CHAPTER 15

President Reagan Sets Up the Checkmate

IN THE EARLY 1980S,President Reagan put the pieces in place to end and win the Cold War. He was not the “victor” in this struggle; the citizens of the U.S. and the USSR were the big winners. Nor was he the closer; George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev filled those shoes. Ronald Reagan’s contribution was to rearrange the chessboard of history in a whole new way.

The Soviet leadership did not understand the American election of 1980. Their analysis of the Carter-to-Reagan transition foresaw the arrival of “a provincial actor, a puppet manipulated by U.S. monopolies and the American military-industrial complex.” On November 17, 1980, KGB Chief Andropov and Foreign Minister Gromyko advised their Central Committee of a plan to identify the advisers who pulled Reagan’s strings. In so doing, they joined a long list of now-vanished American journalists and politicians who made the same mistake.

Ronald Reagan was determined that the free world prevail during his time in office, even though his rendezvous with destiny started out haltingly.

1981: A VACUUM AT THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL

Since the passage of the National Security Act in 1947, American Presidents have used the National Security Council and its supporting staff to organize their thinking about national security matters. ⁴⁴ The NSC staff is headed by an Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs who is also known as the National Security Adviser. The NSC staff explores policy options by means of study memoranda, then the President articulates decisions by means of decision directives. Each President changes the acronyms and starts the numbering sequence anew, but this system of studies and decisions has by now become a White House fixture. Memoranda for the President’s action are drafted by the NSC staff to make sure that all constituencies within the administration are heard and their suggestions vetted before a presidential decision is made.

At the beginning of his term, Ronald Reagan would have none of this. He had been offended by Henry Kissinger’s use of the NSC to promote his visions of détente. Reagan decided he would have a National Security Adviser in name only, with that man’s desk buried in the basement of the White House. Since the responsibilities would not go away, however, and since nature abhors a vacuum, two factions within the new Reagan administration struggled to fill that political void.

The first contestant was Al Haig, formerly Henry Kissinger’s deputy at the NSC and now Secretary of State. Reagan found Haig to be an intelligent and articulate briefer during the presidential campaign, but he was of a different culture from Reagan. He was a structured and disciplined former general. For all practical purposes, he had run the United States during the last six months of the Nixon administration. Haig had very clear views on how the Reagan national security apparatus should work.

During their first week in office, most Presidents promulgate a directive on the mechanics of their national security apparatus. Such papers usually originate with the new National Security Adviser, if not with the President himself. Not caring to wait, however, and eager to fill the policy void at the White House, Haig rushed over on inauguration day with a proposed National Security Decision Directive Number 1 (NSDD-1). It would have moved much of the NSC’s power to Haig’s own office at the State Department. Haig requested a Reagan signature on the spot. He did not get it. Haig’s opponents in this opening challenge were presidential assistants Jim Baker and Mike Deaver and presidential counselor Ed Meese. Richard Allen, another former Kissinger staffer, carried the title of National Security Adviser in the new administration, but Allen enjoyed neither direct access to the President nor the authority that such access would have implied; he worked for Meese. Thus, the disenfranchised NSC fell under Meese’s oversight during that first Reagan year.

Meese intercepted Haig’s draft NSDD-1, rewrote it, and caused it to be issued on February 15, 1981, as a bland continuation of the status quo. While domestic advisers Baker, Darman, et al. grappled with double digit inflation, budgetary deficits, and tax policy, the national security process slowed to a crawl. The NSC staff tried to prepare a few NSDDs that would dispose of or continue in force the Carter-era presidential directives, known as PDs, but those efforts went nowhere. The process came to a halt with the March 30 attempt on the President’s life.

As Reagan returned to work during the summer of 1981, four NSDDs did get signed. They dealt piecemeal with certain of the Carter-era policies, directives that the new administration clearly wished to change. They involved arms transfers, nonproliferation, South Africa, and Micronesia. Beyond that, the Carter PDs stood. In the fall of 1981 four other crisis-driven NSDDs were signed. Three dealt with Libya, Egypt/ Sudan, and Central America, respectively. The fourth structured a White House crisis management system. It put Vice-President Bush in charge, not Al Haig.

Meanwhile, at the Pentagon, the Reagan team was taking two months of transition time and nine months in power to think about how the U.S. strategic nuclear forces should be recast from the Carter mold. Should a more accurate and powerful Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile, capable of striking Soviet missile silos and command posts, be built and deployed? Should the B-1 bomber program, cancelled by Jimmy Carter in July 1977, be restarted? How should the M-X ICBM be based? The arms-control theologians had devised a mobile underground “racetrack” system for the latter. It was alleged to be crisis-stable, but it was surely unaffordable—politically, financially, and environmentally. And how about strategic defenses and the information systems to tie all of this together?

