CHAPTER 17
The Queen of Hearts
NANCY REAGAN WAS INDISPENSABLE to the ending of the Cold War. Without her ambition, drive, and emotional support, it is unlikely that Ronald Reagan ever would have become President of the United States. Yet once in the White House, Nancy preferred the comforts of détente to the conflicts of Soviet collapse. To maintain the tranquility and glamour of her environment, Nancy became an instigator of palace intrigue that nearly derailed her husband’s rendezvous with destiny. Nancy was the Queen of Hearts, and like that playing card, she presents two faces for historians to decipher.
I first met Nancy Reagan almost forty years ago, in late 1965, as her husband was considering a run for the governorship of California. She was a gracious hostess, and she seemed like a great candidate’s wife. As that campaign took shape, I became Ronald Reagan’s northern California campaign chairman. Nancy’s public persona continued to be charming, but backstage she was on the phone regularly with complaints about schedules, accommodations, campaign materials, and a host of other trivia. Most of those calls were directed to the headquarters staff in Los Angeles, but once we were in Sacramento, they were redirected to those of us who had become senior secretaries on the governor’s staff.
Her initial target was the archaic governor’s mansion, provided by the state of California and occupied by the Reagans’ predecessors for decades. Nancy wanted more modern accommodations in a better neighborhood. I accepted that challenge, solving the problem with a rented chateau on Forty-fifth Street. Then, during that first year in office, Reagan’s personal staff was engulfed in a scandal involving unacceptable personal behavior by a few. His chief of staff and a few others were swept away; a young staffer named Mike Deaver might have been consumed in that same firestorm, but cabinet secretary Bill Clark protected him, saving his political life in the process. In the aftermath of that crisis, Clark, then Ed Meese, became Reagan’s chiefs of staff. They assigned the “Nancy account” to Deaver. He was to become her keeper; none of the rest of us would then be subject to further calls. It worked. Deaver listened to Nancy’s complaints, tried to solve her problems, and kept her away from the working staff.
Deaver did well at the job, and over the decades that followed, he evolved into a faithful family retainer. He managed to avoid any serious governmental or campaign responsibility while staying close to the throne. He retained and built his influence at court, and over time he took charge of the Reagans’ schedule. He became their image meister. Ronald Reagan welcomed Deaver’s help and began to treat him as a son— no great honor in the dysfunctional Reagan family—but never protected him. Reagan even allowed Deaver to be removed—temporarily, as it turned out—from the 1980 presidential campaign.
During that campaign, Nancy played a role in selecting the “correct” chief of staff, should her candidate-husband make it to the White House. In Sacramento and the campaigns that followed, Nancy grew tired of what she perceived to be Ed Meese’s bumbling ways. She was concerned that Meese might recapture his old chief of staff role in a new Reagan White House; she had other ideas.
As the campaign drew to a close, campaign consultant Stu Spencer met with the Reagans to discuss the matter of White House staffing. The discussions started in Dallas in late October and continued as the campaign drew to a close. Spencer gave Meese credit for being a longtime and loyal friend of the Reagans, but he criticized Meese as an ineffective manager. Spencer then extolled the virtues of campaign attorney James Baker.
Houston attorney James Baker III first migrated to Washington D.C., in the mid-1970s, to serve in the Gerald Ford administration as Under Secretary of Commerce. Baker joined Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, then returned to Texas to run for office in his own right. He lost the race for attorney general of that state with 44 percent of the vote. In 1979, Baker turned his attention to another campaign— fellow Texan George H. W. Bush’s run for the Republican presidential nomination. That did not work out either, but when Ronald Reagan tapped Bush to be his running mate, Baker was folded into the Reagan-Bush campaign. He acquitted himself well as a campaign attorney, and in the process grew closer to his old friend Stu Spencer. The two had first met during the Ford presidential campaign of 1976.
