A memorial to the victims of Communism will be dedicated in Washington, DC, 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.

F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow Steven F. Hayward

I started reading National Review and watching Firing Line in the 8th grade, thinking that emulating WFB's vocabulary and posture would help me with girls. It didn't work--I think the first girl whom I accused of "tergiversations" probably slapped me--but it did provide a bullet-proof excuse when my mom found a copy of Playboy tucked in my mattress: "But mom--it has an interview with William F. Buckley!" (See--the old cliché about "just reading it for the articles" is true.)

WFB began that interview (this was around 1971 or 1972, when détente was starting to flower) with the assertion that the most deleterious trend of the moment was "the philosophical acceptance of co-existence with the East." Why "philosophical?" Playboy wondered. It is one thing, WFB patiently explained, to make practical accommodations with nations that possess a nuclear arsenal, but quite another to efface the moral distinction between freedom and tyranny. Such transcendent clarity was always the requisite for winning the Cold War, and was much needed at a time when the "realism" of détente was causing the West to become incoherent. We fortunately recovered, with Ronald Reagan reviving the philosophical rejection of co-existence that was a key factor in demoralizing our vicious enemy.

Steven F. Hayward is the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow at AEI.