American Enterprise Institute

March 12, 2008

[Edited transcript from audio tapes]

4:45 p.m.	Registration
5:00	Introduction:	Christopher DeMuth, AEI
	Speaker:	Newt Gingrich, AEI
6:00	Adjournment

Proceedings:

Christopher DeMuth:  Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.   We are gathered for a talk by AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich on the subject, “What if Reagan Had Not Run and The Soviet Union Still Existed:  The 25th Anniversary of Two Speeches that Changed History.”  Now at AEI, of course, we specialize in painstaking research, and cool and sometimes dry analysis.  But serious people, all the way back to Aristotle have understood that rhetoric is important also, not only in political life but also in intellectual life.  Newt Gingrich is, among many other things, a serious student of history and a serious student of political rhetoric.  And as a rhetoritician he’s also a great contributor and has made many, many important changes to the way Americans debate and talk about important political subjects.

So it is with great anticipation that I have been looking forward to this afternoon as he analyzes two of the most important recent pieces of political rhetoric and their effects on the course of history.  And I hope that I have, to some extent, anticipated what will be the actual subject of his discussion, because it is partly about those speeches and partly about - “What if Reagan had not run?”  We shall see.  And I am delighted to introduce and ask everyone to please give a warm welcome to Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich:  Thank you all very much and I want to start by thanking Chris and AEI, because the American Enterprise Institute doesn’t just tolerate, I think it actually encourages this kind of freelancing intellectual effort, to put together in a totally new context and new way of thinking of things, of something which is now twenty-five years old.

When I called Chris a few weeks ago and said, “Could I come?  Could I give this speech?”  I was attracted to this topic by two parallel paths.  One is an area that, along with Bill Forstchen and Steve Hanser and I have been writing; we now have four novels.  We have a fifth novel coming out at the end of April called Days of Infamy and we have written three novels of the Civil War and a first novel of World War II called Pearl Harbor. 

And these we call active history.  We take a particular point in time and we ask, “Could it have been different in a practical way?”  This is different than writing some kind of science fiction or alternative history.  This is a real effort to say, were there branching moments when there were other branches that could have been taken with equal plausibility?

So when we wrote Gettysburg for example, we sat down with people at the Army War College and actually spent three days walking the battlefield, thinking about how Lee thought, looking at how he had fought chances in a second Manassas, and designing a campaign that was totally plausible, actually more likely than the battle he got into at Gettysburg.

I say that as background because part of my interest here is to ask a very simple and fundamental question.  And it is one that I think for a variety of ideological reasons, the academic community has desperately sought to avoid.  And the question is this, particularly in an election year when we have one candidate who is -- who will be attacked by his opponent as being too old.  What if Ronald Reagan had decided in 1979 that he was too old to run in 1980?  And that he and Nancy ought to stay at the ranch, enjoy life, not be unreasonable.  What would have happened? 

And I’m prepared to defend a very simple assertion.  We would today have a Soviet Empire.  We would be in the Cold War.  The entire set of assumptions people believe in would be fundamentally different and your evening news would be radically different.  I would suggest to you all that I think it is virtually impossible to take the world of 1980 and find a path to the end of the Cold War without Ronald Reagan.  You can find a path to continue the Cold War, you can have a somewhat more conservative Cold War à la Nixon and Ford or you can have a more liberal Cold War à la Jimmy Carter.  But to get to a Grand Strategy that would actually eliminate the Soviet Union without Ronald Reagan, strikes me as virtually impossible.  And what I think makes that case the model.

There is a second part, and I think this is equally intriguing on the 25th anniversary of these two great speeches.  The intellectual left in America is absolutely trapped in a pre-Reagan mindset, which hasn’t studied the Cold War.  To the best of my knowledge, I asked a group of general officers today from all the services if any of them had ever taken a class on the Grand Strategy of the 1980’s, and not a single one had.  Because after all, if the end of the Soviet Union was a function of Reagan’s strategies, if it was purposeful-willed event, then Reagan would have been right. 

Since nobody in the academic left believes Reagan could have been right, it could not have happened that way.  Therefore the end of the Soviet Union was a function of Gorbachev being a terrific Rotarian who had always secretly wanted to dismantle the Communist Party and nothing Reagan had done in the ‘80s mattered.  And in the academic tenured faculty of most of America and in many of the newsrooms of most of America, there was almost no serious thought about - “What are the lessons we ought to learn from this period?”  And I thought that the 25th anniversary of these two remarkable speeches was a wonderful time to do that.

I have to thank several people because this speech really relies on a number of people’s work.  Let me say, first of all, Steve Hayward whose second volume of his magnificent Reagan biography will come out I think this fall, was very generous and allowed me to actually steal large parts of his chapter seven.  And I can tell you flatly, having lived through that period, been a member of Congress, been deeply involved, it is a remarkably insightful book and will be a major contribution to understanding what was going on and how it happened. 

I also have to thank Leon Aron who has done terrific work on the end of the Soviet Union and who really had deep insights into what the Soviets themselves thought they were doing during this period.  Vince Haley, who is here, is just doing an extraordinary job as our research director and in fact, a part of my preparation for this particular speech was Vince’s idea of light reading.  And he has really done an extraordinary job in pulling things together.

