Who won the Cold War? Though it seems absurd even to ask the question, many liberals are now attempting to rewrite history by claiming that they were no less opposed to Communism than conservatives -- and even more instrumental in defeating it. But in Useful Idiots, conservative commentator Mona Charen gives the lie to such nonsense -- and shows how countless liberals in politics, the media and academia who served as unwitting dupes, or willing defenders, of murderous Communist regimes. "Though American liberals have staunchly proclaimed their anticommunism in the decade or so since the hammer and sickle were consigned to the 'ash heap of history,'" writes Charen, "things were very different when the red flag flew over the Kremlin."

Charen takes her title from Lenin's prediction that liberals and other weak-minded souls in the West could be relied upon to be "useful idiots" as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. Dredging up hundreds of damning quotations and other hard evidence, including the testimony of former Communists, she makes it clear that it was the crucial propaganda assistance of Western -- chiefly American -- liberals that kept the Cold War going as long as it did, costing millions their lives and freedom.

Find out where they really stood in the struggle against Communism:

Dan Rather * Peter Jennings * Tom Brokaw * Bryant Gumbel * Katie Couric * Mike Wallace * * Phil Donahue * Carl Sagan * Bill Clinton * Hillary Clinton * Bill Bradley * John Kenneth Galbraith * Mary McGrory * Hendrik Hertzberg * Jimmy Carter * Strobe Talbott * Anthony Lewis * Arthur Miller * Ted Sorenson * Oliver Stone * The New York Times * Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. * Bill Moyers * Peter Arnett * Morley Safer * Walter Cronkite * George McGovern * Susan Sontag * Rev. William Sloane Coffin * Mary McCarthy * Jonathan Schell * Frances Fitzgerald * Time * Ron Dellums * John Kerry * Harrison Salisbury * Linda Ellerbee * Sydney Schanberg * Christopher Dodd * William Shawcross * Cyrus Vance * George F. Kennan * The Washington Post * Max Lerner * Tom Wicker * John Maynard Keynes * Andrew Young * Paul Samuelson * Lester Thurow * Harrison Salisbury * Ted Turner * Gail Sheehy * Sidney Blumenthal * Paul Tsongas * Alan Cranston * Newsweek * Geraldine Ferraro * Walter Mondale * Gary Hart * Ted Kennedy * Ted Koppel * Barbara Boxer * Michael Dukakis * Norman Mailer * Charles Rangel * Richard Cohen * Tip O'Neill * Tom Harkin * Patrick Leahy * Connie Chung * John Chancellor * Janet Reno * Evan Thomas * Eleanor Clift

... and countless others. Try as they might to deny the past, writes Charen, "the record of their actual positions on matters from the nature of the Soviet system to the need for defense spending, to aiding anticommunist guerillas around the globe are available. They reveal what those who lived through it recall -- that the question of how or even when to challenge the communists bitterly divided America for at least thirty years. And liberals were, almost without exception, inclined to excuse, justify, or ignore the grave sins of our adversaries while always calling down the harshest possible judgment on the U.S." Highlights:

• The network news anchor who pronounced at the height of the Cold War, "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy"

• How liberals responded to each episode of Soviet criminality by providing tit for tat examples of supposed American wrongdoing

• The ridiculous lengths liberals went to in order to give Gorbachev, not Reagan, the credit for the Soviet Union's abrupt collapse

• How, time and again, the Democrats' contempt for Reagan and his anticommunist foreign policy led them to conduct verging on disloyalty -- including private contacts with Communist leaders

• Each new Communist is different: how liberals were always eager to believe the best of the latest revolutionary movement

• The CNN correspondent who declared, "If suddenly a true, two-party or multiparty state were to be formed in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party would still win in a real free election"

• Why liberals believed (and did their damnedest to convince others) that anti-communism was a greater evil than communism

• How liberals kept alive the canard that the Soviet Union, while not free, at least provided a decent living for all its citizens

• The famous liberal economist who declared in the 1980s, "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth"

• How American journalists traveling with President Nixon gushed about Red China -- a regime responsible for 65 million deaths

• Bryant and Katie go to Havana! Why the Today show hosts' 1992 visit to Castro's Cuba was a milestone moment in useful idiocy

• The New York Times reporter who issued rosy assessments of life under Lenin and Stalin -- and won a Pulitzer Prize for it!

• How the media used distortion and outright lies in reporting on the war in Vietnam -- by, for instance, fabricating "reports" of civilian deaths caused by U.S. forces, and fostering the media myth that the South Vietnamese would not fight

• It wasn't just Jane Fonda: other "political pilgrims" who visited North Vietnam and sung its praises for Western ears

• Leading leftists who actively rooted for a communist victory in Southeast Asia -- and to this day haven't acknowledged the horror of what they achieved

• How liberal journalists and Democrat politicians pooh-poohed the danger of Communist victory in Cambodia

• How the New York Times' Cambodia correspondent Sydney Schanberg filed dispatches ridiculed fears of a bloodbath by the Khmer Rouge -- even after their forced evacuation of 2 million people

• How liberals helped foster the myth that the Khmer Rouge was a "coalition" of disparate elements, some communist and some not

• How, when the full story of the nightmare in Cambodia had become common knowledge, those who had misjudged the Communists shifted the blame away from them -- onto the United States!

• The ABC reporter who explained in 1986 that "Many Soviets don't want Western-style human rights"

• How the media transformed Yuri Andropov from KGB enforcer to a Scotch-drinking, joke-telling, jazz-listening moderate

• Gaga over Gorbachev: what liberals eagerly overlooked in order to portray the new Soviet dictator as a reforming liberalizer

• Liberals react to the shootdown of KAL 007 -- and somehow miss the point that most Americans got instantly

• How "nuclear freeze" advocates popularized wildly speculative theories like "nuclear winter" to push their cause

• "Useful Idiot #1"? The 1980s media star who earned that title as much as anyone

• How Soviet "journalist" Vladimir Pozner suckered the media time and again as a Western TV celebrity in the 1980s

• Debunked: liberal canards about Cuba's "model health care system" and "universal literacy"

• How Cuban dissidents tried to use CNN's cameras to publicize their plight -- and the network never even aired the footage

• How the New York Times equated the invasion of Grenada to free American hostages with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan!

• The "love affair" between American journalists and the Sandinistas. The two Democrat senators whose staff routinely coached the Sandinistas on relations with the U.S. Congress

• Study findings: how the media devoted five times more coverage to Salvadoran government abuses than to Sandinista offenses

• Why the media were blindsided by the Sandinistas' 1990 electoral defeat in Nicaragua

• Post-communist blues: How a number of reporters couched their dispatches from the newly free nations behind the old Iron Curtain in sour tones redolent of nostalgia for Communism

• How the Elian Gonzalez affair proved that liberals learned nothing about Communism from history, from the accounts of refugees, or from its spectacular implosion in the Eastern bloc

• How the 9/11 attacks brought out the same "useful idiot" syndromes in liberals that characterized them during the Cold War -- especially the reflex to "blame America first"