Michael A. Ledeen, Reagan Adviser Involved in Iran-Contra, Dies at 83

New York Times

20-05-2025

Michael Ledeen, a provocative neoconservative who advised Washington policymakers to crush Islamic terrorists, disparaged a free press and helped instigate the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages scandal during the Reagan administration, died on Saturday in Austin, Texas. He was 83.
His death, at his daughter's home, was from complications related to a series of strokes, his wife, Barbara Ledeen, said.
A bewhiskered academic who was a whiz at bridge, liked to quote Machiavelli and kept a Darth Vader mask in his office, Mr. Ledeen was a trained historian and the author of some three dozen books.
He presented himself as an unambiguous champion of democracy, notwithstanding his belief that an elite group of domestic and international statesmen should shape America's foreign policy and his complaint that an unfettered media was a 'disruptive influence.'
For all his prominence and respect among many neoconservatives and his official role advising the State Department and the National Security Council during Ronald Reagan's presidency, however, Mr. Ledeen could sometimes appear as a shadowy figure.
In 1985, with the blessing of the Reagan administration, he held a clandestine meeting at the home of an Israeli arms dealer with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian businessman. Their meeting set in motion what became known as the Iran-contra scandal — the revelations that the administration, defying Congress, illegally sold arms to Iran and used some of the proceeds to support right-wing rebels in Nicaragua known as the contras.
Mr. Ledeen's role as a White House go-between, which facilitated the arms sales to Iran, was 'the first fateful step' in the scandal, the journalist Fox Butterfield wrote in reviewing Mr. Ledeen's memoir, 'Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair' (1988), in The New York Times Book Review.
Mr. Ledeen, however, was never accused of wrongdoing in the affair.
In his book 'They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons' (2008), Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, a foreign policy magazine, characterized Mr. Ledeen as 'an avatar of promoting democracy and smashing terrorism.'
'He insisted that the right, not the left, should be the true heir to the radical, revolutionary tradition of upending dictatorships,' Mr. Heilbrun wrote. 'This was neoconservatism on steroids.'
Mr. Ledeen fervently supported opponents of the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran, in the expectation that democratization would calm conflict in the Middle East.
'Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone,' he wrote of sponsors of terrorism in his book 'The War Against the Terror Masters' (2002). 'They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence — our existence, not our politics — threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.'
In a post on X after Mr. Ledeen's death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel wrote that Mr. Ledeen's 'deep familiarity with the Iranian people convinced him that the ayatollahs who oppress them must be prevented at all costs from developing nuclear weapons, and that a free Iranian people will be a great ally and friend to America and Israel.'
Some of the theories that Mr. Ledeen espoused in his books and articles were later discredited, among them that Iraq had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium powder from Niger as part of a nuclear arms program; that the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981 in Vatican City was orchestrated by Moscow; and that President Jimmy Carter's brother, Billy, had influenced the president on behalf of Libya.
A Senate investigation found that Libya had, indeed, cultivated the president's brother, hoping to gain sway in Washington, but that the Carter White House had disregarded him.
An ardent cold warrior, Mr. Ledeen was described by his friend David P. Goldman, deputy editor of the Asia Times, as 'one of the last of the generation that gave America a monopoly of global power that subsequent misgovernance frittered away.'
Mr. Goldman called Mr. Ledeen a 'revolutionary conservative' who believed in 'creative destruction' at home and abroad.
Michael Arthur Ledeen was born on Aug. 1, 1941, in Los Angeles to J. Louis and Martha (Levine) Ledeen. His father was an engineer, and his mother was a teacher. The family moved to Massachusetts and later to New Jersey, where Michael attended Columbia High School in Maplewood.
After graduating from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., with a bachelor's degree in history in 1962, he earned a doctorate in history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin in 1969. He was an assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis from 1967 to 1973, winning attention for a study of fascism in Italy under Mussolini.
After he was denied tenure there, he moved to Italy to teach at the University of Rome from 1973 to 1977. The Reagan administration recruited him in 1981 to serve as a special adviser to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. He was also a consultant to Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and an adviser to Robert C. McFarlane, Reagan's national security adviser.
Mr. Ledeen was a Rome correspondent for The New Republic; a founder of The Washington Quarterly, a journal covering global security issues, and its executive editor from 1977 to 1981; and a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute for 20 years, before moving to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research group in Washington.
His other books included 'Debacle: The American Failure in Iran' (1981, written with William Lewis) and 'Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away' (1996).
His first marriage to Jenny Newberry in 1969 ended in divorce. He married Barbara Schlacter in 1973. She served on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative public policy group.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Ledeen is survived by two sons, Gabriel and Daniel, and a daughter, Simone Ledeen, who was deputy assistant secretary of defense during President Trump's first term.
Mr. Ledeen once called himself a 'Jackson Democrat,' referring to Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson of Washington, a hard-line anti-Communist. But as the progressives drifted leftward he abandoned the Democratic Party and doubled down on his vehement right-wing views.
'I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say,' he told the American Enterprise Institute in 1983, 'but all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war.'
'What we hate is not casualties,' he added, 'but losing.'