We were not to know it at the time, but 1981 was the last year of the West’s retreat before the axis of convenience between the Soviet Union and the Third World…. “There is new leadership in America, which gives confidence and hope to all in the free world.”
—MARGARET THATCHER, THE DOWNING STREET YEARS
IN ONE OF the favorite conservative books of the pre-Reagan era, Suicide of the West, James Burnham wrote: “A political figure who suggests that Peace may not be unqualifiedly the supreme object of national policy runs the risk of being scalped at sunrise by the leading hatchetmen of liberal journalism.” Reagan, who was familiar with Burnham through his regular column in National Review, might have had Burnham somewhere in the back of his mind when, in his first press conference as president nine days after inauguration, leading media hatchetman Sam Donaldson asked Reagan what he thought the Soviet Union’s long-range intentions were.1 “Do you think, for instance,” Donaldson asked, gilding his question, “the Kremlin is bent on world domination that might lead to a continuation of the Cold War, or do you think that under the circumstances détente is possible?”
In the course of pursuing the presidency, Reagan had moderated several of his saucier positions on domestic issues such as Social Security and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Donaldson’s question was designed to see whether Reagan would now trim his hard-line rhetoric about the Soviet Union, and Donaldson’s use of the phrase “world domination” was a specific reference to what liberals long thought a laughable and unserious tic of conservative anti-Communist rhetoric. More broadly, what was on the minds of the foreign policy elite was whether Reagan, like Richard Nixon before him, would embrace at least a modified détente once in office.
Reagan’s answer stunned the room:
Well, so far détente has been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims…. I know of no leader of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership, that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their determination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state…. Now, as long as they do that and as long as they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, that that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards, I think when you do business with them, even at a détente, you keep that in mind. (Emphasis added)2
That was it. Next question.
There was an audible gasp among the press corps in the briefing room. Some of Reagan’s own aides, cowering in the corners of the room, blanched. This was not the way world leaders talked about other nations. This was the most blunt presidential language since Harry Truman dressed down Soviet foreign minister Vladimir Molotov two weeks after succeeding Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. “I’ve never been talked to like that in my life,” Molotov complained to Truman, who replied tersely, “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”3
At least Truman said this in private, not to a public press conference. The Soviets had long since pegged Reagan as, in the words of Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, “an extreme right-wing political figure” who was a vehicle for “representatives of the most conservative, chauvinist, and bellicose part of American politics.” Of course, Dobrynin’s description is not that different from what many career staff in the State Department and the CIA were thinking and saying about Reagan. (Alexander Haig wrote in his memoirs that upon arriving at the State Department he found that “the fear was abroad that a legion of right-wing activists were going to march in and start conducting American diplomacy according to the rules of a political rally.”) Likewise, many career staff probably sympathized with Dobrynin’s recollection that “[t]hose early Reagan years in Washington were the most difficult and unpleasant I experienced in my long tenure as ambassador. Ronald Reagan’s presidency revived the worst days of the Cold War.”4
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TODAY RONALD REAGAN’S association with the surprising end of the Cold War in the late 1980s is his most prominent attribute in the public mind. While this accolade is fully deserved, in fact he did not come to office with a detailed foreign policy commensurate with his economic policy—that is, a specific action plan that would shape decisions on hot spots such as Central America and the Middle East, as well as opening a new avenue of engagement with the Soviet Union. To be sure, however, he had a general strategy and several guiding principles. Reagan’s central insight into the problem of superpower relations was that the current mode of interaction, which had attempted to convert political differences into technical differences that could be bargained away through the arms control process, needed to be swept away, just as much as the debilitating income tax rates needed to be swept away to fix the American economy.
Here the domestic and foreign parallel is apt and again shows the unity of Reagan’s statecraft. At some level, Reagan understood that just as the economy required a period of painful readjustment to right itself, reorienting superpower relations would require a difficult period of readjustment as well. It would have to start by saying no and increasing Cold War tensions to crystallize the fundamental moral problem at the root of the conflict. Reagan had long yearned to be able to say nyet across the table to the Soviets in the face of a bad arms control deal such as the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), even as he proceeded to build up America’s military power as a deliberate means to bring pressure on the Soviets. He would get this chance several times during his presidency before finally saying da, but before that he had to find more than a new framework for negotiations. He needed to be able to get the Soviets to the negotiating table on his own terms.
In contrast to economic policy, where the crisis of the moment demanded rapid action, reversing the inertia of the long years of détente required patience. Hence Reagan got off to a slow start on foreign policy. Partly this was by design: the paramount importance of focusing on the economy in 1981 meant that, as a practical matter, foreign policy would have to wait. Besides, the key aspect of Reagan’s policy was a defense buildup, and this would take time. Although the outline of what Reagan would summarize as a strategy of “peace through strength” had long been present, the robust and aggressive strategy that would become known as the Reagan Doctrine was not yet in sight. In the first year of his presidency, the administration’s foreign policy statements came in dribs and drabs, usually in response to media questions. Secretary of State Haig made some waves—more than the White House would have preferred—and Reagan’s occasional improvisations were not always helpful. Reagan offered no grand vision, in contrast to his four nationally televised speeches about his economic policy in his first six months.
In April a Washington Post headline declared, “100 Days and Still Groping for a Foreign Policy.” The Reagan foreign policy team, the Post’s Robert Kaiser wrote, is “not at all ready to explain a coherent approach to world problems.” New York Times foreign affairs columnist Anthony Lewis chimed in: “In 100 days the Reagan Administration has set a record for confusion and contradiction in foreign policy.” The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial entitled “The Foreign Policy Vacuum.” Newsweek, observing that Reagan’s foreign policy had been “marred by a confusion of signals on a series of issues” quoted an anonymous White House aide as saying, “We know where we want to go. We just don’t know quite how to get there.”5 William Safire wrote that Reagan was “embarrassingly unprepared on foreign policy.” Pravda got in on the act, zinging Reagan’s “zigzag” foreign policy. Walter Laqueur wrote in Commentary at the end of the year: “Reviewing the first year of the Reagan foreign policy one is driven to the conclusion that a strategy is not yet in sight.”6 Even Reagan’s friends at National Review noted the “disarray” and “untidiness” of Reagan’s foreign policy in the spring of 1981 and returned to this theme in the fall, lamenting that “we still lack an overarching strategic design in our foreign policy.”7 While Reagan was naturally less perturbed than the media chin-pullers by this seeming lack of coherence, he did acknowledge the perception in a personal letter he wrote to a friend in July 1981. “I know I’m being criticized for not having made a great speech outlining what would be a Reagan foreign policy. I have a foreign policy; I’m working on it. I just don’t happen to think that it’s wise to always stand up and put in quotation marks in front of the world what your foreign policy is.”8
Beneath the implied canniness of Reagan’s remark that his purposes might be better served by a degree of Machiavellian concealment, it is necessary to recover the world as Reagan found it in 1981 to understand both his eventual policy and his achievement. While in economic policy the crisis atmosphere and massive public support gave him the upper hand necessary to push through his tax cut plan in the face of bitter opposition, in foreign affairs circumstances were more ambiguous, and the opposition to Reagan’s conception of the world was even more bitter and entrenched. A nation’s foreign policy is like an oceangoing supertanker: its forward momentum (or what might be called the bias toward continuity) makes it difficult to change direction quickly. Reagan inherited a foreign policy establishment, including many within his own party, that longed for a resumption of the palmy days of détente as it had unfolded under President Nixon (not to mention our European allies, who were deeply wedded to an accommodationist policy toward the Soviet bloc). This guaranteed that there would be a fierce institutional undertow against any bold initiatives Reagan might conceive. Public opinion was afflicted with cognitive dissonance: the public supported a military buildup and “standing up to the Russians” but favored negotiations and remained wary of U.S. intervention.