I also have to say in absentia that part of what got me really thinking about this in a coherent way were two books by Peter Schweizer.  One is called Victory in which Schweizer makes the argument very methodically; very clearly that Reagan had a coherent general strategic goal and pursued it in a very methodical way.  I was so impressed with it; I went to see Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick, who at that time had an office next to me here at AEI.  And I said, “What do you think?  How close is this?” 

And she said, “Well, none of us would have said to you that in 1991 the Soviet Union would disappear.  All of us would have said to you, we think it is much weaker than the elite thinks it is.  And we think it is in deep trouble and we think if we keep crowding it something good will happen.”  And she said, “In that sense, no one sat around and said, ‘Let’s figure out how to dismantle the Soviet Union.’”  But everybody sat around and said, “There is a way to keep building the pressure, and to keep weakening them.  And at some point, that will pay off in very big ways.”  And so that was clearly the underlying psychology of the team that Reagan assembled in 1981.

Let me also say that Steve Hanser has been my mentor since 1973 and he lived through this period with me and has lived through most of this material with me.  And I have to commend him.  The other thing that shaped my thinking for today’s speech is a series of conversations, some of which go all the way back to the 1980’s; with George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Ambassador Kirkpatrick, Tony Dolan, Jay Keyworth and Oliver North.  And so because this was a period I lived through I think I can talk about it with some level of understanding.

The first point I want to make about where we were at in 1980 to 1983 is it’s very -- this is why we write active history- – it’s very easy to forget looking back what a mess this country was.  It is very easy to forget how bad the economy got under Carter.  It is very easy to forget how bad the military got under Carter.  It is very easy to forget that the Democrats controlled the House all through this period.  And that many Democrats deeply despised Reagan at least as much as current Democrats despise Bush.  And it is easy to forget that Reagan inherited an economy that was in collapse. 

The depth of the Carter recession doesn’t actually occur until 1982 by which point it becomes Reagan’s problem.  And so, when you read the chapter in Steve’s book, he makes it vividly clear that all of the language, all of the rhetoric of the first quarter of 1983 was dismal.  That people were talking about being in a permanent recession.  People were talking about no likely upturn. 

Alan Greenspan, in his newsletter, was writing that things were probably not going to get dramatically better.  There was a general sense that the administration was on defense.  That it was weakening.  Reagan was running behind in the polls.  Two Democrats were beating him in polling numbers.  And there was serious thought being given to the idea that he ought to retire, including by very senior people in the White House, one of them he was married to. 

And so this was not a period of triumphalism.  This was a period where, almost in the Lincoln tradition, Reagan had to ultimately fall back on Reagan.  And the source of his confidence, the source of his optimism, the source of determination had to be himself.  It was a period also when most of his senior staff didn’t believe in what he was doing.  And for all the challenges we have, and I think candidly -- had George W. Bush read more about this period and looked more deeply into this period he would have understood better what was going to happen to him.  Because the fact is, the State Department consistently undermined Reagan’s foreign policy.  And people thought Reagan was this huge risk-taker.

Let me give you -- just to set the stage for these speeches so you’d understand how decisive this is.  The Evil Empire speech was about domestic politics, deliberately, because they could not get the term “Evil Empire” through the National Security Council.  And they could not get it through the State Department.  So they gave up on trying to put it in the foreign policy speech.   And this is an example again of great willful presidents have enormous capacity to outmaneuver the bureaucracy.  But they have to pay attention.  So they found a place where they were going to give a speech to a religious group, and they decided “evil empire” fit a religious speech. 

Now when you read the speech, and I encourage you to read it, because it is a very comprehensive speech and it covers domestic policy for about 85% of the speech.  By the way, all of it is relevant today.  I mean, not a single thing in that speech would not be relevant today.  The same fights, same arguments, same core argument between a secular left and the rest of the country, which is dramatically more religious. 

And it is only at the very end that Reagan turns and happens to start talking about foreign policy in the context of its moral meaning.  And that is where Evil Empire comes in.  So here is a speech which, I would argue, is the single most important statement of moral purpose in the end of the Soviet Empire.  The speech which finally defines unequivocally and directly that the core structure of totalitarianism is by definition evil and it is given despite the opposition of the entire foreign policy establishment.

Now, the Strategic Defense Initiative speech has an even lonelier background.  By the time the president was going to give the speech, every major element of his administration, except his National Security advisor, Judge Clark and Jay Keyworth who had written it, as head of the Science Counsel, who had written it at Reagan’s direction.  Everyone else is opposed to it, deeply opposed to it.  In the case of George Shultz, almost violently opposed it.  Because they understood what it was doing. 

It fundamentally dismantled the entire strategic framework of Mutually Assured Destruction.  It fundamentally broke out from the legalistic mumbo-jumbo arms negotiation mindset that for twenty-years had defined American policy.  And it did so in one speech, and one direct moment.  And there was the President himself looking in the camera from the Oval Office and he was decisive.  And that is the power a president can have when they create a program.  But it is important to understand, this was leadership at its most lonely.

Now, I think what makes these two peculiarly worth stopping and looking at, because there were many great Reagan speeches; they occur within two weeks.  On March 8th he gives the speech in which he describes the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire.  On March 23rd he speaks from the Oval Office and he describes the importance of developing a new capacity to defend ourselves from missiles by employing science to develop a Strategic Defense Initiative.

