About Suharto our favorite story concerns the immediate aftermath of the coup that the communists attempted in Indonesia in 1965. Even after the movie “The Year of Living Dangerously,” we’ve often felt the scale of that event has yet to sink in. Estimates of the number of persons killed in the coup and its aftermath have ranged up to half a million. Six of the nation’s top generals were killed and their bodies thrown down a well.

During the slaughter, according to the story we heard, an officer of the American Central Intelligence Agency went to the headquarters of General Suharto, which was spared in the violence, and found him seated calmly in his office. Not only calmly, but at a vast and immaculate desk, not a mote of dust on its surface. Suharto was reading something. The American officer walked behind the general and peered over his shoulder to see what the document might be. It turned out to be the latest number of Field and Stream.

For the accuracy of that story we can’t vouch, but for the calm, the sangfroid, of his personality, the anecdote reflects our own perceptions of Suharto, who died of illness over the weekend at 86. The scale of Indonesia, the diversity and passions of its population, the liveliness of its intelligentsia, the number and thickness of the plots, the strategic importance of the crossroads on which it sits, well, they are all hard to match in the Third World. And to survive at the head of the regime there for 32 years, as Suharto did, required an outsized personality.

The editor of the Sun likes to tell colleagues about once meeting President Carter’s assistant state secretary for human rights, Patricia Derian, in Hong Kong. He asked Secretary Derian, who was enroute to Jakarta, what she was going to tell the Indonesian strongman. She replied that she was going to tell him about the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

What Suharto would make of that — or other advice the Americans offered over the years — it was hard to imagine, though he did, following Ms. Derian’s visit, release many of the 20,000 or so political prisoners he was holding on a sort of Devil’s Island. It is even harder to imagine the communists, or any of the other leftist ideologies, operating a less oppressive or more successful state; Suharto’s predecessor, Sukarno, certainly didn’t.

The tragedy of Western policy in Suharto’s time lay not in supporting his anti-communism, but the failure to establish on all the World Bank, commercial bank, and government lending conditionality requiring the kind of free-market system and democratic reforms that have attended the rise out of poverty of all great nations. Nigh absolute power corrupted Suharto nigh absolutely, until a popular uprising turned him out leaving a new generation to try to manage demons, in Islamic-extremism, every bit as dangerous as the communism against which Suharto stood.