At the root of both the elite attitude of appeasement and the public nervousness about asserting American power was the lingering crisis of self-doubt that had come to be known as the “Vietnam syndrome.” The still-too-fresh memory of Vietnam would provide the backdrop for foreign policy disputes in the 1980s and the template through which especially liberals analyzed nearly every American involvement beyond U.S. borders. (The Left still does today, as the discourse over the Iraq War demonstrated.) The searing memory of Vietnam had roughly the same clouding effect on America’s outlook as World War I had on Great Britain during the 1930s: the British averted their gaze from Hitler’s rise and sloughed off Churchill’s warnings. Reagan had fully absorbed this lesson. Although the election of 1980 was clearly seen as the end of the New Deal era in domestic affairs, it was less clear whether or how it would mark the end of the Vietnam syndrome in foreign affairs.
In a nutshell, the Vietnam syndrome could be said to be the doubtfulness of America’s military capacity and resolve along with a presumptive guilt about the role of American power and influence in the world. For a certain cast of mind, Vietnam was not merely a military and foreign policy folly but the paradigmatic expression of modern America’s imperial overreach and misperception about the nature of the superpower struggle. Many liberals had invested considerable intellectual capital in the Vietnam syndrome and would not yield easily to a return to Cold War thought. New York Times foreign affairs columnist Anthony Lewis, for example, wrote in the 1970s, “The United States is the most dangerous and destructive power in the world.” The president of a major university went further in 1971: “In 26 years since waging a world war against the forces of tyranny, fascism, and genocide in Europe we have become a nation more tyrannical, more fascistic, and more capable of genocide than was ever conceived or thought possible two decades ago. We conquered Hitler but we have come to embrace Hitlerism.” The British writer Malcolm Muggeridge had called this kind of thinking “the great liberal death wish.”
Beyond the liberal intelligentsia was a confused public. Military doctrine could be reformed and tactical prowess could be rebuilt, but the apprehensive mood of the nation could not be fixed merely with a larger defense appropriation. Reagan’s remark during the 1980 campaign that the Vietnam War had been a “noble cause” set off a media firestorm.9 The wounds of Vietnam received a fresh salting right at the outset of his presidency when a controversial design for a Vietnam War memorial on the National Mall was selected from among fourteen thousand competing entries in a contest. A Yale University architecture student named Maya Lin proposed what she called “a rift in the earth” consisting of a black marble V-shaped wall featuring the names, in chronological order, of all 57,692 men killed in Vietnam. Critics noted that most memorials are made of white rather than black marble, and rise above the landscape rather than disappearing below it. The monument seemed calculated to express in less than subtle form the antiwar movement’s understanding of Vietnam: the soldiers had sacrificed their lives for nothing. National Review spoke for numerous critics in judging that “it will be a perpetual disgrace to the country and an insult to the courage and the memory of the men who died in Vietnam.”10 Clearly the passions over Vietnam had not subsided.
During the ebbing days of Vietnam in the early 1970s the United States was overcome by a sense of strategic exhaustion, for which détente had been the perfect relief. Even though détente had come apart, most foreign policy thinkers felt that it would be better to try to revive détente in some form rather than return to the tense atmosphere of outright confrontation from the 1950s and early 1960s. That approach had nearly blown up the world in 1962. Détente, for all its failings, had held out the promise that such a prospect was unnecessary.
Therein lies the nub of the problem as Reagan saw it in 1981. Between the strategic exhaustion of the post-Vietnam era and the corrosive effect of self-deluding and revisionist liberalism, the fundamental conflict between the West and the East had given way to the view that it was all somehow a “misunderstanding” that would yield to the solvents of “confidence-building measures.”11 Reagan understood that it was not possible to build genuine bilateral confidence when one of the parties had lost its own. Cold War historian Derek Leebaert noted that “Reagan came to office saying nothing about communism’s threat that John Kennedy had not declared twenty years before.” Yet in the intervening years the disaster of Vietnam and the false dawn of détente had sapped the moral courage of the West such that JFK’s language seemed baroque, at least to the chattering classes. It was now permissible to say that the United States and the Soviet Union had “different” values, but it was beyond the pale to suggest that Soviet values were “evil.”
Yet Reagan wanted to do much more than simply return to a robust anti-Communist foreign policy; he had spoken openly to his aides of wanting to win the Cold War, a hitherto unthinkable notion. Most notably, he told his future national security adviser, Richard Allen, sometime in 1979 that his view of the Cold War was simple: “We win, they lose. What do you think of that?” Reagan rejected coexistence and agreed with the orthodox conservative view that containment was a losing strategy in the face of determined revolutionists. Following Lincoln’s policy on slavery, Reagan wanted to place Communism on the course of ultimate extinction. Like Lincoln just after his election in 1860, Reagan probably didn’t think it could be done during his presidency (as indeed it wasn’t). But as with Lincoln in 1861, events would unfold in a course he did not foresee.
Reagan never fully articulated his view on winning the Cold War during his 1980 campaign or at the outset of his presidency; he probably knew it was so far beyond conventional thinking that it would lose him votes, and in the early weeks of his administration he knew that prudence dictated a nearly exclusive focus on passing his economic plan in Congress, before his precious Capitol Hill clout started to decay. In some ways Reagan’s approach turned the Marxist dialectic on its head: to end the Cold War, it was necessary to bring it back to full strength, in order to heighten the contradictions of the Communist system rather than those of the capitalist system. This would require patience as well as steady determination.
Reagan has been described as an “old man in a hurry,” but in fact he displayed remarkable patience in allowing his foreign policy to take shape. First he needed to make his own government as well as the Soviet Union realize that he meant what he said. Lots of smart and influential people simply didn’t believe Reagan, or at least didn’t believe he could craft a serious hard-line policy in the face of massive institutional pressure to yield. Henry Kissinger had reassured Anatoly Dobrynin shortly before the election that if Reagan won, he would not continue with his harsh anti-Soviet rhetoric. Nixon, in a separate communication with Dobrynin two days after the election, offered a similar assurance. But Reagan didn’t let up, even after his shocking “lie, cheat, and steal” comment at his first press conference led the media and the foreign policy establishment to push him to moderate his language. In early March Reagan reaffirmed his view in a TV interview with Walter Cronkite: “They have told us that their goal is the Marxian philosophy of world revolution and a single one-world Communist state, and they’re dedicated to that.” In essence Reagan’s view was straightforward: why should we think they don’t mean what they say at their annual party congresses and manifestoes? Western sophisticates always wanted to change the subject in the face of such an uncomfortable question.
That Reagan didn’t relent on his rhetoric came as a shock to the Soviets—and America’s European allies. West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, Reagan’s first foreign visitor after the election, spent ninety minutes trying to persuade Reagan to abandon his anti-Communist rhetoric in the interest of preserving harmony within NATO. Reagan responded by telling Schmidt his favorite joke about Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev: Brezhnev was showing off his collection of expensive foreign cars to his mother, who said, “That’s fine, son, very fine. But what happens if the Commies come and take it all away?” Reagan aide Richard Pipes observed that this joke sent Schmidt to “the verge of apoplexy … [W]ith his humorous digression Reagan was conveying: ‘Don’t tell me what to do about the Soviet Union. My mind is quite made up.’”12 Reagan’s attitude, Dobrynin wrote, led to “angry and emotional” meetings of the Politburo in Moscow in the weeks after Reagan took office. The Politburo realized that “détente could not be recovered as long as Reagan remained in power…. [T]he collective mood of the Soviet leadership had never been so suddenly and deeply set against an American president.”13 KGB chief Yuri Andropov frankly warned at a Politburo meeting in May 1981 that Reagan was likely to launch a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. Andropov ordered the KGB to organize a special surveillance program in the United States—code-named Operation RYAN—to look for signs of preparations for an attack.