A couple of things I want to talk about Reagan as a speechmaker, but I just want to put this in context.  Here he is simultaneously in the same month not backing off, not becoming timid, not allowing the economy, the news media, the polling numbers to intimidate him; but instead boldly setting out two great principles of dismantling the Soviet empire.  First, we are going to morally take it head-on and we are going to win the psychological information war campaign by de-legitimizing its authority because it is evil and why should something that is evil have authority?  Second, we are going to start a race involving science and technology, which the Soviet Union cannot possibly win. 

Now, as a bold set of insights, they are remarkable.  The fact that they worked, I would argue, is indisputable.  And yet at the time, they were so radical that almost no one could have accepted them.  Let me give you a flavor of the kind of responses, because I think it’s only when you put in context how Reagan was received that you can appreciate the scale of courage, and the scale of effort that went into this.  And then I want to talk briefly after that about the two speeches themselves. 

Let me start with the Evil Empire speech because it is very important to understand how much of the American news media is deeply committed to the secular left.  And in the tradition of H.L. Mencken reacts viscerally, instinctively and savagely to any reference, which implies religious, moral or other kind of judgment. 

So a couple of perfect examples, this is Anthony Lewis who for those of you are too young to remember, was in his day the archetype example of a totally crazed left-winger; writing in that establishmentarian institution, The New York Times.  “Reagan used sectarian religiosity to sell a political program.  The Evil Empire speech was primitive, a mirror-image of crude Soviet rhetoric.  What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology?” 

Now start with a principle that one could have asked of Mr. Lewis since Reagan was in fact applying Christian doctrine, talking to a Christian group and in fact cites the bible in the speech.  Which simplistic theology do you think Reagan was involved in?  But it is the core notion, it is the moral equivalence.  How can we judge them?

A few other examples, Tom Wicker who at that time, was the head of the Washington Bureau of the New York Times, “The Evil Empire speech was smug and a near proclamation of Holy War.”  Now, he almost got it right, it was clearly a proclamation of intellectual, moral, political warfare, and no question about that.  I mean, if you go back and look at all the different things the Reagan administration did with the Pope, with the Prime Minister, with the labor unions, with the Catholic Church in Poland, I mean we were clearly waging political, intellectual and I think ideological warfare probably as well as we had at any time since we saved France and Italy from Communism in the late ‘40s.

But I would go a step further; we were waging that on the one front while we were deliberately reducing the price of oil, which dropped down all the way to about nine dollars – I think about eight dollars a barrel at the very bottom.  So you have the Russians, the Soviets unable to get hard currency while we are accelerating the development of science and technology, so at the very moment they cannot have any hard currency, we are beginning to pull away in science and technology.  And we were passing laws that made it dramatically harder to sell anything to the Soviet Union that was technologically advanced.  So we were literally squeezing them on every front simultaneously in a Grand Strategy. 

But here are a few other examples, one of my favorite, totally out of touch with reality commentator is Chris Matthews - said, “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.  And at three o’clock in the morning they have got to be crazy right-wingers, so let them.”  Now this is as good an example when establishment -- one of the key points of this talk -- none of the people who were wrong in the 1980’s have learned anything.  Their view of the world today, their understanding of foreign policy today, is as deranged, as factually wrong, as inaccurate and as likely to get us in trouble as it was in the 1980’s.  And nobody holds them accountable. 

Now the whole purpose of this speech is to say, “Let’s have a national debate.”  Did the Soviet Union disappear?  Let’s start with a fact, now if you agree that the Soviet Union disappeared, why did -- do you think Ronald Reagan had anything to do with the disappearing?  That would be a very good national debate.  Now if Ronald Reagan had something to do with this disappearing, what do you think he understood about reality that Jimmy Carter didn’t understand?  And what does that then tell us about the current national debate? 

Is the side which is right about the elimination of the Soviet Empire potentially right about the current conflict across the planet with the irreconcilable wing of Islam?  Or is the group who were fundamentally wrong about the Cold War and fundamentally wrong about the Soviet Union, now suddenly correct?  And why would it be that people who have learned nothing are as wrong today as they were in 1983?

But let me just give you just a few more examples so you can cherish this.  Strobe Talbott, one of the most intellectual and certain of media critics, the man who later on went to, sort of, in the Clinton administration.  Quote:  “When a chief of state talks that way he roils Soviet insecurities.”  The speech made a bad situation worse.  Now it’s fascinating because there’s a very specific point which Steve has captured in his book, where Reagan was actually asked this question about some people think you’re making it worse, he says, “Wait a second, we tried 20 years of appeasing these people and in 20 years they have been gaining ground and we’ve been losing.  Now why would you think that actually standing up to them is going to make it worse?” 

And it is a very clear critique of the difference between the appeasement détente elite view of the world and the fundamental view that says, “We’re the most powerful nation of the world.  We’re on the side of the morally right cause and human beings deserve to have some opportunity to be free.  And if that means that Soviet Union has to disappear, well that’s one of the lessons of history because we’re opposed to tyranny.”

