A memorial to the victims of Communism will be dedicated in Washington, D.C., today, on the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s historic admonition to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall. As part of the commemoration of the horrors of Communism, National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. will be presented the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation for his work to defeat the Evil Empire. To mark the occasion, National Review Online asked a group of friends and experts to remember what WFB did in the days of the Cold War and how he did it.

Mona Charen

It would be difficult to overstate Bill Buckley’s contribution to winning the Cold War. From the beginning of his coruscating career, he drew attention to the great moral chasm that separated the Communist world from the West. National Review ran so many articles by and about Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn that Chris Buckley once quipped that the magazine was “25 years of Solzhenitsyn and carpet ads.” Ronald Reagan, who has received (at last) some credit for bringing down the Berlin Wall and all that stood behind it got many of his ideas from Bill Buckley.

Bill has always had a knack for personalizing the abstraction of dealing with evil. I remember a piece he wrote when he was an observer at the United Nations about how to handle the problem of shaking hands with a Communist. No other prominent figure in America in the 1970s would have mused on that theme.

Buckley is rightly revered as a great leader of the American conservative movement and we are grateful for that. But there are millions of people now living in freedom who owe him even more.

– Mona Charen, a nationally syndicated columnist, is author of Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First.

Lee Edwards

1959 was not a good year for anti-Communists. Fidel Castro overthrew the old-time caudillo Batista and began installing a Marxist-Leninist regime in Cuba.

Mao Zedung had initiated the Great Leap Forward in China and before it shuddered to a stop, at least thirty million Chinese died of famine. The Soviets were bristling with confidence after their brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the launching of Sputnik, vowing to bury us. And then President Eisenhower invited Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the Butcher of Ukraine, to the United States. For many, it was as though FDR had asked Hitler to lunch at Hyde Park.

Young conservatives like myself were in despair. Would no one object to this grossly immoral invitation? Would no one speak out against this diplomatic travesty? One person would and did. William F. Buckley Jr. not only filled New York City’s Carnegie Hall with a rousing anti-Communist, anti-Khrushchev speech but so aroused those present they would have marched on the White House if so directed.

As Linda Bridges has rightly written, it was one of Bill Buckley’s great speeches. After excoriating America’s leaders for conferring “orthodox diplomatic recognition,” Bill went on to say that all was not lost, that “the central revelation of Western experience” is “that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep.”

He told a rapt audience that Khrushchev was not aware “that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. Even out of the depths despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him.”

And so we did a few decades later with the essential help of the words and the deeds of action intellectuals like Bill Buckley.

– Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, is author of The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America, among other books. Steven Hayward I started reading National Review and watching Firing Line in the 8th grade, thinking that emulating WFB’s vocabulary and posture would help me with girls. It didn’t work — I think the first girl whom I accused of “tergiversations” probably slapped me — but it did provide a bullet-proof excuse when my mom found a copy of Playboy tucked in my mattress: “But mom-it has an interview with William F. Buckley!” (See-the old cliché about “just reading it for the articles” is true.)

WFB began that interview (this was around 1971 or 1972, when détente was starting to flower) with the assertion that the most deleterious trend of the moment was “the philosophical acceptance of co-existence with the East.” Why “philosophical”?, Playboy wondered. It is one thing, WFB patiently explained, to make practical accommodations with nations that possess a nuclear arsenal, but quite another to efface the moral distinction between freedom and tyranny. Such transcendent clarity was always the requisite for winning the Cold War, and was much needed at a time when the “realism” of détente was causing the West to become incoherent. We fortunately recovered, with Ronald Reagan reviving the philosophical rejection of co-existence that was a key factor in demoralizing our vicious enemy.

– Steven F. Hayward is author of The Age of Reagan.

