CONSTANTINE MENGES – IN MEMORIAM

On July 11, a dear friend of mine and a great friend of America’s passed away from cancer – Constantine Menges. When I first met Constantine in the White House in 1983, he already had a legendary career in the US intelligence community. Bill Casey had him detailed from the CIA to President Reagan’s National Security Council, where he played an absolutely critical role in implementing the Reagan Doctrine resulting in the demise of the Soviet Empire.

It was Constantine who took me to meet Bill Casey for the first time and outline a strategy of support for anti-Soviet freedom fighters. We collaborated closely for the next several years in the effort to rid the world of Soviet Communism – but it wasn’t simply that we were comrades in anti-communist arms. Constantine was such an admirable man – always thoughtful, calm, balanced, with both a brilliant mind and an unbroached intellectual integrity.

The last time I saw Constantine was when he joined a Reagan reunion dinner in Washington last month a few days after President Reagan’s passing. Constantine regaled us as usual not just with his stories about the Reagan White House but his contemporary insights ranging from Iran to China to Venezuela. We all noticed that he had aged rapidly (he was 64) – but that’s all we thought it was. He didn’t tell anyone that he had terminal cancer.

I will miss Constantine, and so will America.

[For a more in-depth exposition of Constantine and his accomplishments, here is a eulogy by a colleague, Thor Ronay of the International Assessment and Strategy Center in Washington]

Constantine and America, by Thor Ronay
July 12, 2004

Constantine Menges was a patriot, strategic thinker, and an accomplished national security official who served his country with honor and distinction. And, as important to him as a teacher, he was not only a trusted counsel for Members of Congress and Administration officials (of both parties) — but a valued mentor to several younger national security practitioners who went on to serve in all levels of government and policy leadership.

In a classic American story, Constantine was an immigrant whose professor father, after being arrested in 1937 for publicly opposing Hitler, upon release wisely fled Germany. Constantine, born on the run in Turkey on the first day of WWII, (9/1/39) arrived six years later in the US. After graduating from Columbia, Constantine began a career in service to his adopted country, first at Hudson, recruited by Herman Kahn, then at RAND (one of the first cohort developing Soviet nuclear targeting strategies), and then in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan Administrations. From the dock to the White House in one lifetime.

Aside from his training in both physics and security policy, and his broad education in political history (which he taught at Wisconsin), he knew that as important as how things worked was how to work them for positive change, not mere stewardship. From the beginning, Constantine understood the importance of what he called "political action" and "political education" in service of national security at home and freedom abroad. He also believed in the need for advocates, particularly conservatives, to match their ideological determination with the necessary if burdensome requisites both of bureaucratic infighting and strict adherence to the facts — all while never giving any quarter to opponents.

Constantine’s ability to conceptualize and guide political warfare in support of democracy was perhaps his strongest contribution; a skill he would lament is now almost completely absent from the US arsenal. He was an early supporter of the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, a co-founder of the Democracy International (1978), and played a major coordinating role in countering Soviet front activities and coalitions for over 30 years — having been present helping people to escape when the Berlin Wall was being built. (He was on the line similarly in Mississippi during the height of the voter rights struggles in the "long hot summer" of 1963.)

Throughout his career Constantine helped ensure nongovernmental groups and individuals, in the US and abroad, who could effectively counter communist propaganda or build coalitions for freedom were supported. These often included social democrats and former communists — something that made a number of his less strategically minded conservative confreres a bit uneasy on occasion (support for Duarte over D’Aubisson in 1984 El Salvador is a case in point) — but which invariably proved most effective.

In government, in academia, through publishing and speaking, and in the think-tank world he stressed the importance of the idea of ‘principled freedom’ and the need both to build and to protect new democracies — always aware of their fragility, and of the tendency of the US and others to leave the newborn polities unguarded. Current events in Venezuela and Russia did not surprise him, but he believed sustained democracy assistance would have made these transitions less violent and more quickly sustainable.

