Thankful that I was able to visit the Reagan Library. For those who have and wish to, the below video link will make you want to go!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BiVPyfQAOs
Friday, January 6, 2012
Monday, January 2, 2012
Ronald Reagan Statue Erected at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport
You can watch the unveiling presentation here
You can watch the dedication ceremony here
Ronald Reagan Statue Erected in Tbilisi, Georgia
This is not the Georgia of the United States; however, it would be a great idea for them to erect one too.
Ronald Reagan Statue Erected in Budapest, Hundary June 2011
http://blogs.wsj.com/emergingeurope/2011/06/29/ronald-reagan-statue-unveiled-in-budapest/
One wonders what the people of Budapest remember that some in our own country have forgotten...
Ronald Reagan: 100 Years by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation
by Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation
February 6, 2011 was the 100 year anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s birth in Tampico, Illinois. Reagan’s story is an inspiring one of someone who came from poverty but believed in the American dream taking it all the way to the White House. He inspired millions and moved a Nation from a state of lethargy and paralysis to one of leadership and action to spread democracy and freedom across the world. Young people today have a brighter future than they would have had if it were not for Reagan’s faith in God and love for the American Dream. It is difficult for a young person (and some of us who were there) to imagine what the world would have been like if Ronald Reagan was not elected President. However, we know what the world was like before Ronald Reagan became President, and we know that the direction our nation’s history was changed for the better because of his leadership. In spite of opponents to Reagan’s ideology, the evidence is manifest.
I have always appreciated what the conservative columnist George F. Will stated about Ronald Reagan’s accomplishments: “If you seek his monument look around at what you don't see. You don't see the Berlin Wall. You don't see the Iron curtain from Stetin to Trieste.” When Reagan came to the White House, the Soviet Union was on the march and the United States and fallen into a policy called “Mutually Assured Destruction”. The acronym for this policy is exactly what Reagan thought of it—MAD. He sought to reduce the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War and remove this constant threat of doom hanging over our futures. He knew there would be challenges for the United States in the future, but this challenge had to be met effectively or there might not have been a future. Modern critics try to discredit his accomplishments on the world stage; however, the feebleness of their attacks is manifest with all the monuments erected to Reagan in areas once controlled by hostile forces to Democracy and the United States. For example, two satellite nations of the former Soviet Union erected statues of Ronald Reagan one in Warsaw, Poland and another in Budapest, Hungary in 2011. The restored country of Georgia which rose out of the ashes of the Soviet Union erected a statue in honor of Ronald Reagan in their city of Tiblisi in November 2011. Additional statues have been erected in London, England in July 2011 and another one in Washington DC in November 2011 at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. These are just a few of the tributes of respect others had for President Ronald Reagan.
I always appreciated Ronald Reagan’s “Peace Through Strength” principle in ending the failed policies of dealing with global communism. He explained his foreign policy very concisely and clearly—“Our defense policy is based on a very simple premise: The United States will not start fights. We will not be the first to use aggression. We will not seek to occupy other lands or control other peoples. Our strategy is defensive; our aim is to protect the peace by ensuring that no adversaries ever conclude they could best us in a war of their choosing.” (Ronald Reagan: 100 Years, p. 173). Ronald Reagan supported the Strategic Defense Initiative and the effort to build a protective shield to protect nations from nuclear missiles of rogue nations built on their destruction of others. The trends in countries such as Iran show the foresight and wisdom of this vision.
Ronald Reagan: 100 Years is a beautifully bound book in tribute to the unique man. It covers his life from his beginnings in Tampico, Illinois to his final resting place in Simi Valley, California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. I received this book as a gift and was so impressed with its quality, photographs, writing that I read the entire volume with great satisfaction. I was surprised to read just how busy he was when he left the Presidency. Of course not everything went perfectly during the 1980s; even Ronald Reagan confessed this. There were things he wanted to accomplish that he was unable to do; e.g., balanced budget amendment, line-item veto, term limits for Congress and the removal of term limits for Presidents (excluding himself). Some seem to forget the Executive Branch is but one branch of three in our Federal Government and fail to realize that the Congress is the Legislative Branch. When Reagan came to power, the Congress was more opposed to his views than supportive. He was able to often bring them to his way of thinking and achieve great things with the support of the American people who helped persuade their elective officials of Reagan’s policies. There is a reason that Ronald Reagan has become the “gold standard” for modern Presidents. This volume is a great reminder or educational tool to explain why so many Americans hold Ronald Reagan in great esteem to this very day. If you are looking for a special book for an admirer of Ronald Reagan or an introduction to this great man, then this book is a great place to start. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation has produced an exemplary tribute to this great man.
Monday, July 25, 2011
The Secret Memo That Predicted the Soviet Collapse
The Secret Memo That Predicted the Soviet Collapseby Paul F. Kengor
It was 20 years ago this summer that the final disintegration of the Soviet Union rapidly unfolded. In June 1991, Boris Yeltsin was freely elected president of the Russian Republic, with Mikhail Gorbachev clinging to power atop the precarious USSR. In August, Communist hardliners attempted a dramatic coup against Gorbachev, prompting a stunning succession of declarations of independence by Soviet republics, with seven of them breaking away in August alone, and four more following through mid-December.
The writing was on the wall—not the Berlin Wall, which had collapsed two years earlier, but the graveyard of history, which would soon register the USSR as deceased. It was December 25, 1991, the day the West celebrates Christmas—a celebration the Communists had tried to ban—that Gorbachev announced his resignation, turning out the lights on an Evil Empire that had produced countless tens of millions of corpses.