And notice that he did it without killing people.  Poland converted without firing a shot, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, ultimately across the region and then the Soviet Union itself.  I mean, this is one -- I think you could make an argument; this is the most extraordinary strategic victory that I know of in recorded history.  An entire empire disappears, hundreds of millions of people liberated, and nobody in our academic elite wants to study why?  And I think it is very profound part of this year’s presidential debate and this year’s political dialog, is to ask the question, “Why are we being lectured by people who’ve been wrong for their entire lifetime?  And why don’t we hold them accountable when they clearly are out of touch with reality?” 

Let me just give you just a couple of more examples.  This is Talbott again, “The Reagan administration has made a bad situation worse in two ways.  First by convincing the Soviet Union leaders that the U.S. no longer accepts military parity as the base for relations with Moscow.  Second, by challenging the legitimacy of the Soviet Regime, calling the USSR an ‘evil empire doomed to fail’.”  Now I want you to notice, this is in 1984, seven years later the Soviet Union disappeared, which I would think “doomed to fail” is not a bad description.

There’s one other Talbot quote, I want to get to in a second but let me also say, Henry Steele Commager who represented, I think at this stage of his career, the sort of archetype of the tenured faculty irresponsibility that had strong opinions but no judgment, said the following, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history and I have read them all.  No other presidential speech has ever so flagrantly allied the government with religion.  It was a gross appeal to religious prejudice.” 

Now, at one level Reagan has to plead guilty, if you go speak to a group of religious leaders and you describe things with terms like evil, you are probably engaged in a conversation that has some level of moral purpose to it.  But that was the heart of the item.  That was Reagan’s whole point. 

By the way, I am contemplating, unless Steve beats me to it, writing a book at some point on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the war against our Christian civilization.  Chris and I did a DVD this year on the concept of, unless you rather -- on the concept of rediscovering God in America, we did walking tour of Washington and as we did the research for that, we began to come across more and more examples of FDR’s language, all of which has been cleansed by liberals. 

Yet FDR’s standard description of what was at stake in the Second World War was a fight between paganism and quote - “our Christian Civilization”, does the U.S. government post -- which has a Bible with a Nazi bayonet through it.  I mean, these are the things, which of course the modern secular left are going crazy at, because they are truly represented.  This is FDR now, this is not Ronald Reagan.  But I was intrigued with it because Reagan of course was an FDR democrat for much of his life. 

And I was intrigued with it because it represented a continuity of what had been our common civilization till the mid-1960’s when it began to break down as you had a radical left take-over much of the campuses and many of the newsrooms.  And as a result today, I think you have a very fundamental disagreement in the American Society between a secular left which cannot deal with facts and the entire rest of the country which is mystified by the intensively -- but I want to give you the framework because Strobe Talbott, in 1981, I am sorry 1983, explained the framework of the elite, I think very effectively.  I want you to listen to this but I want you in the context also to remember what the modern critique of George W. Bush had been. 

Quote:  “In his distaste for bilateral efforts to manage the super power rivalry and his instinctive predilection for unilateral ones.”  Does this sound at all familiar?  “Reagan is counting on American technological and economical predominance to prevail in the end.  The most striking and questionable themes in his Star Wars speech was his apparent belief that the U.S. could mobilize a scientific community and its economic resources in quest of impenetrable anti-ballistic missile shield over the entire nation without triggering perilously destabilizing countermeasures both offensive and defensive on the part of USSR.  Reagan’s views notwithstanding, there is little reason to hope that many handicaps in the Soviet economy would decisively be advantageous to the U.S. in the long run, allowing the U.S. to beat the USSR in arms race.  There is no question that the Soviet economy is in crisis, but it is a permanent institutionalized crisis with which the USSR has learned to live over but -- which has learned to live, and guns, maybe bazookas, spent missiles or space-based anti-missile lasers.” 

Now if you take that paragraph, it explains what I would argue was the appeasement mentality elite.  The Soviet Union is a fact.  The Soviet Union cannot really be threatened.  The Soviet Union in fact will survive no matter what and therefore the only reasonable rational strategy is to deal with them with dignity and cut a deal and try to minimize conflict because since they are a fact and since conflict would be terrible there is no future that justifies putting pressure.  Now if you read this, he was in fact just plain wrong. 

I remember it 1981, an elderly anti-communist intellectual who had been head of Czech intelligence in 1938 before the Nazis took over the country, came by to see me, I was a sophomore congressman.  And he said, “You know, all of our CIA estimates are wrong.”  So this is much a weaker country than people think.  It is in much greater trouble than people think.  And it is not going to be able to survive any kind of serious competition because it can’t coerce more productivity out of its people.  Now this is a view that would -- and in this city was seen as very radical and very out of touch with reality it is just turned out later on to be true.  And so I frame that to now come back to where Regan was. 

Reagan had an instinct this was correct, and Reagan was following a strategic plan and Reagan tended to think strategically.  People I think are only slowly coming to realize this is a person who had, as Peter Schweizer points out, become vividly anti-communist in 1947 and never deviated from that, had a tendency to come back to the same themes over and over again.  It is no accident that in 1967 as governor, he visits Berlin and looks at the wall and as a throwaway line says, “That wall is really ugly, they ought to tear it down.”  He comes back twenty years later and gives his famous “Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall” speech.  But these patterns were there and Reagan had been thinking a long time and had been talking with active anti-communists about, “What do you do?  How do we go on offense?  What can we do to achieve the future we want?” 