Reagan liked to quip about détente: “Détente—isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey—until Thanksgiving Day?” He understood what Dobrynin, but not the U.S. foreign policy elites, admitted: “Soviet leaders after Stalin were content to see détente as a form of class struggle.”14 International relations professor Angelo Codevilla described détente more directly as “a sophisticated attempt to bribe the Soviets not to use their guns.”15 Beyond the flabbiness of détente, though, Reagan’s outlook appeared to be sympathetic with a deeper strain of conservative pessimism (liberals called it paranoia) about the long-term prospects for the East-West confrontation. Many conservatives thought the West was going to lose.
Lose the Cold War? Today the very notion is considered ridiculous. The outcome seems obvious with the benefit of hindsight, and it is becoming an act of provocative revisionism merely to recapture the facts and perceptions of the time. The neo-Kantian framework for understanding the world that Reagan sought to overthrow nowadays champions the view that Reagan’s confrontational policy delayed the end of the Cold War. The ground of this debate has searching implications for policy in the age of terrorism.
A good summary statement of the conservative outlook on the Cold War can be found in the writings of James Burnham. In Suicide of the West, Burnham wrote: “If communism continues to advance at the rate it has in fact maintained since it began operating as a distinct organization in 1903, it will achieve its goal of world power before the end of this century: well before that, indeed, because the continuing advance of communism, combined with Western withdrawals from regions not yet communized, would throw the world strategic balance decisively in favor of the communist enterprise some time before the direct extension of its rule over all the world.”
All of the trends in the two and a half decades since Burnham penned these words bolstered his judgment. Margaret Thatcher agreed that “the West had been slowly but surely losing” the Cold War.16 Jimmy Carter’s outgoing CIA chief, Stansfield Turner, reported that “since the mid-1970s, an assertive, global Soviet foreign policy has come of age.” The first National Intelligence Estimate produced under Reagan concluded, “This more assertive Soviet behavior is likely to persist as long as the USSR perceives that Western strength is declining and as it further explores the utility of its increased military power as a means of realizing its global ambitions.”17
A look at the global chessboard in 1981 found the Soviets or their proxies on the move in nearly every region of the world. The most notable Soviet presence was in Afghanistan, where by 1981 the Soviets had deployed eighty thousand combat troops. Soviet forces fought with a ferocity that showed they were determined to pacify the country. A fierce resistance (which the United States partially supplied) stymied Soviet efforts, such that they never effectively controlled more than 20 percent of the nation. The CIA judged that the Soviets had their hands full digesting Afghanistan, but no one could be sure that the move wasn’t the first step in a plan to achieve Peter the Great’s ambition of gaining a warm-water port for the Russian empire on the Indian Ocean. The suspicions deepened when considered alongside Soviet activities of supplying arms and advisers to several African and Middle Eastern governments and to guerilla factions fighting the governments in several more. In addition to arms shipments, the Soviets were playing the foreign aid game to the hilt, dispensing $34 billion in the second half of the 1970s (including $2 billion a year to Cuba). We also knew from human intelligence—a highly placed mole inside the Warsaw Pact military command—that the Soviets had a serious war-fighting plan to sweep quickly through Western Europe, beginning with decapitating nuclear strikes at key NATO installations.
The most ominous trouble spot outside Eurasia was Central America, where revolutionary Nicaragua was serving as a conduit for Soviet and Cuban arms shipments to rebels in troubled El Salvador. (American-made weapons seized from the Salvadoran rebels turned out to be weapons that had been lost to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.) In early 1981 Salvadoran rebels launched what they called their “final offensive,” but it failed to topple the government. Nevertheless, the Nicaraguan-Salvadoran intrigue looked like an effort to destabilize a region on America’s doorstep, a step in the strategic encirclement of the United States that anti-Communists had long predicted. When Reagan dispatched two dozen military advisers to El Salvador, the American Left, on hair trigger against American intervention anywhere, warned that Central America might become “another Vietnam.” “U.S. out of El Salvador” or the less coherent “No Vietnam War in El Salvador” became popular graffiti slogans in Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, Cambridge, Greenwich Village, and other fashionable neighborhoods. A popular bumper sticker read: El SALVADOR IS SPANISH FOR VIETNAM.
The question of nuclear arms overshadowed considerations of geopolitics. Liberals had been proven wrong about Soviet strategic intent. In 1965 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara confidently declared, “There is no indication that the Soviets are seeking to develop a strategic nuclear force as large as ours.” But that’s exactly what they did, during which time the CIA consistently underestimated the extent of the buildup. In 1981 the United States still had the edge in the total number of nuclear warheads—the United States had eight thousand warheads to the Soviets’ six thousand—but the Soviets were leaping ahead in the number of accurate land-based missiles and the megatonnage of their warheads; at present rates of production (allowed under the unratified SALT II treaty) the Soviets were expected to have sixteen thousand warheads by 1985.18 (In 1981 the Soviets had five ICBM assembly plants producing missiles; the United States had none.) The combination of increasing stockpiles of warheads fitted on an arsenal of accurate land-based missiles was the basis for what Reagan called America’s “window of vulnerability.”
In the mid-1970s Henry Kissinger asked, “What in the name of God do you do with nuclear superiority?” Winning a nuclear war seemed unthinkable, though signs appeared occasionally in Soviet military doctrine that could convey the impression that they thought they might be able to. The most recent edition of the Soviet military encyclopedia contained references to the possibilities of winning a nuclear exchange, and Soviet military doctrine was replete with references to Karl von Clausewitz’s classic understanding of war as a continuation of politics.19 (There was special emphasis on Clausewitz’s principles of surprise and concealment.) This could be discounted as military bravado intended for the indoctrination of the troops, but what was to be made of the extensive civil defense preparations in the Soviet Union?
Short of intending to win a nuclear war, an equal or superior nuclear force provided more latitude for Soviet action and would constrict the West’s options in any regional crisis. This was already apparent in the Middle Eastern crisis of 1973. In addition to building up its nuclear forces, the Soviets had augmented its conventional forces. As of 1980 the Soviet Union had 4.8 million men under arms, with 180 divisions, backed up by 50,000 tanks and 20,000 artillery pieces. They were building 1,000 fighter aircraft a year, and in Eastern Europe alone the Soviets fielded 3,500 bombers and fighter aircraft. The Pentagon estimated that the Soviets’ military production capacity expanded by a third during the 1970s.
The configuration of these forces indicated they had in mind more than just homeland defense.20 The Soviets were building a high-seas fleet, complete with a new generation of battleships and aircraft carriers that would complicate NATO’s command of the North Atlantic in any prospective war. The new Soviet navy had evolved well beyond being a counterforce to U.S. naval dominance. The Soviets were also developing amphibious attack capabilities and were staging elaborate amphibious exercises with non-Eastern European allies such as Syria.21 In addition to the Syrian exercises, U.S. intelligence noted extensive Soviet military liaison activity with Yugoslavia, South Yemen, Ethiopia, and Kuwait, leading some analysts in the summer of 1981 to speculate that “Moscow may be touching bases in anticipation of a full-scale Middle Eastern war within the next six months.”22
Even the pro-détente, appeasement-minded Europeans were now alarmed about the Soviet Union. According to one West German poll, the number of Germans who felt threatened by the Soviets nearly doubled—from 35 to 63 percent—between 1979 and 1980. In Canada, 62 percent told pollsters they believed the chance of nuclear war was greater than a decade before; in 1970, the number had been only 10 percent. In the Netherlands, 39 percent—a high number for the Low Countries—believed the Soviets were a “serious danger.” In Britain, 64 percent said they believed Warsaw Pact military forces were stronger than NATO forces (53 percent of West Germans also held this view). More ominously, 65 percent of Britons believed that a third world war was coming; almost half guessed that it would come within the next five years.23 A fictional narrative of what such a war would be like, retired British general Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985, was a runaway best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic in 1979 and 1980. “The warning was as clear as any given by Hitler before the Second World War,” Hackett wrote in words that echoed Ronald Reagan. “The steady build-up of offensive military power was not only wholly consistent with a determination to impose Soviet-Russian ends by force of arms if necessary. It was hardly consistent with anything else.”