As Spencer tried to broach the subject of future White House staffing, the candidate would hear none of it. He was superstitious and did not want to talk about such things before the vote. But Nancy did. She was fond of Jim Baker’s charm and good looks; she found him to be a pleasant change from the rumpled Meese. Unconcerned about Baker’s record of electoral defeats, Nancy was pleased when Spencer proposed giving him more exposure to the candidate. Much to Nancy’s delight, Baker was put aboard the Reagan plane during the closing weeks of the 1980 campaign.
The Spencer plan worked. On November 5, the day after the election, the President-elect tapped Baker to serve as Chief of Staff. As always, there would have to be a consolation prize for the loser. Ed Meese would be entitled “Counselor,” with cabinet rank. Thus it was that James Baker III acquired the central chair in the Reagan White House.
When they all made it to the White House, both Mike Deaver and Nancy Reagan hit their stride. Deaver took seriously the plaudits from his new friends in Georgetown, while turning on those who had saved his political life. He found Bill Clark and Ed Meese to be unsophisticates from a dark age long gone. Within two years he conspired in their fall from grace, their departure from the White House. As Harry Truman put it so well, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”
THE GROUP
When I first came to know the Reagans, Nancy’s friends were the wives of a few prominent Hollywood agents and a lot of Los Angeles businessmen. As the Reagans grew more glamorous and powerful, her following changed. By the end of the 1970s, as Reagan’s run for the presidency took on gravitas, Nancy’s collection of friends morphed into “the Group,” women with blond bouffant hairdos, full-length sable coats, and new, very rich, husbands. These ladies came to constitute her window onto the world, the voice of the people. With the ascendancy of the Group, the wives of the auto dealers and truck-line operators, people who lived in the real world, disappeared as surely as if they had been airbrushed away.
Once in the White House, openings for distinguished men and women to represent the President in foreign capitals presented a great opportunity for the Group, and Nancy weighed in. The appointment of ambassadors to fun, English-speaking places became her personal province, and the White House personnel office did not put up much of a fight. When there were no vacancies, Nancy would help create them by undercutting the incumbents in the eyes of the President and his advisers.
Reagan tolerated this, for his mind was on other things. Besides, he was not above using an embassy or two as a consolation prize for unsuccessful candidates for cabinet or near-cabinet positions. Presidents often do that. Leaders of the Group soon found their husbands posted to the great watering holes of Europe. The lesser acolytes were sent to charming Caribbean and Pacific beach towns. Only a few had to be recalled: one after a scandal involving young girls and porno films; another after he established his own, unauthorized back-channel communications with Libya’s Muàmmar al-Gadhafi. The rest served their time harmlessly, some even beneficially, given their direct access to the President’s household.
CAMELOT II
Nancy arrived at the White House without a philosophical compass. Social standing was her guiding star. “Peace,” as expressed by the Soviet word “mir” (the peace of the graveyard), was her mantra. She preferred getting along to confrontation. I do not know her views on the proper role of government, on women’s liberation, on environment-development conflicts. I have no idea how she envisioned an end to the Cold War, but I am sure winning it was not on her agenda. And yet she provided the ambition that propelled her husband to his rendezvous with destiny. Even their son, Ron Jr., confirms that observation; Ronald Reagan was not an ambitious man.
Upon her arrival in Washington, Nancy had a clean slate. With Frank Sinatra and his Hollywood entourage on one arm, a handsome landslide-empowered President on the other, and the enormous wealth of the Group to back her up, Nancy could have become the new Jackie Kennedy, the founding queen of a conservative Camelot. Eva Peron pulled it off a generation before. In a few short post–World War II months, with her political-personal glamour and her dictator-husband’s power, Evita swept the British quasioccupation of Argentina into the dustbin of history. Nancy could have done the same to the liberal salons of Georgetown, but that was not to be. Rather than replace the entrenched liberal establishment, she sought to join it, or at least to seek its approval.
