Tehran to oppress their Muslim subjects. And as the wars dragged on for years, not as combat but as futile nation-building, our “ordinary lives” at home changed dramatically. Security precautions inevitably eroded our liberties, inuring us to unprecedented levels of government monitoring and intrusiveness.
With all of that, the most damaging aspect of the government’s approach was the growing chasm between the public and the war effort. As America went to the mall, the burden of a global war fought in faraway hell holes fell exclusively on the shoulders of military families — the best of our society, but a vanishingly small percentage of it.
The family Michael and Barbara raised exemplifies a better America: one that grasps the centrality of sacrifice to the endurance of liberty. Their skin-in-the-game commitment to freedom is why America is great and can remain great.
A Reaganite, Michael was one of the visionaries of our nation as the shining city on a hill. He embodied an America that would spread freedom by living up to its promise, not by imposing its will but by being worthy of emulation — the staunchest of friends to those in need and the fiercest of enemies to the despots.
Michael Ledeen was one of a kind. For all his scintillating books and essays, for all his labors on behalf of those fighting oppression, the family he leaves us is his greatest monument to a life well lived. May his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.