Ash Heap of History: President Reagan’s Westminster Address 20 Years Later - Remarks by Edwin Meese III (June 3, 2002)

Today's program deals with what I believe is one of the most significant events in the Cold War. I certainly commend Matthew Spalding and Lee Edwards for putting this program together today to mark that particular historic event.

Twenty years ago next Saturday, I had the privilege of sitting in Westminster Palace with all of its pomp and circumstance -- a most impressive place for a speech such as this -- and watch Ronald Reagan deliver these particular remarks. As Matt said, Ronald Reagan believed that this was one of the most important speeches that he ever gave while he was president.

The stage has been set by Matt in terms of where the world was in 1982. Ronald Reagan was virtually unknown in Europe. The European press, and to some extent, papers like the New York Times and other organs of America journalism had depicted him as a hip-shooting cowboy from the West. They didn't know much about Ronald Reagan -- they knew even less about California, apparently, from where he had come -- and they were very skeptical about Hollywood, which had been his original profession.

The Westminster speech brought together two very important concepts and introduced them to the world stage. The first was Ronald Reagan's personal assumption of global leadership in the Cold War, and the second was the exposition of his strategy of dealing with communism. I'd like to talk about each of these ideas. In other words, how did Ronald Reagan get to Westminster and how did he get to this exposition of his views on the Cold War?

Well, Ronald Reagan had been a leader from his earliest days. He had been the president of his student body when he was in high school, he had been the president of the student council when he was in college. Because he wanted to ride horses, he joined the Army Reserve in the 1930s, and took the necessary exams to become a second lieutenant. At the beginning of World War II, he was called to active duty and ultimately became a captain. So in everything he did up until that point, he had exerted recognizable leadership.

So, too, in the movie industry his peers recognized his abilities as a leader and elected him president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1947. Now, most people would not regard either Hollywood or the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild as a platform for future presidents or world leaders, but the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was, in fact, most important in formulating Ronald Reagan's ideas about communism, which led to his ideas about winning the Cold War.

Running the SAG was his first experience with communism. As he said in his own words in a 1951 speech about Hollywood, the communists tried to invade the movie industry, and “we fought them to the point where we now have them licked.” That battle had a great impact on Ronald Reagan personally. He saw firsthand how the communists operated. He also found out that there was something particularly pleasing about beating them at their own game.

Ronald Reagan participated in several organizations in the immediate post-World War II period that he soon discovered were communist fronts. They had innocent sounding names like the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions or the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee or the Los Angeles Committee for a Democratic Far-Eastern Policy or the American Veteran's Committee or the Hollywood Writers Mobilization. In each of these instances, he soon found that they were part of a coordinated effort to take over the movie industry and turn it into a medium of propaganda for communist and Marxist ideas.

Ronald Reagan personally experienced the dangers of communism during this period as his life was threatened, and at various points he was put under 24-hour guard to protect him from possible assassination. He worked closely with the FBI to provide information to them about these communist-front organizations.

This was the start of a lifetime study of Marxism-Leninism for Ronald Reagan. He had a close friend, Larry Beilenson, who had written a book called The Treaty Trap and other treatises on world affairs and on foreign policy. Larry Beilenson kept providing Ronald Reagan with articles at his request. He also read a great deal about communism by other writers, including one of our speakers this morning, Richard Pipes. He gave a lot of thought to the essence of communism, how it operated, its methods, and also its weaknesses.

That led to a major concern of Ronald Reagan in the 1970s. He was worried about the notion that there were certain spheres of influence in the world and that we should cede parts of the world and abandon the captive nations behind the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union. He worried that “détente” meant that we should accept that we would be perpetually living side by side with the threat of communism around the world.

He deplored the pessimism of the pundits that Matt talked about. Many of them, looking at Africa, South America and Asia, had the feeling that capitalism was on the decline, that democracy had peaked and would be matched or even exceeded by Marxism in the developing world, and that the wave of the future would be socialistic in both economics and politics.

Most of all he was absolutely opposed to the idea of moral equivalency between what was being practiced by the imperialistic activities of the Soviet Union and the furtherance of freedom and democracy by the West. It was in this period -- the 1970s -- while reading and thinking, talking with others, visiting Europe and meeting with world leaders, that he developed the strategy that it was vital to fight rather than accommodate communism.

That strategy gave rise to, first of all, challenging communism on the moral plane and insisting it was not correct that there was an equivalency between the ethical concepts of the two systems and furthermore that the oppression of peoples, whole nations, was not morally acceptable to those who believed in freedom.

A second part of his strategy was the imperative to let the Soviets know that the people of the West, a free people, would not continence any further aggression by the Soviet Union, that we would not stand for what happened when the Soviets marched with impunity into Afghanistan, that imperialist aggression had to stop.

But more than merely stopping aggression, Ronald Reagan's motivating idea was that we had to roll back the prior aggression and give support to freedom fighters wherever they existed and at any place in the world, whether it was Poland or Angola or Nicaragua or Afghanistan itself. This is what became the Reagan Doctrine.

Ronald Reagan viewed the Westminster Speech as the kickoff for activities in support of winning the Cold War. This is what the President himself said about the speech: "We begin applying conservatism to foreign affairs. When I came into office I believed that there had been mistakes in our policy toward the Soviets in particular. I wanted to do some things differently, like speaking the truth about them for a change rather than hiding reality behind the niceties of diplomacy."

The Westminster address also fit, he said, into "my plan of speaking my mind about communism." He was amazed; he later reflected that “our national leaders had not philosophically and intellectually taken on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. We were always too worried we would offend the Soviets if we struck at anything so basic. Well, so what?" In his typically direct way, he said, "Marxist-Leninist thought is an empty cupboard. Everyone knew it by the 1980s but no one was saying it. I decided to articulate a few of these things. I think our honesty helped the Soviets face up to their own weaknesses and uncertain future."

Ronald Reagan was convinced that the attitude and the ideas portrayed in the Westminster speech had a real impact on how Mikhail Gorbachev thought about our country and the Cold War when he came to power three years later. As he said, "General Secretary Gorbachev has had the foresight to see things previous Soviet leaders had been unwilling to see. There's no doubt in my mind that this speech helped him to have that point of view."

In the fight for freedom, Ronald Reagan's rhetorical ammunition was as effective as bombs and bullets. The Westminster Speech, which we commemorate today, was the opening broadside.

Note: The preceding remarks were part of a panel discussion held in The Heritage Foundation.