The leaders of permanent Washington are very good at cultivating the court of whatever new ruler arrives from outside the Beltway. That establishment bends the wills of senators and congressmen with their sophistication. They urge new appointees to the Supreme Court to reorient their moral compasses to the mother lode of Washington wisdom. They welcome new Presidents and their assistants with open arms, buffet tables, and bars.
The dean of this establishment was Katharine Graham, a personally delightful lady who was publisher of the Washington Post.Rather than attempting to dethrone her, Nancy spent enormous time and effort cultivating Mrs. Graham, and vice versa. On December 11, 1980, even before the Reagan inauguration, the first-family-to-be were guests at Mrs. Graham’s home for dinner; that, despite the deadly opposition of the Post and the rest of the mainstream media to virtually everything Ronald Reagan stood for. Nancy had selected her route to glory. It ran through Georgetown, not across the icy tundra of the Cold War.
CONTENDING FORCES
Ronald Reagan seldom took the initiative when it came to the management of his staff. He sized people up well, but found it hard to act, or to resist the personnel actions of others on his staff. Reagan was a man capable of dealing with only one subordinate, a chief of staff who would run everything else. The events of November and December 1980 had violated that principle. James Baker, installed as Chief of Staff, was nominally in charge of administration. Ed Meese, entitled “Counselor,” was in charge of ideas and policy. Assistant Mike Deaver was to handle the Nancy account. This triumvirate was complicated enough, but in January 1982 a National Security Adviser, Bill Clark, was added to the mix. Therein lay the seeds of warfare that in time would seriously discredit Reagan’s entire administration.
In the autumn of 1982, Bill Safire ran a column in the New York Times reflecting on “this chasm that divides the White House.” Safire correctly identified one Reagan White House as being run by James Baker and Michael Deaver, supported by Nancy Reagan. In time this group came to be known as the Pragmatists, since they seemed to favor form over substance. Safire identified the other faction as the “Old Shoes” from Sacramento. They were led by Bill Clark, Ed Meese, and myself. Safire forecast a fight for control of the White House.
What were the differences between these two groups? One was cosmetic. Nancy loved nice clothes, and both she and her husband appreciated those who dressed properly for their parts. The trim and handsome twosome of Baker and Deaver scored well on these counts, while the Old Shoes did not. Bill Clark was presentable, if not fashionable, in business suit and cowboy boots, but the rest of us were overweight and underdressed. Campaign press secretary Lyn Nofziger, who chose not to join the administration, gave definitive meaning to the word “sloth.”
On a deeper level, these two groups of White House players were separated by their confidence, or lack thereof, in Ronald Reagan’s ability to think through and give direction to his government. The Baker-Deaver axis, with their supporting cast of Pragmatists, viewed Reagan as the Great Communicator. To them, Reagan was a President of limited intellectual power whose role was to approve predigested position papers, documents that delivered a consensus solution to any given problem. He was then to sell that course of action to Congress and the American people. Among the President’s staff, only Mike Deaver had any ability to read the man. The other Pragmatists could not break the code; their supporting staffs had no idea what Reagan was thinking, nor did they seem to care.
The Old Shoes were cut from different cloth, and we were far less sophisticated. We had no interest in the approval of the Georgetown set. Embassy dinners were to be avoided at all costs. Talking to the media was anathema to all but the Communications director; that was his job. We understood Reagan’s core beliefs, and we had total confidence in his ability to think through where he was going. We believed he had uncanny foresight, a vision on how things would turn out, and we were comfortable with that. We knew how to read him, how each facial grimace or movie reference applied to the issue then under discussion. Our job was to scrub the alternatives, including those Reagan came up with himself, and to present them as a menu for his decision. We had full confidence in his ability to lead and to decide. Our shorthand expression was, “Let Reagan be Reagan.”
A third difference between these contending forces was far more visible to the outside world. It had to do with subservience to the media. The Pragmatists were masters of public relations, having cultivated the Washington press corps and the Georgetown establishment at every turn. Approval by them, an evening at Katharine Graham’s, was the ultimate high. Nancy lived by the morning headlines and the evening news. She required that the staff make the President look good in the eyes of the media and the Washington establishment every day.