I want to give you though, one example of Reagan because I think people really misunderstand the power of Reagan’s communication skills.  Chris was talking earlier about the power of rhetoric, thinking about Reagan has actually changed some of my own and frankly studying Lincoln, has changed my own understanding about presidential leadership in terms of communications because I think we understate the importance of education as opposed to communication.  The greatest of our presidential leaders consistently educate the country and move the country to a better understanding of reality and a deeper understanding of the country’s moral purpose.  And they do it sometimes at speeches that are astonishingly dense.  But we remember in retrospect the clear vivid language of the key moments so that the power of the key sentence mesmerizes us. 

But let me give you a couple of examples.  This is from the Strategic Defense Initiative Speech; I was amazed at the density of this.  For twenty years the Soviet Union has been accumulating enormous military might.  They didn’t stop when their forces exceeded all requirements of a legitimate defensive capability, and they haven’t stopped now.  During the past decade and a half the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons; weapons that can strike directly at the United States. 

As an example, United States has introduced its last new intercontinental ballistic missile “The Minute Man Three” in 1969 and we’re now dismantling our even older Titan missiles.  But what has the Soviet done in these intervening years?  Well, since 1969 the Soviet Union has built five new classes of ICBMs and upgraded them eight times.  As a result their missiles are much more powerful and accurate than they were several years ago and they continue to develop more, while ours are increasingly obsolete.

The same thing has happened in other areas over the same period.  The Soviet Union built four new classes of submarine-launched ballistic missiles and over sixty new missile submarines.  We built two new types of submarine missiles and actually withdrew ten submarines from strategic missions.  The Soviet Union built over 200 new Back-fire bombers and their brand new Blackjack bombers now under development.  We haven’t built a new long range bomber since our B52s were deployed about a quarter of century ago and we have already retired several hundreds of those because of old age.  Indeed, despite of what many people think our strategic forces only cost about 15% of the defense budget.

Another example of what’s happened, in 1978 the Soviets had 600 intermediate range nuclear missiles based on land and were beginning to add the SS20, a new highly accurate mobile missile with three warheads – we had none.  Since then the Soviets have strengthened their lead.  By the end of 1979 when Soviet leader Brezhnev declared a balance now exists, the Soviets now had over 800 warheads – we still had none.  A year ago this month Mr. Brezhnev pledged the moratorium of freeze on SS20 deployment, but by last August the 800 warheads had become more than 1200 – we still had none, some freeze. 

At this time Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov announced approximate parity of forces continues to exist.  But the Soviets are still adding an average of three new warheads a week and now have 1300, these warheads can reach their targets in a matter of a few minutes – we still have none.  So far it seems the Soviets’ definition of parity is a box score of 1300 to nothing in their favor. 

Now, there is not a political consultant in America who would have thought that was effective three paragraphs.  It has all those facts, it has all those numbers and yet -- I saw Reagan do this 20 times during the eight years -- when you’d looked at these speeches, he would pile on and pile on and pile on and after while you had the sudden -- and he understood something, neither the news media nor the academic community was giving the American people the facts, so he would. 

And the real effect of the speech was over three, four, five months because gradually people would read them, think about them, go back and look at them; argue over them and you saw the country swing.  And you saw the country literally day-by-day, get educated into a different way of thinking about this.  It was a remarkable capacity but it wasn’t rhetoric in the sense of glibness or cleverness or being able to command English in a narrow way, much like Lincoln. 

It was fundamental belief that you could offer a logical argument based on challengeable fact and driven by moral purpose and people would, as a consequence, conclude that whatever they believed when you started.  They had to fundamentally re-assess their belief when you were done.  Now this is an act of enormous moral courage but more than that it is an act of extraordinary skill. 

And I would suggest, nobody has done this that I know of, that if somebody ought to take Lincoln’s abilities which were arguably the greatest communications ability of any American president and parallel them with Reagan’s, that there would be a lot you would learn by seeing the ways they both constructed it.  Reagan uses less Shakespeare and less of the Bible than Lincoln does, and so he’s less of a poet, Lincoln is a very poetic writer, but they both use facts; they both use logic.  They both strive to moral superiority, and I mean moral superiority in the best sense that this argument is right. 

This is a very important concept in one which we’ve had -- we’ve now had fifty years of academic effort to convince us that saying right and wrong is somehow fundamentally inappropriate because after all one shouldn’t be judgmental.  The great leaders understand that’s exactly wrong; on everything that truly matters there is no choice except to render judgment.  And judgment in the end requires the ability to say, “This is right and this is wrong and we should do the thing that’s right and we should not do the thing that’s wrong.” 

That’s a very important distinction and Reagan will, I think, will be historically one of our greatest presidents not only because of his effect; which was to eliminate the Soviet empire, re-launch the American economy and rebuild American civic culture.  But also because of his underlying core set of beliefs which were generation of Americans - gave them a new grip of what it meant to be American. 