Knowledgeable leaders should have settled those questions during their first winter, for it is during the first hundred days of a new President’s administration that initiatives are most readily accepted, but that did not happen. As the months rolled by, the Pentagon team formed study groups and blue ribbon panels. Only by the end of September did it reach some conclusions.

That is not to say things were stagnant at Reagan’s Pentagon. The new administration installed a team of hawkish policy advisers, and it requested an immediate 20 percent ($33 billion) increase in the defense budget then before Congress. These actions and other signals made it clear that change was in the air. Once Secretary of Defense Weinberger came to terms with the strategic force options before him, he was able to get those matters onto the President’s agenda. Reagan signed six more NSDDs during October and November 1981. They dealt with space, nuclear weapons, and the updating of corresponding Carter policies. The first, NSDD-12, was signed on October 1,1981. It ratified the Weinberger decisions on strategic forces.

And yet, as 1981 drew to a close, only a handful of ad hoc decision directives had been executed. There were no study memoranda on any subject. The mind boggles to think of the chaos that might have unfolded if a more alert and aggressive Soviet Union had understood the extent of this vacuum.

RECONNECTING WITH REAGAN

On October 2, 1981, the President held a press conference to announce the decisions reflected in NSDD-12. Secretary of Defense Weinberger was at the President’s side; the presentation was a fiasco. Reagan read a credible statement, then turned the microphone over to Weinberger, who read another prepared statement. Once the questions started, however, neither man seemed to know what he was talking about. Lou Cannon of the Washington Post reported it as “a sorry performance.”

Reflecting on those delays in national security organization and policy-making, I wrote a personal letter to Reagan that commented on the October 2 press conference and urged him to get serious about his national security apparatus. I did not know how chaotic the situation really was, but I did know Reagan’s management style. I suggested he pick and then empower a real National Security Adviser, someone he trusted from way back. Cap Weinberger, Ed Meese, and Bill Clark were my suggested candidates. A few days later, in mid-October, I received a personal reply acknowledging the merits of my advice. End of story, I thought, but there were other forces at work.

Reagan liked the cabinet-style management system he had developed in Sacramento and now used at the White House. In the autumn of 1981 he came to realize that a fully empowered National Security Adviser—one whom he trusted, and especially one familiar with his policy-making style—could be compatible with his cabinet system. In addition, he wanted to focus substantially more of his time on national security matters. He advised those managing his schedule of this, and over the Christmas holidays asked Bill Clark to come talk. Their discussions produced a meeting of the minds, as they always did between those old friends.

Clark agreed to become the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Access was to be unimpeded, at any hour of day or night, alone or with others, as Clark thought best. Clark was to organize a new NSC staff. Dick Allen was to depart as a result of other problems. The decisions were confirmed in a January 4, 1982, press release and an internal memo approved by the President that same week. Everyone, from the old Sacramento hands to the Jim Baker crowd to Nancy Reagan, concurred in this decision. The following week, on January 16, 1982, my longtime friend and officemate from Sacramento, Bill Clark, called to ask me, along with Bud McFarlane and a few others, to join his new team at the NSC.

SETTLING IN

On January 21, 1982, I was issued a spacious office in the Old Executive Office Building, the ornate structure across the walkway from the West Wing of the White House. Upon my arrival I also was issued a secretary and some military assistants, including a young Marine major named Oliver North.

During the first year of the Reagan administration, Bill Clark had served as Deputy Secretary of State. Having spent most of the 1970s on the California bench, culminating with a Reagan appointment to the California Supreme Court, Judge Clark was not fully versed in the intricacies of foreign policy. On the other hand, he well understood, and shared, his President’s strategic visions, his suspicions of Soviet intent, and his loyalty to proven allies.

Clark’s 1981 Deputy Secretary of State confirmation hearings had bordered on harassment as the President’s critics posed arcane questions about the prime and foreign ministers of various third world countries. At the end of the day, however, the newly Republican Senate accommodated their President’s personnel choices. Clark’s prospective job was to manage the details of diplomatic intercourse, not to make foreign policy. He was to ensure the faithful implementation of the President’s vision and to keep the new Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, fully connected and responsive to Reagan, the White House staff, and the rest of the national security team.

