Fathers Day
by James Carvin 6/12/04

My Dad, Charley Carvin, at the Breakers, Palm Beach

My two sons are Jonathan, age ten, and George, now six . Next Sunday is Fathers Day. Dad died in 95'. This week we all celebrated the life of Ronald Reagan, who died last Saturday. Although the Clintons fell asleep at the funeral, the eulogies were inspiring. Too bad they missed them. Jonathan, who kept the TV occupied with the GameCube most of the week, asked me what the big deal was about Ronald Reagan. I told him we could talk about it after he put the GameCube away. The conversation later that night went something like this:

Jonathan: "Okay, so who was this Ronald Reagan? I know you've got a picture of him with your Dad. I know he was the president. But outside of that I've never heard of him before."

I shouldn't have been so surprised that the Public School System would have failed to have ever mentioned him.

Me: "Ronald Reagan was president at a very difficult time in American history, dear. While I was growing up our biggest enemy was the Soviet Union. They wanted to take away American freedom. They were communists. In communist countries you couldn't say anything bad about your government or you would be killed. There were dozens of countries under Soviet rule. Ronald Reagan had a hand in defeating communism. The countries they controlled are all free now."

Jonathan: "I never heard about all that. Was he like FDR? There wasn't a war after World War II was there?"

Naturally, he had heard about FDR in the public school but not Ronald Reagan and the cold war.

Me: "There have been a number of wars since World War II. Some of them have been wars against communism. South Korea wanted democracy and North Korea tried to take them over. The same thing happened in Viet Nam. The North Vietnamese were communists. And we tried to help the South Vietnamese stay free."

Jonathan: "We lost in Viet Nam, didn't we?"

Me: "Yes. You see in FDR's day it was much easier to win a war because Hollywood and the media were on our side. But the communists were smart and infiltrated them. We would have won in Viet Nam but the American people decided they didn't want to keep fighting anymore when they saw pictures on TV every night of our soldiers dying. That was part of the Soviet strategy. We won World War II even though ten times as many American soldiers died because we kept fighting until the job was done. Everything you heard on the News was positive."

Jonathan: "Well what did Ronald Reagan do?"

Me: "One of the things Ronald Reagan did was to expose them in the Screen Actors Guild. He used to be an actor. There were a lot of communists here in the United States before and after World War II and there still are. But exposing communists became a problem too. There was a guy named Joseph McCarthy, a US Senator who started arresting people that were suspected of being communists. A lot of people objected, and saw this as an invasion of their privacy."

Jonathan: "Who was fighting in World War II? I thought the Russians were our allies!"

Me: "They were. The Germans, the Italians and the Japanese were all fighting against the Americans, the English, the French and the rest of Europe. They wanted to take over the whole world. FDR stopped them."

Jonathan: "But if the Russians were our allies why did we wind up fighting against them?"

Me: "Well, the Germans wanted to take them over. They needed our help. And we needed their help. Sometimes you ally with your enemies because it is the only way you can survive and win a war. It worked. After the war FDR made some very bad mistakes, I think. He split up the territory taken by the Germans with the Russians like it was booty. We gave them East Germany, for instance. From that point on, the wall between East and West Germany in Berlin marked the dividing line between communism and capitalism. And communism just doesn't work. The people were very poor and very sad because they weren't even allowed to complain about it."

Jonathan: "But I thought the war was about the Jews. What is that word ... 'hol ... something?"

Me: "Holocaust. Hitler hated the Jews and tried to kill them all. Like the communists he believed that all religion was like a poison in the world. He killed a lot of Christians too, as did the Russians. But you don't hear about that very much because the American media was so filled with people who sympathized with the communists and because Russia had control over their own news and media. I think about 20 million Christians were killed in Russia, 40 million people in all, but you only hear about the 6 million Jews. The Jews Hitler tried to kill also needed a place to stay after the war. Hitler had taken Palestine. So a bunch of nations got together and decided to let them stay there. And that is how Israel came back as a nation after almost 2000 years. But since the Muslims had built a temple there in Jerusalem too and had taken Israel from the Christians in the seventh century, they had had it for over a thousand years, which is also a very long time, even if the Jews had it first. Really, if you look at the Bible you'll see that the Canaanites had it first. But that didn't matter because no one these days claims to be a Canaanite. What matters is that the Muslims didn't like losing Jerusalem. And that has caused a lot of problems, including the terrorism we see today."

Jonathan: "So were the Russians like terrorists?"

Me: "In some ways the Russians in the cold war were like the terrorists of today. They both use the American media to their advantage. In the war in Iraq we only used about 150,000 soldiers, which is just 1% of the size of our army in World War II. And in World War II over 400,000 soldiers died, which is more than 400 times as many as have died in Iraq. But the American press is still calling the war in Iraq a failure. The American press is dividing our country so that we will vote for a president who will withdraw our troops and make us quit before we finish, even though we are winning and there really isn't that much more work to do except protect them from terrorists for a little while longer, until they are strong enough to protect themselves."

Jonathan: "Did Ronald Reagan fight against terrorism?"

Me: "In a few cases, yes. The terrorists have been fighting against us ever since we gave Israel to the Jews. But Ronald Reagan's biggest battle was against communism. Communism and terrorism are both opposed to freedom. And they both want to destroy America, because we are one of the only countries in the world that has it and also has the power to fight for it. But in a lot of ways we have to fight with our hands tied behind our back. We don't fight wars the same way the terrorists do. Our whole way of life is different. We are a moral people. That is why our country was so upset by the prison abuses at Abu Grabe. We showed pictures to the whole world of ways we had abused some of the Iraqi prisoners we had taken, people who had tried to kill our soldiers but we didn't treat nicely. Our enemies saw these pictures and thought we were really bad. And then there was the movie made by Michael Moore called Farenheit 9-11. But there is no comparison to how bad we are and how bad they are. We just looked bad because of the media and Hollywood."

