Let us praise famous men for their unique ability to talk foolishness and be admired for what they say. Here is Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, lui même, in the Wall Street Journal:

Where Washington seems to regard the East European satellites as faithful creatures of the Kremlin, West Euro­peans see them as restless, discon­tented and, from the Soviet viewpoint, quite unreliable. Where the West Europeans favor the use of trade and cultural exchange to promote the independence of the satellites, the Reagan policy, they fear, is driving the satellites into greater dependence on the Soviet Union.

Anyone with a more discriminate sense of the factual, and a better recall of contemporary history than the famed historian would remember, with a sigh, that since at least 1956 we have done nothing but promote trade and cultural exchange with the captive nations the professor calls “satellites.” Under Ken­nedy, Johnson, and Nixon we ex­changed with Poland, for one, so much culturally that we provided all Gomulka’s and then Gierek’s thugs with the fattest and juiciest grants the State Department had to offer. Today, Poles are being trampled on by Jaruzelski’s henchmen, still sporting those Brooks Bros suits and ties they purchased at the time of those delightful exchanges to which we gave our best hopes and which they immediately and cynically converted into petty material advan­tages through immaterial promises. Prof. Schlesinger may teach his students many things, but he himself will never learn that “independence” or “greater depend­ ence” of the subjugated Eastern Europe is exclusively regulated by a couple of offices in theKremlin, and by nobody else. Or by uprisings.