So I think this is an important anniversary I wish I could get every talk radio host in the country spend a day or two playing parts of these speeches, sharing the critiques, giving people a chance to think about the parallels with today.  And having a dialogue of who was right, who was wrong and what do we learn from the fact that Ronald Reagan didn’t think he was too old, didn’t stay at the ranch and as a result the Soviet empire disappeared.  I look forward very much to your questions and I appreciate this chance to share. [Applause]

Yes, sir -- I think, we have microphones, yes, here comes the microphone.  This gentleman right here--

Male Voice:  [off mic - indiscernible] My question would be -- when I think of the origins of the Cold War beginning with Harry Truman and the measures that were put in place to confront the Soviets, and as I look at what President Kennedy said in the end to President Johnson, he trust him that with commentators and certain politicians [indiscernible] who were very much on the other side, [indiscernible] on the Cold War must go on, has it that -- partly in some way betrayed the heritage?  Did it have a--

Newt Gingrich:  No, it is a new and different democratic party.  It’s very interesting Reagan in one of his speeches cites Harry Truman and quotes Harry Truman’s speech in which Truman begins the process of explaining why we have to be involved in containing communism.  And he does it deliberately; that Reagan had been for Truman in the 1948, he had done radio commercials for Hubert Humphrey in 1948 when Humphrey was the liberal anti-communist leader in Minnesota against the communist wing of the DFL, people tend to forget what’s some of the politics of that era was like.  And Reagan deliberately as president quotes Truman to draw on that part of the Democratic Party’s heritage. 

I thought Joe Lieberman was extraordinarily effective about two weeks ago, when he gave a speech against the Finegold proposal on Iraq, and he quoted John F. Kennedy and he quoted Harry Truman and he said, “This proposal is a direct repudiation of everything they believed.”  I don’t think he said it more clearly that Senator Lieberman is talking as a Democrat.  But I think clearly the modern Democratic Party is a different institution than the Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. 

And I think you can probably date that to Lyndon Johnson’s inability or refusal to defend the Vietnam War and the rise of a generation that felt genuinely betrayed by their elites.  And that felt that America was a [indiscernible] -- there was a recent comment that America was a mean country.  That America was a country that did bad things and I think the core of the modern Democratic Party in energy at least is people who come out of that background and who sincerely believe it and they would be appalled at Harry Truman or John F. Kennedy.  Yes, sir, I think --

Bob Hershey [phonetic]:  I am Bob Hershey, I am a consultant.  You cited President Reagan bringing the facts to people and actually having quantitative things and relying on the good sense of the American people to say, “Hey, these are the facts, I understand them.”  And I would wonder can we contrast these to what’s been happening lately? 

Newt Gingrich:  Well, okay I think if the -- part of the difference is that President Bush has never mastered addresses from the Oval Office, and it is a very important distinction.  Ronald Reagan was The President and when he came on TV he had a command that led people to stop.  And partly because of the way the election happened in 2000, partly because of the base mobilization “Red versus Blue” strategy they adopted.  They guaranteed that half of the country would never tune in. 

Reagan was very careful never to do that.  Reagan was very thoughtful strategically and there’s a reason why he annihilated Mondale in 1984 when he literally was trailing both John Glenn and Walter Mondale in 1983.  And part of it was conscious strategic sense of how you unify the American people.  Reagan didn’t speak about us versus them; he never attacked Democrats, he attacked liberals and talked about secularists.

But he picked his fights in ways that were designed to narrow down -- we did an entire project which I think at AEI, where we literally tried to explain how Reagan would think about these things and Reagan’s ability to figure out -- “If I say something in a certain way, 85% of the country would be with me and if I say it the wrong way 15% of the country would be with me.  Gee, I think I’ll say it so that the 85% are with me.”  That is an art form; it is a very calculated thoughtful art form. 

And as I said earlier, I mean if I were designing who to study, I would say Lincoln, FDR and Reagan are the three great rhetoricians who were able to unify the country.  There are other presidents who were great speakers but these three had this conscious consistent model of maximizing their penetration of the American people and educating the American people by their rhetoric. 

Yes, sir -- back there.

Francois Hibreia [phonetic]:  I am Francois Hibreia, the head of a group of French conservatives and I wanted to thank you very much for what you said.  But especially about Italy and France, our country owe our freedom to United States not only about -- because of national socialism but also communism and I want to say that we are very grateful for the role you had. 

And I had a question about 1981.  You mentioned that period and remember we had a president named Francois Mitterand, he was from the socialist party.  And the French diplomacy at that time was quite anti-Reagan but my feeling is that our president even from the socialist party, and even with communist ministers in our government, Mitterrand understood perfectly the historical role and the intuition of President Reagan and I wanted to know if you share that item.  Thank you.

Newt Gingrich:  That’s actually a very good question.  I am going to go out on a limb for a second.  My sense was that Mitterrand because he had been an anti-Nazi and because he had been actively part of the resistance; because he understood the role that America had played in liberating France and because he understood from his experience with the Nazis the totalitarian states are really totally unacceptable if you believe in freedom.  I mean, if you have a personal sense of what freedom ought to be then, the totalitarian states are just simply unacceptable.  He was actually very anti-communist in that underlying sense that he would have been horrified at the concept of the communists ever running France in terms of creating a totalitarian Soviet-style communist state. 

And I would suggest it’ll be interesting -- if somebody could study this, it would be very interesting, I would suggest that Mitterrand was less anti-American than Chirac.  That Chirac represented a wing of French society which resented the Americans much deeper than Mitterrand did and that Mitterrand was actually relatively helpful anytime he could be while never getting too far out in front of the general French attitude. 

