Robert C. McFarlane served his country in actual combat in Vietnam and later in political combat in three White Houses, where he helped defeat the "evil empire" without firing a single shot. He deserves to be remembered as a hero, not as a left-wing media target.
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A touching tribute...let me post extended excerpts:
Hereâs how The New York Times wrote up the passing of a war hero-turned-public servant in a May 13 bulletin: âRobert McFarlane, a top Reagan aide who fell from grace in the Iran-Contra scandal, has died at 84.â
Got that? A U.S. Marine who served his country in Vietnam, who worked in the National Security Council (NSC) for three presidentsârising to the top of the NSC under President Ronald Reaganâis reduced, in a headline, to an âaide who fell from graceâ in a âscandal.â
If you had that sort of media power, what characterization would you blast out about a patriotic fellow citizen? Hopefully, youâd be more charitable than the Times.
A graduate of the United States Naval Academy, McFarlane received a commission in the Marines in 1959. In 1965, he led one of the first Marine combat units in Vietnam. He did two tours.
After that, he was named as a White House Fellow, a high honor. From there he was assigned to the NSC, working for President Richard Nixonâs top diplomat, Henry Kissinger, on the China desk, traveling several times to China with Kissinger.
In 1979, McFarlane retired from the Marines as a lieutenant colonel, going to work on Capitol Hill for Sen. John Tower (R-TX), who was leading the opposition to President Jimmy Carterâs SALT II arms control treaty. Carter had signed that treatyâand sealed the deal with a kiss, in factâwith Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. For their part, Tower and other Republicans, aided by McFarlane, opposed the deal as one-sided (no wonder Brezhnev was so happy).
In fact, SALT II was was so unpopular among Americans that it never even came to a vote in a Democratic-controlled Senate. (Then-Sen. Joe Biden was in favor of SALT II.)
After Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in the 1980 presidential election, McFarlane went to the State Department and then back to the NSC, first as the deputy and then as the head. It was on McFarlaneâs watch, on March 8, 1983, that the 40th president labeled the Soviet Union as an âevil empire.â And McFarlane was on hand, too, on March 23, 1983, when Reagan launched its Strategic Defense Initiative. The purpose of SDI was to safeguard the U.S. from nuclear annihilation, and believe it or not, the left back thenâincluding most top Democratsâthought that SDI was a terrible idea.
For instance, the 1984 Democratic platform dubbed SDI as âStar Wars,â ripping it as âphantom,â âfutile,â and âprovocative⌠lull[ing] our nation into a false sense of security.â Yes, Democrats were that determined to leave the U.S. defenseless against atomic destruction.
I was so impressed by what I had heardâand so intrigued by McFarlaneâs role in this great sequence of eventsâthat I invited him to lunch at the White House Mess. I started by thanking him for his service in and out of uniform, and he responded with a tight smile, âCall me Bud.â
At our meal, he was gracious and reserved and always, like a Marine, even when sitting ramrod straight. He told me an interesting bit of back story about the genesis of SDI: One of the controversial sticking points in the drafting of the SDI speech was Reaganâs insistence that it include a pledge of âeliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles.â That is, for all of humanity, including the Russians.
Why did Reagan want to say this? Because he was a liberal? Of course not. Reagan was as hard-nosed and anti-communist as ever, and yet he knew that if he was going to bring the Democratsâwho controlled the U.S. House back thenâalong, as well as the rest of the world, he was going to have show a little liberal âleg.â It was a gesture, even a ploy, in keeping with a leader who had learned how to negotiate with liberals as head of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s and 50s.
McFarlane filled me in on this, making the point that in Oval Office negotiations, both the State and Defense Departments had opposed any such talk of de-nuclearization. The secretaries of state and defense, George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, were both wise and honorable men, and yet they just couldnât bring themselves to see Reaganâs stratagem.
As McFarlane recounted the scene, Reagan would say what he wanted in the speech draft, and the State and Defense officials would nodâand yet then the revised draft come back as State and Defense wanted it, not as Reagan wanted it. This happened twice, McFarlane remembered, and after the second time, Reagan gave up on the process and just wrote in the words as he wanted them.
I asked Bud what he thought of all this: âI supported the President on his decision.â Said like a loyal staff man. The NSCâs job, he explained, is not to make policy, but rather, to facilitate policymaking. And the president is the commander-in-chief.
At one level, thatâs an interesting historical snapshot of a bureaucratic tug-of-war, and yet if we step back, we see the full panorama of Reaganâs vision: He was an anti-communist to his core, and yet he could see the value of âsweetening the potâ in his dealings with the Soviets. They were still the evil empire, and yet they existed, and so Reagan had to deal with them. And he did. And the U.S. won.
Needless to say, Reagan never got rid of our nuclear arsenal. It will always be a dangerous world, and so we need our nuclear deterrent and also our nuclear defenses.
Happily, by now the idea of missile defenseâagainst nukes from North Korea, China, and yes, still, Russiaâis widely accepted in both parties. We can chalk that up as one more Reagan success, bringing both parties to realize that America should be defended.
The last time I saw Bud was in 2019. When the usual D.C. chit-chat took on a serious tone, McFarlane, too, grew serious: The choices we make, he said, will echo for 50 years, and so we have to make the right choices. The room erupted in applause.
Well more than 50 years ago, McFarlane made his choices, and they were fateful for his country as well as for himself. And in the end, they turned out wellâeven if The New York Times doesnât agree.
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