On January 30th, Dr. Arnold Beichman, Hoover fellow and prominent anticommunist, was greeted with a standing ovation when presented with a lifetime achievement award by the Stanford Review. Beichman received the award for his steadfast support of the Review and sponsorship of the weekly Hoover lunches.

Beichman was introduced by Dr. Thomas Sowell, the nationally syndicated columnist and Senior Hoover Fellow.Sowell lauded Beichman’s courage in his long intellectual fight against communism. “Since we’re among friends – and off campus,” he began, “I can say America is a great country.”

He explained how Beichman and others who were unabashedly proud of American achievement had to struggle to expose lies about America. Communism, he remarked, killed more than Hitler, but the intelligentsia denied or apologized for these atrocities.

Beichman, on the other hand, was anticommunist “when it was uncool” and told the world painful truths. Sowell concluded by saying that unlike Whittaker Chambers, who never lived to see democracy’s victory, Dr. Beichman lived to see the fruit of his struggle. Indeed, “he fought the fight when the fight seemed hopeless, and won when the very idea of victory was unthinkable.”

Dr. Peter Robinson, a former speech writer under President Reagan and host of the Hoover-produced show Uncommon Knowledge, then interviewed Beichman about his past.

Beichman told Robinson that he was not always a member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” – he actually started his career at a small leftist newspaper. But he gradually grew disillusioned. The broad antifascist alliance created by the Spanish Civil war was threatened as people noticed that Stalin was pulling far too many strings in Spain. Beichman finally became a firm anticommunist when the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact was signed.

Beichman recalled his youth, and its highlight: a meeting with Babe Ruth. Beichman had run up to the Babe’s car after a baseball game. He still remembers the Babe’s words perfectly - “Get off the running board.” It didn’t matter what he said, Dr. Beichman recalled, “It was as if God had spoken to Moses: ‘Get the hell off Mt. Sinai!’”

Of course, there were also uglier memories. Anti-Semitism was common in Beichman’s New York. Dr. Beichman went from being roughed up by the local Italians to almost being denied the editorship of Columbia’s student newspaper.

He did, however, find solutions: he can still say a few Italian words with the right accent, and he found that a juicy story about the captain of the football team opened many doors.

On the question of Russia and its President, Vladimir Putin, Beichman said that he was puzzled by the Russian fascination with strong leaders. Russia, he said, has never been able to produce a stable democratic society, despite producing fine artists, writers, and composers. He surmised that the phenomenon could be related to Russia’s constant drive to expand.

Asked for a book recommendation, he offered The Great Terror, by Robert Conquest. The book, said Beichman, describes the senseless state terror and random violence of Stalinist Russia. That terror, he said, was unimaginable, and he marveled that the people of Russia withstood it for decades. “Your grandchildren,” he told the audience, “will never know the horror.”

Beichman’s most vivid memories, however, are reserved for his two greatest loves: flying, and above all, his wife Carroll.