Although the Western alliance triumphed in Hackett’s grim narrative, his scenario depended on two notable points. First, it assumed that the Western alliance, following the flaccidness of the 1970s, had engaged a significant rearmament program starting in the early 1980s, providing the West with the means to trump Soviet arms. Second, it envisioned a Soviet Union emboldened by the weakness of a Republican southern governor elected to succeed President Carter in 1984. Obviously Hackett wrote that before the 1980 election of Reagan was in prospect, yet it raised the pertinent question of whether this genial new president would exhibit weakness.
Before Reagan’s election the United States and the NATO alliance agreed to increase defense spending to counter the Soviet buildup. But Moscow compelled a much tougher decision than mere dollars. Since the mid-1970s the Soviet Union had deployed hundreds of multiple-warhead intermediate-range nuclear missiles—SS-20s—in Ukraine and other western locations, which brought all of Europe within range. The deployment of SS-20s completely upended the existing deterrent logic of NATO. Western defense doctrine rested the defense of Europe against superior Soviet conventional forces on the American nuclear umbrella; in other words, the threat of an American nuclear strike on the Soviet Union held the Soviets in check. The potential flaw in this deterrent was whether the United States would be willing to put its own cities at risk of retaliation from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
So in 1979 the NATO allies reached the difficult decision to deploy American intermediate-range, single-warhead nuclear missiles—108 Pershing IIs and 464 cruise missiles—in Europe as a counter to the Soviet missiles. This hardly represented an out-of-control arms race; even a full deployment of this battery would leave the Soviets with a four-to-one advantage in total intermediate range warheads. But deployment wouldn’t take place until 1983, during which time it was hoped that there might be an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union to reduce the number of SS-20s and remove the need to deploy the American missiles. In fact, many European leaders didn’t want the Pershing and cruise missiles deployed, and agreed to the gambit as a bluff. West Germany was the crucial venue for missile deployment and the weakest link in the alliance. Willy Brandt, the former chancellor of West Germany and the chairman of the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD), declared, “The SPD has cast its decision [to support deployment] not in order that arms will necessarily be increased, but rather so that there can be negotiations on disarmament.”24 The entire issue was closely bound to the SALT negotiations; other senior voices in West Germany’s SPD said that the U.S. failure to ratify SALT II would create “a new situation” with regard to deployment of intermediate range missiles.
The Soviets sensed the obvious opportunity to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, particularly since Reagan’s hard-line rhetoric was so unwelcome in Europe. Through propaganda the Soviets would undoubtedly try to turn Reagan’s tough posture to their advantage. As a result, Reagan had to proceed carefully, convincing the Soviets that he meant business while keeping the Europeans calm and steady enough to follow through with deployment if negotiations failed. Although the action around the periphery in Asia, Africa, and Central America dominated headlines, the central venue was still Europe. If the Soviets could decouple Europe from the United States, all kinds of possibilities would open up, both economic and military.
Beyond the European question lay the problem of America’s window of vulnerability. The Soviets’ buildup of ICBMs in the 1970s had brought them to the point where they could deliver three warheads on every American missile silo and every other strategic target using only about half of their missile force. Such a prospect rendered obsolete American nuclear doctrine of massive retaliation and escalation dominance. Although the United States also had a potent arsenal of missile-firing submarines and heavy (though aging) strategic bombers, only land-based missiles were thought to have the accuracy to destroy key Soviet targets in a counterforce strike. The rise of the Soviets’ overpowering arsenal had been totally unexpected; in the early 1970s the CIA’s intelligence assessments—and Henry Kissinger—had believed that the Soviets would not risk the benefits of détente by building a missile force designed to win a war.25 And the Soviets showed no signs of slowing down. Even with the most generous game-theory assumptions about the caution of the men in the Kremlin, it was impossible to explain Soviet motivations with an answer that was not disquieting.
Jimmy Carter had agreed without enthusiasm to the development of a new, mobile ICBM, known as the MX. Two hundred MX missiles, each capable of accurately delivering ten independently targeted warheads, would be deployed by 1989. Carter proposed basing the MX missile on a mobile “racetrack,” in which missiles would be shunted along hundreds of miles of underground rails connecting forty-six hundred concrete shelters in Utah and Nevada. The Soviets wouldn’t know where the missiles were, and wouldn’t be able to target all the possible sites without using a large portion of its ICBMs. Building the underground rail basing system would have been the largest construction project in the history of mankind, requiring more concrete than the entire interstate highway system. It was a preposterous idea, and was dead by the time Reagan took office. So Reagan had to solve the problem of finding a way to deploy a mobile missile that had no means of mobility, and that as a result was just as vulnerable as the existing Minuteman missile.
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UNDERNEATH THE OVERT signs of gathering Soviet strength, however, were signals of latent weakness. As U.S. intelligence began generating more accurate estimates of Soviet military preparations in the late 1970s, it also began to detect deepening economic and social trouble. In the early 1960s the Soviet Union had boasted that its economic program would generate “the highest standard of living in the world” by 1980, but in fact, as Soviet scholar Martin Malia described the situation, “by the 1980s much of the country was literally crumbling into ruin.” On a table of global living standards, the Soviet Union ranked about sixtieth.26 Third world students who came to the Soviet Union to study often found a standard of living lower than at home. The CIA had judged that the Soviet economy had grown at an annual rate of 3 percent during the first half of the 1970s, slowing to 2.3 percent annual growth from 1976 to 1980. Official Soviet statistics reported growth about twice these levels. In reality, the Soviet economy was shrinking.27 One sign of their trouble was a steep decline in agricultural production under the watch of the young new agriculture minister, Mikhail Gorbachev. Although the Soviet Union had more than four times the number of tractors as the United States, it managed to produce only one-third as much food.
The Soviets’ downward spiral probably began as far back as the 1960s and would have been more acute but for the generous trade credits, investment, and subsidized agricultural sales that flowed from the first flowering of détente under Nixon, along with the oil boom of the 1970s.28 The Soviets’ oil exports accounted for nearly 80 percent of their hard currency earnings in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and mitigated the increasing decrepitude of their economy. The Soviet system was still grinding out centrally directed five-year plans, and official statistics reported that the production targets were being met. Commercial ministries to manage the machine continued to grow, but central bank subsidies to basic industries would rise to 8 percent of GDP by the mid-1980s. Soviet industry was so inefficient that it required three times as much material and labor as a Western country would need to manufacture a comparable product. By the late 1970s, the deterioration had become so pervasive that 40 percent of the state’s construction projects were abandoned before completion, up from an estimated 1.7 percent in the 1960s.29 British historian Robert Skidelsky observed, “The Soviet state deliberately fostered monopolies and gigantomania in order to coordinate production: 73 percent of enterprises had over 1,000 employees.”30
Measuring an economy without real prices was always a difficult task, which explains the uncertainty and large margin of error in everyone’s estimates—including those of the Soviets themselves. Soviet economic accounting was so fraudulent that the KGB used its own spy satellites to estimate domestic crop harvests.31 While guesses about growth rates might be wildly inaccurate, there were telltale signs of erosion, such as declining exports of raw materials.
