The Third Most Over-rated President

Dear Dr. Schweizer,

The present-day phenomenon of the 'chicken hawk' - warmongering conservatives who found ways to ditch their duty during the Vietnam era - has renewed my interest in McCarthyism. I wonder whether the same type - the loud-mouth, self-proclaimed super patriot - succeeded politically then using the same tactics Karl Rove succeeds with today. Rove has successfully trashed men whose patriotic credentials seemed beyond reproach - John McCain, Max Cleland, and John Kerry. Does this repeat an ugly pattern from the past? Do the loud-mouth, sunshine patriots always win?

I began compiling a list of Predators and Prey from the McCarthy period. I was considering adding Ronald Reagan to the Predators list - when I picked up your book as part of the research. I also picked up Eric Bentley's,Thirty Years of Treason, where I read Reagan's testimony before HUAC. The only person Reagan trashed was Herb Sorrell (and I'll take your word that Sorrell merited trashing) so I decided that he was not a true Predator. And Reagan was fairly eloquent expressing his confidence that a free society could win an open debate with Communism.

Your book disappointed me in several ways. Your portrayal of the Hollywood strike made it appear that the strikers were all dupes - puppets on Sorrell's string. Your analysis struck me as shallow and perfunctory. People do not, like zombies, risk their livelihood. I could not buy your assertion (on p. 282) that 'Moscow and its supporters did try to gain a level of control in Hollywood.' Frankly, I am still with Lillian Hellman's confession that she was wrong about Stalin but the McCarthyites were the ones who damaged the country.

Your analysis of the Hollywood strike raised my suspicions. I skimmed the index. Lo and behold, there was no mention of 'Beirut' or 'Marine barracks' or 'Lebanon' or 'national debt.' Warily, I read on. Imagine my disgust with your omission of any reference to the cut and run after the bombing of the Marine barracks on February 23, 1983. That omission is especially nauseating given the fact that Marines (who had been on the way to Beirut and diverted at sea) landed on Grenada on the very same day! That is a startling fact. Your failure to comment upon it makes it difficult to take you seriously as a biographer.

(Would it not be perfectly logical for the terrorists - comparing President Reagan's tough policy toward the Soviets with his cut and run from Beirut - to conclude that assymmetric war might very well work against the United States? May I suggest this as a topic for your next book? Would not that be a meatier, more dignified topic for someone with your credentials than joining Ann Coulter in her petty hectoring of liberals?)

The Wall in Berlin fell at some cost. The women of Afghanistan paid a very high price for the re-unification of Germany. The bureaucrats of the Soviet puppet government in Kabul were 55% female. When that government fell (after holding on for several years after the Russian withdrawal), those women were handed pink slips and blue burkahs. A reign of Terror was unleashed. Our abandonment of those women was a great sin. Connect that sin up with Reagan's obscene deficit spending - and the unheeded warning of Deuteronomy, chapter 28, seems our just desserts. After warning, in verse 12, that God's people "shalt lend unto many nations and thou shalt not borrow," verses 49-52 describe the punishment: "The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from afar, from the end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth... and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates until thy high and fenced walls come down..."

In conclusion, your use of Soviet and old Warsaw Pact sources briefly made an impression upon me. But upon consideration of the startling omissions, the bias with which I began reading the book still stands. Ronald Reagan, though a very nice guy, is the third most over-rated President in American History.