256. Come on U.S. presidents, listen to my civics teacher.

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Most of us believe by now that a market economy will outperform a planned economy hands down.  Communist states just fall behind in supplying material goods.  And that's where we measure success in the East-West competition, isn't it, in material satisfaction of the workers?  The American Dream is a dream of money, ability to buy things; the Marxist dream is a dream of satisfied needs, material needs (it's dialectical materialism, isn't it?).  Show Krushchev those rows of middle-class houses in Detroit, tell him they belong to workers, and we can see points going up on the board.

So why did we need to do all those dirty tricks to communist countries, and send advisers to coach resisters, and agents to funnel arms to opponents, and technicians to help the arms-handlers, and do all those covert things Robert M. Gates, Cold War insider, tells about in his book, From the Shadows? 

"Because sometimes, when something had to be done, you could do it more effectively and safely covertly than you could by doing it in the open."

But why did we have to go so far?  Like mining a harbor and blowing up a Soviet ship.  Real in-your-face challenges.  I remember those Cold War anxieties.  We knew what kind of eager warriors we had in Washington.  Smart, but oh my. They could so easily miscalculate.  Trigger too much pride, impose too much humiliation, underestimate a paranoia, and we could find ourselves under an approaching missile.  Or stuck in a postcolonial swamp.  Along with the dictator we backed.

"I know the answer to why we went so far.  Because I've studied some history.  It's that if we hadn't gone far enough we simply would have lost."

Lost what?  Our lives?  Our way of life?

"No.  The game.  It's the game, stupid.  The Great Game, the game played by Britain against Russia for a hundred years in Asia, the game played by Palmerston in his morning coat and Disraeli in his spats, sending an emissary here, a regiment there, the game we're continuing to play against Russia now.  But it's really the game played by any country that wants to be a Great Power (to take over the capital letters awarded to those countries who succeeded in the nineteenth century).  Slip a little and you lose your title."

That's a tough game, I know, but if you're up against communists you don't have to play it.  If what my high-school civics teacher told me about both systems is true we can just sit back and wait for their system to wither.

"Yes.  If your civics teacher is right about communist systems that's what our legislators can vote for.   And if voters really believe what they say about communism, they'll be behind them.  So instead of a Cold War with all its expense and crises we'll have peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want. Oh yes, and love will be a thing that can never go wrong, and (to finish Dorothy Parker's way) you'll be Marie of Romania.  The unreality of your logically sound conclusion must be apparent to you. "

 Well, with Gates’ help it's becoming so.  I must admit that it's hard to see any of those five presidents he worked under — Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush — saying, "Well, we're going to sit back and wait for things to go our way on this one."  Even harder when you see Obama getting plastered every time he goes an extra second on his chair.

 "And that's just pressure from the voters.  Think of presidential cabinets and staffs, the best and the brightest, the most eager.  Even the most progressive, those most alert to human suffering, with the most humane instincts, even they are going to want action.  Action.  Get a picture of them at home during the Cold War (as in Katherine Graham's autobiography) and what do you see?  Hawks, hawks, and more hawks.  Democratic, humane, Goldwater-deploring, Nixon-fighting, future warriors on poverty.  There they are in Graham's dining room, sorting out moves against the Soviets.  To the last guest!"

And yet, if my teacher is right about communism and I'm right about a passive stand-down in the face of it, what they're going against is peace and prosperity and saved lives and built-up capital and everything civilized human beings might want.  Who goes against such things?  Barbarians.  Are Cold Warriors barbarians?

"It's a reasonable question, and, as you can see in Gates' book, one our presidents most frequently had to ask about CIA people, who often took the operational lead, or stood nearby pushing their favorite operations.  But pushed in such a gentlemanly way.  None more gentlemanly, more civilized appearing, than CIA Director William J. Casey,   "He dressed expensively and formally.  Even on weekends, when he would come into the office, he almost always wore a jacket and tie." He'd have been right at home, sartorially, among the players of the first Great Game, those in the Palmerston cabinet, planning moves against the Russians. 

"And he'd have a lot in common with that other group of well-dressed males around a table in St. Petersburg, planning opposing moves.  I'm with you here.  They're all one.  They're all having the time of their lives.  'Man, is this ever a great game.'  All their hormones are engaged. Male life lived all the way up.  If the Brits weren't having so much fun why would they call it a game?"