The accumulating anecdotes were arguably more revealing. Shortly after the 1980 election the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post both ran bemusing stories about three separate freight trains bound for Odessa that simply disappeared, victims apparently of piracy. Suspicious conservatives wondered whether these kinds of stories were deliberate misinformation, intended to reinforce the view that the Soviet Union was little threat to the West. (After all, Soviet intelligence services operated a Directorate of Deception precisely for this kind of misinformation.) Ronald Reagan was not among them. He would refer often to the Soviets’ “Mickey Mouse economy,” and he loved hearing stories of economic absurdities such as the missing trains. Reagan instructed the State Department to collect Soviet jokes and send them along to him in weekly memos. Paul Goble, head of the Balkan desk at State, collected more than fifteen thousand Soviet jokes during the 1980s. Reagan would later use them on Soviet leaders.32
The declining economy had one overarching implication: the Soviet Union could not go on increasing defense spending 4 to 5 percent a year without exacting further deprivations on Russian consumers. U.S. intelligence picked up signs of growing consumer discontent, predicting that it “will cause the regime of the 1980s serious economic and political problems.” The lengthening lines for consumer staples were obvious; accounts of strikes appeared in the Soviet press. The commonplace joke in the Soviet Union became “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” For the first time in 1980, the CIA predicted that the Soviet economy would decline in the next decade. Unknown to Western intelligence, some inside Soviet leadership had reached the same conclusion. The KGB’s foreign intelligence directorate ran a computer simulation to project future global economic trends and concluded that the United States was winning—and the USSR now losing—the Cold War.33
Some of the best indications that the Soviet Union was breaking down came not from intelligence services but from, of all places, the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1980 two Census researchers, poring over official and unofficial Soviet statistics, realized that the health of the Soviet population was collapsing. In the 1950s, Soviet life expectancy was reported to be greater than that of the United States (68.7 years in the USSR compared to 68.2 in the United States in 1950).34 The Soviets also boasted an infant mortality rate lower than Austria’s and Italy’s, and close to Belgium’s and West Germany’s. Demographer Nick Eberstadt noted: “In the face of these and other equally impressive material accomplishments, Soviet claims about the superiority of their ‘socialist’ system, its relevance to the poor countries, and the inevitability of its triumph over the capitalist order were not easily refuted.”35 But in the 1970s life expectancy suddenly dropped by six years from its 1950s level. For people in their fifties, death rates jumped 20 percent; for people in their thirties, 30 percent. Infant mortality slumped to the level of semi-developed nations such as the Dominican Republic and Panama, but these nations were moving steadily up while the Soviet Union was falling. Birth defects were rising by 5 to 6 percent a year, while the average Soviet woman of child-bearing age had six to eight abortions. This translated into 10 million to 16 million abortions per year. (The comparable figures for the United States were 0.5 abortions per woman and roughly 1.5 million abortions per year.) Eberstadt noted, “The only country in modern times to have suffered a more serious setback in life expectancy was the ‘Democratic Republic of Kampuchea,’ Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Clearly, something in Russia is going very, very wrong.”
Alcoholism in the Soviet Union was rising in inverse proportion (and probably in direct relation) to life expectancy. Per capita alcohol consumption was estimated to be twice as high as in the United States or Sweden (a half liter per capita per day), though the actual level was likely higher. Soviet households spent as much of their household budget on booze as American households did on food, and alcohol sales may have accounted for as much as one-third of domestic trade volume, as it was the one consumer product even the Soviets’ dysfunctional economic system could provide in abundance.36 Managers in the workplace reportedly judged whether workers were sober enough for their jobs by whether they were able to stand. Most major factories had alcoholic wards where drunk workers could dry out.
More than a million Soviet hospital beds were in facilities that lacked hot water; one-sixth of hospitals had no running water at all, and 30 percent lacked indoor toilets. Some of the Soviet rot began to approach the level of farce: Eberstadt noted that one of the leading cardiac clinics in Moscow was on the fifth floor of a building that lacked an elevator.37 Eberstadt concluded: “Measured by the health of its people, the Soviet Union is no longer a developed nation.” The CIA, meanwhile, missed this entirely, with a senior CIA figure writing in 1977 that the Soviet record in public health was “outstanding.”38
The decline in public health, like the decline in the nation’s economy, could be easily traced to the nation’s disproportionate commitment of resources to its military. The supreme effort to build a global military power of the first rank was taking an appalling toll on the economy. The Soviets later admitted that their military spending was more than twice the highest CIA estimate. The Soviet Union, as Martin Malia put it, wasn’t a country with a military-industrial complex; it was a military-industrial complex. But the decline in public health along with a declining birthrate meant that the Soviet workforce was starting to shrink, and the country would soon begin to face a severe labor shortage. Within the foreseeable future there would not be enough men available to keep up its current troop strength, a fact not lost on military commanders.39
Less clear was whether the Soviet leadership class, isolated from the people over whom it ruled, perceived the necessity of reform, or if it did, whether it could act on the impulse.40 By the early 1980s it was fashionable to refer to the ruling cadre of the Central Committee of the Communist Party as the “gerontocracy.” The elderly leadership class in the Kremlin had been propelled into their Party careers as a result of Stalin’s murderous Great Purge of the late 1930s, with who knows what distortion to their souls; Brezhnev had been appointed to his first government post (head of strategic rocket forces) by Stalin himself. Russian scholar Leon Aron notes that the Twenty-sixth Party Congress of 1981—Brezhnev’s last—“was a strange affair at which the cymbals of victory reverberated through an atmosphere filled with the faint but distinctive smell of decay.”41 By 1981, the seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev, hobbled by a series of strokes and barely able to function, could be seen drooling on himself on his rare appearances on Soviet television. Rather than removing him, however, the Politburo merely nominated him for still more medals. Lenin—the “incandescent” Lenin, as Churchill called him—would have been appalled.
Brezhnev had argued in a secret speech to party leaders in the mid-1970s that by the mid-1980s the “correlation of forces”—the Soviet term used to describe the East-West balance of power—would favor the Soviets and give them the means to take the initiative against the West. Yet by 1981 it might be said that the correlation of forces was swinging in favor of the West. But did this make the Soviet Union less dangerous, as Western liberals argued, or more dangerous? The Soviet Union was underfed and overarmed, a dangerous combination. Cold War historian Derek Leebaert reflected: “The fiercely armed yet sclerotic giant might not be long for this world, but no one knew what convulsions, fatal to far more than itself, might disfigure its last moments. The longer the Soviet Union survived in this condition, the greater the chance that something might go horribly wrong.”42 Senator Pat Moynihan argued the case at the time:
The Soviet empire is coming under tremendous strain. It could blow up. The world could blow up with it…. The problem is that the internal weaknesses of the Soviet Union have begun to appear at the moment when its external strength has never been greater. Edward Luttwak has described the present Soviet situation as one of “operational optimism” and “strategic pessimism.” The short run looks good, the long run bad. Therefore move. It was the calculation the Austro-Hungarian empire made in 1914.43
Moynihan returned to this theme several times in the early 1980s, worrying that desperate Soviet leaders might try “to reverse the decline at home and preserve national unity” by seizing Middle Eastern oil fields.
The collapsing social health, the sclerotic leadership class, and the West’s uncertainty about Soviet intentions underscored the USSR’s remarkable isolation from the rest of the world, surely the first global power in all of history to be so isolated. The Soviets’ self-imposed isolation was increasing at the outset of the 1980s; foreign travel by the nomenklatura was sharply reduced beginning in 1981 (with the exception of KGB agents), bringing to mind Churchill’s memorable assessment of the USSR written in 1929: “Russia, self-outcast, sharpens her bayonets in her Arctic night, and proclaims through self-starved lips her philosophy of hatred and death.”44 The French writer Alain Besançon said that understanding the Soviet Union requires us to “remain mentally in a universe whose coordinates bear no relationship to our own.”
The West proved very poor at this task. Soviet scholars in the United States had a terrible track record of predicting major political changes in the Soviet Union. Leopold Labedz, the longtime editor of Survey of Soviet Studies, noted wryly that the only Western journal to predict the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 was Old Moore’s Almanac, which was an astrological journal.45 (Maybe Nancy Reagan’s interest in astrology wasn’t so outlandish after all.) Western intelligence, meanwhile, had badly misjudged Soviet military output, the size of the Soviet economy, and Soviet moves throughout the world.
