Peel the church bells! Shout the hosannas! A summit conference has adjourned without an American President giving away real estate or allies or national honor. That’s a rarity in summits.
The first two summit conferences in recorded history were held with the devil on the pinnacle of a temple and on the top of a high mountain. Succeeding summits proved disastrous for the West because our leaders did not have the courage to say, “Begone, Satan, thou shalt not tempt America.”
Contrary to the biased news coverage about the Reykjavik meeting, the facts are that the mini-summit was a success, that Reagan emerged on the high ground standing tall for freedom, and that Communist Party Secretary Gorbachev blinked. That’s why the Party-controlled press in the U.S.S.R. gave zero news coverage to the Reykjavik summit.
Since a grim-faced Ronald Reagan walked out of the meeting house in Reykjavik, the media elite who manage news selection on television and radio have waged an unrelenting assault on Reagan. They said he walked away from a chance to abolish nuclear weapons. They said he is on the defensive and will be hurt in the upcoming elections.
Television coverage of the aftermath of the Reykjavik Summit has exposed the biases of big media. The media elite who frame the news in our country seem determined to portray Ronald Reagan as the man who threw away the chance of a lifetime to prevent nuclear war, and to portray Communist Party Secretary Gorbachev as a reasonable man of peace.
National television news coverage gave more precious minutes to Soviet criticisms than to American support of Reagan. Heady with their success in ramming through sanctions against South Africa over President Reagan’s veto, the media have been trying to treat President Reagan as savagely as they treated Prime Minister Pieter Botha.
The media have overdone it. For Reagan, it’s like another Grenada.
The American people will reject the outrageous interpretations of Reykjavik that the media liberals are trying to hang around his neck. This is not because the President is a “great communicator,” or “lucky,” or “popular,” or any of the other silly reasons that the media constantly use to belittle Reagan’s successes.
It is because President Reagan’s position is eminently rational and credible, and the anti-SDI position is not. Reagan’s position is that an SDI space shield is defensive, non-nuclear, and non-threatening, so why are the Soviets so agitated unless, indeed, they are planning on attacking us?
Reagan’s position is that the MAD ABM Treaty of 1972 is, indeed, mad. He believes that Mutual Assured Destruction is a crazy way to preserve peace, and it’s time we renounce it in favor of a real defense.
Reagan’s position is that an SDI space shield is the key to practically everything in our relations with the Soviet Union — the key to our survival in the face of the Soviet nuclear missile force, the key to getting the Soviets to talk to us about weapons reduction, and also our insurance policy in case they don’t live up to their agreements (which is likely, since they have violated all the preceding agreements they’ve ever made with us).
Ronald Reagan offered the Soviets a dramatic, mutual reduction of weapons, and Communist Party Secretary Gorbachev walked away from it. He said that the Soviets won’t play unless the United States unilaterally gives up developing and testing our SDI space shield. If Gorbachev intended to live up to any weapons-reduction agreement, SDI would be irrelevant.
The fact is that an SDI space shield is even more vital to us in a period of weapons reduction than at the present time. If the two superpowers face each other with 6,000 warheads each and one side cheats by a thousand, that won’t make a substantial difference. But if the two superpowers face each other with only 1,000 warheads each and one side hides a thousand in the snows of Siberia, it can make the difference between life and death for America.
The big liberal media have shown their true colors — in a confrontation between Reagan and Gorbachev, the media are on the side of Gorbachev and against Reagan. Freedom of the press in America allows that choice, but it also allows the American people to identify the bias of the media and expose them as working to achieve Gorbachev’s agenda.
The American people will support President Reagan in hanging tough for a decision to deploy SDI, and against accommodating the unreasonable demands of Communist Party Secretary Gorbachev.