Haig liked structure. He could not deal with Reagan’s fuzzy and illdefined relationships and agendas. Bill Clark was as well-organized as Haig, but he’d been with Reagan long enough to understand how to connect Type A overachievers into the laid-back Reagan court. During the first year of the new administration, it was hoped that Clark would provide a stabilizing connection between Foggy Bottom and the White House. It did not work out that way because Haig would not talk to Dick Allen or any of the other presidential assistants. He would speak only with the President. Unfortunately (for Haig), that’s not how the Reagan system worked. Now, in January 1982, Clark was to move to the newly rejuvenated NSC. He was to serve as a modem, to connect the nation’s national security apparatus into the Reagan White House. In time it would become Clark’s duty to disconnect the ill-suited Haig from the administration itself.

A properly functioning NSC acts as the President’s eyes and ears. More accurately, it is a settling tank into which bright ideas are dumped for a quick but thorough scrubbing before becoming national policy. Some initiatives come from the cabinet departments, some from the NSC staff, and some from the President himself. My new job was to organize the defense issues at the NSC. Others were to deal with intelligence, foreign policy, economics, etc. In time those lines fuzzed over, but for the moment I tried to give Bill Clark a crash course in how the Department of Defense worked.

We went to visit the National Military Command Center and chatted with the chiefs of staff. I prepared lists of critical issues needing attention. The military establishment took a liking to Clark, but his ace in the hole was a close, fifteen-year relationship with Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger.

Bill Clark moved from initiate to full control of the NSC on Tuesday, January 12, 1982, when the President executed three long-overdue decision directives. The first (NSDD-2) clarified the structure of the NSC. The second (NSDD-4) rendered a full set of decisions on the Carter-era PDs. The third (NSDD-19) set the ground rules for the protection of information. The NSC staff was charged with some real responsibility, and the decisions began to flow.

REAGAN AND THE COLD WAR

When Bud McFarlane and I arrived at the White House, we found no formal plan for dealing with the Soviet Union. That was surprising, given that President Reagan had long-held views on this subject, which he thoroughly communicated over the years.

Only recently, however, have I come to appreciate the priority the new President accorded the Soviet challenge in his personal, preelection thoughts. This insight does not come from early policy advisers, nor speechwriters, nor from the man himself. It comes from Stuart Spencer, Reagan’s longtime, nonideological political guru. Spencer came to discuss Reagan’s thinking about the Soviet Union during the long flight from Reagan’s home in Los Angeles to the Republican nominating convention in Detroit during July 1980. Spencer is not a policy wonk, but he is a smart, hard-hitting political warhorse. As the two men left Los Angeles, they compared notes on immediate practical matters: delegate counts and convention strategy. Over lunch, talk turned to possible VP choices.

In the afternoon the conversation turned philosophical. Spencer asked the question all political pros learn to ask their candidates early on. “Why are you doing this, Ron? Why do you want to be President?”

Without a moment’s hesitation Reagan answered, “To end the Cold War.”

Spencer: “How do you plan to do that?”

Reagan: “I’m not sure, but there has got to be a way.”

Reagan went on at length about the weakness of the Soviet system, about his horror at the thought of nuclear war, and about his annoyance with the accommodating, détente-oriented posture of the incumbent and preceding Presidents. Reagan was not a hawk. He did not want to “beat” the Soviets. He simply felt that it would be in the best interests of both countries, or at least of their general citizenry, to “end this thing.” If the United States was strong enough, it could capitalize on the Soviet weaknesses that Reagan knew were there.

“There has to be a way, and it’s time.”

Only at the end of the flight did the topics of big government, taxes, and the other shibboleths of the campaign make it into the conversation. Reagan was not worried about those. He was worried about the nation’s security and the possibility of nuclear war.

In the months that followed Reagan’s election and inauguration, Spencer dined often with the Reagans in the private quarters of the White House. They philosophized about the history unfolding around them, and they strategized about how best to take the President’s case to the American people. Those conversations with a detached observer now provide critical benchmarks on Reagan’s mind-set as he devised a strategy for the endgame vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

THE PLAN TO PREVAIL: NSDD-32

On Monday, February 1, 1982, Clark, McFarlane, and I met with Reagan at our usual 9:00 A.M. hour. After tending to the business of the day, we discussed the lack of a Reagan plan for dealing with the Cold War. How did this administration view Brezhnev’s Soviet Union? In previous administrations, the President would have laid a policy question like that before his staff in the form of a study memorandum. The NSC staff then would organize interagency groups, analyze sets of questions, and come back with alternatives for presidential decision. So far nothing like that had happened during the Reagan years. It was time.

Given my long association with the President and my familiarity with his thinking on this subject, it was logical that he asked me to do it. We returned to our offices to write down the terms of reference for this project. At the end of that week, on February 5, 1982, the President signed National Security Study Directive Number 1 (NSSD-1). Its stated purpose was to review U.S. national security objectives and the impact of Soviet power and behavior on those objectives. The result would be a decision directive that would codify the President’s thinking about the Cold War. I was to chair the interagency review group preparing this study.