In other words, we didn’t have a clue. Better than our intelligence agencies, however, was Ronald Reagan’s intuition. Here the most intriguing aspect of Reagan’s Cold War strategy comes to the fore. While he warned of the threat of the Soviet military, his instincts told him that the Soviet Union was potentially a house of cards. Perhaps Reagan had a grasp that the general tide of history was moving in his direction. When Margaret Thatcher came to town in February 1981, Reagan said, “Everywhere we look in the world, the cult of the state is dying.” The president gave his first public hint of his intuition about the potential demise of the Soviet Union in his commencement address at Notre Dame in May 1981: “The West won’t contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. It won’t bother to dismiss or denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”46 Ten days later, in a commencement address at West Point, Reagan previewed another rhetorical theme that would later loom large, referring indirectly to the Soviet Union as an “evil force.”
Robert Gates, deputy director of the CIA under Reagan (and later director under George H. W. Bush), remarked that “Reagan, nearly alone, truly believed in 1981 that the Soviet system was vulnerable, not in some vague, long-range historical sense, but right then…. So he pushed—hard.”47 Indeed, most of the foreign policy establishment, along with the elite intelligentsia, considered it outlandish to suggest that the Soviet system might be weakening. The CIA, Angelo Codevilla noted, “willfully believed in the Soviet Union as a stable communist superpower.”48 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., fresh from a visit to Moscow in 1982, wrote, “Those in the U.S. who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse, ready with one small push to go over the brink, are … only kidding themselves.” One prominent group of Western Sovietologists predicted in 1980 that the Soviet economy would continue to grow at a 3.15 percent annual rate through the year 2000. The projection “does not portray a Soviet economy on the verge of collapse.”49 Another leading Sovietologist, Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University, wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability that suffice to endure the deepest difficulties.”
Joseph Berliner of Brandeis University and Harvard’s Russian Research Center wrote an assessment that deserves to be cited at length to appreciate its comprehensive wrongheadedness:
The first conclusion is that the [economic] reforms give no evidence of a disposition to doubt the efficacy of the system of central planning as the basis of the economic mechanism. On the contrary, the 1979 Planning Decree affirms the intention to strengthen the planning system by improving the quality of the national plans. In this respect the efforts of the last several decades have probably been successful. The technical equipment now available to planners, including electronic data processing equipment and mathematical modeling techniques for checking the consistency of plans, have no doubt been helpful. We may expect that the plan-making process will continue to improve in the future, although the growing complexity of the economy increases the size of the task from plan to plan.50
This is the quality of analysis that emanated routinely from academic departments of Soviet studies and official intelligence agencies right up until the Soviet regime drew its last breath.
CONSERVATIVES SHOULD NOT be exempted from the gallery of intelligent people who missed the signals of Soviet vulnerability. In a sense they had less excuse to miss the cracks in the Communist edifice, in part because conservatives, at least the tradition-minded among them, emphasize the supremacy of the spiritual over the material. And the most significant vulnerability of the Soviet Union on the eve of the 1980s was not its material decrepitude but its spiritual emptiness. Reagan understood this, writing to a friend in the summer of 1981 that “religion might very well turn out to be the Soviets’ Achilles’ heel.”51
The challenge first came to sight in the form of an unlikely gnome of a man named Karol Wojtyla, who came from an unlikely place: Poland. Wojtyla is of course better known as Pope John Paul II, and he would become a crucial strategic partner to Reagan during the 1980s. The first non-Italian Pope in 455 years set off alarm bells in the Kremlin when he was selected in October 1978. Before his ascension to the papacy, Wojtyla is reported to have told a group of German bishops that he believed Communism was doomed and might soon collapse.52 Wojtyla’s headline proclamation upon being selected Pope was “Be not afraid!” Be not afraid of what? The indirect meaning was clear.
The uncertainty and worry in ruling Communist circles could be seen in the first moments of John Paul’s selection; while the news spread instantly across Poland by word of mouth, the state-controlled Polish TV and radio network delayed announcing the news for several hours while the ruling Communist Party worked out its position. A hastily prepared CIA analysis concluded, with typical understatement of the obvious, that a Polish Pope “will undoubtedly prove extremely worrisome to Moscow.” (For this keen analysis American taxpayers must pay?) An Italian journalist with good access to the Soviets remarked that “the Soviets would rather have Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Secretary-General of the U.N. than a Pole as Pope.” The head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, called the KGB’s Warsaw station chief demanding to know, “How could you possibly allow the election of a citizen of a socialist country as Pope?” The Polish ambassador to the USSR was called in for “consultations” in Kiev the day after Wojtyla’s selection; one can only speculate what undiplomatic epithets were exchanged. Surely, some Soviets thought, the United States must be behind this.53
Poland, the flash point for the outbreak of World War II, the crucible of the Cold War (at Yalta), and the keystone of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, would become the point of slippage. In part the growing resistance to Communism reflected the fact that Russian influence and Marxist ideology were broadly detested in Poland. Historian John Lukacs noted at the time, “There is not one intelligent person in Eastern Europe who believes a word of Marxism or Communism…. The dissolution of feudalism required hundreds of years. The dissolution of Marxist socialism has taken less than twenty.”54 But the developing rebellion owed much to Poland’s religious profile as well. More than 80 percent of the Polish population was Roman Catholic, and the church had long been the one significant focal point of resistance to the Communist regime. “Going to Mass,” Time magazine noted, “became not only a religious act but a quiet sign of rebellion against the state.”55 Stalin had famously dismissed the importance of the Catholic Church with a quip: “The Pope—how many divisions does the Pope have?”56 The Soviet Union was about to find out.
The multilingual and charismatic John Paul was a firm anti-Communist; he used to urge parishioners to read samizdat copies of George Orwell’s 1984. He was much more threatening to the Soviet Union than any liberal Eastern bloc politician; he was an intellectual but had maintained a studied distance from politics for much of his life. As such, he had successfully resisted the blandishments of the Polish Communist Party. His frequent preaching about universal human rights, though always carefully worded so as not to attack the state directly, made the government uncomfortable. For a long time the Polish government had been worried that Wojtyla would succeed Cardinal Wyszynski as primate of the Polish Catholic Church. In 1974 a Polish Communist Party official, Andrzej Werblan, had singled out Wojtyla as “the only real ideological threat in Poland.”57 Now he was Pope. His most authoritative biographer, George Weigel, notes that “John Paul II’s refusal to accept the Yalta division of Europe as a fact of life was a frontal challenge to postwar Soviet strategy…. A Slavic Pope, capable of addressing the restive people of the external and internal Soviet empires in their own languages, was a nightmare beyond the worst dreams of the masters of the Kremlin.”58
The nightmare was not long in coming. Just months after moving into the Vatican the new Pope announced his intent to visit his home country the following summer; it would be the first-ever visit by a Pope to Eastern Europe. Brezhnev wanted Poland to disallow the Pope’s trip entirely, but the Polish government knew this was impossible. Instead the Polish leadership hoped to limit the impact of his visit, haggling over dates and cities to visit, and censoring media coverage of the trip. John Paul originally proposed a two-day visit to Krakow and Warsaw to celebrate the Feast of St. Stanislaw on the nine hundredth anniversary of his death on May 8, 1979, but the Polish government resisted, since this feast day, as George Weigel observed, had “unmistakable overtones of resistance to state power, [and] was simply too much for the regime to contemplate.”59 The Polish government was relieved when the Pope agreed to come in June instead. But John Paul got the better of them: instead of two days and two cities, he would be coming for nine days and visiting six cities. “The regime may have convinced itself,” Weigel reflected, “that, by deflecting the visit from the traditional date of Stanislaw’s feast, it had won a considerable victory. In fact, the communists had lost a great deal. John Paul happily traded two days for nine, two cities for six.”
