Remembering Neville Chamberlain

[Posted 1:02 PM by Roger Kimball]

Remember Neville Chamberlain? My, how we despise him now for his pusillanimous blindness. What will history say about figures like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Strobe Talbott, and so many others who dismissed as an "hallucination" or worse Ronald Reagan’s efforts to roll back the Soviet threat in the 1980s? The Belmont Club has it about right, I think:

Today Arthur Schlesinger’s assessment of Reagan, written with such serious and deluded assurance, has something of the air of those scratchy old newsreels showing a turkey-necked Neville Chamberlain fluttering a paper bearing Herr Hitler’s signature. Funny now but nobody was laughing in 1938, and Chamberlain waved his paper to the cheers of the crowd.
It’s worth remembering both aspects of the Neville phenomenon: 1) his culpable if high-principled and well intentioned appeasement. (What better intention is there than peace?) And 2) the near universal approbation that Mr. "Peace-in-our-times" enjoyed . . . until, of course, it was too late.

The Belmont Club is right, too, about the ultimate nature of Reagan’s legacy--he did as much as anyone to win the Cold War, yes, but he also provided a shining example of American individualism--by which I mean individualism defined by principle, not self-infatuation or narcissism--in action.

Sophisticates unwittingly paid Reagan a compliment by calling him a cowboy, by which they meant gunslinger, instead of in the more accurate sense of a man able to see nature without blinders; to know things for what they were. Although Ronald Reagan has left the nation a huge legacy of achievement still it would be incomplete and his bequest to posterity less final if we forget that his greatest strength was to think for himself and dare to do the same.
Wise words.

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