Because of Afghanistan, relations with the Soviets were already bad when Reagan took office. In the first days of the administration, the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev wrote to the new president requesting a summit meeting—a goodwill gesture somewhat obscured by the boilerplate condemning of American militarism and imperialism. Reagan dismissed the overture, in keeping with Alexander Haig’s admonition that arms control and trade benefits had to be conditioned on Soviet conduct, and in particular on restraining Fidel Castro. But then Reagan was shot, and he woke up possessed of the idea that God had saved him for the purpose of preventing nuclear war. Now he wanted to answer Brezhnev.
From his hospital bed, he wrote a conciliatory response asking for a “meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to finding lasting peace.” As a token of friendship, Reagan offered something he intended to do anyway for domestic political reasons: lift the grain embargo imposed by Carter in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These messages were embedded in a heartfelt expression of his political philosophy. “The peoples of the world, despite differences in racial and ethnic origin, have very much in common,” Reagan wrote. “They want the dignity of having some control over their individual destiny. They want to work at the craft or trade of their own choosing and to be fairly rewarded. They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves. Government exists for their convenience, not the other way around.”
His draft greatly alarmed his foreign policy circle, who wondered what had happened to the president’s distrust of the Soviets. Haig, committed to the policy of linkage, tried to talk him out of lifting the grain embargo and sending the letter, which he proposed replacing with a State Department version complaining about the Soviet military buildup. “I need to follow my own instincts. And I’m going to,” Reagan told Deaver. In the end, Reagan sent both: the State Department indictment, along with a handwritten version of his personal overture as a cover letter. Whether because he found the letter provocative or because he was addled from his addiction to sleeping pills and by a series of small strokes, Brezhnev sent what Reagan described as an “icy reply.”
Both sides were doing a fine job of misintepreting each other’s signals. Hearing Reagan’s charged rhetoric and his claims about Soviet nuclear superiority that they knew weren’t true, Soviet officials began to believe that the United States was pursuing a first-strike capability, if not planning an actual first strike. In May 1981 the KGB advised its stations in the West that the United States might be preparing an attack and asked them to relay any additional warning signs. The equivalent misunderstanding on Reagan’s part was that the Soviets viewed nuclear war as winnable and were trying to gain an edge, while still pursuing a strategy of world revolution.
As a result of these mutual misreadings, there would be no presidential summit meetings during Reagan’s first term. This was partly a matter of successive Soviet leadership transitions, from Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov to Konstantin Chernenko to Mikhail Gorbachev in twenty-eight months. “They keep dying on me,” Reagan joked. It was also a reflection of the Haig-Pipes view of Soviet proclivities and the confrontational policies outlined in NSDD 75. At the same time, Reagan kept looking for a way to open arms control talks that few others in his administration wanted. He read parts of his hospital letter to Brezhnev in a November 18 televised speech, his first major address on foreign policy. In it, Reagan embraced the so-called zero option for intermediate-range missiles in Europe. America’s NATO allies believed that Soviet SS-20 missiles deployed in Warsaw Pact countries in the 1970s had upset the balance of power. Their plan was to deploy new Cruise and Pershing II missiles to redress it, but the Soviets saw the more accurate American missiles as tilting the balance in the other direction. Reagan’s offer was that the United States would cancel deployment of the Cruise and Pershing missiles if the Soviets removed their SS-20 missiles aimed at Western Europe.
Given that the zero option asked something for nothing—the Soviets’ existing intermediate-range arsenal in exchange for the U.S.government agreeing not to deploy new missiles—it was unlikely to go anywhere. Nor did the plan take into account the independent nuclear arsenals of Britain and France. But while the sure-to-be-rejected proposal reflected a degree of cynicism on the part of advisers who didn’t believe in arms control, Reagan was sincere in his desire for disarmament in broad strokes. His aides became adept at ignoring this side of his belief system, because they viewed it as impractical and contradictory to his calls for a military buildup. It surfaced again as he prepared for his first European trip in the summer of 1982, when Reagan announced that he was scrapping the framework of SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, in favor of START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The world already had thirty thousand nuclear weapons, he said. Instead of merely curtailing the rate of increase, he wanted to reduce their absolute number.
