Bush Has the Same Enemies Reagan Did

George Melloan, in the WSJ (June 15, 2004):

... some of the same people who were attacking Ronald Reagan in the 1980s are still around doing the same thing to President Bush. Teddy Kennedy was calling Ronald Reagan a warmonger in 1984, thus feeding useful nuggets to KGB propagandists; he today chortles that Iraq is President Bush's"Vietnam." Senator John Kerry, now on the campaign trail accusing the president of irresponsibility, was similarly scornful of President Reagan's moves to resist Soviet and Cuban efforts to grab Central America. He called the president's well-founded fears of an invasion of Honduras by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas"ridiculous."

In a recent newspaper article lauding Senator Kerry, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.— that well-known chronicler of Democratic Party triumphs and Republican failures— wanted to make sure that George W. gets the blame if things go wrong in Iraq. He wrote that the war"was a matter of presidential choice, not of national necessity."

In 1982, Mr. Schlesinger came back from a trip to Moscow to report that there was fat chance that Ronald Reagan could push the Soviet Union into a social and economic collapse. Things were looking bright there, he said, admiringly. But of course that is exactly what Reagan did by touching off an arms race that overtaxed the sluggish, muscle-bound communist system.

I'm indebted for these recollections to Peter Schweizer's excellent book, published in 2002 by Doubleday, titled"Reagan's War." As he points out, Democrats were not the only Reagan doubters. A majority of the president's own cabinet was against the massive $32 billion military-budget increase he launched two weeks after entering the Oval Office. He replied that his primary responsibility was for the security of the U.S. and that the arms buildup would go ahead.

Former Republican presidents Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon also thought Mr. Reagan was spending too much on defense. Republican Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, a former corporate boy wonder (Bell & Howell), took it upon himself to counsel Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin not to"play into Reagan's hands" by taking a hard-line position.

The stakes were high in those Cold War years. As Mr. Schweizer recounts, President-elect Reagan just before his 1981 inauguration was briefed on the procedures to be followed if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack. Because Soviet missile submarines, called"boomers," were cruising in the Atlantic not far off the American coast, the president would have to decide how to respond to an attack within a space of six to eight minutes. An officer carrying the"football," a briefcase with the codes for launching a U.S. counterstrike, was standing nearby as Mr. Reagan took his oath of office.

In harking back to those years, it seems clear that Ronald Reagan was no more free of political adversaries than George W. Bush today. The idea that he got along better than Mr. Bush with Europe doesn't hold up to close scrutiny either. His support for a NATO plan to deploy Pershing II rockets and cruise missiles in Germany to counter Soviet SS-20 intermediate missiles trained on Europe provoked protest riots in Rome, Bonn and Berlin. Charges that he was a wild-eyed Western" cowboy" were similar to those leveled against President Bush today.