Bill Clark and the Old Shoes did not, could not, meet that test, because we understood the media to be a pivotal battleground in the Cold War; it had been for decades. The Algerians and the Vietminh understood where they would win their wars with France: not on the sand dunes of the Sahara or the jungles of Vietnam, but in the streets of Paris. Soviet political manipulation had successfully headed off European deployment of neutron-generating nuclear weapons during the Carter years. A similar, broader campaign was now under way, both in the United States and Europe, to preclude the European deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing II ballistic missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20 deployments.
But in the 1980s the Soviets were dealing with a tougher President. Ronald Reagan would not back down in the face of such an attack; on the contrary, he knew how to fight on the media battlefield. He was carrying that fight to the enemy. Under the heading of “public diplomacy,” he was speaking to the captive peoples of Eastern Europe as well as to the Soviet people themselves. He talked about the illegitimacy of the occupying Soviet armies and the unelected Soviet government. He showed that the Soviets were not invincible, that communism was not the wave of the future, that a strong and free system of democracy would stand up to attempted Soviet encroachment. It was Clark’s role in spreading these messages that drove Nancy and the Pragmatists wild.
This was the crux of the difference between these forces, contending as they were for control of the White House: their differing views of the Soviet Union and the best American policy for dealing with that apparent superpower. The Nancy-Baker-Deaver axis remained caught in the grip of the past, entranced by dreams of détente and peaceful coexistence. An immediate Nobel Peace Prize was their daily goal. In her own post–White House memoirs, Nancy spells out her nonconfrontational “let’s all get along” views of the Soviet Union very clearly: “I just felt here were these two superpowers sitting there, and it was silly not to get together.” 51
Fortunately, her husband did not agree. At his first presidential press conferences, during the week following his inauguration,52 Reagan made clear his views: “The only morality [the Soviets] recognize is what will further their cause.... They reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat in order to attain [their goals.]” Two years later, in March 1983, he urged evangelicals gathered in Orlando to beware of “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire....”
We Old Shoes shared Reagan’s views of the Soviet Union as an illegitimate dictatorship led by thugs and murderers. Détente with such leaders, having failed to slow the expansion of the Soviet empire in the seventies, surely would be counterproductive in the eighties. Resistance to Soviet expansionism, the pursuit of peaceful change in the Soviet Union, was our goal.
The President paid little attention to Nancy’s lobbying on policies or people. The Old Shoes regularly witnessed his disapproval when she expounded in front of us, which she never did in public. Reagan made it clear by gesture or look that he was the President, that she should cool it. Thus, to work her ways, Nancy had to operate through the staff, promoting the cause of the Pragmatists when she could and denigrating the Old Shoes whenever they made the President “look bad.” Her verdict on such image transgressions was vintage Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland: “Off with their heads.”
The problem with this regular pronunciamento was that she gave no thought to who might capably replace her target. Recruiting good people was not Nancy’s strong suit. She allied herself with the Baker-Deaver Pragmatists because she was comfortable with them and because they saw Nancy as the key to their ambitions. And thus it was that Bill Safire included a prescient line in his November 1982 article on the coming crisis in the White House. In forecasting a victory by the Old Shoes, he added a hedge: “Firing Nancy will be the hard part.” How true.
