When the Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest was asked by his publishers what subtitle they should use for the reissued edition of his seminal work, The Great Terror, whose claims about the evils of Stalin's regime had been corroborated by old KGB files after the Soviet collapse, his reply was, "What about 'I Told You So, You Fucking Fools'"? The fools in question were the left-wing Western intellectuals (Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodore Dreiser, Romain Rolland, et al.) who cavalierly turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Soviet regime while excoriating with demented monotony, like adolescents rebelling against their parents, the shortcomings of the West, especially the U.S. Bob Conquest has conquered, as it were, by sheer longevity and conviction. He outlived the Soviet Union and now, at age 92, as Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, with a list of honors as long as your arm, he can look back on a wonderfully full life, as the pre-eminent historian of Stalinism and as a close friend, drinking companion, and fellow-prankster of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, back in the wild and woolly London of the '50s. Alas, the Western idiot-savants are still with us; they who once made excuses for Stalin now tremble at the notion of criticizing the theocratic thugs of the Middle East, or the self-anointed high priests of the Church of the Holy Climate Change; but they still turn their shrill ire on their hapless big daddy, America, without which the whole world would be a Gulag. And there were no Starbuckses there, boys and girls.