If you enjoyed the recent N.C. History Project paper and public presentation on the relationship between Sen. Jesse Helms and Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, you might appreciate the following excerpt from Lee Edwards? recent biography of William F. Buckley, as published in ?The Canon? from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute:
Reagan hesitated and then decided to do as Buckley had suggested: challenge incumbent president Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. A turning point for Reagan had been Ford?s refusal to meet with famed Russian dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For Reagan and Buckley there was no greater anti-Communist than the man who wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulad Archipelago. ?The public acclaim by Solzhenitsyn of the kind of thing we were doing,? Buckley said, ?was an enormous stroke in the ideological heavens, and his Gulag book simply broke the back of the intellectual pro-Communist left.?