Millions turned out to see the Pope celebrate what were probably the largest outdoor masses in the history of the church. In Warsaw’s Victory Square, the crowd began chanting, “We want God, we want God, we want God in the family circle, we want God in books, we want God in government orders, we want God, we want God.” Two million turned out for his final mass in Krakow. The government ham-handedly tried to undermine the Pope’s visit by circulating a flyer in the public schools that declared, “The Pope is our enemy…. Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists.” (One almost wonders whether such a crude broadside wasn’t the work of the CIA or secret Catholic sympathizers within the Polish government.) Polish television was careful to focus its camera tightly on the Pope, deliberately avoiding any views of the massive crowds that turned out to see him. These attempts to contain the Pope were hopeless. “For nine days the state virtually ceased to exist,” historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote. “Everyone saw that Poland is not a communist country—just a communist state…. It is impossible to place an exact value on the transformation of consciousness wrought by the Polish Pope.”60
There was little doubt about where the real power now lay. The regime cowered. The Soviet ambassador to Poland left the country for the whole week, and the forty thousand Soviet troops based in Poland were confined to quarters, lest any inadvertent provocation occur. The Pope’s carefully worded spiritual messages took direct aim at Poland’s Communist government and by implication its patrons in Moscow: “The exclusion of Christ from human history is an act against man…. There can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map.” A Polish bishop told Time magazine:
“The Polish people broke the barrier of fear. They were hurling a challenge to their Marxist rulers.” George Will tersely noted: “No Communist leader in Eastern Europe or the U.S.S.R. will ever hear such cheers.” John Lukacs concurred: “In Poland the monopoly of the Communist Party is broken beyond repair.”61
The Soviet leadership in Moscow didn’t want to sit back and passively watch events unfold. In November the Politburo passed a six-point policy statement entitled “Decision to Work Against the Policies of the Vatican in Relation with Socialist States.” It directed the Communist Parties of the Soviet states bordering Poland to step up propaganda against the Catholic Church. Outside the Soviet bloc, the KGB was ordered to “improve the quality of the struggle against the new Eastern European policy of the Vatican,” and above all “to show that the leadership of the new pope … is dangerous to the Catholic Church.”62
Moscow didn’t have to wait long for the other shoe to drop. In the middle of August 1980, workers at a shipyard in Gdansk (better known to the prewar generation as Danzig) went on strike to protest sharp increases in food prices by the government. The strike quickly spread to the coal mines of Silesia and other industrial sites; soon more than 750,000 workers (according to official estimates—the real number was probably higher) were off the job. Polish workers in the past had risen up and even rioted against their Communist slave masters to protest price increases and food shortages, in 1956, 1968, and most notably in 1970, when the police and army opened fire on protesters, killing a never-disclosed number. On all the previous occasions, the combination of lethal force and lesser intimidations made the workers skulk back to their jobs and swallow the government’s gross economic mismanagement.
This time it would be different. In another irony that seems worthy of being attributed to Providence, the Gdansk shipyard where the first authentic workers’ revolt in the Communist world began was named after Lenin. To succeed where previous worker protests had fizzled would require a leader of Lenin-like talent and drive. Such a man came in the form of Lech Walesa, a thirty-seven-year-old unemployed electrician, jailed previously on several occasions for illegal unionizing activities. What Walesa lacked in gainful employment he made up for with abundant charisma. Walesa had red hair and a handlebar mustache, and like Karol Wojtyla was a slight man; many Western press accounts commented on his Chaplinesque appearance. He was a born organizer, and shortly after he climbed the shipyard fence to join the workers (rather than staying off the job, the workers shrewdly decided to occupy the shipyard), he emerged as their leader.
As rumors of a Soviet invasion or a Polish military crackdown grew, the scene at the Lenin shipyard riveted the world’s attention. Thousands brought food and flowers to the workers occupying the shipyard. Most ominous for the regime were the pictures of the Polish Pope (who had sent a message supporting the strikers in the first week of their action) hung on the shipyard fence, and the scene of hundreds of workers going to confession and taking communion on the grounds, not only symbolizing the rival power but also defiling the atheist legacy of the shipyard’s namesake, Lenin. Soon this incipient labor movement took a name that itself expressed righteous larceny from the so-called ideology of worker empowerment: Solidarity.
Beyond the symbols, though, were some hardheaded demands from Walesa. Solidarity wanted the right to form as a free and independent union, and the right to strike—freedoms unheard of in any Communist country, where the Communist Party claimed to represent the interests of all workers. Events came to a head in late August as the Polish government sat down for negotiations with the strikers inside the shipyard. Walesa theatrically climbed over the shipyard fence at frequent intervals to brief the Western press and the assembled crowds on the progress of the talks.
Signs pointed to a crackdown, with either a rerun of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 or at the very least the imposition of martial law by the Polish government. The threat to the Communist Party’s status was not lost on neighboring rulers. The Communist Party rulers in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and East Germany feared that “the Polish disease” would spread next to their countries. The Soviets had good reason for this concern at home, where a series of local strikes had occurred. East Germany and Czechoslovakia in particular urged Moscow to lead a crackdown, and offered to lend troops and tanks for the purpose. The Soviet Union hurriedly drew up contingency plans to send fifteen divisions with up to a hundred thousand troops and fifteen thousand motorized vehicles into Poland for “assistance.”
But at this moment the rulers in Moscow and Warsaw blinked. The Polish government apparently decided to play for time, yielding on virtually all of Solidarity’s demands. The Gdansk agreement, as it became known, not only guaranteed Solidarity’s right to exist as an autonomous union and to go on strike, but also promised to reduce censorship and even to grant access to state TV. In another less-than-subtle sign of the real nature of the political struggle now under way, Walesa signed the agreement at an outdoor ceremony with a large pen bearing the image of the Pope. The accord was more than a mere economic agreement; Poles interpreted the episode in explicitly social terms, and above all stressed that the chief result of the Solidarity movement was an expression of their dignity. Polish poet Stanislaw Baranczak said it was like coming up for air after living for years under water.63 In other words, Solidarity really did represent a spontaneous expression of a recovery of civil society behind the Iron Curtain. There were actually some tangible measures to these grand words: according to official statistics, in the months after the Gdansk accords, suicides in Poland fell by a third, and alcohol consumption dropped by a quarter.64
The Soviet Union had not abandoned plans to intervene to stop Solidarity; it had merely postponed an invasion, hoping that Polish authorities could get control of Solidarity through the fine arts of infiltration and intimidation. Solidarity as an open organization would be easier to control than a large-scale underground group. After all, Communist intelligence services had thoroughly penetrated Eastern European human rights groups such as Charter 77 (though this did not diminish the impact of these groups).
Yet contrary to Soviet hopes, Solidarity’s initial victory was a disaster for Polish Communism. A million Poles quit their membership in the Polish Communist Party over the next few months, reducing its membership to about two million. A poll taken in the fall found that only 3 percent of Polish voters would pull the lever for the Communist Party in a free election. Meanwhile, Poles signed up in droves to join Solidarity; the union quickly enrolled ten million members in regional chapters throughout the country. Most ominous to the rulers was that the membership was overwhelmingly young, and one-third of the Polish workforce was under the age of twenty-five. The Communists had lost the next generation. The leader of the Polish Communist Party, Edward Gierek, was sacked. Stanislaw Kania, head of Poland’s intelligence service, replaced him, though increasingly prominent in public affairs and in the communications with the Kremlin was the commander of the Polish military, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.
The Polish government had no intention of allowing Solidarity to become a full-fledged independent source of power, but the union’s momentum proved unstoppable. In late September Walesa submitted the formal application to have Solidarity registered as a legal trade union. The regime dragged its feet, and Walesa responded by calling for a one-hour general strike on October 3. Although the state-controlled media refused to broadcast any news of the strike, Solidarity’s own communications network made the strike a nationwide success. The Polish Communist Party Central Committee met for two days of what was described as “vitriolic argument” about what to do. When a judge finally granted Solidarity legal recognition, he added a provision to the union’s charter asserting the Communist Party’s supremacy over Poland’s economy. Solidarity erupted in fresh fury and threatened a day-long general strike. Two days before the strike date, the Polish government backed down and removed the offending clause.
