September - October 1993
American Purpose
Issue 7, Volume 7

Publication Date: October 1, 1993
Posted: Friday, October 10, 1993

This issue includes 'National Endowment for Democracy'; 'The Freedom Offensive'; 'The Reagan Initiative'; 'A Private/Public Partnership'; 'The NED Difference'; 'Works Built on Faith'; 'Challenging the Disinformation/Misinformation Campaign'; 'Witnessing'; and 'Why We Should Care'.


In This Issue :

National Endowment for Democracy
Investing in Peace Through Freedom
Virtually every word or phrase in the lexicon of time-hallowed Washington homage fits the National Endowment for Democracy (NED): "bipartisan," "cost-effective," "practical," "timely," "on the cutting-edge," "inspiring," "visionary," etc. etc. It is safe to say that no other federally funded initiative of the last twenty years has attracted the breadth of moral and political support, at home and abroad, that has rightly come to this one. The National Endowment for Democracy is the American people, and the U.S. government, at their best. [More]

The Freedom Offensive
The idea that the United States ought to help fellow democrats abroad, for reasons both practical and altruistic, did not, of course, originate with the National Endowment for Democracy. A commitment to democracy-building in the horrid aftermath of Nazism and as an instrument of U.S. national security policy helped shape the Marshall Plan. Similar concerns drove the covert funding that the United States provided, often through the CIA, for democratic political parties in western Europe in the late 1940s and beyond. (Those whose fastidiousness is offended by this bit of history might remember that during this period the Soviet Union was pouring huge financial resources into Communist parties and front organizations in western Europe—resources aimed at doing there what the Red Army had done in eastern Europe in 1944-45: bring it under the Soviet heel in what Moscow always understood as a struggle for global supremacy.) [More]

The Reagan Initiative
Ten years after Douglas's book, President Ronald Reagan gave the new thinking real political impetus when he addressed the British House of Commons in historic Westminster Hall. There, on June 8, 1982, Reagan declared his belief, not only in the superiority of democracy, but in the historical likelihood of tyranny's collapse and democracy's victory in the Cold War. The passion to participate in the grand experiment of self-governance was not, Reagan argued, a private preserve of North Americans and western Europeans; it animated brave spirits throughout the world, even where tyrants had worked their hardest to extinguish the flame of freedom. [More]

A Private/Public Partnership
The National Endowment for Democracy is not an agency of the federal government; it differs in that crucial respect from the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities. Rather, NED is, in political-science argot, a QUANGO—a "quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization." It is a private, non-profit corporation that receives an annual appropriation from the government, after an extensive round of hearings in the Congress. [More]

The NED Difference
Four characteristics mark the Endowment as a unique venture in private/public cooperation on behalf of the democratic cause through out the world. [More]

Works Built on Faith
Some N.E.D. Programs
In the Senate debate over a proposal to kill the Endowment, a senator who, in charity, shall remain nameless here (though not in the Congressional Record for July 28) vouchsafed that NED was just "a relic of the cold war." [More]

Challenging the Disinformation/Misinformation Campaign
During the House and Senate debates on NED'S future, a number of misconceptions about the Endowment's program and procedures (some of them recycled from previous anti-NED campaigns) came to the fore: [More]

Witnessing
More evidence that NED is an extraordinarily sensible investment in the future of freedom is to be found in these testimonies from some of the leading freedom-seekers of our time: [More]

Why We Should Care
In October 1941, about six weeks before Pearl Harbor, the House of Representatives came within one vote of dismantling the United States Army. A similar kind of shortsightedness seemed apparent in the June 22 House vote to kill funding for the National Endowment for Democracy. [More]