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“I often say to people, you’ve all seen these demonstrations in the streets of Iran, thousands of people chanting, “Death to America.” What do you think they mean? What is that all about anyway? Is that some local street festival? Is it something they do to amuse themselves? And the answer is no. That’s exactly what they have in mind. It’s exactly what they want to do.”
That was Michael Ledeen at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend ten years ago. Obama was clinging to power in his last years and Ledeen let him have it in characteristically direct terms. Then, as he had always been, Ledeen was direct, compelling and unequivocal in standing up to evil. Like David Horowitz, whose recent passing reminded so many of the debt the movement owed to his work, Ledeen was a liberal scholar who came into his own as a fiery public thinker and activist with the rise of Reagan. Also like Horowitz, he was uncompromising in defense of principle, but would also unpretentiously build relationships with everyone in the fight because he knew victory would depend on building a movement.
“I knew David Horowitz in his ‘second thoughts’ years, when he turned away from the Left and became a conservative; he often came to our house to satisfy his craving for Chinese takeout and to structure his new political movement. My wife Barbara worked closely with him and Peter Collier, and we’ve been friends ever since,” he wrote in his review of the final volume of Horowitz’s ‘Black Book of the American Left.
David Horowitz and Peter Collier are sadly no longer with us and neither is Ledeen.
But the force that drove both men was the recognition of what the Left was and was becoming, and that force, almost visionary in its intensity, endures in the many whom they influenced.
Ledeen’s passing was met with contempt by many of the same leftists who had penned acid-tongued obituaries for David Horowitz. Leftists connected him to every ‘right-wing conspiracy’ and investigated him during the Iran Contra hearings in hopes of finding something.
Like David, they hated him because he was right.
“Michael is now widely thought of as a reactionary. This is the fate of many people who turn out to be uncannily correct early on about the cruel deceits of left-wing and anti-American movements,” Martin Peretz, his former boss at The New Republic, a liberal himself, wrote.
And Ledeen and Horowitz both understood that Islam was just as great a threat.
That was one reason why Michael Ledeen made repeat appearances at our Restoration Weekends and why his articles were frequently published by Front Page Magazine. For a time, Ledeen was a Shillman Fellow with the Center, and in his later articles warned about the rising threat of Communist China. He not only got it, he spoke out forthrightly about it.
Some dismissed Ledeen as a ‘neoconservative’, but while many of his colleagues from the Reagan and Bush years scrambled to become Never Trumpers, he saw Trump as the fulfillment of his vision of a strong America, able to deter foreign and domestic enemies, and fought for him. Like Horowitz, he lost friendships because he supported Trump, but never backed down.
As Trump became the nominee, Ledeen and Gen. Michael Flynn co-authored ‘The Field of Fight’ about how to defeat Islamic terrorism in which he articulated his conviction that there was no substitute for victory against the Jihad.
“Messianic movements, whether explicitly religious or seemingly secular and ‘scientific, (Communist) read history’s tea leaves for proof that their efforts are blessed. No matter if the blessings come from the god of the dialectic or Allah, victory today confirms belief in the glory of tomorrow. Defeat thus opens fissures within the ranks, for they ask themselves, and their leaders, whether and why the cause has been abandoned by the Prime Mover,” he wrote earlier.
In his later years, Michael Ledeen’s mind turned back more to his beloved Italy that had shaped his past political identity and transformation as a much younger man. Rich in the history that had animated him, he saw in it the dramatic currents of human civilization that drove his work.
During the Cold War when many intellectuals thought it fashionable to preach that history was over, Ledeen firmly rejected any such notion. History, he knew, was all around us. The pivotal events that would reshape the world were not in the past or the future, but right this moment. This urgent conviction could be read and heard in the energy of his rhetoric and his writing.
And so it is only fitting to tell the story of Michael Ledeen’s work through the lens of history.