That's a terrible thing to picture when you can see where the low-level players of their game wound up. There they are, the poet reminds us, "East and west on fields forgotten....Lovely lads and dead and rotten."  To the soldiers it wasn't such a great game.

"That eats at me me.  And all the more in the light of the history I've read.  I know that what put those lads on those fields, dead, were moves planned by gentlemen, educated, highly civilized gentlemen, England's brightest and best.  As our brightest and best put our lads, dead, on the fields of Viet Nam."

It eats at me too.  And it leads me to believe that I, for all my upward-gazing awe, and you, for all your sophistication in history, still have a naive view of gentlemen.  All those players of the Great Game, old and new, whatever their dress, or manners, or education, or state of civilization, were playing for a very primitive satisfaction: to get the best of another male. What we have to see in those morning coats, essentially, is what I saw on my big city grammar-school playground: competitors in a contest over who would be "cock of the walk," as my uncle from the farm called the winner.  Unsatisfied testosterone.  New on the playground, old in the cabinet meeting.  Inside that morning coat or blazer there's still an unspayed tomcat.  There may be signs of a successful operation, but it hasn't worked.

"That's certainly hard for me to dispute when I look at the CIA described in all the other books about it.  Oh, it's got variety, and thought, and humanity, but you know what its default position is?  You really want to know?  It's a grip on the balls.  The CIA's most vigorous people, the people that gravitate to it, still love Teddy Roosevelt, his manliness, his realistic manliness: 'When you've got 'em by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.'  So shut up, peaceniks, about hearts and minds.  On with the Great Game.  The Ur-Game was Greek wrestling, with no holds barred."

How it must grind those types now when they read of Jimmy Carter, that wimp, doing more with his talk of human rights to break down the Soviet Union than they ever did.  Carter, leveraging the idealistic language Ford had gotten the Soviets to agree to in the Helsinki Accords, and with the help of the new pope (still with no army divisions), started the fires in Poland and Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe that would burn down the whole communist house.  And Gates, noting how he and Ford were belittled for their naive idealism by "those who considered themselves as hardheaded realists in foreign policy," gives him full credit for it (pages 89-96).

Did Carter understand power, the power of ideas, their appeal to hearts and minds, better than they did?  His behavior encourages doubt but to me it looks like it.  The central fact about those CIA realpoliticians, those confident justifiers of the dirty trick, the talking point when you want to take their money (and their reputation in history) away, is that they simply did not understand power.

"And, you know, every time a dirty trick was exposed they had a chance to understand it.  The indignation before the world's TV sets, the disappointment in our allies' faces, the regret in the hearts of our young. They could have learned something from that."

Well, they certainly got their come-uppance from the grieving young in the sixties.   "Covert action?  That might be uncovered?  Christ, can't do that any more.  Not with all these students ready to flood the streets."

"The realpoliticians couldn't do anything any more. Kissinger at the table with the North Vietnamese starts one of his old moves and then, in mid-gesture, realizes that the students wouldn't put up with it."

Ah, those sickened hearts and minds of the young.  But back to the education of the vigorous old.  Only if they had taken their high-school civics course — the course the grieving young were so much closer to — only if they had taken that course seriously, would they have learned something.  Take "democracy" and "the rule of law" as mere words and you're uneducable.  You're free, in your ignorance, to mine another nation's harbors, and overthrow its elected presidents, and deceive your own legislators about the whole thing.  You're free to undermine, and dismiss as naive, the very power that can win the battle you're fighting, the power of an idea.

So, I conclude, my high-school civics teacher had the secret to power, the key to the kingdom, all along.  She have could given it to these presidents play by play.  I'll make her National Security Adviser and let her speak:  "Trust your system.  Trust democracy.  Trust free enterprise.  Trust the ideals of the Founding Fathers.  Trust their strength.  In the battle for hearts and minds, the battle where the war is won, they will win out.  The world will see you conserving lives and treasure, prospering, confirming the practicality of your nation's ideals.  And there's only one person who can keep those ideals from winning out.  You.  You can screw them up.  If by your behavior and the behavior you allow your subordinates you show that you don't trust them, you will screw them up.  The world will hear the once-powerful words and say, 'Yeah, yeah.'  There goes your strength and you'll be back to the no-holds-barred game, which you have no better chance of winning than the other dirty players have."