THE FAREWELL DOSSIER
There could be no clearer delineation between the Old Shoes and the Pragmatists than the matter of the Farewell dossier. 53
In the early 1970s the Nixon administration put forth the idea of détente. Henry Kissinger’s hopes were that “over time, trade and investment may leaven the autarkic tendency of the Soviet system.” He believed that détente might “invite the gradual association of the Soviet economy with that of the world economy and thereby foster interdependence that adds an element of stability to the political relationship.” 54
Leonid Brezhnev did not quite see it the same way. In 1972 he told a group of senior party officials: “We communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their credits, their agriculture, and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs, and by the mid-1980s we will be in a position to return to an aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper hand with the West.” 55
Reagan was inclined to ignore Kissinger’s theories of détente and to take Chairman Brezhnev at his word, but all doubt was swept away on July 19, 1981, when the new American President met with President François Mitterand of France at an economic summit meeting in Ottawa. In a side conversation, Mitterand told Reagan of his intelligence service’s success in recruiting a KGB agent in Moscow Center. The man was part of a section evaluating the take from Soviet efforts to acquire, and if necessary steal, Western technology. The source, Colonel Vladimir I. Vetrov, was designated “Farewell” by the French DST. He enjoyed an ideal port for viewing the work of the “Line X” collection apparatus within the KGB’s Technology Directorate.
Reagan expressed great interest in Mitterand’s sensitive revelations and was grateful for his offer to make the material available to the U.S. administration. The dossier, added to the “KUDO” intelligence compartment, arrived at the CIA in August 1981. It immediately caused a storm. The files were incredibly explicit. They set forth the extent of Soviet penetration into U.S. and other Western laboratories, factories, and government agencies. They made clear that the Soviets had been running their R&D on the back of the West for years. Given the massive transfer of technology in radars, computers, machine tools, and semiconductors from U.S. to USSR, the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself.
The Farewell dossier also identified hundreds of case officers, agents in place, and other suppliers of information and parts throughout the West and Japan. During the early years of détente, the U.S. and the USSR had set up working groups in agriculture, civil aviation, nuclear energy, oceanography, computers, and the environment. The purpose was to start construction of “peaceful bridges” between the superpowers. Working group members were to exchange home-and-home visits. The Soviets thoroughly corrupted this process by inserting intelligence officers into those delegations dealing with technology of interest to them. Farewell made the extent of this subterfuge glaringly apparent. Even one of the Soviet cosmonauts, participating in the joint U.S.-USSR Apollo-Soyuz space flight, was a KGB science officer. 56
Aside from agent identification, the most useful information in the Farewell dossier was the KGB’s shopping list: its targets for technology acquisition and theft during the coming few years. When the Farewell dossier arrived in Washington, Reagan asked Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey to come up with a clandestine operational use for the material.
During the fall of 1981, one of my NSC associates, Dr. Gus Weiss, was cleared to read the material. He devised a remarkable plan: “Why not help the Soviets with their shopping? Now that we know what they want, we can help them get it.” There would be just one catch: the CIA would add “extra ingredients” to the software and hardware on the KGB’s shopping list. Weiss presented the plan to Casey in December 1981 and Casey took it to the President in January 1982. Notably absent from their meeting were any of the White House’s strong believers in détente.
Reagan received the plan enthusiastically; Casey was given a “go.” There are no written memoranda reflecting that meeting, or for that matter, the whole project, for many in the intelligence community were concerned about the security of the new, computerized, internal NSC communication system.
Within a few months the shipments began. The Weiss project targeted the Soviet military-industrial needs as set forth in the Farewell dossier. “Improved”—that is to say, erratic—computer chips were designed to pass quality acceptance tests before entry into Soviet service. Only later would they sporadically fail, frazzling the nerves of harried users. Pseudosoftware disrupted factory output. Flawed but convincing ideas on stealth, attack aircraft, and space defense made their way into Soviet ministries.
The production and transportation of oil and gas was at the top of the Soviet wish list. A new trans-Siberian pipeline was to deliver natural gas from the Urengoi gas fields in Siberia across Kazakhstan, Russia, and Eastern Europe, into the hard currency markets of the West. To automate the operation of valves, compressors, and storage facilities in such an immense undertaking, the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems. They bought early model computers on the open market, but when Russian pipeline authorities approached the U.S. for the necessary software, they were turned down. Undaunted, the Soviets looked elsewhere; a KGB operative was sent to penetrate a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to steal the needed codes. U.S. Intelligence, tipped by Farewell,responded and—in cooperation with some outraged Canadians—“improved” the software before sending it on.
