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Greatest Hits of the Eighties

The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, John O'Sullivan, Regnery, 360 pages

Disillusioned adults sometimes revisit the fairy tales of their childhood and wonder what happened, in the end, to Goldilocks, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. Did they all live happily ever after or was it the usual story—the enchanted forests plowed down for tract homes, the happy kingdoms absorbed and obliterated by powerful and oppressive neighbors, the Red Riding Hood family sued into the ground by the wolf’s relatives, and the three bears carted off to the zoo for protective custody?

It is the same with our grown-up stories of heroism and triumphant goodness. It seems cruel to dispel them. But perhaps we must, if only to make sure that the good old causes are not all defeated in the end, thanks to unwise complacency or self-delusion. The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, John O’ Sullivan’s engaging account of that great period of hope in the 1980s, must warm the heart of any decent person. We few, we happy few, who did not buy the fellow-traveling garbage of the majority, never expected to see such wondrous times. As I read through this committed, generous account, I recalled all those moments when my own spirits lifted higher than I had ever thought possible. I recollected an encounter with Lech Walesa on a freezing morning in Gdansk, when he was still one small man against an empire, fortified by an unconquerable faith. I remembered an even colder day in Prague when that impossibly lovely city suddenly recovered its twice-betrayed liberty. And I called to mind the almost inexpressible delight of seeing thousands of Communist Party membership cards hurled into trashcans and onto bonfires in Moscow in August 1991. O’Sullivan is also good on the creepy machinations of Western fellow travelers who actively sold or gave themselves to the wrong side and should never be allowed to forget it. Yet they have forgotten it, and they got away with it, and they continue to be powerful in Western nations, which is what is wrong with this celebratory account of a victory that has drained away.


How long ago it all seems now—and what a lost opportunity. But I shall come to that. O’Sullivan’s history does an important service in reminding us of three extraordinary, seemingly providential people whose simultaneous existence certainly altered the course of history. If others had held their posts, then many things we now see as normal would undoubtedly remain the eccentric fantasies they were 30 years ago. And if they were providential, what of the extraordinary way in which all three survived determined attempts to murder them? Was that providential, too? O’Sullivan hints that it may have been, which is a good story. And his account of Ronald Reagan’s conduct after he was shot is extremely moving. But while I should like to believe that the hand of the Almighty stretched forth to save these people, I cannot. I am one of the last Protestants still standing in Britain, where all branches of Christianity now huddle together for warmth, whereas they used to warm themselves by incinerating each other. Yet even I often feel that Karol Wojtyla’s tenure as bishop of Rome was close to miraculous. One certain result was that it became far harder for educated people to scorn religion once he had shown its power to move and the courage it could engender.


Even so, we must be careful here. The Cold War in Europe appeared to be the clearest and most unambiguous conflict between good and evil most of us were likely to see. The pure rightness of the West’s cause gave a sort of glory to a series of men and women, ranging from thumping crooks to workaday politicians, who scaled the greasy pole of politics and found themselves thrust into the leadership of a crusade. In the case of the late pope, the glory was not undeserved. Free of the political taint, raised under tyranny and educated in austere, incorruptible opposition to it, John Paul II was born and shaped for the role he played. He was undoubtedly a good and noble person, an example of true manhood and a fine intellect, and Poland was a dreadfully oppressed country sighing for emancipation.


But I think there is a sort of presumption in the idea that God is particularly interested in liberating people from Communism, let alone from the rule of Jimmy Carter or of the British Labor Party. His kingdom is not of this world, as Christ unambiguously said. Go to Poland now, and you will find that the church and the Christian faith are, if anything, weaker than they were under the heel of the Communists. I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is. As for the U.S. and Britain, I will get round to that. I really wouldn’t like to speculate on what God might have wanted to happen, but if He was hoping for the current arrangements, I should be very much surprised.


So I cannot quite share John O’Sullivan’s awe at these things, even though I once did, and even though I should like to. As I read, and enjoyed, his fond recollections of Margaret Thatcher’s resolve and Ronald Reagan’s humorous squashing of liberal idiocy, I kept thinking, “Yes, so it was, but why in that case have we ended up as we are?”


My notes are full of indignant squawks, as he skates elegantly past the manifold faults, bungles, omissions, and errors of Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan. He is far too kind to Reagan, whose laughable idealist pacifism came close to bringing about Western nuclear disarmament at the Rejkyavik summit. Likewise, he is much too generous to Thatcher, whose economic policies, which were intended to squeeze a swollen public sector, actually began by devastating much of Britain’s manufacturing industry.


But above all he is silent on the complete failure by these two supposed conservatives to grasp that the Marxist enemy had shifted his ground. As the missiles and tanks withdrew or went to the scrap yard, the enemies of freedom and faith fanned out into the schools, the TV studios, the publishing houses, the judges’ benches, the newspaper offices, and the academy. Liberated from the charge of disloyalty because their cause could no longer be identified with a hostile foreign power, they had never been so free to subvert our open societies. The unfettered market, the sale of public housing, the transformation of public monopolies into private ones were not answers to this powerful ideological opponent—all the more potent because so many of its ill-educated foot soldiers did not even know what cause they were serving. What did Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan do for the institution of marriage, rigor in education, adult authority, or the idea that people are responsible for their own actions? Far too little.


What did they do for the idea of national sovereignty without which no proper conservative positions can be defended? Well, Reagan was less to blame in this matter, but Thatcher repeatedly compromised with the European Union’s aggrandizement, which is actually one of the major instances of real great-power aggression in our age. She began the betrayal—now almost complete—of Britain’s own people in Northern Ireland, and even became involved in the campaign for liberal intervention in Yugoslavia, a foreign-policy impulse that led directly to the Iraq fiasco.


By contrast, the pope and his less-beloved but more dogged successor did hold fast against the satanic optimism of the free market and opposed both vainglorious Gulf Wars despite the unpopularity it caused them. I am by no means sure that, had they survived in office into the current era, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would have been able to resist the rush to attack Saddam Hussein or the current attempt to inflate Iran into a global threat. Just as importantly, I think their moral and cultural failures at home would have become more evident. In that case, would the apparent alliance between pope, premier, and president have been sustainable? Could their stories have been contained in one book suggesting they were all traveling parallel paths? I rather doubt it.


Had they been as successful as is now claimed, it is odd that so much of the supposed Reagan-Thatcher legacy has proved so easy to dismantle. The incompetent, extravagant Bush administration has probably sunk political conservatism in the U.S. for ten years to come, and perhaps longer. The British Conservative Party nowadays hopes to save itself by adopting the spending habits and social programs of its Labor opponents and shrinks like a prodded mollusk when asked to pronounce on issues of absolute morality or national independence. In both countries, actual and moral illiteracy are epidemic, and the liberty of the individual is in serious danger. The power of the Western alliance, once apparently unchallenged, has plainly passed its peak. The world has certainly changed since 1980, and to begin with, it seemed to be changing for the better. But can we now be so sure of that? It is too soon for such confident eulogies as this.

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Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday. He is the author of The Abolition of Britain.

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