John O’Sullivan

It is pretty generally accepted that Bill Buckley is one of the principal founders of modern conservatism — up there along with Reagan, Friedman, and Hayek. Some of those who concede this do so, admittedly, because they have no very high opinion of conservatism and are content to give Bill credit for it. But that is not true about his equally valid claim to be one of the main figures who helped bring Communism to an end. Liberals have been asserting since 1989 that it was a united America led by Truman and Kennedy as much as by Nixon and Reagan that contained and eventually transcended the evil empire. In that account Bill becomes a minor figure who led a noisy anti-Communist McCarthyite rabble and — sure — kept it more or less civilized.

For an immediate antidote to this nonsense, visit Eastern Europe (of which more later.)

In fact Bill performed four great services to the cause of anti-Communism and to the succouring of its victims. His first was to make anti-Communism the glue that held an otherwise heterogeneous conservative coalition together. As the conservative movement grew, therefore, so it ensured that anti-Communism was kept in the forefront of public policy and the public mind. Second, he created the magazine, National Review, that became the meeting ground for anti-Communists of different stripes. Again, through NR, he kept inserting anti-Communists perspectives into a public debate that would otherwise have marginalized them before 1968 and overwhelmed them after 1968. Third, he gave a platform and a megaphone to the two most important anti-Communist intellectuals in American life after 1945: James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. Strategically and spiritually they gave Americans far better advice on the Cold War than did the liberal intellectuals of the “vital center” who anyway after 1968 began to equivocate and appease. Fourth, Bill himself dispelled the cultivated myth that anti-Communists were by their nature crude extremists or simplistic yokels by the simple device of being himself. Regularly defeating the faculties of Harvard and Yale in debate, he won over the first thousand names in the telephone directory to the anti-Communist cause.

In Eastern Europe he won something more important — the hearts and gratitude of the citizens of the captive nations. When I visited Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, I was treated as a hero and benefactor simply by virtue of being editor of NR. Dissidents told me how they had read smuggled copies of NR by torchlight under the bedclothes. New ministers in anti-Communist governments asked me if I could arrange a meeting with WFB so that they could thank him in person. Even those Soviets still clinging on wanted to persuade him that they weren’t so bad. And now that they were finished, he could afford to be gracious.

In sum: Bill led a fight that Chambers thought was lost and Burnham feared might be endless. And he won because his troops were a minority in the West but the great majority of the East.

— John O’Sullivan is author of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

Peter Robinson

“The great man or woman in history,” the philsopher Sidney Hook argues in his book, The Hero in History,

is someone of whom we can say on the basis of the available evidence that if they had not lived when they did, or acted as they did, the history of their countries and of the world, to the extent that they are intertwined, would have been profoundly different. Their presence, in other words, must have made a substantial difference with respect to some event or movement deemed important by those who attribute historical greatness to them.

Does William F. Buckley Jr. fit the description? He does indeed. He founded the conservative movement in America, giving it a voice, giving it substance, and giving it — a not insignificant matter — bravado. Think of it. In the late 1970s, the United States was suffering unemployment and inflation, both in double digits, while watching its geopolitical position steadily eroded by a worldwide Soviet advance. Scarcely more than a decade later, the United States had begun enjoying the prosperity and dynamism of the long economic boom that continues to this day. The Soviet Union? Officially defunct. How did this happen? The conservative movement achieved power, cutting taxes, deregulating markets, rebuilding our defenses, and championing human liberty — which is to say, enacting the program of William F. Buckley Jr. Without William F. Buckley, Jr., no conservative movement. And without the conservative movement, no renaissance of American power and ideals.

During the Eighties, as Daniel Oliver has noted, you couldn’t find a conservative, from the president of the United States to the editor of a college newspaper, who had not had dinner with Buckley, exchanged correspondence with Buckley, or at the very least heard Buckley speak. “Even today, it’s a lot like the apostolic succession,” Daniel says. “Everywhere you go, you’ll find conservatives who have experienced the laying on of hands of Bill Buckley.”

William F. Buckley Jr., a hero in history — and to each of his numberless friends.

– Peter Robinson wrote the famous Berlin Wall speech. He is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life.