With his military buildup funded, Reagan shelved his concern about a window of vulnerability. Even though the balance of power had shifted only in theory, he no longer felt that the United States was too weak to negotiate with the Soviets. Reagan’s grasp of the particulars of nuclear strategy was always vague. Advisers noticed that he didn’t appear to appreciate the differences among ground-based ballistic missiles, submarine-based missiles, and those dropped or fired from planes. He hadn’t understood, for instance, that the Soviets possessed mostly land-based missiles. To Reagan, a nuke was a nuke. That meant that when he asked his aides for a bold offer to send to ongoing midlevel arms talks in Geneva, he was at their mercy. The proposal that resulted expressed his paradoxical demands, and quickly fell by the wayside. But Reagan’s larger approach was coherent. He saw his military buildup as the path to successful negotiations, not an alternative to them. Despite the Orwellian ring of his slogan “Peace Through Strength,” there was never any contradiction in Reagan’s mind, and there turned out not to be much contradiction in practice. Reagan thought military superiority was the prerequisite for disarmament, and he wanted the latter to follow close on the heels of the former.
Most people took Reagan’s stance as simple opposition to arms control, which gave rise to an enormous antinuclear movement in the West. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in London and other European cities in 1981 to protest the American buildup. With the talks in Geneva stalled, the president now faced a risk that European allies might reject the U.S. missiles scheduled for deployment, fracturing NATO in the process. By 1982, there were large demonstrations in the United States supporting a nuclear freeze, culminating in a gathering of seven hundred thousand people in New York’s Central Park in June 1982. That fall, the movement gathered momentum as Senators Ted Kennedy and Mark Hatfield announced their intention to introduce a freeze resolution in Congress.
Reagan saw the demand for unilateral disarmament as a parallel to appeasement before the Second World War. To him the idea was “a very dangerous fraud” that was rapidly gaining traction. In August 1982 the freeze resolution made it to the floor of the House, where it failed by only one vote. The issue deepened rifts in his own family, when his daughter Patti disavowed his policies at rallies and “No Nukes” concerts. The freeze movement’s misconstrual of Reagan as a warmonger engendered a reciprocal misjudgment by Reagan himself, who thought he was in familiar territory. Applying a framework from the 1950s, he insisted that the Soviets had instigated the freeze movement, citing a Communist-dominated group called the World Peace Council. At the same time, he needed something to offer as an alternative.
The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) emerged out of the pressure from the freeze movement, Reagan’s abhorrence of nuclear weapons, and an impasse over nuclear strategy; with congressional politics blocking the MX missile, hawks believed that America’s ICBMs remained vulnerable. At a scientific level, the father of the idea was the nuclear physicist Edward Teller, the founder of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. When Teller pitched space-based defense using X-ray lasers to the president in September 1982, Reagan embraced the idea as eminently logical. “Look, every weapon has resulted in a defense—the sword, then the shield,” he said. At a political level, SDI owed its arrival to Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Reagan’s deputy national security adviser. Despairing of a way to close the “window of vulnerability” without a viable plan for deploying the MX, McFarlane fastened on to the idea of space-based missile defense, which he’d heard about via Teller and others.
A savvy bureaucratic operator, McFarlane knew how to tee up the proposal. At a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on February 11, 1983, he arranged for military leaders to report promising progress on recent research. “Wouldn’t it be better to protect the American people rather than avenge them?” General John Vessey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asked the president. Then McFarlane weighed in: “For the first time in history what we are hearing here is that there may be another way which would enable you to defeat an attack by defending against it and over time relying less on nuclear weapons.” As expected, Reagan latched on. “I understand,” he said. “That’s just what I’ve been hoping.”
What McFarlane didn’t anticipate was how swiftly and completely Reagan would become consumed by the concept. McFarlane saw missile defense mostly as a bluff. If made to sound sufficiently impressive, the research effort could be traded away for reductions in Soviet ICBMs—“the greatest sting operation in history,” as he later put it. Reagan did not see the Strategic Defense Initiative as a bargaining chip or a sting operation. He saw it as an umbrella. His excitement is palpable in the diary entry he wrote after the Joint Chiefs’ presentation, which echoed Vessey’s words: “What if we were to tell the world that we want to protect our people not avenge them; that we are going to embark on a program of research to come up with a defensive weapon that could make nuclear weapons obsolete?”
