{"id":781,"date":"2025-05-19T20:45:04","date_gmt":"2025-05-19T20:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/?p=781"},"modified":"2025-05-20T00:31:43","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T00:31:43","slug":"reagan-admin-official-who-helped-america-defeat-communism-dead-at-age-83","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/19\/reagan-admin-official-who-helped-america-defeat-communism-dead-at-age-83\/","title":{"rendered":"Reagan admin official who helped America defeat communism dead at age 83"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael A. Ledeen, a major American historian and intellectual, died after suffering a series of small strokes on Sunday at his daughter’s house in Texas. He was 83 years old. Ledeen was a vigorous participant in contributing to the demise of the communist Soviet Union <\/a>and its Iron Curtain allies in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

Ledeen served as a special advisor on terrorism to President Ronald Reagan\u2019s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and later worked as a consultant for the National Security Council.\u00a0Writing for the Asia Times<\/a>, author and journalist David P. Goldman argued that Ledeen\u2019s “personal contribution to America\u2019s victory in the Cold War is far greater than the public record shows.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Goldman noted that the Reagan administration, in 1983, sent Ledeen, a scholar of Italian history and fascism, to meet Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi to convince the Italian leader to allow the U.S. to deploy Pershing missiles to counter rising Soviet jingoism. Goldman added, “The incident reflects the high trust that Ledeen commanded in the Reagan administration and the strategic role that he played.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

TRUMP SAYS US HAS GIVEN IRAN PROPOSAL FOR NUCLEAR DEAL<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

After Italy accepted the Pershings, the then-Social Democratic German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who was reluctant for his nation to be first to house Pershing missiles, agreed to Reagan\u2019s demand.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Leeden was a fan of former anti-communist American philosopher Sidney Hook, who declared during the Cold War that “Freedom is a fighting word.”<\/p>\n

Ledeen would take his hard-charging world view against a new set of U.S. enemies after the ground zero of communism was defeated: radical Islamism in Iran<\/a>, North Korea\u2019s totalitarian regime, and Arab and Latin American despots bent on the eradication of the U.S.<\/p>\n

In 2003, while working as the resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute,\u00a0Ledeen wrote about former President George W. Bush\u2019s Axis of Evil<\/a> (Iran, North Korea and Iraq), “Most commentators ridiculed the very idea of the Axis of Evil, just as they laughed at Reagan\u2019s description of the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire. The deep thinkers laughed at Reagan, and then somberly warned that such language was not only misguided but provocative, as if the Kremlin would be more aggressive as a result of the president\u2019s speech.”<\/p>\n

Ledeen stressed the importance of American leadership breeding inspiration among dissidents trapped in totalitarian systems: “The greatest of the Soviet freedom fighters, from\u00a0[Vladimir] Bukovsky to [Natan] Sharansky, have since written about the surge of hope they felt when they saw that the American president understood why they were fighting.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

He would bring his same intellectual freedom toolkit to his principal worry in this century: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ledeen garnered enormous respect and praise from Iranian dissidents seeking to dissolve the theocratic regime in Tehran, the world\u2019s worst state-sponsor of terrorism, according to the U.S. State Department.<\/p>\n

His wife, Barbara, told Fox News Digital about her late husband, “My only regret is that he didn\u2019t outlive the regime.”<\/p>\n

IRAN\u2019S LONG TRAIL OF DECEPTION FUELS SKEPTICISM OVER NEW NUCLEAR DEAL AS TALKS CONTINUE<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Leeden did not advocate military intervention in Iran. He was in the business of replicating Reagan\u2019s anti-Soviet playbook for Iran\u2019s clerical regime.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He told Fox News Brit Hume<\/a> in 2005 that “the Western world, and in particular the United States” needs to support political prisoners in Iran and demonstrations against the regime.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He told Hume,\u00a0“We should be giving money to the various … Farsi-language broadcasters, some here, some in England, some in Sweden and so forth, some in Germany, to go on the air and share with the Iranian people the now-demonstrated techniques for a successful, nonviolent revolution.”<\/p>\n

He coined the phrase “Faster, please!” for his widely read blog at PJ Media to denote the great urgency to dismantle America\u2019s enemies and stop Islamist-animated terrorism.<\/p>\n

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, paid tribute to Ledeen in a post on X. He wrote in part, “Michael’s understanding of the American people and the Jewish people formed the basis of his abiding faith in the future of America and Israel and in our enduring alliance and friendship.”<\/p>\n

Ledeen was born in Los Angeles in 1941 and authored numerous books on national security, including “Perilous Statecraft: An Insider\u2019s Account of the Iran-Contra Affair.” He\u00a0earned a Ph.D. in history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison. His academic advisor at Wisconsin was the prominent historian George Mosse, who fled Nazi Germany because of antisemitism<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ledeen cultivated a new generation of academics, journalists, think tank scholars and authors at his Chevy Chase home. His residence became a kind of informal salon for\u00a0intellectuals and foreign policy types who had freshly arrived in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

He was also a top-level bridge player and won a national championship, the Truscott\/U.S.P.C. Senior Teams. He is survived by his wife, a daughter, Simone, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense during the first Trump administration, and his two sons, former Marine Corps officers Gabriel and Daniel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael A. Ledeen, a major American historian and intellectual, died after suffering a series of small strokes on Sunday at his daughter’s house in Texas. He was 83 years old. Ledeen was a vigorous participant in contributing to the demise of the communist Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain allies in Eastern Europe. Ledeen served […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":502,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":782,"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781\/revisions\/782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vecimasupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}