OPINION:
The death of Fred Ikle last week inspires me to prophesy. Thus far, only the redoubtable Wall Street Journal has remarked on his passing. That he was a formidable mind during the Cold War and important to the peaceful settlement of that decades-long struggle is remembered thanks to the Journal. Yet to much of the rest of the media, he is a minor figure, perhaps a menacing figure. We shall see what they say, but I am not holding my breath. This is the way liberalism creates the Kultursmog, which is to say, the politicized culture that surrounds us.
Now for my prediction: I can foresee the day, decades hence, when some professor of history will come down to the faculty lounge and notify his trusted colleagues of an astonishing discovery. Perhaps he will begin with this: “They weren’t all idiots and racists and dunderheads.” The prof will, of course, be speaking of the members of the conservative movement, the people who began to revive America around their leader, President Reagan. He will have discovered that those conservatives who resolved the Cold War and got the economy growing again knew just what they were doing. What the professor will use for research, I cannot say. There is plenty of evidence lying around contemporary America, but it is ignored in the standard commentary and history of our times.
That is how the Kultursmog works. It deletes the persona of which it does not approve and renders the facts agreeable to moribund liberals. Thus, the other day in The Washington Post’s Style section, some Kultursmogist reported on a soiree at the Motion Picture Association of America that had been convened to mull over how “Reagan’s movie career affected his presidency.” Presumably, the discussion was serious. In years gone by, it would have been sneering and risible. But now Reagan has become domesticated. He is presented as being almost a liberal, defending polite society from the bad guys, people like Mr. Ikle.
No conservative known to me was present at the MPAA presentation, which was presided over by a Democrat, its chairman, Chris Dodd. There were Mr. Dodd, Andrea Mitchell, Colin L. Powell and someone by the name of Jeff Bewkes. Oh, yes, and John F. Harris was there from Politico. He is the objective journalist who, in his book “The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House” assessed the Clintons to be “the two most important political figures of their generation.” Ken Duberstein also was there. He accompanied President Reagan to my home for dinner in 1988, but I really would not call him a conservative. Fred Ikle was a conservative.
Fred was undersecretary of defense for defense policy from 1981 to 1987. Born in Switzerland, he came to America in 1946 and in time joined the Reagan Revolution. He was a uniquely gifted defense strategist but also very competent across a wide area of intellectual life. With the illustrious Albert Wohlstetter, he devised U.S. nuclear defense strategy during some of the most dangerous days of the Cold War. At some time in the 1970s, Bob Bartley, the great editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, introduced us during a policy seminar, I believe, in Geneva. From that time on, Fred always made time for me and my writers to be briefed on threats to the free world. He sat down with us at editorial lunches and kept us apprised of strategic developments almost to the very end. He appeared in the American Spectator’s pages for the last time in July 2010. He was 86 years old.
In the 1970s, he opposed arms control as imprudent and shortsighted and favored a credible deterrent as a safer strategy. While at the Pentagon, he was instrumental in getting the Strategic Defense Initiative going and deploying midrange nuclear missiles in Europe, to the anger of the Soviet bloc. He was a proponent of Reagan’s arms buildup, which bankrupted the Soviet Union, and of sending Stinger missiles to Afghanistan, where the red army began to doubt its invincibility.
Through all his public life, he was a cheerful advocate of intellect on behalf of national security and personal liberty. Into his early 80s, he was on scientific boards planning strategy and warning of threats to America. Americans owe him a lot.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of the American Spectator and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. He is author of “After the Hangover: The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery” (Thomas Nelson, 2010).
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