‘Reagan’s 40-Year War Against Communism’ vs. Obama’s 50-Year War for it

Reagan’s 40-Year War Against Communism

Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Thursday, June 10, 2004

In a letter to a friend Ronald Reagan once wrote: “But bearing what we cannot change and going on with what God has given us, confident there is a destiny, somehow seems to bring a reward we wouldn’t exchange for any other. It takes a lot of fire and heat to make a piece of steel.”

These powerful words were not crafted at the height of his presidency, but in 1972, when the cauldron that was Ronald Reagan was already forging its steel.

Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the seminal “Reagan’s War,” gets impatient with those who still harbor the notion that Ronald Reagan was merely the incidental occupant of the White House when the former Soviet Union imploded of its own weight.

The fact is, argues the scholar and author, Ronald Reagan is credited with the victory in the Cold War not just by many armchair analysts – but also by the enemy. And who else would know better than those bitten by the Reagan steel?

There was a grave reason, Schweizer maintains, why at arms summits, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev frantically offered increasingly gigantic cuts in strategic missiles – first 50 percent, then all of them – if Reagan would just abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative, as “Star Wars” was formally known.

Genrikh Grofimenko, a former adviser to Leonid Brezhnev, has noted for the historic record: “Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that you won the Cold War because of your president’s insistence on SDI.”

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