Bad Timing

Stop Press: Time magazine endorses Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Its current issue notes that the Soviet system was “not just bad or inept but inherently destructive, its stupidity regularly descending into evil.” Since this admission occurs in a Time cover story on how Eastern Europe regained its freedom in 1989, we may infer that the said system was heretofore an empire. And placing the two ideas together, we get an “evil empire”—although Time’s computer is probably programmed to use the phrase only in pejorative irony. Its 1983 report on the President’s speech described it as “fire and brimstone,” and “bellicose.”

Now for the bad news. This tardy surrender to Mr. Reagan’s analysis was set in the context of wide-eyed schoolgirl adulation for Mr. Gorbachev as “Man of the Decade.” He is, gushes Time, “the Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud of Communism all wrapped into one,” “a visionary . . . the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan … a global navigator.” Such things were, of course, said about Ceausescu, but only by the ventriloquist’s dummies of the controlled local press. Time presumably believes them.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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Stop Press: Time magazine endorses Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Its current issue notes that the Soviet system was “not just bad or inept but inherently destructive, its stupidity regularly descending into evil.” Since this admission occurs in a Time cover story on how Eastern Europe regained its freedom in 1989, we may infer that the said system was heretofore an empire. And placing the two ideas together, we get an “evil empire”—although Time’s computer is probably programmed to use the phrase only in pejorative irony. Its 1983 report on the President’s speech described it as “fire and brimstone,” and “bellicose.”

Now for the bad news. This tardy surrender to Mr. Reagan’s analysis was set in the context of wide-eyed schoolgirl adulation for Mr. Gorbachev as “Man of the Decade.” He is, gushes Time, “the Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud of Communism all wrapped into one,” “a visionary . . . the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan … a global navigator.” Such things were, of course, said about Ceausescu, but only by the ventriloquist’s dummies of the controlled local press. Time presumably believes them.