STUCK ON SUPER-STUPID!

I listened to John Lewis Gaddis on NPR today about his new book on The Cold War. Gaddis is now perhaps our most distinguished historian and his recent book Surprise, Security, and the American Experience is a brilliant excursion through 225 years of American history explaining how our reaction to 9/11 fits into prior U.S. history and effectively producing an excellent argument putting President Bush’s policies into a broader context.

Gaddis’s new book will become a must-read for serious students of American history, as the Cold War remains at the center of some of the present political spectrum’s permanent refraction points. Gaddis had to fend off a caller from Berkeley [!] who of course absolved President Reagan of any responsibility for ending the Cold War. It was all Gorbachev’s doing, according to the leftist mantra intoner. Patiently, the Yale Professor walked the caller through some uncomfortable facts for the left. First, Reagan had been in favoring of the dissolution of the East Bloc since before he became California governor and had made it his career mission. Second, Reagan’s placing of Pershing missiles in Central Europe pushed the USSR into a situation which made its budget for military overwhelmingly oppressive. Third, Star Wars pushed the USSR even further into bankruptcy.

Gaddis did not have to mention that Reagan’s initiatives were done despite the unceasing kicking and screaming of the Democrats, who now have the effrontery to claim that Reagan's initiatives didn’t cause Commie collapse!

Gaddis had some interesting comments on just how well-penetrated the U.S. government had become by Soviet agents under FDR and HST. Luckily, however, Stalin and Khrushchev were both ideological animals stuck on stupid and all the agents like Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and other senior U.S. spies could do was give them good information, which both totalitarians promptly ignored when the facts didn’t fit their Communist dogma.

Therefore, the USSR did not predict the Marshall Plan, because capitalists were too greedy. You can read it in Das Kapital. Sergei K. thought his saber-rattling in 1956 caused Britain, France, and Israel to withdraw from Suez. Therefore, this lifelong delusional shoe-pounding alcoholic believed he could rattle the young JFK out of Cuba in similar fashion. Gaddis also brought up some neglected info, including Reagan’s lifelong wish to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

I for one am going to buy the new Gaddis book ASAP.