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New York Times
20-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Michael A. Ledeen, Reagan Adviser Involved in Iran-Contra, Dies at 83
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.'
Fox News
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Reagan admin official who helped America defeat communism dead at age 83
Michael A. Ledeen, a major American historian and intellectual, died after suffering a series of small strokes on Sunday at his residence in Maryland. 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 as a special advisor on terrorism to President Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and later worked as a consultant for the National Security Council. Writing for the Asia Times, author and journalist David P. Goldman argued that Ledeen's "personal contribution to America's victory in the Cold War is far greater than the public record shows." 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." 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's demand. Leeden was a fan of former anti-communist American philosopher Sidney Hook, who declared during the Cold War that "Freedom is a fighting word." 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, North Korea's totalitarian regime, and Arab and Latin American despots bent on the eradication of the U.S. In 2003, while working as the resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen wrote about former President George W. Bush's Axis of Evil (Iran, North Korea and Iraq), "Most commentators ridiculed the very idea of the Axis of Evil, just as they laughed at Reagan's 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's speech." Ledeen stressed the importance of American leadership breeding inspiration among dissidents trapped in totalitarian systems: "The greatest of the Soviet freedom fighters, from [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." 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's worst state-sponsor of terrorism, according to the U.S. State Department. His wife, Barbara, told Fox News Digital about her late husband, "My only regret is that he didn't outlive the regime." Leeden did not advocate military intervention in Iran. He was in the business of replicating Reagan's anti-Soviet playbook for Iran's clerical regime. He told Fox News Brit Hume in 2005 that "the Western world, and in particular the United States" needs to support political prisoners in Iran and demonstrations against the regime. He told Hume, "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." He coined the phrase "Faster, please!" for his widely read blog at PJ Media to denote the great urgency to dismantle America's enemies and stop Islamist-animated terrorism. Ledeen was born in Los Angeles in 1941 and authored numerous books on national security, including "Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair." He earned a Ph.D. in history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His academic advisor at Wisconsin was the prominent historian George Mosse, who fled Nazi Germany because of antisemitism. 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 intellectuals and foreign policy types who had freshly arrived in Washington, D.C. 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.
Time Magazine
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
How the Iran-Contra Scandal Impacts American Politics Today
President Donald Trump's actions, including denying election results, ignoring court decisions, and attacking civic institutions, have left many concerned that American democracy is imperiled. Historians have chronicled how precedents from the past have helped make these dangerous behaviors possible. They've cited the long history of conservative backlash against liberal reforms since the 1960s, the coarsening of political discourse in the 1990s, and the denial of voting rights and election results in the 21st century, for instance. But this narrative of democratic decline leaves out a pivotal episode: the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. This opaque foreign policy mess has receded from history, a minor speedbump at the triumphant end of the Cold War. In a 2023 episode of Only Murders in the Building, Steve Martin's character explains to a bored millennial that Iran-Contra was 'worse than Watergate, just not as interesting.' Yet, understanding Iran-Contra's assault on democracy makes it interesting—and relevant—once more. The Iran-Contra scandal highlights how little respect Reagan Administration officials harbored for the guardrails of democracy yet suffered few penalties for their misdeeds. The rule-breaking and impunity during Iran-Contra may have set the stage for Trump. Americans have a muddled memory of Iran-Contra, in part because of its complexity. The scandal had two separate branches, each stemming from an attempt to achieve one of President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy goals. The first part transpired between 1984 and 1986, as Reagan's administration worked to free hostages held by allies of Ruhollah Khomeini's anti-American Iranian government. Believing that the Iranians could secure the release of the hostages, Reagan's aides sold them thousands of missiles to use in their war against Iraq. Doing so violated American law, and it broke Reagan's own promise never to negotiate with terrorists. These efforts proved, at best, ineffective and, at worst, counterproductive: they freed three hostages but got three more taken, and they failed to moderate the regime in Tehran. In late 1986, word of the secret sales leaked. Simultaneously, the other part of the scandal—the 'Contra' component—was taking place in a very different region of the world. In late 1984, Congress banned any U.S. intelligence organization from giving military funds or advice to the Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's socialist government. Despite the clear ban, however, Reagan ordered subordinates to keep the Contras alive ' body and soul.' Trying to satisfy this directive, the CIA handed its mission to the National Security Council (NSC). More specifically, the mission fell to the NSC's deputy director of political-military affairs, Lt. Col. Oliver North. He took over a secret—and again, illegal—war with the help of private Americans and foreign governments. When a so-called private plane came crashing down in Nicaragua just weeks before news of the arms sales to Iran broke, the U.S. government's stealth effort in Central America emerged in broad daylight. The two were tied together because North diverted millions in unexpected profits from the arm sales to the Contras. While many in the government participated in at least one of two separate schemes, for instance by helping the Contras or shipping arms, only a scant few knew of this connection. Like the other elements of the scandal, it, too, was illegal, as the funds from the weapons sale should have gone to the U.S. Treasury by law. When the scandal engulfed the administration, Reagan did transfer North back to the Marine Corps and fired his national security advisor, John Poindexter. But, incredibly, he at first denied that he had sold weapons to Iran. His subordinates lied to congressional committees. And his attorney general, Ed Meese, ran a 'fact-finding' operation so careless that it seemed meant to protect the President while allowing North and his secretary to shred documents. This was not the behavior of an administration accepting responsibility or displaying transparency. In fact, in an interview with