We first met in the White House Situation Room on February 18. After that meeting, something changed in the American government. Perhaps it was just that the President had shifted his focus from the economy to national security. Words like “containment,” “détente,” and “mutual assured destruction” were out. The Cold War was no longer to be viewed as some permanent condition, to be accepted with the inevitability of the sun’s rising and setting. The words of Whittaker Chambers from thirty years before echoed in both my mind and the President’s: “In this century it will be decided whether all mankind is to become communist or whether the whole world is to become free.” We were not just going to talk about freedom anymore. One side in this Cold War was going to win and one was going to lose. It was time to think through the steps needed for the U.S. to crystallize its case and to bring this conflict to a peaceful close on a basis acceptable to American values.

Conducting this study was hard work, ⁴⁵ for the bureaucracy did not like laying out a variety of options from which the President might select. They desperately wanted to deliver a predigested consensus view of the world. I knew Reagan well enough to resist.

Toward the end of April, I began delivering regular progress briefings to the National Security Council. This was a way of laying out options informally, of taking cabinet members’ temperatures and getting Presidential guidance without the preparation of contentious memoranda. It was at one such session that the President provided his ever so casual but unmistakably clear evaluation of the Soviet economy described in the previous chapter. The last such cabinet briefing was conducted on April 27.

The proposed national security strategy, spelled out in the resulting draft NSDD-32, started out with some pretty conventional objectives: to preserve our democratic institutions, to protect our citizens, to promote their economic well-being, and to foster an international order that was supportive of those purposes. But the document that followed was anything but conventional. It tabulated Soviet strengths and inventoried their growing weaknesses, forecasting confrontations and the reliability of friends and allies. And then came the bottom line: to seek the dissolution of the Soviet empire. NSDD-32 listed five integrated strategies to achieve this result: economic, political (at times to include covert action), diplomatic, information (both the promotion of unfettered communication and the use of propaganda), and military (to include arms control). Even so, NSDD-32 was only a beginning, designed to serve as “the starting point for all components of our future national security strategy.”

President Reagan signed the eight-page NSDD-32 on May 5, 1982. The substance of our study and the ensuing directive, along with Deputy Secretary of State Eagleburger’s initiatives to counter the nuclear freeze movement and to take the political war to the Soviet Union, became the basis for Reagan’s speech to the British Parliament, sitting in Westminster four weeks later, on June 8, 1982. In his remarks, Reagan proposed to “foster the infrastructure of democracy.” He closed by urging movement “toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.” To future historians, he would label that speech as one of the most important he ever gave. “What eventually flowed from it became known as the Reagan Doctrine,” he said.

The details of NSDD-32 were conveyed to the public in two speeches that I wrote during that same month. ⁴⁶ The first was delivered by National Security Adviser Bill Clark to Georgetown’s Center for Strategic and International Studies on May 21. The second was my address to the national convention of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association on June 16. My files include the final draft of the latter, taken to Reagan for his personal approval while traveling aboard Air Force One. It carries his trademark “OK RR.” The courier to Air Force One was Oliver North. Both speeches ended with a summary of our new objectives vis-à-vis the Soviet Union: “It is our fondest hope that with an active yet prudent national security policy, we might one day convince the leadership of the Soviet Union to turn their attention inward, to seek the legitimacy that comes only from the consent of the governed, and thus to address the hopes and dreams of their own people.”

That’s the way it turned out, but NSDD-32 was just the beginning.

BREZHNEV CHECKS OUT

In the wee small hours of the morning on November 11, 1982, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin called Bill Clark. The call came in on one of the three ambassadorial “hot lines” installed in Clark’s office and residence. ⁴⁷ Dobrynin wanted to advise Clark that Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, had just died. Dobrynin hoped Reagan would attend the funeral services in Moscow later in the week. Clark thanked the ambassador for the message, then called the President.

Leonid Brezhnev seized control of the Soviet Union in 1964, at age fifty-eight, with the support of the Red Army. He forcibly retired the erratic Nikita Khrushchev and thereafter held power for eighteen years. The expansion of Soviet power was his objective, and for a while it was his pride and joy. At the end, enfeebled by strokes and alcohol, supported only by cronies and relatives, he was oblivious to the disintegration taking place all around him.