“I thought I’d start my contributions for Frontpage with a bit of autobiography. I’m an old guy—will be 77 in a few months—with 38 books written, and hundreds of articles, some scholarly, some political. Like my old friends Peter Collier and David Horowitz, I used to be a Lefty (well, not like Peter and David, rather more like a Scoop Jackson Democrat), but I don’t do that anymore,” Michael Ledeen wrote back in 2018. The passing of all three is a grievous loss, but the work they dedicated their lives to is being carried on by the organizations they built, the many whom they mentored and by their voluminous writings that changed the world.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center mourns the loss of a scholar, warrior and old friend.
One thing that struck me, reading the article, was that David Horowitz had a gift for capturing the mood in Berkeley in those days exactly right. I lived through it myself and always felt that reading his articles.
Horowitz and Ledeen knew the plans of t he Left and their Plans Against America just as real today they were during Senator McCarthy
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Back in the 1980’s, Michael Ledeen was one of the writers, to use a phrase, I cut my teeth on. Tom Wolf, Florence King, Emmet Tyrrell, the last is still with us, but not really. I miss them all. Off topic this “End of History” nonsense. I’m the slow kid, so I think I just got it. After Regan the so called conservatives were all excited about Francis Fukuyama. I see now that that was the Thomas Freedman school foreign policy. ‘A country with a McDonald’s has never attacked another country with a McDonald’s.’ What a bunch of carnival barkers. I’m glad I could never have afforded to go on their stupid conservative cruise ships, when that was a fad.
Don’t China and India both have McDonalds?
China has Country Joe McDonald’s
India has Norm McDonald’s
We are losing anchors to a civilized world. A truth is vanishing . They have left us with a wealth of guidance and hope. It’s there for the taking. RIP.
We are losing those anchors because somehow we neglected to pass the torch of critical thinking on to future generations. I doubt you could find anyone under 30 who knows who David Horowitz, Peter Collier, or Michael Ledeen were.
Horowitz and Ledeen were visionaries – absolutely essential men for the building and preserving of civilization. They are just as important as the “great man” who needs their gifts of thoughtful analysis and vision. They love their people and are willing to sacrifice much in the service of truth.
The LORD bless them all, and give them a great inheritance in eternity.
I was sad to read that Michael had died. He was an old friend from his days as a history professor at Washington University in St, Louis. He was an extremely popular teacher known for his captivating lectures. Although I was a graduate student in mathematics, I attended a class he gave on twentieth century youth movements.
Michael was not ideological. He viewed things as a problem solver, much the way Trump does. I remember one conversation with him that had a profound effect on my thinking. It was in the fall of 1970. I ran into him at a coffee lounge at Washington University and we got into a conversation about the antiwar movement. The previous spring had seen the most massive and violent protests against the war and many expected that the turmoil would intensify once students returned.
He thought the opposite. He told me that the movement was over for three reasons. The first was that the war was winding down. the US was removing soldiers and the casualties had decreased dramatically. The second was that the escalation of the protests had led to a level of violence that the public would no longer tolerate and the government’s response was to increase the severity of punishment for participating in violent protests. The third reason was futility. While the public had grown tired of the endless war, the antiwar movement had failed to translate the discontent into a strategy capable of forcing the US to withdraw from it.
Eric Hoffer wrote that “all great causes begin as movements, become businesses and end up as rackets”. Like Michael, I became critical of what became of what Ron Radosh labeled the leftover left. It wasn’t so much that I had changed but that the world had changed. The issues were different and the problems that remained required a different way of looking at things.
I lost track of Michael after he left St. Louis but I read some of his writing and it was always worth the read. He was one of the most thoughtful voices in American life and he will be missed.
I, too, am saddened to learn of my old friend and drumming partner’s death. We were band and orchestra drummers at Columbia HS (Maplewood NJ). His technical facility and superlative sight-reading ability were inspirations for the entire troupe (we knew nothing about politics back then (1957-1959)!
May he enjoy his eternal life – RIP –
The torch has been passed to others to keep the torch held high and burning intensely illuminating the truth and exposing the lies, hypocrisy and treason
This is such sad news. What a loss.
May he rest in peace.
I wonder if Ledeen knew Rush…
Well written, Daniel, as always. A fitting tribute. Another incomprehensible loss to our side of things.