Constantine wrote books and articles about the transition to Democracy from both regimes of the Left and the Right at a time when the authoritative Foundation Directory did not even list "democracy" as a grant or program area — much less indicate the cottage industry ‘democracy’ was to become.

In 1979, he wrote an article in the NY Times, presciently titled "Democracy for the Latins" –seriously arguing that the time was at hand for 340 million people to the south of the US to live under democratic governments, and suggesting that this be a US policy goal. Unsurprisingly, the usual academic and professional foreign policy establishment naysayers scoffed.

Citing the examples of Portugal and Spain, including the overt, covert and nongovernmental support roles played by western democracies in ensuring those transitions, and noting the positive trends in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Bolivia who were, in the late 1970s, voluntarily phasing out military rule, Constantine outlined a strategy for democracy to "compete and win." A little over a decade later, despite the active opposition of those same doubters, every country in Latin America had a democratic government. 500 million people were free. During that period, Constantine was on the job.

While he served three Presidents, his service in the Reagan years was, both at CIA and the NSC, was the most vital — especially in Latin America. While many take credit after the fact for what became known as the "Reagan Doctrine" — it was Constantine who, in 1968, wrote the original RAND paper that became the Reagan Doctrine, "Democratic Revolutionary Insurgency as an Alternative Strategy" — arguing that "Communist regimes are very vulnerable to a democratic national revolution that is conducted with skill and the determination to succeed." He knew there had to be a military component to match the political work; neither alone would be sufficient.

Twelve years later, Constantine’s update of that strategy — applied to Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Grenada and Angola — was part of the 1980 Reagan transition work. Not an Ivory Tower tinkerer or post facto pundit, Constantine was in Argentina working on preliminary training and intelligence sharing for the ‘Contras’ before the Administration even took office.

It was this combination of vision, and the ability to clearly and convincingly outline it in actionable plans, that appealed to both President Reagan and CIA Director Casey — and which led them to choose Constantine for senior most positions on Latin American policy at the most trying time for that portfolio.

It is not to much to say that millions of people around the world, but particularly in Latin America, owe their freedom in some measure to the tireless efforts of Constantine Menges. Bill Buckley wrote, "Constantine Menges is among the wisest and ablest of those who have sought to realize Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy goals."

After the Reagan era, Constantine worked at AEI writing, inter alia: a critically acclaimed book on the need and preferred modalities for German reunification; a history of the Cold War; and, a memoir of the internal battles to implement, rather than ‘reform,’ President Reagan’s national security policy. He launched the Transitions to Democracy Program at The George Washington University and revived the venerable journal "Problems of Communism" (abandoned by the US Govt. after decades as the leading publication on the issues), re-launching it as "Problems of Post Communist Transition."

In recent years Constantine continued his work on Russia and China, and tirelessly pursued a range of "political action" activities — letters, op-eds, testimony and speeches — aimed at targets such as Castro’s Cuba and Chavez’ Venezuela, pointing again to the threat posed by destabilizing coalitions of antidemocratic forces and the costs of delaying action supportive of democratic forces.

The week before his untimely passing Constantine was slated to be a panelist at a Hudson Institute conference on the US-Taiwan-PRC relationship. He was concerned about China’s military threat and its potential to support anti-American coalitions in the Middle East and elswhere; and, at the same time, he was concerned about the cohering of democracies in the defense of freedom. In this case: how the US could best stand with the 27 million people of Taiwan, and how we might prepare now for supporting proactively democracy in mainland China, and of course, how those two properly are related.

That was Constantine Menges, giving his all to support the vision of democracy and freedom. "It’s not inevitable," he always said of democracy, "but it’s certainly achievable by people of good will and strong conviction. And, it’s Always in the best interest of the United States" Freedom has lost a friend and the country has lost a Patriot.

[NB, It was a privilege to have worked with Constantine during the Reagan Administration and at George Washington University where we co-founded the China Security and Democracy Project and published the journal, "Problems of Post Communist Transition" ]

Constantine is survived by his wife Nancy and son Christopher. Further details may be available from the Hudson Institute in Washington, 202-223-7770