Better in their words…

Review & Outlook: Right From the Start – WSJ.com.

I remember reading these guys, especially Rusher.

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Consumed by today’s debates, we too often forget those who labored in the past to secure our current freedom. Two men who were right about the Cold War and the great debates of the 20th century—William Rusher and Igor Birman—recently died and deserve more notice than they’ve received.

Rusher, who died Saturday at age 87, was a conservative writer and the long-time publisher of National Review magazine in its heyday. Though less renowned than editor William F. Buckley Jr., Rusher played his own important role as ballast among the many sharp minds and large egos when that magazine was shaping modern conservative thought.

In the early 1960s, Rusher and others built the foundation for what became Barry Goldwater’s successful run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964. While Goldwater lost, his candidacy signaled the conservative ascendancy within the GOP that culminated in Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

Rusher wrote a successful syndicated column for 36 years in which he exhibited his fundamental optimism about America and its purposes—even through the dark days of reckless government expansion after 2008. Having once thought Reagan should mount a populist, third-party challenge to the GOP in the 1970s, Rusher and the tea party were kindred spirits. He had a deep faith in the ability of the American people to regain their bearings after a political mistake.

He was also a man of great personal dignity and superb taste who we recall once offering us the very good advice that, “The best restaurant is the restaurant that knows you best.”

Birman, who died on April 6 at age 82, was a Russian economist who emigrated to the U.S. in 1974 and predicted the collapse of the Soviet economy. Perhaps because he had served as a director of planning in Soviet factories, Birman had a profound distrust of Soviet statistics and believed its economy was smaller and could support far less nonmilitary consumption than nearly all Sovietologists in the West believed at the time.

An occasional contributor to this newspaper, Birman was especially critical of the CIA and most Western experts for trusting too much in Moscow’s official claims. For this apostasy, these Western elites ostracized and criticized Birman, saying that his views were by definition biased because he was an emigre.

That dismissal was unfair to Birman’s scholarship, but it also had profound implications for U.S. policy during the last decades of the Cold War. The flawed CIA judgment that the Soviet economy was nearly as large and as wealthy as America’s supported the view that the Soviet empire could never be defeated and so some kind of detente with Communism was inevitable.

Birman’s insight that the Soviet Union was far weaker than it seemed from its military prowess was implicitly adopted by Ronald Reagan when he famously predicted in 1982 that “freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” For that, Reagan was also reviled as a Cold War simpleton.

Birman stuck to his views and drew further scorn later that decade by predicting that Mikhail Gorbachev would lack the will to make the far-reaching economic reforms that were the only way to save the Soviet political system. As the world soon learned, Gorbachev’s economic reforms were too little and the Soviet Union collapsed.

In a 2003 essay, “The Failure of the American Sovietological Economics Profession,” John Howard Wilhelm recounted the debate between Birman and the CIA, concluding that “Given what has happened and what we now know, Birman clearly did get it right.”

That the deaths of both Birman and Rusher have been so little remarked is a reminder that the liberal establishment will forgive intellectual dissenters for being wrong, but it will never forgive them for being right.