This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more. Larry Schweikart, author of A Patriot’s History of the United States, calls Dupes “a great contribution.” Fred Barnes calls it “an incredibly important book.”
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, this February includes some famous presidential birthdays: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan. It also features the centenary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. Also, Presidents’ Day falls this month. Where do dupes fit into presidential history?
Kengor: Americans will be surprised to learn that our first president, George Washington, warned of dupes in his historic Farewell Address. Dupes have been a big problem in this country since the literal founding of the republic.
Big Peace: You cover that history in your book. You note, however, that this process of duping took an “ugly upsurge” with the founding of the American Communist Party and Soviet Comintern in 1919.
Kengor: That’s where the process of communists dutifully seeking liberals and progressives for manipulation and exploitation began–and with great success.
Big Peace: Sticking with presidents during and after that period, which were the biggest suckers?
Kengor: Surprisingly, the first president to deal with communists, Woodrow Wilson, actually was not a dupe. He was a wild progressive, who did a lot of damage elsewhere, but he was thoroughly anti-communist. Wilson called the Bolsheviks “terrorists,” “tyrants,” and “barbarians.” We should discuss him at length at some point.
Big Peace: You say the first president to be terribly duped was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Kengor: As we’ve talked about here, FDR was rolled, from his own advisers to “Uncle Joe” Stalin himself. FDR was a significant dupe. His successor, Harry Truman, who had his faults, and made some mistakes, got Stalin exactly right. In Truman’s estimation, Stalin was “a little son-of-a-bitch.” He suffered no delusions about “Uncle Joe.”
Big Peace: You note that John F. Kennedy was an excellent anti-communist.
Kengor: JFK warned of our “atheistic foe,” and of the “fanaticism and fury” of the “godless communist conspiracy,” often sounding like Ronald Reagan–and certainly not sounding like his younger brother, Ted.
Big Peace: Speaking of Reagan, you noted in a recent “Big Dupes” how Reagan had been duped as a young liberal actor, only to emerge the greatest of ex-dupes, a Cold Warrior. In contrast, Jimmy Carter, discussed in our last “Big Dupes,” and who’s on the cover of your book kissing Leonid Brezhnev, is your biggest duped president.
Kengor: That’s correct. We did our two most recent “Big Dupes” on Carter and Reagan, separately. I thought today we could contrast them head-to-head. Doing so is extremely illuminating.
Big Peace: Okay, let’s start with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979. That’s where you start the comparison in Dupes.
Kengor: Carter was stunned by that invasion. After all, he and the Soviet leader, Brezhnev, had literally hugged and kissed each other six months earlier at the Vienna Summit. Carter felt betrayed. He gave a jaw-dropping interview to ABC’s Frank Reynolds, where he said: “My opinion of the Russians has changed most dramatically in the last week. [T]his action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time I’ve been in office.”
Big Peace: Share Ronald Reagan’s reaction to this, which Reagan offered in private. You read those private letters.
Kengor: Reagan, who was living in California, did his best to keep his disbelief and disappointment to himself, saying privately that Carter’s assessment “would be laughable, I think, if it were not so tragic.” In another private response (a letter to a friend), Reagan added: “It is frightening to hear a man in the office of the presidency who has just discovered that the Soviets can’t be trusted.”
Point taken.
Big Peace: An equally shocking contrast, which you believe you’re the first to notice and report, were the reactions by the two presidents to the Berlin Wall.
Kengor: I never saw this until I was digging through Carter’s Presidential Papers. In July 1978, President Carter was in West Berlin. A woman asked, “For how long, Mr. President, do you think we’ve got to live with the Wall?” A helpless Carter responded: “I don’t know. I hope that it will be removed in the future, but I have no idea when it might be. I’m sorry I can’t give you a better answer.” The Presidential Papers records laughter when Carter said that.
Now, compare that to Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech, demanding Gorbachev tear down that wall. Or, closer in the timeline, just four months after Carter said that, Reagan, in November 1978, travelled to Berlin as a private citizen. Two friends and colleagues, Richard Allen and Peter Hannaford, went with him. They witnessed Reagan saying: “We have got to find a way to knock this thing down.”
Big Peace: As you note, this was part of Reagan’s wider objective to, in his words, “bring it [the USSR] to its knees.” Here, too, you pose a stark contrast to Carter.
Kengor: President Carter, in February 1980, explicitly promised, “We are not trying to bring the Soviets to their knees.”
How’s that for a world of difference?
Big Peace: You provide an amusing visual contrast between Carter and Reagan involving the Soviets.
Kengor: Michael Reagan often tells the story about when his father lost his presidential bid against Gerald Ford in August 1976. Michael asked his dad his greatest regret. He said his greatest regret was he wouldn’t be able to lean over and whisper “nyet” (“no”) in Brezhnev’s ear. Well, instead, America, in June 1979, during the signing of the SALT II Treaty in Vienna, got Jimmy Carter smooching Brezhnev. That visual contrast is most instructive. It says it all.
In the Cold War, it would be the difference between winning and losing.
Big Peace: You quote Carter repeatedly calling the Soviets our “friends.”
Kengor: He said that constantly. Literally the first week of his presidency, Carter said: “My own hope as president is to explore every possible way to work with the Soviet Union and with other potential enemies of ours, who at this point seem to be our friends.” Contrast that with Reagan’s first press conference, where he warned that the Soviets “lie,” “steal,” and “cheat.”
At a March 1977 news conference, when asked how he might help dissidents suffering in the Soviet Union, Carter magnanimously reassured his Soviet friends: “I have tried to make sure that the world knows that we are not singling out the Soviet Union for abuse or criticism.” Really, why not?
Besides, Carter added in June 1978, “We want to get along with the Soviet Union.”
Again, that’s the difference. Reagan wanted to win the Cold War, to defeat the USSR. As Carter was saying these things, Reagan was saying his idea of Soviet policy was very simple: “We win, they lose.”
Big Peace: What’s the lesson for Presidents’ Day?
Kengor: It’s likewise very simple: Americans need to elect the right men to the White House. When we elect presidents who fail to confront evil, it’s our fault as much as theirs.