Strategically, missile defense solved the problem of protecting American ICBMs from a first strike. Politically, it gave Reagan an answer to the freeze movement. Morally, it offered a way out of mutually assured destruction, offering him a new nuclear policy that wouldn’t necessitate “dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence.” Psychologically, it was a great simplifying solution, a way to slice through what he experienced as the horrific muddle of nuclear strategy. Reagan couldn’t wait to surprise the country with the good news. McFarlane and others thought his insistence on a March 23 announcement was wildly premature. Top defense officials saw the text of the president’s speech only the night before. NATO allies and key congressional leaders had no notice at all. “Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope,” Reagan told the nation that evening. “It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.” The peroration appears in a draft in his own handwriting: “I call upon the scientific community in this country, who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace; to give us the means of rendering these weapons impotent and obsolete.”
Coming just two weeks after his “evil empire” remarks, what immediately became known as the “Star Wars” speech threw the Soviet leadership into a panic. The new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, took it as confirmation that the United States had been planning an all-out nuclear attack and was now preparing to protect itself from retaliation. To the Soviets, Reagan’s announcement heralded an arms race in space that they could ill afford and in which they lacked the technological expertise to compete. And wouldn’t one side’s ability to defend itself upset the balance of terror? Reagan understood that missile defense risked undermining deterrence. A week later, he came up with the solution: if the technology could be developed, he would share it with the enemy. Where the Soviets found his initial proposal terrifying, they considered the addendum preposterous.
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Inside the White House, Reagan was more typically reactive, responding to what was brought to him. He asked few questions of his staff and seldom challenged them. He shunned conflict, responding with a joke or story to defuse tension and change the subject. This passivity lent itself to massive bureaucratic infighting. Reagan had appointed Haig as secretary of state on the basis of a personal recommendation from Richard Nixon. But power exacerbated Haig’s paranoid and aggressive tendencies. After much nagging, he secured a promise that he would have full control of foreign policy. He then announced to the press that Reagan had made him the “vicar” of international affairs. “He didn’t even want me as the president to be involved in setting foreign policy—he regarded it as his turf,” Reagan noted in his memoirs. By mid-1982, Deaver was telling Reagan that Haig was a “cancer that has to be cut out.” When Haig threatened resignation for the umpteenth time amid a crisis over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the troika persuaded Reagan finally to call his bluff.
Reagan’s first national security adviser, Richard Allen, was out, too, resigning over a scandal involving a thousand dollars cash in an envelope from Japanese journalists interviewing Nancy Reagan, though no wrongdoing was ever proven. The replacements cut against each other. For State, Reagan chose George Shultz, a gravelly voiced former secretary of labor and secretary of the treasury in the Nixon administration with a background in academia and business. Shultz was a political moderate with an unreadable, self-contained style. But he could be petulant and, like Haig, often threatened to resign when he felt his integrity or his prerogatives were being challenged. To replace Allen, Reagan promoted his old friend William Clark. A lanky rancher in a Stetson hat and cowboy boots who kept a Colt .45 pistol on display in his office, “the Judge” was a more apt version of the John Wayne stereotype Europeans often applied to the president. Shultz, who did not share the hostility of the hawks to arms control agreements—or the neoconservative view that the Soviets would never change—arrived with the goal of improving relations between the superpowers. Clark came to prevent Deaver and Nancy Reagan from causing “an outbreak of world peace.” Almost immediately, the two began a cat-and-mouse game, in which Clark blocked Shultz’s access to Reagan and Shultz sought ways around him.
With Shultz’s ascendancy, Reagan’s peacemaking instincts began to round out his hawkish commitments. The new secretary of state elaborated a more conciliatory policy in a memo entitled “U.S.-Soviet Relations in 1983,” sent two days after NSDD 75 and, implicitly, an answer to it. Though he was too wise to use the term, Shultz was essentially arguing for a resumption of détente—“intensified dialogue with Moscow.” Finding Reagan eager for direct contact with Soviet officials, Shultz circumvented Clark, getting Deaver to help him sneak Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador, into the White House for a secret meeting with the president. Reagan asked Dobrynin for the release of seven Christian Pentecostalists who had sought asylum in the U.S. embassy in Moscow and were living in the basement. He also proposed a back door for direct communication with the Kremlin via Shultz. “If you are ready to move forward, so are we,” he told Dobrynin.
From that point on, Reagan generally preferred Shultz’s conciliatory views to the confrontation of Clark and Pipes. “Some of the N.S.C. staff are too hard line & don’t think any approach should be made to the Soviets,” he wrote in his diary in April 1983. “I think I’m hard-line & will never appease but I do want to try & let them see there is a better world if they’ll show by deed they want to get along with the free world.” When Pipes left the NSC to return to Harvard, Reagan passed over Pipes’s uncompromising disciple John Lenczowski in favor of Jack Matlock, a career foreign service officer allied with Shultz.