Once in the Soviet Union, computers and software, working together, ran the pipeline beautifully—for a while. But that tranquility was deceptive. Buried in the stolen Canadian goods—the software operating this whole new pipeline system—was a Trojan horse. 57 In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds.
The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was the detonation of a small nuclear device. The Air Force chief of intelligence rated it at three kilotons, but he was puzzled by the silence of the Vela satellites. They had detected no electromagnetic pulse, characteristic of nuclear detonations. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another twenty years to tell me why.
The Farewell countermeasures campaign was cold-eyed economic warfare, put in place to inflict a price on the Soviet Union for corrupting the lofty ideals of détente. While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy. Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet technical leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation.
As a grand finale, in 1984-85 the U.S. and its NATO allies rolled up the entire Line X collection network, both in the U.S. and overseas. This effectively extinguished the KGB’s technology collection capabilities at a time when Moscow was being sandwiched between a failing economy on one hand and an American President—intent on prevailing and ending the Cold War—on the other.
Gorbachev was infuriated at his agents’ arrests and deportations, for he had no idea that American intelligence agencies had access to the Farewell dossier. At a meeting of the Politburo on October 22, 1986, called to debrief his associates on the Reykjavik summit, he ranted that the Americans were “acting very rudely and behaving like bandits.” While presenting a soothing face in public, Gorbachev privately referred to Reagan as “a liar.” During the final days of the former Soviet Union, the General Secretary of the CPSU had to operate in the dark. Gorbachev had little idea of what was going on in the American laboratories and high-tech industries; he could not tell if, or how badly, his own had been corrupted.
Through all of this, the White House Pragmatists also remained in the dark. If Nancy Reagan, Jim Baker, or Mike Deaver had known that the U.S. government was blowing up Soviet pipelines, infiltrating Soviet computers, bollixing their software, or spoofing electronic equipment—even though done with the President’s approval—they would have had a fit. As it was, they remained ignorant while the President played his trump card: SDI/Star Wars. He knew the Soviets could not compete in that league because he knew the Soviet electronics industry was infected with bugs, viruses, and Trojan horses placed there by the U.S. intelligence community.
THE 1983 STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL OF THE WHITE HOUSE
Bill Safire forecast a victory by the “Bill Clark combo” in the coming struggle for power. In Safire’s scenario, Clark would succeed Baker as chief of staff, Meese would move to the cabinet, and the NSC job would be open. After reviewing the candidates on the horizon—John Lehman, Richard Perle, Fred Ikle, David Abshire, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, et al.—Safire concluded that “the man with the inside track to head a rejuvenated NSC” would be me.
Baker responded to that article in December with a different proposal to the President. His White House reorganization would have removed Clark and Meese (and all other Sacramento players) from the White House, installing himself as the National Security Adviser and Mike Deaver as the chief of staff. Reagan, in his inimitably open way, showed this plan to Clark. He asked what Clark thought of it, and suggested that Baker and Clark “work things out.” It was the classic case of dropping two scorpions—or more accurately, one scorpion and one grasshopper—into a bottle.
Within days of the President’s return to Washington after the 1982 year-end holidays, Baker, Deaver, and their allies unleashed the furies of the media on all the Old Shoes. The Pragmatists had courted that media assiduously for two years. Leaks of the most sensitive inside information had been laid onto favored journalists in anticipation of paybacks when the time came. The Old Shoes were hopelessly outgunned; one by one we drifted away.
CLARK MOVES ON
Bill Clark’s departure from the White House was triggered by the success of another covert operation, this one using assets that were not formally Clark’s to command.
