NOW THAT USSR IS NO MORE, WHO WAS WRONG, WHO RIGHT?

I continue to be astonished at the lack of credit given former President Ronald Reagan for the fall of Communism and the collapse of what he accurately called to the horror of liberal media gurus everywhere "the evil empire."

Now comes a new book by seasoned reporter Don Oberdorfer of The Washington Post (not exactly a pro-Reagan rag) that may be the beginning of giving credit to our immediate past President, where that credit is most certainly due.

Oberdorfer's book is entitled "The Turn: From the Cold War to the New Era." (Poseidon Press, $25.) A brief excerpt from a book review by David Brock of The Wall Street Journal contains this concise summary of the successful Reagan policies that concluded the West's 50-year war against the totalitarians:

"Unlike Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, Mr. Reagan first engaged the Soviets (at Geneva in 1985) from a position of military strength after the pershing deployment, after Grenada, after the Reagan Doctrine, after the military turnaround and the military buildup. All this merely set the stage for the ensuing acts: democratization of the Third World, bilateral disarmament, and the dissolution of Communism itself."

That concise summary leads us inevitably into an inquiry into who was right, and who wrong, during the long twilight struggle against Communist tyranny around the world. It has never been said any better than by Norman Podhoretz, a leading neo-conservative intellectual. Listen to him:

"Who was right? Why, we were, of course. And by `we' I mean the unreconstructed anti-Communist cold warriors. We were right, in the first place, on the moral question. We said and never stopped saying that Communism was one of the two great forms of totalitarianism, and as such no less evil than Nazism. We said and never stopped saying that no people had ever freely decided to live under Communism, or ever would if given a choice.

On all these points, nowadays so blandly conceded by everyone, we were not only opposed but were sneered at, ridiculed and defamed. We were told these things not only by the Communists themselves but by good liberals and social democrats people who in their own eyes differed from us in being more realistic, more flexible, more pluralistic and (above all) more devoted to peace."

Norman Podhoretz, who earned fame in the '50s and '60s as a radical liberal author, critic and editor of Commentary magazine, before breaking with his friends on the left to become a leading figure of neoconservatism.

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From an article by a scandalized Jon Wiener in the Dec.16 issue of that quintessential left-wing rag, The Nation:

The Hoover Institution heads the list of Yeltsin advisers. Probably the world's most notorious bastion of Cold War thinking, the Hoover was founded not by J. Edgar but by Herbert, in 1919; he later declared his institution's purpose was to "demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx." .... When the Hoover team visited Moscow in March, Yeltsin said, according to a Hoover fellow, "Your institute did great work for Reagan. Now do it for me."