A memorial to the victims of Communism will be dedicated in Washington, D.C., today, on the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s historic admonition to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down that wall. As part of the commemoration of the horrors of Communism,
National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. will be presented the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
for his work to defeat the Evil Empire. To mark the occasion,
National Review Online asked a group of friends and experts to remember what WFB did in the days of the Cold War and how he did it.
Mona CharenIt would be difficult to overstate Bill Buckley’s contribution to winning the Cold War. From the beginning of his coruscating career, he drew attention to the great moral chasm that separated the Communist world from the West.
National Review ran so many articles by and about Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn that Chris Buckley once quipped that the magazine was “25 years of Solzhenitsyn and carpet ads.” Ronald Reagan, who has received (at last) some credit for bringing down the Berlin Wall and all that stood behind it got many of his ideas from Bill Buckley.
Bill has always had a knack for personalizing the abstraction of dealing with evil. I remember a piece he wrote when he was an observer at the United Nations about how to handle the problem of shaking hands with a Communist. No other prominent figure in America in the 1970s would have mused on that theme.
Buckley is rightly revered as a great leader of the American conservative movement and we are grateful for that. But there are millions of people now living in freedom who owe him even more.
— Mona Charen, a nationally syndicated columnist, is author of Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First.
Lee Edwards1959 was not a good year for anti-Communists. Fidel Castro overthrew the old-time
caudillo Batista and began installing a Marxist-Leninist regime in Cuba.
Mao Zedung had initiated the Great Leap Forward in China and before it shuddered to a stop, at least thirty million Chinese died of famine. The Soviets were bristling with confidence after their brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the launching of Sputnik, vowing to bury us. And then President Eisenhower invited Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, the Butcher of Ukraine, to the United States. For many, it was as though FDR had asked Hitler to lunch at Hyde Park.
Young conservatives like myself were in despair. Would no one object to this grossly immoral invitation? Would no one speak out against this diplomatic travesty? One person would and did. William F. Buckley Jr. not only filled New York City’s Carnegie Hall with a rousing anti-Communist, anti-Khrushchev speech but so aroused those present they would have marched on the White House if so directed.
As Linda Bridges has rightly written, it was one of Bill Buckley’s great speeches. After excoriating America’s leaders for conferring “orthodox diplomatic recognition,” Bill went on to say that all was not lost, that “the central revelation of Western experience” is “that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep.”
He told a rapt audience that Khrushchev was not aware “that the gates of hell shall not prevail against us. Even out of the depths despair, we take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep we fall, for there is always hope. In the end, we will bury him.”
And so we did a few decades later with the essential help of the words and the deeds of action intellectuals like Bill Buckley.
— Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, is author of The Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America, among other books.
CONTINUED 1 2 Next > 
