I and the small group of intellectual friends I had at the time, never felt betrayed by anyone questioning military buildups and foreign policy decisions. Instead, they were that ray of sunshine from the outside that kept us going.

In hindsight, who knows if that posturing is what caused the Cold War to break or we were simply lucky enough to be pushing at a time when the Soviets were crumbling on their own no matter what we did. I tend to lean towards the latter. I also will always believe that we were an accident or incident away from all out global destruction during those days, probably as close as we were during the Cuban missile crisis.

A lot of people have invested a lot of effort in trying to prove that Reagan just "happened to be in the neighborhood" when the Soviet Union fell.

That it would have happened anyway if we had followed the policies of the Left and unilaterally disarmed, pulled our missiles out of Europe, "frozen" our nuclear forces, cut military spending, refused to confront Soviet surrogates in nations around the world, or done any of the other things that the Reagan administration refused to do, despite the howls of the Democrats and others.

Or that it was all Gorbachev, a thesis that obviously the Nobel Committee subscribed to.

Fine with me, I suppose. The alternative scenario, that Reagan actually made it happen, or that if Carter had been elected in 1990 that the U.S.S.R. would still be going strong, is inconceivable to many people, and now that the U.S.S.R. is history, I really shouldn't care.

If Bush manages to succeed in the Middle East, I suppose it won't take long for him to be written out of the success story either.