An expert on terrorism, Europe and the Middle-East, Michael earned a PhD from University of Wisconsin and has been a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for 17 years. He has authored several books, including ‘The War Against the Terror Masters.’ Ledeen was founding editor of Washington Quarterly, and is a columnist at National Review Online. He and his wife Barbara have raised three children and live in the Washington, D.C. area.

Michael Ledeen - A multicultural personal history

I grew up everywhere. I was born in Los Angeles, and when I was two months old we moved to Albany, and then I lived variously in Pasadena, Westwood, Springfield, Massachusetts. I went to high school in New Jersey, did my undergrad work at Pomona, and got a PhD from the University of Wisconsin.

I wrote several books about fascism, then several books about communism, then a couple of books about foreign policy, followed by a book about Machiavelli, and a book about Tokyo, and I’m almost done with a book about Naples. I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which is America’s greatest university, even though it has no students. Along the way, I played on a pro bridge team with Omar Sharif, along with a couple of Arabs and a couple of Italians, and we traveled the world. So I’ve been multicultural for a long time.

I was the Rome correspondent for the New Republic in the ’60s and ’70s. My wife Barbara and I met in Rome and were married there in 1973. After having being diagnosed as inconceivable and unimpregnable, she became pregnant within months of our marriage, so I had to go straight. We now have three children — that’s when I gave up competitive bridge. We moved to Washington, D.C., where I was the first editor of the Washington Quarterly. When Alexander Haig became secretary of state he asked me to work for him, which I did. Then I came to the AEI, where I’ve been for 17 years now, very happily.

Raising patriots

The first child, Simone, our daughter, is just back in Washington after nearly a year in Iraq and many months in Afghanistan. She works in finance, and has an MBA. She was working with the Iraqi Finance Ministry on ‘post-combat reconstruction,’ to answer questions like, ‘What does a modern banking system look like? Iraq had been a completely cash economy. In Afghanistan, she figured out that if they could collect customs duty they could cover half the national budget.

Child number two, Gabriel, 23, is a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, getting ready to go to Iraq. He’s in logistics. Daniel, 19, is a freshman at Rice University in Houston on a Navy ROTC scholarship.

From bridge to blogs

Actually, my first enthusiasm online has to do with bridge. I hadn’t played in 19 years, and I was in New York with an old friend who asked why I didn’t play anymore. I said I never had five or six hours to go to a bridge club, play and come home. He said, ‘Well, do you have 2 hours?’ So I started playing online, and it was wonderful. And I met up with all my old bridge friends online. Most of them were still around. And then I started reading blogs, starting with Drudge. I made Drudge my homepage, and I’d take links off of Drudge. After a while, I found Roger Simon, and I became addicted to his blog.

I love the rough and tumble nature of the internet, though I’m often hurt by it, because people tend to write the most amazingly irresponsible things. But the nice thing about the blogosphere, as opposed to print, is that you can get things worked out a lot faster. You can get to the truth more efficiently than you can in print. What I don’t like about it is that blogs don’t come with consumer warning labels, so you have to take the time to watch a blogger and figure out if he or she is reliable or not. But that’s not really any different than a columnist in a newspaper.

There’s no question that for a lot of important subjects and events, Iraq for example, you get a lot better coverage on blogs. I don’t understand how people who don’t go online can understand what’s going on in Iraq. It’s impossible.

On our direction

The exciting thing about Pajamas is that the blogosphere will, for the first time, come pre-filtered. Blogs will come to people, and they’ll have a high degree of reliability. It’s obvious that in some period of time, the good blogs are going to compel the mainstream media to change the way they do business. And my heart goes out to people who think they can beat this. You can’t beat it. You have to be in it. So I’m delighted to be involved in this thing.