Our generation's Long Telegram

Many historians and most pundits hate to credit Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War. There is, in fact, a wide-spread loathing to even speak of a U.S. victory in the long, twilight struggle. Instead, the conventional wisdom runs something like this: "Ronald Reagan, an amiable dunce, happened to be president when Gorbachev decided to end the Cold War."


Historian Paul Kengor begs to differ and he has the newly declassified documents to back it up.

Predicting the Soviet Collapse

When we look back at the Cold War, we remember big names and big statements and documents. There’s nary a college course on the Cold War that excludes George Kennan’s seminal “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow in February 1946. Kennan’s memo prophetically captured what the free world faced from the USSR at the start of the Cold War, forecasting a long struggle ahead. Herb Meyer’s November 1983 memo likewise prophetically captured what the free world faced from the USSR, but this time nearing the end of the Cold War, uniquely forecasting a long struggle about to close — with victory.


George Kennan’s memo is remembered in our textbooks and our college lectures. Herb Meyer’s memo merits similar treatment.

Meyer worked for William Casey at CIA. He was an outsider and something of bombthrower. In addition to his memo on Cold War strategy, he and his boss had an acute sense of the weaknesses that beset the analytical branch of the Agency.

Meyer found his NIC [National Intelligence Council] colleagues unhurried, complacent, serene. '"hey had a phrase that drove me crazy," he recalled. "You'd raise a hypothesis and they'd answer, 'we have no evidence of that.' What do you mean, you have no evidence? Is there no evidence, or didn't you ask the right questions to get the evidence? Where did you look? 'We have no evidence' can mean you never looked at all, never asked....


"'We don't have any evidence' is a non-sequitur. Bill and I would go ballistic when they'd tell us that. Did they expect it to turn up in the mailbox?"

Joseph Persico, Casey

Sadly, this problem persisted even after Meyer, Casey, and Reagan were proven right about the Soviet unions problems.


Donald Rumsfeld wrote this in his recent memoirs:

I first heard a variant of the phrase 'known unknowns' in a discussion with former NASA administrator William R. Graham when we served together on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in the late 1990s. Members of our bipartisan commission were concerned that some briefers from the U. S. intelligence community treated the fact that they lacked information about a possible activity to infer that the activity had not happened and would not. In other words, if something could not be proven to be true, then it could be assumed not to be true.