During the 1980s, the Soviet Union was pushing into Central America at every turn. They were trying to do the same in South America if they could find the right toehold. From their primary political base in Cuba, the Soviets were making inroads, from Nicaragua to Grenada. A prime target was Suriname, one of the three former Guiana colonies of France, Holland, and Britain on the northeast coast of South America. U.S. intelligence confirmed a Soviet presence in its capital, Paramaribo. A Soviet embassy was planned, and a very secret deal with the local dictator, Desi Bouterese, was in the works. It would welcome Cuban troops and Libyan support into the country. The latter would take the form of arms and very sophisticated communications gear. If the Soviet initiative was successful, it would give them their first base in South America and an important anchor across the Caribbean Sea from Cuba.
Bill Casey, director of Reagan’s CIA, and Bill Clark devised another unique top secret operation: a scheme to get Suriname’s neighbors, Venezuela and Brazil, to clean up their own neighborhood without obvious U.S. involvement. Under Casey and Clark’s direction, the Pentagon prepared an elaborate plan for an air and sea invasion of Suriname. In theory, it was to be done by U.S. forces in Panama with the support of ships already in the North Atlantic; in practice, the administration had no intention of carrying it out. Clark, his NSC staffers, and their associates from the CIA, were to fly to Caracas and Brasilia to brief the presidents of Venezuela and Brazil on the “impending U.S. action.” The objective was to spur those big-time governments into action on their own, to kill off the imminent Soviet expansion into South America by themselves.
Reagan loved the plan. Clark was going to use a nondescript Air Force plane to make his rounds, but the President directed him to use Air Force One. He felt it would lend real credibility to what would be one of America’s greatest politicomilitary scams targeted at the Soviet bear.
During the third week of April 1983, Clark and his entourage pulled off this very secret trip unnoticed by the U.S. press corps. They made detailed nocturnal presentations, complete with the Pentagon’s best graphics, to the presidents and defense ministers of Venezuela and Brazil. The meetings were conducted aboard Air Force One, parked at the end of deserted runways in those nations’ capitals. The impact was as desired. Clark’s hosts were horrified at the prospect of another gringo invasion of Latin America, but the prospect of an expanded Soviet presence next door was even worse. They were appreciative of the “heads-up” and the choices laid before them. They wanted to keep this challenge local, and Clark respectfully deferred to their wishes. The Brazilians promptly applied both carrot and stick to their tiny neighbor to the north, bringing a peace and prosperity to Suriname’s quarter million people that the Soviets could never match.
When Clark got home, however, Jim Baker went ballistic. As chief of the White House staff, Baker nominally controlled the President’s special aircraft, and Clark had used the plane without Baker’s knowledge or permission. This affront was the last straw. Baker unleashed a torrent of leaks and innuendo about Clark’s perceived usurpation of power, the implication being that Clark’s lone ranger antics would tip the country into war. This internal struggle came to a head with a Time magazine cover story on Bill Clark. UPROAR OVER COVERT AID, was the caption, and a White House loss of trust was the underlying theme. Newsweek joined the chorus. Such cover stories usually are the death knell for any Washington career.
In September 1983, Clark met with Reagan at Camp David to discuss these attacks, arguing that they were damaging national security and corroding the President’s image. Clark was ready to leave the public glare, to return to his ranch in California, but Reagan wanted him to stay on his team. Clark was an outdoorsman, so the two men settled on a plan for him to move to the relative tranquility of the Interior Department, serving as its secretary through the end of Reagan’s first term.
DENOUEMENT
As Safire had predicted, “Firing Nancy would be the hard part.” She sided with the Pragmatists in their struggle for power, and they won, but her shortsighted attitude toward any who offended her began the descent into Iran-Contra and the fiascos of the second term. By the time that second term unfolded, no one was left standing between the President and the action officers—the young staffers, both military and civilian—whose job it was to execute policies originated elsewhere. The absence of graybeards, those who might say “Wait a minute” or “What the President means” resulted in a White House operated by younger men and women who were most eager to carry out the President’s wishes, even if those expressed desires made no sense. General Jack Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the epitome of integrity, was specifically excluded from the National Security Working Group meeting in the summer of 1985, which first considered the sale of arms to the Iranians for the benefit of the Contras. On the other hand, Oliver North, the supreme action officer, was there.
