From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DISPATCH
The Long Goodbye
Do I miss the Cold War? You better believe it.
One evening some years ago, my wife and I had a little dinner party for a columnist we admire, Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune. The idea was to get him together with the redaktzia of the Jewish Forward, which I was editing and which carried his column. The conversation soon turned to the topic of Lani Guinier, whose nomination to the Justice Department President Clinton had recently abandoned after the disclosure of her writings on behalf of the idea that American civil rights law requires the election of minorities.
At some point, I offered the thought that the story behind the story in the Lani Guinier affair had little to do with civil rights and much to do with communism. The central idea she was advancing--proportional representation--had been tried not only to sorry effect in Europe but also, in the 1940s, in New York City. There it gained only one result, the installation of two Communists on the City Council. When proportional representation was abandoned, the headlines blared that the Communists were defeated.
That occurred in the election of 1947. Also in the late 1940s, Ms. Guinier's father, Ewart Guinier, sought the borough presidency of Manhattan on the line of the American Labor Party. I explained that the ALP had been founded with the help of the Jewish Forward but that the Forward pulled out when the party was taken over by communists. As I struggled to explain the relevance of this history, Mr. Page finally looked at me with an expression of benign pity. "In case you haven't noticed," he said, to the appreciation of my young staff, "the Cold War has ended."
"Well, no wonder we're in such a mess," I growled.
No doubt the reason it had to be put in such a way is that there is something in our current situation that does not entirely trust this moment. Call it the long goodbye. I don't mean that anyone wishes the Cold War were still going on. Certainly I don't. The idea of peaceful coexistence, once a rallying cry for the left in the West, was one of the most morally bankrupt notions of the era. Untold millions died under the heel of the communist boot, and the sooner it ended, the better, so long as it ended with victory belonging to the free world.
Her question tends to resonate, even without getting into the matter of Communist China. While President Bush was issuing at Warsaw his inspiring call to democracy and free markets and a unified Europe, he is bowing to pressure from the left to resume negotiations with North Korea. He was being jerked around on Capitol Hill because his State Department nominee for Latin American affairs played an outsized role in the struggle against communism in the region. He has just dispatched to the Middle East an envoy whose mission is to get Israel back into negotiations with the erstwhile Soviet puppet known as the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The West's drive for outright victory over the Soviet regime was led, in the climactic years, by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Lane Kirkland, Pope John Paul II and a few other visionary leaders who knew the free world had enemies. The Cold War, like all great struggles, had a clarifying, bracing effect on our public lives. It made many seemingly local matters loom large in geopolitical calculations. There were ups and downs, from Berlin to Vietnam, to Afghanistan and Nicaragua, to Poland and Jerusalem and Africa. The war made palpable for many of us on the American side the notion that we all had a stake in these smaller theaters.
Critics of the Cold War will argue that it was all a cynical calculation and manipulation to "win" the war against the Soviet regime. That has always been false. From Winston Churchill to Ronald Reagan, the primary motive was to do good and defeat evil, and that purpose made us care about peoples and places and their well-being in a way that perhaps does not now seem so compelling. And so we're inclined now to think that genocide in the Balkans is "not our problem." Or a thug Marxist dictator's ruination of Zimbabwe is just too bad for Zimbabwe. Perhaps it is indeed the case that we can no longer be the world's policeman. But for many people, as in Eastern Europe, there was hope when we were.
Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.