Awakened out of a sound sleep, Reagan did not hesitate in his reaction to the news of Brezhnev’s death. He did not know the man and had no affinity for that stolid icon of the Cold War. Reagan wanted his first trip to Moscow to be one of substance. He told Clark that the Dobrynin-proposed trip would be pointless. But then, as was typical, Reagan asked Clark to “round-table it with the fellows. We’ll talk about it in the morning.” At a more reasonable hour, Clark canvassed the National Security Council principals by phone. Crisis or no, Clark usually did that every morning, just to keep the President informed. Secretary of State Shultz, Secretary of Defense Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence Casey, and UN Ambassador Kirkpatrick were unanimous in their views that Reagan should attend the Brezhnev funeral.

Clark and the President discussed all of this at their 9:00 A.M. meeting. Clark was directed to thank “the fellows” for their advice but to send Reagan’s regrets, along with the Vice-President, to Moscow. As an afterthought, Reagan suggested a stroll to the Soviet Embassy to sign the condolences book. He had never been there. The next day, the President, his wife Nancy, and Bill Clark walked the four blocks up Sixteenth Street to the Soviet fortress that was its embassy in D.C.

Clark found the visit memorable for two reasons. First of all, the Soviet Embassy was the most cheerless place any of the trio had ever seen. “Like a morgue,” the President observed later. Secondly, after signing the condolences book, the President turned to Clark and in his best sotto voce whisper asked, “Would they mind if we just said a little prayer for the man?” And so the three of them did just that, bowing their heads in the lobby of the Soviet Embassy to ask the Lord’s forgiveness for the departed Soviet party boss.

Unappreciated at the time was that the departure of Leonid Brezhnev was another mysterious death of an aging Soviet dictator, unwitnessed by any members of his family.

At 7:30 A.M. on November 10, the elderly and infirm Brezhnev took breakfast and read the morning newspaper in his private Kremlin dining room. Twenty minutes later he headed upstairs to his bedroom, accompanied by his two KGB guards. All three entered the bedroom together and closed the door behind them. Brezhnev was never again seen alive. At about 8:00 A.M. the two guards emerged and went downstairs to advise Mrs. Brezhnev that her husband had just died. She was not allowed upstairs into the bedroom, nor were any doctors called, nor was any autopsy performed. She never even saw her husband’s body until the state ceremonies in the Hall of Columns two days later.

Until her dying day, Victoria Petrovna Brezhneva remained convinced that her husband met with foul play. That conclusion is understandable, given that Brezhnev’s successor was KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the man who personally selected those two guards.

NSDD-75

In the aftermath of that change in Moscow, President Reagan and his NSC spent some serious hours trying to think through what it all meant. In time he would build an interesting relationship with Yuri Andropov. Reagan found the man tough but realistic, but the more immediate issue was not getting along with Andropov, it was setting up the end game, if not the checkmate itself. By November 1982, Ronald Reagan was focused on the priority objective of his life: ending the Cold War.

On November 29, 1982, in the wake of Brezhnev’s death, the President signed NSDD-66, a directive that codified a stiffened plan for economic relations with the Soviet Union. Elsewhere in the NSC a more virulent process was under way. The national security planning group ⁴⁸ was meeting in the White House situation room to review the economic situation in the Soviet Union. Henry Rowen, Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, reiterated his earlier views about the declining Soviet economy. He urged continuing pressure on the USSR, foreseeing an economic implosion there if we stayed the course. Director of Central Intelligence Casey was implementing a plan to spoof the entire electronic nervous system of the Soviet Union. NSC staffer Richard Pipes was preparing some thoughts on overall East-West relations. Within a few weeks they were codified into a draft NSDD that was adopted by the President on January 17, 1983. (Not without a struggle; the détente-minded members of the administration fought it.)

NSDD-75 became the blueprint for the endgame. It was a nine-page document that focused the contest on three fronts: the reversal of Soviet expansionism abroad, the promotion of a more pluralistic Soviet society at home, and the engagement of the new Soviet leadership in negotiations to protect and enhance U.S. interests. NSDD-75 was a confidential declaration of economic and political war. Contrary to Soviet fears at the time, reflected in their “Project Ryan” tasking to all KGB stations, NSDD-75 did not include any plan for initiating a nuclear attack on the USSR.

The thrust of NSDD-75 was made public eight weeks later in Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, delivered on March 8, 1983, in Orlando, Florida. The tone of that oratory drew gasps from those who wished to accommodate the sinking USSR, but Reagan meant every word.

During the following week, at one of their private dinners for three, both Nancy Reagan and Stu Spencer raised their collective eyebrows at the speech. Nancy always longed for friendly summit meetings with whatever Soviet dictator was in power. Stu Spencer had no problem with the philosophy expressed in the speech. He just thought that, as a matter of practical politics, the evil empire language would scare the American people to death. The President waved them both off. “It is an evil empire,” he said. “It’s time to close it down.”