This constant decapitation produced a succession of staff chiefs who had no insight into Ronald Reagan’s mind. As the White House ricocheted from crisis to scandal, James Baker was succeeded by Don Regan, then by Howard Baker, then Ken Duberstein. They were all good men, but they had no ability to read and thus interpret the wishes and the policies of an increasingly confused President. The results showed. In time even Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was indicted for perjury (lying to Congress), saved only by a last minute pardon from the succeeding President, George H. W. Bush.
While Jim Baker professed great loyalty to Reagan, it is interesting to note that in his memoirs, Baker praises that President only once. 58
WHO WAS RONALD REAGAN?
As the Old Shoes now gather in twos and threes, some truths become clear. One is that Ronald Reagan had no deep and lasting friend, as most of us understand that word. He had a few close associates and companions. One might call them segmented friends, because some were close to Reagan on spiritual matters, others on politics, and still others on a personal level. His wife had friends, and they had husbands with whom Ronald Reagan would socialize. He had longtime acquaintances, like Holmes Tuttle, who first sold Reagan a Ford coupe in 1946 and stuck with him ever after. 59 But Reagan had no friends with whom he shared complete openness, trust, and confidences as most of us do with a few other human beings. Either Reagan did not need friends because of his rock-solid faith and his self-confidence in his own beliefs, or he could not handle having any.
Nancy was his wife, his lover, his closest companion, but she was not his friend. Her close confidants have confirmed that she was not the person to whom Ronald Reagan bared his soul. Nor was anyone else. Yet if Reagan was a good President, if he laid the groundwork for ending the Cold War, it could not have happened without Nancy. She provided not only the personal care; she supplied the ambition and the focus.
As I said earlier, Ronald Reagan was not an ambitious man. He had confidence in his personal beliefs, but he was not a zealot, possessed by the need to impose his vision on others. He believed in leaving people alone to seek their own fortunes and fates. He accepted and supported the Nixon presidency, probably far longer than he should have, out of a sense of loyalty to a legitimate, anticommunist President. He saw himself as Nixon’s heir, in terms of primogeniture, not ambition. Then, after Watergate, there was Gerald Ford, deposited into the line of succession by an accident of history. Reagan did not think Ford deserved to be President, but neither did Reagan burn for the job himself. It was Nancy’s ambition that took over after the couple left Sacramento. Like many a wife whose husband starts coming home for lunch, she prodded him into a useless but damaging race against Gerald Ford in 1976, even though by then Ford was the incumbent Republican President.
Then Reagan’s competitive instincts took over. That is one of the many conundrums of his persona. Though not ambitious, Reagan was a fierce and unstoppable competitor. Once in—whether it was his first race for governor in 1966, his run for the presidency in 1980, or his ongoing contest with communism—he was uncompromising and unstoppable. Second prizes were simply out of the question. In the late 1970s it was Nancy who harnessed her ambition alongside his driven sense of mission to pull the Reagan chariot into the coliseum of history. Throughout their golden years, Nancy hung in there. Others began to note her husband’s decline along the way. In 1983, Bill Clark questioned Reagan on the wisdom of a second term. As that second term unfolded, National Security Adviser John Poindexter felt sure Reagan was losing his mental grip. I last saw Reagan in the summer of 1992. He joined a group of us at a northern California resort. He was charming, but he had no idea who I was. In the summer of 1993, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In November 1994 he hand-wrote his touching farewell to the American people, then disappeared from view.
A decade later he passed away, with Nancy at his side. Whether she was the queen as seen by Alice or the queen of a Camelot that never came to be, Nancy was Ronald Reagan’s Queen of Hearts. Despite a personality that disturbed, damaged, or destroyed so many, the fact remains that she gave Ronald Reagan’s life direction and protection. If Reagan was good for the country, as I believe he was, then, in net, the country and the world are better places for Nancy having been here.