It was de Gaulle who was very anti-communist, who established a kind of tone of anti-Americanism as one of the bulwarks of French politics.  And there were no circumstances where de Gaulle I think would have favored the Soviet Union but he found it useful in defining France to not have it be in the shadow of the Anglo-American duality.  And I think that part of that went back to his experience in the World War II, and partly was a legitimate expression of French nationalism. 

What is interesting to watch now, your new president who is a mixed bag in many different ways but intriguing and I have written a fair amount about Sarkozy, you know and I’d like to talk to you later about it.  I think his campaign last year was very, very educational for anybody who is interested in how you can win from the Right with an unpopular and incumbent president. 

I think Sarkozy’s first genuine break with that attitude and I think that comes about because the relative dynamism of the American system in an age of information makes it really important to break down the sort of core oligarchical pattern of French bureaucracy.  And so in a sense Sarkozy is using us as a lever to break up the rigidity of the French economy.  But I think he still has to remain a Gaullist and a person who defends France as opposed to somebody who would allow France to be in the shadow of America.  I don’t know how close that is. 

Yes, sir -- way in the back.

Male Voice:  Thank you sir.  I am [indiscernible] from India Globe and Asia Today [indiscernible].  I cover the vitals every day.  How do you compare the Soviet Union then and the China today?  And what advise do you think you have for them next or this president, as well as China has build up its concern?  And how much U.S. should be worried about what China has been doing and going against the United States?

Newt Gingrich:  Well I think they are radically different situations.  The Soviet empire at its peak has a world-wide totalitarian campaign to eliminate freedom.  And if you go back and look at the scale of Soviet activities around the planet and the intensity of them; if you look at the level of spying even in the United States; if you look at the funding of the appeasement forces in Western Europe by the Soviets through largely to the East Germans.  If you look at the funding for the early stages of terrorism which were largely funded by the KGB, you know, the Soviet Union was an active competitor seeking to defeat us, if they can figure how to do it.  And I have no doubt that if they have been able to do it, they would have imposed a totalitarian system on the planet. 

The Chinese are a billion-three-hundred-million people with an extraordinarily powerful history of being the middle kingdom, the center of the universe, the richest place on the planet with an extraordinarily rich culture and they are rapidly emerging.  I think that’s just a fact - that makes them a competitor but not an enemy.  And I think we ought to deal with them as a competitor but not an enemy. 

If we make the correct investments and frankly the greatest threat in the American future is not China.  It’s the collapse of American math and science education.  I mean we are destroying ourselves.  You don’t have to focus on Beijing; we ought to focus on the local schools because if we don’t fundamentally overhaul our education system, we’re not going to lead the planet.  But that is not a Chinese problem that’s an American problem. 

And on the other hand if we did the right things about science and technology and education and had the right focus on economic growth, the Chinese wouldn’t catch us in your lifetime, wouldn’t come close to catching us.  They have huge challenges coming down the road, so I don’t worry much about the Chinese in the short run unless we’re really terminally stupid.  In which case by the way, it won’t be their fault, I mean you know, somebody who is determined to get defeated can. 

Yes, sir -- right there.  She will come running up with the --.

Male Voice:  [Indiscernible] from the International Center for scholars.  First of all, thank you very much for a very informative and useful presentation.  I am a person from Azerbaijan from former Soviet Union.  It was interesting to put, you know, together insight, views from -- as an insider as, how it was seen from the United States and actually you partially started to address the question that I have.  You know you described the world in the 80’s and you described the world in the current world. 

Azerbaijan is a secular country but a country with mostly Muslim population and you know this is a reality that the image of the United State is declining through the last several years, four or five years.  And don’t you think the current world -- and you started to address this question -- is different in the 80’s, it is much more complicated so more kind of [indiscernible] of its policy, more careful policy, more -- I don’t know softer policy is required both to a kind of address goals and values that were promoted by Reagan and by the United States in general.  Are you dependent on who is in authority, Democrats and the Republicans?  It is more important for the United States though it would seem, for the world that United States is seen as one country.  So in your opinion what kinds of policies are required in current stage?  Thank you.

Newt Gingrich:  That’s a pretty large question.  Let me just say that -- I don’t know that Reagan would have accepted the premise that the world is more radically more complicated today.  I mean, we forget for example the scale of the anti-American marches in Britain and in France -- not in France, in Britain and in Germany during the period when we are trying to move Pershing missiles into Europe.  We now know that they are largely funded by the Soviet Union.  But they were there and they were real. 

We tend to forget the amount of anti-Americanism that was routine in the United Nations.  We tend to forget that the Iranian revolutionary regime broke all international law, seized the American embassy and held American diplomats hostage in total violation of the international law for 444 days.  Then the American embassy was burned in Pakistan and an American ambassador was killed I believe in Afghanistan, I mean you know, this was not a period that was easy or simple.  We tend to forget nowadays that Soviets were on offense not just in Afghanistan.  They were on offense with their Cuban proxies in Mozambique and Angola.  They were on offense in Grenada.  They were on offense in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

 You know this was a complicated period.  I once had that the opportunity actually working with Michael Ledeen here at the American Enterprise Institute.  When he was at the State Department, we got the Grenada papers published, which were still available and it was fascinating.  It was the first time we’ve captured a Soviet style regime and as a result we actually can publish their internal documents. 

