No, Cristina. My daughter, Dana, does not live with the same sense of shame as you do, because I did not serve Ceausescu and his political police until their last day. I exposed their crimes 33 years ago, when both were at the top of their glory. I paid for that with two death sentences, and I was afterward hunted by your father and others like him who continued to serve Ceausescu, who had set a $2 million bounty on my head.
No, Cristina. My daughter, Dana, does not live with the same sense of shame as you do, because in April 1988 one of the superb contributors to this magazine, Michael Ledeen, at that time working for President Reagan at the White House, stated in a review of my book “Red Horizons” that Reagan called it “My Bible for dealing with tyrants.”
No, Cristina. My daughter, Dana, does not live with the same sense of shame as you do, because on March 13, 1989, Time magazine published a photograph showing my “Red Horizons”, which was dedicated to Dana, on the desk of President George H.W. Bush.
No, Cristina. My daughter Dana does not live with the same sense of shame as you do, because in 1988 a Romanian translation of “Red Horizons” was infiltrated into Romania, and samiszdat and Mao-style pocket versions of this book were secretly published in several Soviet bloc countries.
No, Cristina. My daughter, Dana, does not live with the same sense of shame as you do, because on Christmas Day of 1989 Ceausescu was sentenced to death in a trial where most of the accusations had come almost word-for-word out of “Red Horizons”. The next day, my book began being serialized in the new official Romanian newspaper Adevárul (The Truth), which replaced Ceausescu’s Scinteia. In its lead, the paper explained that the broadcast by Radio Free Europe of “Red Horizons” had been an inspiration to the rebels, and concluded: “The publication of this book played an uncontested role in revealing in all its hideousness the true face of a dictatorship, which with diabolical cunningness had managed to outfox a part of the world.”
If you, Cristina, would have just glanced through “Red Horizons” before writing your comments, you would have seen that I broke with Communism because I refused to be implicated in the assassination of Noel Bernard, whom I highly esteemed. You would have also found in that book a strong condemnation of Ceausescu’s terrorist operation against Monica Lovinescu. And, keep in mind, “Red Horizons” was published in 1987, when Ceausescu was in his full glory.