In July 1983, Reagan drafted another personal letter, this one to Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB, who had succeeded Brezhnev. “If we can agree on mutual, verifiable reductions in the number of nuclear weapons we both hold, could this not be a first step toward the elimination of all such weapons? What a blessing this would be for the people we both represent,” he wrote. “You and I have the ability to bring this about through our negotiators in the arms reduction talks.” Reagan gave the draft to Clark, who believed that it made the United States look too eager for arms control, and urged Reagan to take out all references to eliminating nuclear weapons. Reagan reluctantly acceded, redrafting the letter as an anodyne request for dialogue, though he emphasized again his wish for a way to circumvent the bureaucracy in communicating. Officials noted Andropov’s shaky handwriting in his response. They thought he might be suffering from stress. The kidney disease that would kill him a few months later was a well-kept secret.
Clark’s star was in rapid descent. He overplayed his hand when he sent Reagan a memo arguing that Shultz was a “solid economist” who had no business meddling in Soviet policy. Shultz caught wind of the memo and threatened to resign. Reagan begged him to stay, offering him enhanced authority. Crucially, Nancy Reagan—upset about a Time cover that called Clark “the second most important man in the White House”—sided with Shultz, and began lobbying her husband to replace his national security adviser again.
Shultz’s efforts to thaw superpower relations stalled abruptly on September 1, 1983, when a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean Air Lines passenger jet that had strayed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 people aboard, including Congressman Larry McDonald, who happened to be the president of the John Birch Society, and sixty other American citizens. The Soviets made matters worse by issuing a preposterous denial that they had shot down the plane, and then insisting that the plane was on a spying mission. It wasn’t, of course, although American fighter jets had increased the risk of a hair-trigger response by aggressively challenging the Soviet Union’s air perimeter over the preceding months.
Reagan resisted calls for significant punitive action, but further inflamed the issue with his language in a televised speech from the Oval Office a few days later, where he called the shootdown a “massacre,” “savagery,” and a “crime against humanity.” He also advanced a claim others in his administration rejected, that the Soviets had downed the civilian airliner on purpose. The Soviets responded with archaic propaganda describing Reagan as a madman and comparing him to Hitler. In a statement issued from his secret VIP hospital, Andropov said that any improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations would be essentially impossible so long as Reagan remained in office.
The next international shocks came in rapid succession. On October 23 a truck bomb killed 241 U.S. Marines in their barracks in Beirut, where they were deployed as part of a multinational peacekeeping mission following Israel’s withdrawal of its occupying force. Two days later, Reagan approved an invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island of 110,000 people. Maurice Bishop, the country’s late ruler, was a Cuban-backed Black Power revolutionary who had been assassinated by members of his own movement who deemed him insufficiently radical and, in Reagan’s view, because he wanted better relations with the United States.
Reagan’s televised address about these two events, which he rewrote heavily himself, displayed both his limitations as a thinker and his tremendous gifts as a communicator. The military had gone into Grenada to rescue nearly a thousand American medical students placed in jeopardy by a violent coup. But Reagan framed both interventions as responses to Soviet aggression. “The events in Lebanon and Grenada, though oceans apart, are closely related,” he said. “Not only has Moscow assisted and encouraged the violence in both countries, but it provides direct support through a network of surrogates and terrorists. It is no coincidence that when the thugs tried to wrest control over Grenada, there were 30 Soviet advisers and hundreds of Cuban military and paramilitary forces on the island.”
In reality, the events were not related to each other, and only Grenada had anything to do with the Cold War. Hezbollah and Iran were the likely culprits in the Lebanon bombing, though they didn’t take credit for it. The real significance of the Grenada invasion was as an expression of resurgent U.S. nationalism, and in the confident and effective use of the U.S. military. Reagan had tears in his eyes as he watched American students “lean down and kiss American soil the moment they stepped off the airplanes that brought them home.” This was the old lifeguard on duty, rescuing people he didn’t know, who would probably never thank him.