And lucky for us they spoke English so we didn’t have to try to get them translated and it was absolutely fascinating because for me it was very revealing.  This is a group of African-descended Caribbean politicians who created a dictatorship on the style of the Soviet Union whose economy was collapsing this is -- you can imagine, you impose a Soviet style dictatorship in the Caribbean and the odds of you being able to make any money goes down pretty radically.  So their economy was totally collapsing and their answer was twice a week to hold sessions to study Stalin’s writing. 

Now if you say to yourself and if you are trying to write a comedy -- here is a Georgian revolutionary bank robber turned dictator writing megalomaniac material that’s very turgid and hard to read that might be semi-appropriate for a mid-Russian winter if you are really a bad regime, being studied in the sunny Caribbean by African-descended politicians who are seeking to learn the future by mimicking Stalin.  This is -- I couldn’t have made this up, you read the documents, you read the debates they were having and you know help me understand why Cuba would never work.  You see these people who actually believe this stuff and many of them have tenured faculty positions in the U.S. 

So I would simply say to you that -- I would also say this, United States does an amazing amount on the planet.  For most of which we get no credit because by definition, if it’s good we could not have done it.  So you take the Bush administration, the Bush administration has spent more money and has spent more time on sub-Saharan Africa than any administration in American history.  Now my hunch is that you have to go a fairly long way to understand that and to realize how true it is.  But it is a fact. 

And so I would just suggest to you that the United States – One, should adapt policies to expand freedom in the planet and to protect the United States’ security.  And two, should probably have a dramatically better communications program, which means it almost certainly cannot be in the State Department. 

But though we also have to recognize that it’s going to be uphill; because it’s not in the interest of people around the planet to decide that the most powerful nation in the world is also the nicest.  I mean, there’s a point where you kind of just go, “They’re already this big and they’re already this rich and already this dominant, you know, won’t they just let me alone for a while.” 

Yes, sir--

Majhi Moca [phonetic]:  Thank you, Majhi Moca.  If I think of the memorable Reagan speeches, I think you pointed out two of the most significant of them.  The memorable ones to me would be the Pointe de Hoc, June 6 anniversary of 1944, the speech at the House of Commons when he condemned communism to the [indiscernible] of history, the Berlin speech that you referred to and of course address to Moscow University in 1988.  And I think in those speeches what you see is your point about the, educating presidents, taking it to a much wider populace not just in the United States.  And I think that, in retrospect, is one of the most significant aspects of the Grand Strategy of the Cold War. 

I wonder if you’d comment upon that - whether you think that was deliberate on his part, whether he saw that global audience is the key - whether you think those speeches were in a ways as important to speaking of him.

Newt Gingrich:  I think if you started in his inaugural address in 1981, you can compile extraordinary Reagan speeches.  I don’t know that any two fit as perfectly as a fulcrum of change as these two.  These are the two that I think begin to put into practical application the general strategy that they’ve been growing and building for two years.  But you can certainly make an argument for many of them. 

But there’s a second half to your question, partly again because he is a student of FDR.  FDR and Churchill understood that moral force really mattered.  There is no accident that they’ve developed the four freedoms.  It’s no accident that they developed the Atlantic charter.  It’s no accident that they talked about the United Nations; I mean they are consciously waging intellectual-psychological warfare against totalitarianism.  If you go back and look at their speeches in ’37, ’38, ’39, ’40, ’41, I mean, they know what they are doing. 

That if you look at -- if you listen as we did last year and we hope we’ll do again this year – to we had about 15 hundred radio stations play the prayer that FDR gave on national radio for six and a half minutes on D-Day, came on the radio at 10 o’clock at night and said, “We have landed in Normandy.  All of our young men are at risk; will you join me in praying?”  And then for six and a half minutes he prays.  And when you listen to prayer it’s much like Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and these are moving the country towards a realization, towards an understanding.  They are very powerful things. 

So I suspect that Reagan -- I saw him interviewed the night the Berlin wall fell, and Sam Donaldson is probably the nicest Sam Donaldson ever was to Reagan and he was clearly awestruck, and to be there to have heard him say, “Tear down this wall”.  And now to be interviewing Reagan with the wall coming down and at one point he said to Reagan, “Did you ever really think this would happen?”  And he said, “Well you know, they’re all Germans and I sort of thought they’d probably want to be together.”  Because it’s that simple, it wasn’t some vast complex, you know CIA document number 73.  It was just the application of common sense.  

So I think Reagan probably felt that is was very important for him to do everything he could, along with Lady Thatcher and along [indiscernible] with the Pope.  I mean it’s the three of them who are moving Western civilization for almost a decade in a direction of being for more freedom. 

Well let me just say that I am honored and I want to repeat what I’ve said in the beginning.  Without the support that Chris has given us and without the extraordinary opportunity to interact with scholars here at AEI, we would not be able to do some of the things we do and I think this to me was exactly the right topic to be at AEI talking about it because it is about the application of ideas in order to create a framework in which people can change the world.  And I think that’s what we should be celebrating on this 25th Anniversary.  Thank you all very, very much.

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