TIME, Reagan blamed the press for his troubles, and Republicans blamed Congress. Even when Reagan finally fessed up to having falsely denied an obvious arms for hostages operation, he told the American people, 'My heart and best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.' The revelation of the intertwined scandals captivated Americans. Between the fall of 1986 and the fall of 1987, more than seven out of 10 Americans watched some of the televised congressional hearings about Iran-Contra. But once it became clear that Democrats would not impeach Reagan, public interest waned. Unlike Watergate, when a smoking gun tape implicated President Richard Nixon, to many, the 1980s scandal seemed a blur of byzantine Cold War diplomacy, opaque Swiss bank accounts, and a large cast of forgettable middlemen. The country boxed up the ugly affair and stored it in the attic of its memory. It did so even as the scandal persisted and investigators indicted dozens of administration officials. In 1988, Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, won the presidency, and throughout his entire administration, those responsible for Iran-Contra dodged the political and legal consequences of their actions. Defendants in Iran-Contra cases benefited from a Bush Administration that refused to make many documents available to the courts, thus forcing prosecutors to pare back their charges. This allowed most to escape justice in criminal court. On, Christmas Eve 1992, after Bush had lost his reelection race, the lame duck president pardoned all of those still facing legal jeopardy from Iran-Contra. That conclusion—as well as the Reagan administration's lack of concern with legality—confirmed the erosion of core democratic norms, including separation of powers, rule of law, judicial independence, consent of the governed, and trust. In its final report, the Democratic-led congressional investigation committee sounded the alarm about the impact of Reagan officials' widespread disdain for democracy: 'Constitutional process is the essence of our democracy and our democratic form of Government is the basis of our strength.' A privatized war was 'a prescription for anarchy in a democratic society' they argued and the diversion of funds was 'the path to dictatorship.' But, crucially, unlike during Watergate, these conclusions weren't bipartisan. In fact, Republicans dismissed them. One conservative lawyer cynically called the criminal charges against North—lying to Congress, obstructing inquiries, and accepting an illegal gratuity—'nothing you couldn't charge a hundred other people with in this town.' Some congressional Republicans came away from the hearings convinced that their own institution should further encourage a 'unitary executive' that bullied not only Congress but also all executive departments. 'There was no constitutional crisis, no systematic disrespect for 'the rule of law,' no grand conspiracy, and no Administration-wide dishonesty or coverup,' concluded Republican Congressmen and Senators in the now-famed "Minority Report." Instead, many Republicans in Congress were frustrated by their own institution's legal right to restrain the power of the executive. They could freely dismiss the scandal in part because the GOP paid little political price for it. Voters elected Bush in 1988. In 1994, North came within a hair of winning a Senate race in Virginia. That same year, reflecting how Iran-Contra became a partisan Rorschach test more so than a badge of shame, the New York Times reported that, among those charged, convicted, or pardoned, 'almost all are unrepentant.' Poindexter reflected, 'If I had it to do over again, I would probably do things just about exactly the same way I did then.' The GOP's dismissal of the scandal has shaped politics in the decades since Iran-Contra. Dick Cheney, who served on the House Iran-Contra committee in 1987, later became vice president and recalled his and his colleagues' ' robust view of the president's prerogatives.' Elliott Abrams, Bill Barr, and John Bolton, who all figured in the scandal, served in the first Trump Administration. Additionally, echoes of Iran-Contra can be seen today. From the Trump Administration's refusal to obey congressional subpoenas to the mishandling of classified documents officials have ignored democratic norms and practices. Trump has also tried to shutter government agencies without congressional approval, refused to spend congressionally appropriated funds, and chipped away at the trust that cements relationships in a democracy. These behaviors represent the full flowering of the " unitary executive concept,"—an attitude that first reared its head during Iran-Contra. Alan McPherson is professor of history at Temple University and the author of The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy.
Indianapolis Star
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Indianapolis Star
From federal prison to tourist destination, see what Alcatraz looks like today
Show Caption Donald Trump 's call to reopen the infamous Alcatraz prison in the San Francisco Bay has garnered attention since the president posted about it on May 4. The federal prison on Alcatraz Island housed notorious U.S. criminals such as Al Capone before it closed in 1963, becoming one of San Francisco's most popular tourist destinations. While Trump called to "REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!" to "house America's most ruthless and violent Offenders," the actual process of doing so would prove tricky, as the building has become a museum and historic site brimming with guided tours as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, overseen by the National Park Service, since its closure. Reopening the facility, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and named a National Historic Landmark in 1986, has been considered before. In 1981, Alcatraz Island was one of 14 sites evaluated as the Reagan Administration searched for a location to hold 10,000 to 20,000 Cuban detainees during the Mariel Boatlift. However, the site was rejected because of its lack of utilities, historic nature and popularity as a tourist destination.
Indianapolis Star
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Indianapolis Star
From federal prison to tourist destination, see what Alcatraz looks like today
Donald Trump 's call to reopen the infamous Alcatraz prison in the San Francisco Bay has garnered attention since the president posted about it on May 4. The federal prison on Alcatraz Island housed notorious U.S. criminals such as Al Capone before it closed in 1963, becoming one of San Francisco's most popular tourist destinations. While Trump called to "REBUILD, AND OPEN ALCATRAZ!" to "house America's most ruthless and violent Offenders," the actual process of doing so would prove tricky, as the building has become a museum and historic site brimming with guided tours as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, overseen by the National Park Service, since its closure. Reopening the facility, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and named a National Historic Landmark in 1986, has been considered before. In 1981, Alcatraz Island was one of 14 sites evaluated as the Reagan Administration searched for a location to hold 10,000 to 20,000 Cuban detainees during the Mariel Boatlift. However, the site was rejected because of its lack of utilities, historic nature and popularity as a tourist destination. Today, Alcatraz is more of a museum than a prison. Here's a look at where things stand on the inside. See what Alcatraz looks like today