Jonathan: "How did Ronald Reagan win the war against the USSR if Hollywood was so bad?"

Me: "He did it by spending a lot of money on nuclear weapons. And he didn't care if Hollywood and the media had nothing good to say about him. Those were very scary times for everyone. The Americans and the Soviets both had thousands of nuclear missiles pointed at one another. Some of them were very close to us. Fidel Castro was a communist and controls the island of Cuba to this day. We are thinking of going to Key West for the Fourth of July. That is just 90 miles away from Cuba. When John F. Kennedy was president he tried to invade Cuba and get rid of Fidel Castro. He didn't plan very well and he failed. And later he signed a treaty with Cuba saying we would never do that again. As a result, Cuba is one of the last remaining communist countries in the world."

Jonathan: "How many nuclear weapons does it take to blow up the whole world?"

Me: "Any one of them would have been enough to destroy us and two or three could destroy the entire planet. The ones we started making back then were much stronger than the ones we used against the Japanese in World War II."

Jonathan: "If it only took two or three of them to blow up the whole world why did they need so many of them?"

Me: "Everything was about strategy.Our strategy was called "MAD," which stood for "Mutually Assured Destruction." We had to make sure they knew that if they sent any nukes to us we would send some back and that would result in the end of the world. There would be no world to take over. It was the only deterrent that worked. The reason for having so many was that we had to have enough left over after we were hit that we would be able to strike back no matter where the first one landed. We also had to keep hiding them so they wouldn't know where to hit us. If they found out our secrets and were able to hit in the right place the Soviets would be able to destroy us without destroying themselves. They could send just one nuke into our atmosphere to put out our communications. Then they could send a few more in to destroy military bases before we had our communications back up, if they knew where they were. They also did the same thing, hiding their military launch points all over their huge country. We had to have a lot so that we could defend ourselves against them under every conceivable scenario, assuming that most of our weapons and launching facilities would be destroyed in the first strike."

Jonathan: "So what happened?"

Me: "Ronald Reagan started a progam called SDI, "Strategic Defense Initiative." This was nick named "Star Wars." It was very expensive. The idea was to set up satellites with lazers powerful enough to strike at any incoming missiles before they had a chance to hit us. We had already spent a lot of money on nuclear weapons but then Reagan started asking for money for SDI, Star Wars. I don't think we ever got it built, but the Soviets also tried to make their own SDI system. They spent all the money they had trying to build it. In the end, we just had more money than they did. And since they had taken so much money away from all of their people in so many countries around the world the people in the communist countries became even unhappier than they already were."

Jonathan: "But if they were really poor what difference did that make?"

What a smart boy. He really was getting this.

Me: "Yes, they had always been poor. But on top of all of that, Reagan talked about the Russian lack of freedom right to the Russian President's face, Michael Gorbachev. This started getting into the Russian press and Gorbachev wanted to present himself to the world as a likeable person. He was winning the war on ideas when it came to everyone opposing buying more nuclear weapons and quitting in wars like VietNam, but he was losing the war on ideas when it came to the freedom of the press in Russia and communism's ability to provide a better life. So he developed "perestroka" and "glasnost." "Perestroika" was a new policy which let people who disagreed with the Russian government to speak in communist newspapers and TV. "Glasnost" was a new freedom of communists to be able to own their own businesses. These were good things but they came at a very bad time for Gorbachev. The only way the Soviets could continue would be to control the press but he couldn't get away with that any more. The many countries under Soviet rule wanted freedom. They started to fight for it and they eventually won."

Jonathan: "So Ronald Reagan saved the world?"

Goodness. I hadn't thought about it that way. And now what have I done? Will Jonathan go back to school telling everyone he is a Republican? He was making straight "A"s. He'll be marked as a target if he says anything like this.

Me: "A lot of people say that communism would have fallen anyway. It was just a matter of time. I'm not so sure. If they had survived we might be dead. You could be right. I grew up in a very frightening age."

It made the problem of terrorism feel a little less dangerous thinking of it this way.

Me: "Your generation will have to deal with the problem of terrorism. At least its not as bad as having your enemies pointing a bunch of nukes at you. We'll talk about terrorism another night. Goodnight, sweetheart."

I went to bed thinking about how my son was growing up. I thought about my dad's influence on me. And I thought about how devisive politics are. Suppose he becomes narrow minded and overly simplistic? But that was one of Ronald Reagan's strengths. My dad loved Ronald Reagan the way Rush Limbaugh and so many others do to this day. Suppose he thinks badly of me the day he hears things from Reagans' detractors? Suppose he rejects me whole sale when he becomes a teenager and wants his freedom from all my advise? It won't be long before he hears the liberal slant on things. I prayed I would be able to give him a balanced view of things. I prayed I would be able to teach him to love. I prayed he would see me as a man who had considered all things and thought through all things because that is how I want him to be. This is the inheritance I want him to pass on to his children. To do that I will have to be a man of peace and understanding. It is a high challenge.

We honor our fathers and our mothers. And so far both of my children have my love and respect. They look up to me like I know everything. Those days will soon disappear. I think of my dad. He didn't know everything though I once thought he did. I remember one of the last things he said to me, when he was too far gone to speak. He looked at little Jonathan and then he looked at me and he said, "you'll know." It was his way of saying that he loved me. And it was his way of asking me to think of him every time I think of my own son. This Fathers Day, as on many others I say, "thanks Dad. I miss you. And I love you too." And then with that thought this year I think I'll add, "and I know everything is going to turn out all right."

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