Annals of Ignominy

National Review, March 24, 2003 by Jay Nordlinger

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, by Mona Charen (Regnery, 308 pp., $27.95)

We're a forward-looking people, we Americans. That's a good thing, no doubt. We do not glance back, but keep our eye on today, and on the bright future. That's lucky for the Left, because they have gotten away with murder over the years. They can say or do whatever they like, no matter how silly, repugnant, or treasonable. And all is forgiven, not even remembered. Does it work this way for the Right? I don't think so. In some ways, Sen. McCarthy -- Joe, not Gene -- is more with us today than when he was alive, drinkin' and accusin'. I once said, only half-jokingly, that my education in American history consisted of Jim Crow, Japanese internment, and McCarthyism -- year after year.

And Charles Lindbergh never quite recovered from his pre-1939 softness on the Nazis, even with a kidnapped and murdered baby. But fools or knaves of the Left? They simply glide on.

Take something quite recent. Before President Bush withdrew from the ABM treaty, many people said that the sky would fall -- that an American withdrawal would inflame Moscow, begin a new arms race, lead to Armageddon. Such politicians as Joe Biden were hysterical on the subject. Then Bush went ahead and withdrew -- and there was hardly a ripple. The administration just proceeded with SDI. Biden and other Democrats were more offended for Moscow than Putin was, which was embarrassing -- or should have been -- for the Democrats.

But no one ever goes back, holding pundits, analysts, and pols to account. We just "move on," as Bill Clinton and his people like to say. Moving on is a very fine thing to do, when we do so chastened, enlightened, and better. But that's not the kind of moving on Clinton et al. are talking about.

One who is not content to move on -- just yet -- is Mona Charen, the conservative columnist. Her new book, Useful Idiots, looks back at the Cold War, recording -- excruciatingly and mercilessly -- who said or did what, when. This is supposed to be verboten. Taboo. It's no fair, this going back. We're all Cold Warriors now, don't you know, in the collective, and cockeyed, memory. Just as every Frenchman was a Resistance fighter after 1945, we all get to be Cold Warriors now. Even McGovern, I suppose.

Early on -- that is, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- Ronald Reagan caught wind of this and didn't like it. He spoke at the 1992 Republican convention, one of his final appearances. Noting that speakers at the Democratic convention had said "We won the Cold War," repeatedly and formulaically, the ex-president quipped, "What do you mean, 'we'?" Exactly.

But two presidential elections later, Democratic candidate Bill Bradley was saying, "Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, we were sure about one thing: We knew where we stood on foreign policy." This is brazen revisionism. As Michael Barone remarked in a recent National Journal essay, the Democratic party effectively gave up on the Cold War after 1972. And it was often outright hostile to the Republicans' determination to stick with it. Mona Charen has the goods, on everybody. She doesn't shrink from calling a Red a Red, a fellow-traveler a fellow-traveler, and a naif a naif. It is sort of stunning to see her go. Fear of the charge of "McCarthyism" is supposed to stay our hands. Time after time, an obit of a Communist is published in the New York Times. And we read that the deceased had been an "activist," a "progressive," maybe even a "radical" -- but it seems bad form, somehow, to identify him as a Communist, or to remember him as a servant of Stalin, or of "Fidel." (They're still serving him.)

I must confess that there are merits in not going back -- it allows you to get on with life, less troubled. To read what liberals -- not the hard Left, but standard liberals -- said when the Khmer Rouge came to power is sickening. Sickening. And if you know what Jane Fonda did in Vietnam, how can you look at her in a workout tape, or in a movie? If you know what Peter Jennings said about Nicaragua, how can you watch ABC News? Charen uses an epigram from Saul Bellow, for one of her chapters: "A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is great."

In these pages, all the episodes, all the figures, come vividly back. Helen Caldicott, Jonathan Schell, Carl Sagan, Jason Robards, Samantha Smith. (Remember her? The girl who wrote the letter to Andropov, and who was later asked to question the Democratic presidential candidates?) I'd forgotten that Sen. Alan Cranston based his entire campaign on the nuclear freeze. The man who beat him, Walter Mondale, said, "The fact is that four years of Ronald Reagan has made this world more dangerous. Four more will take us closer to the brink." Les Aspin, a fairly moderate Democrat, once sighed, "It ought to be possible to stake out a position to the left of Reagan and not be crazy about it." But it often seemed not to be.