1989: SERIOUS PEACE

This first week of October in 2008, we launch a new feature in To The Point.  It is entitled How We Won The Cold War: A Personal Account of the Greatest Adventure of Modern Times.  "Win the Cold War" for short in the left side bar. This calls for an explanation, and a confession.

The confession first.  I have absolutely no excuse whatever for not completing The Jade Steps.  After completing 33 chapters, I have only the concluding last chapter and the epilogue to go, and I haven't done it.

So I hope that by starting another book, it will force and embarrass me enough to finish the historical novel.

How We Won The Cold War, however, is no novel.  It's the way things really happened.  It's the book my literary agent (and avid TTP'er) Theron Raines has said what I must write, the book I owe to history.

The situation is this.  I have completed the first six chapters, which I'll be posting for the next successive six weeks.  They are setting-the-scene chapters which give me time to get back from my travels and get back to work (yes, this means finishing The Jade Steps as well!).

Hopefully, so many of you will bug me so much to keep posting the next chapter in the series that I will actually get the book written to completion.

So here we go with an Introductory Note and Chapter One, 1989: Serious Peace.  Wish me luck.

How We Won The Cold War: A Personal Account of the Greatest Adventure of Modern Times

Introduction 

This book is not meant to be a comprehensive account of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Empire.  It is a personal account. 

The  "We"  in the book's title refers to America in general, and collectively to all those individuals during the presidency of Ronald Reagan whose efforts succeeded in America's winning the Cold War.  I was one of those individuals and while I knew many others, I was only one among them and did not know them all.

So this is a personal account, and in two ways.  First, it is the story of how one single person, not working for the government or any government agency, just all by himself on his lonesome can still have an actual impact on history. 

In my case, I credit this far more to luck and circumstances than brains and ability, but I hope it will inspire people to understand that they, too, can make an individual difference in the world.

Second, this is an adventure story, a personal adventure.  You can read umpteen books about the Cold War and most will bore you to tears with cold dispassionate dry professorial analysis.  Yet for those who were there, for the small band of Reaganauts dedicated to ridding the world of the Evil Empire, winning the Cold War was an astounding, thrilling, magnificent adventure.

Winning the Cold War as an adventure story – ever heard it talked about that way?  That's what it was.  It's a story that's never been told.  It's real history, it really happened.  So find a comfortable chair, settle in, put your feet up, and let me tell you the story of the greatest adventure of modern times.

Chapter One  

1989:  SERIOUS PEACE

Little more than nine months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in late January of 1989, I had an impromptu lunch with Gennadi Gerasimov, personal spokesman for Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and the official spokesman of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, in Acapulco, Mexico.

We were both speaking at a conference of the Young Presidents Organization, an international group of businessmen. Gerasimov was there at Gorbachev's bequest to persuade them to invest in the Soviet Union. My speech was entitled, "The Coming Collapse of the Soviet Union," and in it I said that investing in the U.S.S.R. was an excellent way to lose your money because before very long the Soviet Union would cease to exist.

My prediction at the time seemed so farfetched that those YPO members who already had put money into the Soviet economy got so upset with me that they suggested I had been smoking some Acapulco Gold.

During a luncheon break, my wife Rebel, never the shy one, spotted Gerasimov, swept into the seat next to him, patted the empty chair to her right for me to sit down, gave him a dazzling smile, and asked, "May we join you?"

Gerasimov was gracious, I was dubious. He was a colonel in the KGB, and had to be familiar with my reputation as the founder of the Reagan Doctrine, since the Soviet press had denounced me as an "ideological gangster." Nonetheless, he was one of Gorbachev's closest associates, so I said what the hell to myself, let's go for it.

Naturally, he soon was talking about "peace." While others at the table promptly recognized the signal to turn their brains into mush and began nodding their heads sagely over how important "peace" was, I decided to cut the silliness short.

"The trouble, Gennadi, is that 'peace' for Soviets and Americans mean very different things. "

"What do you mean, Jack? Peace is peace."

"No, the Russian word mir does not correspond to the English word peace. Your government insists that whenever it uses the word mir in its pronouncements and propaganda, it be translated in English as peace. But 'mir' is not ‘peace'."

"What is it, then?"

"Order. For Americans, peace means the absence of violence. For you Soviet Communists, mir means the absence of disobedience. That's very different. For us, peace means freedom: people being left alone without violence so they can conduct their lives and work towards their goals peacefully. For you guys, 'peace' means obedience: the 'vanguard of the proletariat' ‑‑ your buddies on the Politburo ‑‑ giving the orders, and everybody else obeys. When the 'masses' are all good little boys and girls and obey their masters, you have order, and then you have 'peace': mir."1.

Silence reigned at the table, while Gerasimov stared at me without a trace of expression. By now, I was revved, so I plowed ahead before he could reply.

"Tell you what, let's talk about real peace. The people I work with in Washington, we're not interested in peace as an armed truce. America has a real peace with its former enemies against whom we've fought real wars, like Japan and Germany, or England and Spain for that matter, all of whom are now our friends and allies. We can have the same kind of real peace with your country as well."

"And what do we have to do to get this 'real peace' of yours, Jack?" he asked, eyeing me warily.

There was no other choice now but to go all the way. I tried to respond matter‑of‑factly and quietly. I wanted my words to be flat, without any argumentative sarcasm.

"The way to real peace, Gennadi, is for your government to stop being a colonial power. Just as England and France and the other Western powers gave up their empires decades ago, now you must give up yours ‑‑ and I don't just mean freedom for Cuba or Angola in the Third World, or even Poland or Hungary in Eastern Europe. I mean freedom for Ukraine, for Georgia, for Lithuania ‑‑ even for Russia itself."

With a faint smile of condescension, he smoothly replied, "You mean an invitation to disintegration."

I did my best to be just as smooth and conversational. "The disintegration is inevitable. The real question, Gennadi…" I looked straight at him… "is, will it be peaceful?"

The unruffled veneer of the professional diplomat vanished for a brief second as his head snapped back in shock. No one had ever said anything like that to him ever before. He made no reply and we looked at each other silently. Rebel wisely decided to break the spell. "So, Gennadi…" she broke in, and began engaging him in small talk.

1. In Marxist ideology, mir can only be achieved only through the world‑wide liquidation of exploitative capitalism. The Soviet Military Encyclopedia states: "Peace [mir] is impossible without socialism… A truly lasting peace is impossible and cannot be achieved without a proletarian revolution." (Moscow: USSR Ministry of Defense, 1976‑1980, vol. 5, 1978, p. 316.). In Lenin's words: "As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace.  In the end, one or the other will triumph ‑‑ a funeral dirge will be sung either over the Soviet republic or over world capitalism." V. I. Lenin, "Speech to Moscow Party Nuclei Secretaries, n November 26, 1920. Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1943), vol. 8, p. 297.