Paul Kengor teaches foreign policy and twentieth century history in the department of political science at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He is the author, most recently, of DUPES: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century (2010).
Kengor also wrote The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (2007).
At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, Kengor spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about The Crusader and how he came to write that book.
Reagan's intentions
The process of researching and writing The Crusader “began when I realized that a lot of people in academia – and, really, generally -- didn’t realize, didn’t know, didn’t understand that Ronald Reagan actually intended to undermine the Soviet Empire,” Kengor said.
In a sense, he explained, “they knew from his rhetoric and his speeches,” such as the June 1982 Westminster address, the May 1981 Notre Dame speech, and the so-called “Evil Empire” speech before the religious broadcasters in March 1983 that “he thought that Soviet Communism was evil. They knew that he predicted it would end up on the ash heap of history.”
At the same time, however, these observers “thought that might have been rhetoric” rather than an expression of intention.
“What they didn’t realize,” Kengor went on, “is that behind all of that was a very specific campaign on multiple fronts, probably about a dozen to maybe two dozen different things, where Reagan actually intended to peacefully undermine the USSR.”
Original source material
To back up his thesis, Kengor looked directly at recently declassified government documents, particularly NSDDs, or national security decision directives.
He contrasted his research with that of other academics who have not availed themselves of these documents.
“If academics are going to be scholars,” he complained, “they need to read primary sources, like they tell their students to do. But they don’t. They read each other and they cite each other. They don’t learn anything.”
The proof of Reagan’s intentions is in these documents, Kengor said.
“All this information has been declassified. You look at NSDD 32, NSDD 66, NSDD 75, and you see here a clear intent to roll back, undermine, and as one of the documents says, bring political pluralism – [it] actually uses that word, pluralism – to the Soviet Union.”
The collapse of the Soviet empire, Kengor asserts, “was intended and there’s a paper trail to prove it.”
Interviewing the principals
His research did not end with the documents, however.
“Beyond the paper trail,” he explained, “all the people who were involved in this are either still alive or died in the last 10 years” and were available to tell the story.
“I’ve interviewed all of those people,” he said. “I mean everybody that I could find: Bill Clark, Cap Weinberger, George Shultz, Richard V. Allen,” naming, respectively, the director of the CIA, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Advisor of the Reagan administration.
Those people, he noted, “will tell you this, that [undermining the Soviet system] was the intention.”
In part two of this interview, Kengor explains the origin of the title of The Crusader and what his message is beyond analyzing a period of history.
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