The Soviets misread Grenada as a sign of greater aggression to come. Soon after the tiny war, the United States and NATO were scheduled to conduct a military exercise called Able Archer, designed to test their nuclear command-and-control processes. Able Archer was an annual event, but this particular version of the exercise was more elaborate, involving the defense ministers of several NATO countries as well as the president and vice president themselves. A theory at the KGB held that if the United States were going to launch a nuclear strike, it would use a military exercise as cover. Now, against the backdrop of heightened tensions—Star Wars, the “Evil Empire” speech, the Korean airliner, and Grenada—KGB officials read the electronic signals as evidence that the United States was preparing a surprise attack on the Soviet Union.
Though the Able Archer exercise ended without incident, this was probably the most dangerous moment in the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis. That same month, Soviet negotiators walked out of both the START talks in Geneva and conventional force limitation talks in Vienna. At the end of 1983, for the first time in many years, there were no active discussions between the superpowers. When Reagan learned about the Soviet misinterpretation of Able Archer, by way of a KGB double agent working for the British, he expressed shock that the Soviets could see the United States as a potential nuclear aggressor. It made him, he wrote in his diary, “even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him that we had no designs on the Soviet Union and the Russians had nothing to fear from us.”
Lowering tensions was a political imperative for him as well. With the 1984 election less than a year away, Reagan faced a problem. His pollster Richard Wirthlin reported that a majority of the public disapproved of his foreign policy, with a significant percentage saying that his handling of Soviet relations was increasing the risk of war. Inside the White House, the troika put the blame on Clark for undermining disarmament discussions. The opportunity for Reagan to replace him arrived when Secretary of the Interior James Watt was forced to resign over the bigoted comments he made while attempting to lampoon affirmative action. Reagan shifted Clark to the Interior Department, where he could only be an improvement, and promoted McFarlane to national security adviser.
Clark’s departure made all the difference. McFarlane didn’t try to keep Shultz away from the president. The secretary of state now had a clear path to reopen the START talks. Reagan was ready to make a deal as well, believing that he could now negotiate from a position of strength. The president sent Andropov another conciliatory personal message on Christmas Eve 1983. But having just walked out of talks, the Soviets weren’t ready to return.
Reagan spoke to the American public in January 1984, acknowledging that relations with the Soviets were bad and vowing to engage in dialogue. “My dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth,” he said. The most heartfelt passage in his televised address was a parable of his own devising about a Russian couple named Ivan and Anya meeting an American couple named Jim and Sally. Supposing away the language barrier, the two couples wouldn’t debate their differences—they would become friends. He concluded with a plea to the Soviet leadership to do the same. “Let us begin now,” he said. The press missed the significance of this slightly goofy allegory, just as it had overlooked Reagan naming Shultz as the administration’s chief spokesman on arms control and other peacemaking gestures.
The Soviets themselves, thoroughly persuaded of Reagan’s hostility, dismissed his warmer tone as an election-year ploy. They had worries of their own: Andropov died in February 1984 and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko. Reagan once again found reason to believe that this leader would be different. “I have a gut feeling I’d like to talk to him about our problems man to man & see if I could convince him there would be a material benefit to the Soviets if they’d join the family of nations etc.,” he confided to his diary. The president sent another handwritten note, assuring the new Soviet premier that the United States had no offensive intentions. On the rush translation of Chernenko’s droning response, Reagan noted, “I think this calls for a very well thought out reply & not a routine acknowledgement that leaves the status quo as is.” He appended another handwritten note to his response, telling Chernenko, “I want you to know that neither I nor the American people hold any offensive intentions toward you or the Soviet people.”
These are poignant communications: a president seeking a pen pal, reaching out in the most personal way he could to a series of ghosts. Gasping with emphysema, Chernenko failed to appreciate Reagan’s overtures. The Kremlin hard-liners saw arms control negotiations the same way the American hard-liners did: as a carrot to reward improved behavior by the enemy. The Soviets refused to meet unless the United States withdrew its new missiles from Europe. Only then would the Soviets discuss what they wanted to talk about: banning weapons in space. In May 1984 they announced they were pulling out of the upcoming Olympics in Los Angeles, reciprocity for the U.S. boycott in 1980. Reagan didn’t help matters that summer when he performed a microphone check before recording his regular Saturday radio address. “My fellow Americans,” he ad-libbed, “I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Reagan and Shultz weren’t to be deflected from their new course, however. When Shultz told Reagan that the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, was interested in coming to Washington to meet with him, Reagan seized at the opening, despite Gromyko’s reputation for humorless rigidity. Meeting with Gromyko in the Oval Office, the president asked him to stay afterward for a private word. Then he said something that wasn’t in his official talking points. He wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons completely.