Michael Ledeen passed away on May 17 at the age of 83 after a long illness. His death deprives the United States of one of the last Americans who approached intelligence with a deep understanding of history and culture. He was one of the last of a generation that could not have been educated at today’s universities.
His personal contribution to America’s victory in the Cold War is far greater than the public record shows. Dr. Ledeen combined the intellectual depth of a historian, a deep understanding of culture, and the instincts of a man of action. He was one of the last of the generation that gave America a monopoly of global power that subsequent misgovernance frittered away. As a friend and mentor, he was as generous as he was sagacious.
In 1983, the United States proposed to station the Pershing II intermediate-range missile in Western Europe to counter similar Soviet deployments. Germany’s then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who quipped that the definition of a tactical nuclear weapon was a nuclear weapon that went off in Germany, balked at the deployment unless another European country did so.
The Reagan White House dispatched Ledeen, whose major publications addressed Italian history, to meet Italy’s Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. Ledeen persuaded Craxi to deploy the Pershings.
This, to my knowledge, has never been reported. The incident reflects the high trust that Ledeen commanded in the Reagan administration and the strategic role that he played. Press accounts of Ledeen’s activity in the Reagan administration focused on his minor involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, which Ledeen reported in his book “Perilous Statecraft.” Ledeen, who knew Iranian politics in depth, helped contact the Tehran regime. Unlike other Reagan officials, Ledeen never was charged with wrongdoing.
Michael Ledeen reached out to me in 2008 after I wrote that Barack Obama was a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans. Ledeen had an anthropologist’s appreciation of politics. He was writing a history of Naples, with vivid documentation of the quasi-magical beliefs of its inhabitants, who believed that dead relatives could communicate with the living and give them tips about winning lottery numbers.
Ledeen peered deeply into the irrational side of the Italians and produced a profile that should still be required reading for diplomats and intelligence officers concerned with that country. I had just joined the masthead of the religious monthly First Things and arranged for publication of a chapter.
It’s said of America’s southern cooking, “More important than what it is, is what it was” (look up “Brunswick Stew”). The adage applies emphatically to politics in every part of the world except the United States, which was born (figuratively) yesterday.
The past is a living presence in European politics, and Ledeen’s lighthearted but profound account of Neapolitan folk beliefs explains his effectiveness as an intelligence officer as much as his highly respected books on Italian fascism. In style and substance, it recalls Heinrich Heine’s marvelous writings on German folklore.
After his service in the Reagan administration, Ledeen held the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute for twenty years, before moving to the Foundation for Defense of Democracy. Sometimes labeled a “neoconservative,” Ledeen had little in common with the Leo Strauss kindergarten that hijacked the Bush administration in a crusade to propagate democracy, although he was personally close to some of the neoconservatives, including Richard Perle.
He had a closer affinity to Angelo Codevilla, the scourge of neoconservative nation-building (we both contributed to Claremont Review of Books‘ memorial symposium for Codevilla after he died in 2021).
Ledeen was a political conservative, but neither a neoconservative nor a traditional (or “paleo”) conservative. On the contrary, he was a revolutionary conservative. This encapsulation of his outlook drew the ire of a critic in the “paleo” journal American Conservative back in 2003:
“Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace.
Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.”
Ledeen’s revolutionary conservatism was profoundly American, and in another sense, deeply Jewish in character. His understanding of America as a transformational principle rather than a static entity. But there was nothing narrow or chauvinistic in his appreciation of the United States.
He saw in the chaos and craziness of Naples a creative impulse, writing in 2011, “Naples is the last creative city in Europe. No other place has the constant high energy, the magnificent fashions, the marvelous food, the legendary music, the remarkable literary renaissance, the charm and wit of the population and the sheer physical beauty of Naples.”
He is survived by his wife Barbara Ledeen, long a prominent staff member for several Senators and Senate committees; his daughter Simone, who served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration; and his sons Gabriel and Daniel, both of whom served as officers in the US Marine Corps. The Ledeen household was warm and hospitable, teeming with children and guests and pets.
Follow David P Goldman on X at @davidpgoldman
