Remembering Richard Pipes, a Cold Warrior Extraordinaire

Lee Edwards, The Daily Signal

Image from article, with caption: Richard Pipes, second from right, participates in a meeting of Soviet experts with President Ronald Reagan, Nov. 7, 1985.

Excerpt:

Richard Pipes was a distinguished Russian historian, influential public intellectual, and top adviser to President Ronald Reagan who helped end the 44-year-old Cold War. He died on Thursday at the age of 94.

Born in Poland in 1923, Pipes and his Jewish parents fled to Italy in 1939 soon after German troops entered Warsaw. They reached the United States one year later, settling in upper New York state. After receiving a B.A. from Cornell University, Pipes earned a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1950. Soon thereafter, he began teaching at Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his academic career.

Pipes was one of America’s leading experts on communism when he took a leave of absence from Harvard in 1982 to join Reagan’s National Security Council staff. He was the principal author of two key national security decision directives: NSDD-32 and NSDD-75.

NSDD-32 declared that the United States would seek to “neutralize” Soviet control over Eastern Europe and authorized the use of covert action and other means to support anti-Soviet groups in the region, especially the Solidarity trade union in Poland. NSDD-75 called for the United States to seek not coexistence with the Soviet Union, but a fundamental change of the system.

Both directives became essential parts of the Reagan Doctrine, a multi-faceted foreign policy that included a substantial increase in pro-freedom public diplomacy [JB emphasis], a drive to hurt the Soviet economy by reducing the price of oil, and U.S. support of anti-communist forces in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. ...