WASHINGTON — The death of Fred Iklé last week inspires me to
prophesy. Thus far only the redoubtable Wall Street
Journal has remarked on Fred’s 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 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 Ronald
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 it does not approve of and renders the facts agreeable to
moribund Liberals. Thus the other day on the Washington
Post’s “Style” page some Kultursmogist reported on a
soirée at the Motion Picture Association of America convened to
mull over how President “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 President
Reagan has become domesticated. He is presented as being almost a
Liberal, defending polite society from the bad guys, people like
Iklé.
No conservative known to me was present at the Motion
Picture Association of America presentation, which was presided
over by a Democrat, its chairman Chris Dodd. There was Mr. Dodd and
Andrea Mitchell and Colin Powell and someone by the name of Jeff
Bewkes. Oh, yes, and John 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 “the
two most important political figures of their generation.” Ken
Duberstein was also there. He accompanied President Reagan to my
home for dinner in 1988, but I really would not call him a
conservative. Fred Iklé was a conservative.
Fred was undersecretary 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 for
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. In July 2010 he appeared in
The American Spectator’s pages for the last time. 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 that 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 in 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.
