I first met Ronald Reagan when he ran for president and I supported him as a member of Democrats for Reagan. (Yes, I used to be a Democrat. I didn’t change – the party did and I said goodbye when it left me. But that’s another story.)

I met him again a few years later when I was invited to have dinner at the White House. My wife decided to change her hairdo just before we left the hotel and we were late getting to the White House, something that apparently happens very seldom. It caused a flurry of phone calls from Washington to my office in Los Angeles with the Secret Service wanting to know where we were and why we weren?t at the dinner. In the end it all turned out just fine – we enjoyed the dinner, the president complimented my wife on her hairdo, and we chatted about the beautiful white horse he had just been given by the president of Mexico. Reagan insisted that the horse wasn’t a gift.

“That would be illegal,” he chuckled. “It was a loan; just a loan until I give it back .”

The last time I met Reagan was after he had left office, sometime in the early 90’s. I got a call from someone in Washington who told me that a member of the Russian Duma was coming to Los Angeles to see President Reagan and asked if I’d be willing to interpret during the visit,
just in case the Russian didn’t speak any English.

As it turned out, my services were not really needed. Ilya Zaslavsky, the young Russian parliamentarian, was quite fluent in English. We met in the lobby of the Century City office building where Reagan’s office was on the top floor. Secret Service agents accompanied us into the elevator that didn’t even have the top floor marked on its control panel. Our escort used a special key to go up and President Reagan came out. smiling, to greet us. 

Our meeting lasted less than twenty minutes. Mr. Zaslavsky, who is handicapped and uses crutches to walk, had been elected to the Duma in 1989 on a disabled rights platform. In 1990, still in his early thirties, he was elected to head the Oktyabrsky district in Moscow, a ward of 230,000 people. (I got this information off the Internet. Mr. Zaslavsky never mentioned how important or clever or powerful he was – he just sat there, awed, listening to Reagan).

He and the former president complimented one another, Reagan told a few jokes, and we had our pictures taken. Eventually Reagan presented Mr. Zaslavsky with an autographed copy of his book, we all smiled, shook hands and the visit was over.

We took the elevator down and when we walked into the Century City sunshine I had a brief farewell conversation with Mr. Zaslavsky. I then understood much that hadn’t been clear to me before and probably isn’t yet clear to people like those CBS executives who approved the Reagan miniseries that raised such an outcry. It never will be clear to the show business attack mongrels whose salaries exceed their IQs by a million to one.

I asked Zaslavsky what his plans were for Los Angeles and offered to drive him around and show him the city.

He seemed surprised. “I am not staying in L.A.,” he said. “I am on my way to the airport. I am catching a plane back to Washington.”

“Oh?” I said, smiling. “It doesn’t seem that it was worth a trip from Washington to L.A. and back again just for twenty minutes with Reagan. Was it?”

He looked at me in honest amazement. I had a distinct feeling that he thought me surprisingly stupid.

“Not worth it?” he said in disbelief. “What are you talking about? This is a man who saved our country. He saved Europe. He probably saved the world – and America as well. Are you kidding? I would travel a week, a month, just to shake his hand.”

He slowly turned and limped away. I stood there, embarrassed. Zaslavsky’s contempt for my ignorance was well deserved. 

He was right. Ronald Reagan did win the most important battle of the 20th century. He recognized the Evil Empire for the evil that it was, he took it on, and he won. He recognized and believed that America’s destiny and America’s duty is to fight evil.

If it weren’t for President Reagan, the Soviet Union might still be a superpower and the U.S. might be isolated, alone and facing a hostile, Soviet-dominated world.

The mental midgets and historical illiterates who denigrate his accomplishments will be forgotten, but the generations of those who will live as free men and women will honor his name.

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Si Frumkin, a Holocaust survivor and human rights activist, is chairman of the Southern California Council for Soviet Jews.