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Six Cold-War Western Heroes
Insight on the News, August 2, 1999 by Eli Lehrer
Reagan, Truman, Adenauer, Churchill, Solzhenitsyn and Wojtyla -- a soon-to-be published book proclaims these men as the heroes who waged and won the Cold War.
In downtown Washington's Ronald Reagan International Trade Center there is a rough chunk of concrete -- part of the Berlin Wall that the 40th president challenged Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down. To those who notice, that steel-reinforced slab covered with political graffiti is a reminder of the Cold War victory of democratic capitalism over totalitarian socialism. In March 1999, the Department of Defense formally recognized that conflict as a discrete historical event and gave a Cold War service award to a generation of men and women who served in the military between 1948 and 1991.
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Today, 10 years after a mostly nonviolent series of revolutions toppled communism around the world, scholars and pundits finally have turned their attention toward a search for heroes of the Cold War.
Joseph Shattan, a White House speechwriter during the Bush administration, has written a book devoted to this search. In the forthcoming work, Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War (Heritage Foundation, November 1999), he selects presidents Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, British prime minister Winston Churchill, Russian writer and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II as the Cold War's foremost heroes of the era.
"Of course, plenty of others deserve recognition," says Shattan. "The fact is that we should recognize someone. In the Bush administration, I was writing speeches and, for good reasons, we didn't want to offend Gorbachev so we never really talked about the heroes. Now, with this history behind us, it's time to recognize who the heroes really were."
Although the historians and policymakers Insight spoke with expressed a variety of views about the Cold War's heroes, all agreed with two of Shattan's choices: Truman and Karol Wojtyla -- the Polish archbishop who went on to become Pope John Paul II. Truman played a key role in laying the groundwork for Western engagement in the Cold War, while the pope provided moral support to the organizations that ultimately overthrew communism.
Truman shifted from Franklin Roosevelt's wartime policy of cooperation with the Soviets to a policy more aggressively countering dictator Josef Stalin's imperial ambitions. Through the Marshall Plan his administration saw the rebuilding of Western Europe, and through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization it took on the responsibility of defending it against invasion.
Most importantly, Truman's massive infusions of aid to noncommunist governments in Greece and Turkey ensured that both countries remained more or less in the Western camp. The formal start of the Cold War came under the Truman administration as a U.S.-led airlift (lasting from June 1948 to May 1949) circumvented a Soviet blockade of the divided city of Berlin. Germany's traditional capital, Berlin then consisted of separate U.S., French, British and Soviet zones but sat isolated in the middle of the Soviet zone of Germany itself. The airlift eventually convinced the U.S.S.R. to lift the blockade and put West Germany under the leadership of Adenauer (see sidebar) on Cold War footing.
A generation after the airlift's end, John Paul II played a key role in supporting many of the movements that led to communism's downfall. Under his leadership, the Roman Catholic Church expanded its Cold War mission from a narrow defense of the church to a morally principled defense of human rights and religious freedom for all. Combined with support for Solidarity, the independent trade union in his native Poland, Pope John Paul II deprived the communists of any claim to moral legitimacy.
To those on the right, Reagan has a legacy every bit the equal of Truman and Wojtyla, though the left and survivors of the era's foreign-policy establishment continue to deny this. Criticism of Reagan's foreign-policy legacy focuses mostly on the idea that the Soviet system's collapse would have happened anyway, a view espoused by Robert Maddox, an historian at Penn State University. "On both the right and the left, people failed to realize what bad shape the [communist] system was in" he says. "Reagan moved things along, but he didn't cause the collapse."
Others disagree. Charles Lichenstein, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington and conservative former U.S. alternate representative to the United Nations, argues that Reagan and Pope John Paul II represented an unbeatable combination. "What did the Soviets do to deserve having both of them come into power at the same time?" he asks ironically. "It was terrible luck for them, but that's what undid communism."
Solzhenitsyn, whom Reagan received at the White House, never held political office or made policy. His books, however, played a key role in turning public opinion against communism both in his native Russia and in the West. His first major published work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, described the life of a prison-camp inmate in Stalin's gulag. Published in 1962 with the official blessing of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the book had a revolutionary impact in the Soviet Union -- and an even greater one in the West, where it brought home the horrors of the totalitarian state.
