Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2002

"Reagan’s War” reveals new information that Carter, as president and later as a private citizen, sought the help of an avowed foreign enemy of this country to undermine Reagan’s candidacy in 1980 and, even more shocking, tried to cripple President Reagan’s foreign policy in 1984.

The former Democrat president, who had been ousted by voters four years earlier, wanted the Soviets to help him put a Democrat back in the White House.

Speaking Tuesday at a seminar at the Institute of World Politics, the book’s author, Peter Schweizer, said Jimmy Carter owes a full explanation, and then depending on his answer, a decision could be made as to whether the former president "stepped over the line” from pure dissent to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

NewsMax.com CEO Christopher Ruddy has written that Carter "may well have committed treason by enlisting the help of the Soviet Union in the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections.”

"It’s a fair question for him [Carter] to give his account of what happened, and a response, which he has not done,” the author told NewsMax.com. "Then, you know, depending on his reaction and response, there needs to be further discussion. The other thing potentially that perhaps ought to be asked [is] that Moscow release any files it has” on the meetings.

"All we have right now,” Schweizer added, "is based on these accounts by [former Soviet Ambassador] Dobrynin. And it begs the question: Is there any more material based on his [Carter’s] dealings with Moscow?”

'Carter Won't Forget' Soviet Assistance

Schweizer’s book, which is going straight to the top of the best-seller list, reveals that during the 1980 campaign when Reagan was gaining in the polls, Carter "dispatched [pro-Soviet industrialist] Armand Hammer to the Soviet Embassy for a secret meeting with Ambassador Dobrynin to ask for Soviet help” with Jewish emigration and other potential vote-getting issues for a sitting president. The Soviets were promised that "Carter won’t forget that service if he is re-elected.”

Note this was years before the Clinton era when leaning on foreign sources to boost domestic political fortunes became a way of life.

It is ironic that later in Reagan’s presidency, congressional leftists launched a witch hunt based on an out-of-thin-air charge that Reagan and his future CIA Director Bill Casey tried to persuade officials of the terrorist Iranian government to wait until after the election before releasing the American hostages they had held for months. The charges were proven to be totally phony.

Schweizer reports that when Reagan was running for re-election in 1984, Carter himself visited Ambassador Dobrynin warning there "would not be a single agreement on arms control, especially on nuclear arms, as long as Reagan was in power.”

Carter wanted the Soviet Union to help the Democrats regain the presidency. History shows his prophecy about no hope for a nuclear arms agreement to be wrong. It was a part of Reagan's success in ending the Cold War on America’s terms.

Asking Carter to explain to Americans this part of his stewardship is most "reasonable,” in Schweizer’s view. When he asked the former president about this, all the author got was "No comment.”

NewsMax posited an uproar would have ensued had former President Herbert Hoover visited the German or Japanese embassy in early 1941, before U.S. involvement in the Second World War, and said, "What are we going to do about that wild man [Franklin Roosevelt] in the White House?”

Dissent in foreign policy is constitutionally protected. Since the founding of the republic, every war in which the U.S. has been involved was preceded by honest dissent from citizens. The question here is: At what point does dissent cross the line into collaboration with the enemy?

Carter's actions revealed in "Reagan’s War” may lead legal experts to revisit the issue.

Soviets Spawned Muslim Terrorists

At the IWP seminar, longtime espionage and former intelligence official Herbert Romerstein presented airtight documentation that many of today's Islamic terrorist groups originated in the ex-Soviet Union. He called on the Russian government to release the files on terrorist groups created by their predecessors.

"The Russians could also make available KGB information on those politicians and foreign policy ‘experts’ that collaborated with them against President Reagan,” Romerstein added.

And whatever those files say about Jimmy Carter should make for interesting reading.

Special offer on "Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism.”

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