Historians debate the credit that goes to various players for that collapse, from Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel, to name a few. These are the people who get books written about them. But there were many behind-the-scenes players who performed critical roles that have never seen the light of a historian’s word processor. Here I’d like to note one such player: Herb Meyer. Specifically, I’d like to highlight a fascinating memo Meyer wrote eight years before the Soviet collapse.
From 1981 to 1985, Meyer was special assistant to the director of central intelligence, Bill Casey, and vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. In the fall of 1983, he crafted a classified memo titled, “Why Is the World So Dangerous?” Addressed to Casey and the deputy director, John McMahon, it had a larger (though limited) audience within the intelligence community and the Reagan administration, including President Reagan himself. Later, it would earn Meyer the prestigious National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. Even so, the memo has eluded historians, which is a shame. It ought to rank among the most remarkable documents of the Cold War.
Meyer began his eight-page memo of November 30, 1983, by describing a “new stage” that had opened in the struggle between the free world and the Soviet Union. It was a “direction favorable” to the United States. He listed positive changes in America that suddenly had the USSR “downbeat.” Not only was the U.S. economy “recovering,” but Meyer foresaw a “boom” ahead, “with the only argument” having to do with its “breadth and duration.”
Meyer listed seven signs of America’s surge before providing even more symptoms of Soviet decline—a decline that was unrecognized by most pundits and academic Sovietologists. His insights into what he saw as an imminent Soviet collapse were prescient. After 66 years of Communist rule, the USSR had “failed utterly to become a country,” with “not one major nationality group that is content with the present, Russian-controlled arrangement.” It was “hard to imagine how the world’s last empire can survive into the twenty-first century except under highly favorable conditions of economics and demographics—conditions that do not, and will not, exist.”
“The Soviet economy,” Meyer insisted, “is heading toward calamity.”
Meyer nailed not only the Soviet Union’s economy but also its “demographic nightmare.” Here, he was way ahead of the curve, reporting compelling information on Russian birthrates, which were in free-fall. He recorded an astounding figure: Russian women, “according to recent, highly credible research,” “average six abortions.”
As for the Soviet Bloc, Meyer didn’t miss that either. “The East European satellites are becoming more and more difficult to control,” he wrote, emphasizing that it wasn’t merely Poland that was in revolt. “[O]ther satellites may be closer to their own political boiling points than we realize.”
“In sum,” concluded Meyer, “time is not on the Soviet Union’s side.”
He summed up with two predictions, nearly identically worded, as if to let the reader know he knew the magnitude of what he was saying: (1) “if present trends continue, we’re going to win the Cold War;” and (2) “if present trends continue we will win.” He quoted President Reagan’s May 1981 Notre Dame speech, where Reagan proclaimed that history would dismiss Soviet Communism as “some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” Meyer felt that Reagan was “absolutely correct,” adding that the USSR was “entering its final pages.” His memo projected a window no longer than 20 years.
Herb Meyer was dead on. I know of no other Cold War document as accurate as this one.
I recently talked to Meyer about his memo. He had no idea it had been declassified until someone sent it to him last month. “I was astonished,” Meyer wrote me in an e-mail, “and it’s a weird feeling to read something you’d written decades ago and hadn’t seen since.”
Meyer remembered well certain elements of the memo, particularly the Cold War predictions. He also had not forgotten the memo’s reception. Within the intelligence community, there was a general feeling that Meyer had lost his mind. That was just the start of the backlash.
The memo was leaked to syndicated columnists Evans & Novak, who devoted a column to it. There was subsequent uproar throughout Washington, which made Meyer very nervous. He was summoned to his boss’s office.
“Herb, right now you’ve got the smallest fan club in Washington,” Bill Casey told him grimly. As Meyer turned pale, Casey laughed: “Relax. It’s me and the president.”
Today, Meyer says with a chuckle: “If you’re going to have a small fan club—that’s it.”
CIA director Casey, like President Reagan, was committed to placing a dagger in the chest of Soviet Communism. He was pleased, and he encouraged Meyer.
Meyer recalls: “My orders were, in effect, to keep going.”
Meyer particularly remembers Reagan’s being shaken by the statement about Russian women averaging six abortions. To Meyer’s knowledge, Reagan “never went public with that astounding statistic…. Come to think of it, no one—except some Russians—ever talked about it.”
Of all the items in the memo, that one remains the most far-reaching.
Demographers today foresee Russia plummeting in population from 150 million to possibly 100 million by 2050. Meyer’s memo is a prophetic warning that isn’t finished. For Russians, the internal implosion isn’t over.
When we look back at the Cold War, we remember big names and big statements and documents. There’s nary a college course on the Cold War that excludes George Kennan’s seminal “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow in February 1946. Kennan’s memo prophetically captured what the free world faced from the USSR at the start of the Cold War, forecasting a long struggle ahead. Herb Meyer’s November 1983 memo likewise prophetically captured what the free world faced from the, but this time nearing the end of the Cold War, uniquely forecasting a long struggle about to close—with victory.
George Kennan’s memo is remembered in our textbooks and our college lectures. Herb Meyer’s memo merits similar treatment.
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SOURCE: http://www.visionandvalues.org/2011/07/the-secret-memo-that-predicted-the-soviet-collapse/
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