Reagan neglects his friends at the Hoover

Press, 3 February 1981, Page 13

Reagan neglects his friends at the Hoover

By

NEAL ASCHERSON

in Palo Alto Z - A

Revolutions may devour their children. They, also have a way of neglecting their parents. '-y. The mighty Hoover In- < stitution. powerhouse of American . " conservative thought; claims to have created Ronald Reagan’s politics. Certainly, Hoover dominated''his campaign advisory committees and, after the elections, many of his transitional task forces. i '’ > But, as it has turned out,? very few jobs in the neW; Administration are ; going to j the / sons arid;.' daughters of-Hoover.

After the elections Dr Peter Duignan, one of Hoover’s / senior fellowsands/its main'. Africa tex-., pert, boasted: “Our biggest problem may be to pur-, suade Reagan not to strip the place.’’ A ’ There were happy celeb r a t i o n s‘ and congratulations around the enormous Hoover Tower, which rises in the middle of the .Stanford University campus, at Palo Alto, California. But President Reagan. who as; Governor of California' hilng on the words of Hoover’s fellows, has. not invited ..the ■ .in-, stitution to strip.' Hoover .is certainly present in the new Administration. and in two inn. pressive posts. Martin An- R derson, ; a senior fellow whose speciality is criticism of the welfare state, will; be the President’s assistant for domestic policy developments, probably a key job as Mr Reagan i ; tries to reduce State aid to the poor. Richard Allen,- also a Hoover fellow for many

years; will be the National Security Adviser. This job no longer carries the powerful, almost.’uncontrolled ■ supervision of foreign policy. Ironically, it was' Allen’s long, personal campaign - against Dr Henry Kissinger which persuaded Mr Reagan that the-, national .security post should be sharply-downgraded. Th theiend,” Mr , Reagan -went for people with more political experience • and less ro fnantically Rightwing views than the Hoover group. ■' ’ '”■ Messrs,.. Anderson and Allen'were both 'members of the . _Nixon Administration — part of a young, extreme group which was purged early on and re-. placed by. the “moderates,’?' John Ehrlichman. and Bob Haldeman. 1 Hoover’s .domestic affairs experts recognise that Mr, Reagan is not nearly as radical in economics as Milton Friedman (senior Hoover research fellow) or;. Friedrich Hayek (one of the three honorary fellows); the other two are Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Mr Reagan himself.

The Hoover Institution, all the same, reached the peak of its fortunes when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Manv of its doctrines are embedded in the; Presidential- mind. Many of its fellows, past and present, ' are his friends. • Many-- ■'• of-’-'-•its people will exert direct influence on the new Administration as unofficial adviser-.

One will probably be Thomas Sowell, the black conservative who says: “Reagan looks to the future while civil rights advocates look to the past.” Another is Dr Duignan,

who-j believes the -United States should stand ready to “take over” the Gulf States and, support moderate nationalists, rather than the .opposition, in South Africa. ’ v A■ *.

The formidable former Marine, Richard F. Staar, Floover’s'crew-cut Director .of International. Studies, - encouraged.- Mr; Reagan to make his startling .pr.o-Tai-waq statement : du. ing' the campaign. “The' mainland Chinese will just have to be offended,” said Mr : Staar. “After all, ; they need us more than we ..need them.’ '

The “Hoover Institution on War, Revolution ..-and Peace” is rather uneasily ■embedded in the Stanford :campus. Stanford academics, who'.tend >o be liberal, suspect Hoover politics and can b<_ withering about the quality of Hoover political* .research. Stanford’s grants; go exclusively to the Hoover •Library and Archive; the research work depends on private grants from sympathetic corporations or financiers. .

The library, for many years the main institution feature, is "he most extraordinary collection of contemporary archives in pri-. vate hands, housing trea-; sures like the files of ■Tsarist secret police, the main Trotsky papers, a better Polish Communism collection than they have In Warsaw and the first, number of “Pravda.’AT

Solzhenitsyn, ’ William Shirer and Ba.bara Tuchman are;. among - the writers who have worked here. Much is.. still unsorted, and Stalin’s old medical card,’ pre-1914; recently turned up. (The

reason that he was 'never called .up was explained■ — he had two fused ,toek); .A" It was after 1945 that Hoover earned a reputation for being ultra-Right. as a colony of East European ; - emigres 'And Cold Warriors settled down, around the archive. The <Hoover researchers, not the archive, became/’a fusty Cold War. monastery” whose ideas belonged to M. Poujade and Dr Strangelove.' Todayls. director, Glenn " Campbell, campaigned for Barry Goldwater. AA :

The institution, no .longer exclusively obsessed with fighting '■ Bolshevism' abroad, has developed a large domestic policy side? -Last year it produced.’ the hefty “The United .States in‘the Eighties,” an 868page -Hoover symposium on policies for the next, decade which is supposed to be Reagan’s intellectual Bible.' A > The Hoover people • are no longer the “Tsarist generals with eye-patches” an American journalist once described. They are the well-suited, increas- . ingly sophisticated prophets of a less com- ' passionate, more ruthless United' States which Mr Reagan, their.' protege through his years as Governor of California, has offered to create. — Copyright London Observer Service. ■■ •