Realizing that the Polish government would be unable to get control of Solidarity, the Soviet Union resumed preparations to intervene late in the year, this time with plans to execute Solidarity leaders by firing squad after summary trials. This then was the state of play in the weeks after the 1980 election, as the CIA, working from detailed reports from its source in the Polish military, briefed President Carter and President-elect Reagan that a Soviet invasion was imminent. President Carter issued public and private messages to the Soviet Union warning of “very grave consequences” if the Soviets intervened in Poland. Carter also got other Western leaders to issue their own warnings to the Soviets (West Germany’s Helmut Schmidt warned that “détente could not survive another Afghanistan”), and President-elect Reagan issued a statement backing Carter’s actions. AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland promised to organize a worldwide labor union boycott of Soviet commerce.
For the second time in six months, the Soviets stood down. The Poles had warned the Soviets that Polish resistance to Soviet force might be ferocious; there were even rumors that some units of the Polish military would oppose the Soviet army. The Soviets realized that they had miscalculated Western reaction to their invasion of Afghanistan a year earlier, and that an invasion of Poland would not be a replay of the Czech intervention of 1968.
How much did Soviet fear and uncertainty about the Pope and the incoming American president play into their calculations? It is impossible to say without access to the still-classified transcripts of Politburo deliberations from that period. But there were rumors at the time (incorrect, as it turned out) that the Pope would come to Poland in the event of an invasion, and as the Soviets were struggling with how to come to grips with Ronald Reagan, it is certain that a provocation over Poland would have worked at cross purposes with the incipient diplomatic and propaganda effort to separate the United States from its European allies.
For the time being Solidarity maintained the upper hand, but the Polish story was far from over. This was but the close of the first of three long acts in what became a central drama of the last decade of the Cold War. Although the Soviet and Polish Communists were stymied for the moment in their attempts to subvert or subdue Solidarity by force, they thought patience would bring them more chances to turn the tide. Indeed, as we shall see, subsequent events in Poland would provide the catalyst that finally helped crystallize Reagan’s foreign policy after nearly a year of drift and confusion.
The events in Poland reinforced Reagan’s instincts about the vulnerability of the Soviet system. In a June 1981 press conference, the first question, from Dean Reynolds of ABC News, was: “Mr. President, last month you told graduates at Notre Dame that Western civilization will transcend communism and that communism is, in your words, ‘A sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.’ In that context, sir, do the events of the last 10 months in Poland constitute the beginning of the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe?”
To this question Reagan responded: “I think the things we’re seeing, not only in Poland but the reports that are beginning to come out of Russia itself about the younger generation and its resistance to longtime government controls, is an indication that communism is an aberration. It’s not a normal way of living for human beings, and I think we are seeing the first, beginning cracks, the beginning of the end.”
Reagan’s answer to this would turn out to be exactly correct.
* * *
IN ADDITION TO understanding the world situation as Reagan found it upon taking office, it is necessary also to review the starting lineup of his top appointees in foreign policy. The prevailing view of Reagan in Washington, Lou Cannon reminds us at the outset of President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, was that the White House staff carried Reagan and was responsible for the decisive aspects of policy that emerged from the Oval Office. The prejudice was strongest in foreign policy. Yet Machiavelli reminds us that “good counsel, from wherever it comes, must arise from the prudence of the prince, and not the prudence of the prince from good counsel.” In other words, no amount of good advice (and advice is never unanimous) can make up for a lack of judgment by the man at the top; to the contrary, it is the clarity of view of the man at the top that enables advisers to do their jobs constructively. With a few notable exceptions, Reagan showed remarkably good judgment on foreign affairs. This was not always the case with his foreign policy team, and Reagan sometimes had difficulty discerning this. Even when advisers share the essential principles of the president, they will often differ on the application of those principles to day-to-day decisions. Differences on foreign policy were the cause of the worst infighting throughout Reagan’s entire presidency.
The adage “Personnel is policy” is perhaps most applicable in foreign affairs, not merely because of the wide sweep of matters that come before the government but also because the senior foreign policy team filters the information and shapes the agenda that reaches the president’s desk. This has never gone smoothly in the modern presidency, and Reagan’s presidency was no exception. Reagan’s attempts to reform the national security and foreign policy apparatus to reduce the natural friction of this domain failed miserably, in part because the inherent nature of the conflict makes the task impossible, and in part because of the personalities of the people involved.
Reagan’s initial foreign policy team was, with a few exceptions, arguably the best of his entire presidency. Alexander Haig seemed well suited for the job of secretary of state. He had been a deputy to Henry Kissinger and then chief of staff to President Nixon during the awful final days of the Watergate agony. He had been commander of NATO forces in Europe after leaving the White House, so he was well known to our European allies and understood the dynamics of the Soviet military buildup. He shared Reagan’s tough-mindedness about the Soviet Union. Yet he was an unmitigated disaster.
Haig began alienating Reagan and his inner circle starting on Inauguration Day, when the new secretary tried to push through a plan to put himself at the center of all national security policy making. Haig had watched Henry Kissinger control foreign policy from his White House perch as Nixon’s national security adviser through the simple expedient of being head of what are known as the Interagency Groups (IGs)—that is, the consultation process on foreign policy making among the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the intelligence agencies. Haig hoped to emulate Kissinger’s power, but he was maladroit about pressing for being put at the center of all the IGs. To the White House inner circle, it looked like a power grab; in the press, it was described as an attempted “palace coup.” Strobe Talbott observed that Haig fit Churchill’s famous criticism of John Foster Dulles as being “the only case I know of a bull who carries his china closet with him.”
The inaccurate story was reported in the media that Reagan was still in his inaugural formal wear when Haig tried to get him to sign a formal National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) ratifying the scheme. In fact Reagan never saw it. Haig gave his draft to Ed Meese, who squashed it. The troika—Meese, Baker, and Deaver—were on their guard over Haig from that moment on. Haig came to believe that the troika was out to get him, even as he dismissed them as “second-rate hambones.” He disdained his peers in the cabinet too, writing harshly in his memoirs about Cap Weinberger’s “foolish statements,” adding, “The arduous duty of construing the meaning of Cap Weinberger’s public sayings was a steady drain on time and patience.”65 Haig received a humiliating comeuppance in mid-March when the White House announced that Vice President George Bush would head the official crisis management process. The next day Haig wrote out the first of several letters of resignation he would threaten with over the following sixteen months. Reagan had to talk him out of it and issue a public statement affirming Haig’s preeminence.
Part of Haig’s problem, one Reagan intimate said on a not-for-attribution basis, is that he brought the competitive style and hard-edged mentality (and probably some of the paranoia) of the Nixon White House into the more comfortable and confident Reagan White House, where it fit like a square peg in a round hole. Lou Cannon remarked, “It is difficult to understand why Haig, either at the time or retrospectively, was so totally devoid of insight into Reagan’s style of governance.” What Haig thought was a take-charge approach seemed more like a takeover approach. Reagan noted in his memoirs that Haig “didn’t even want me as president to be involved in setting foreign policy…. [H]e wanted to formulate it and carry it out himself.” Haig did little to disabuse Reagan or anyone else of this perception, saying in an interview later that “I wouldn’t call Reagan a student of foreign affairs…. I think that the president at that stage in his life was, on some occasions, less than in total command of an issue.”66 National Security Council staffer Donald Gregg described Haig at cabinet meetings as looking like “a cobra among garter snakes, looking for somebody to bite.” Charles Hill, one of Haig’s State Department assistants, attributed Haig’s abrasiveness to a service academy mentality (Haig was a graduate of West Point) in which “they regard every encounter as a personal confrontation that you have to win.” “There was hostility all the time,” Martin Anderson recalls.67 Reagan soon came to share that hostility. NSC aide Richard Pipes observed that Haig’s “superior airs visibly annoyed Reagan.” Haig, however, was oblivious.
Haig also drew too much attention to himself, even after being asked by James Baker to curtail his TV appearances. He got into a public spat with the Soviets in the early weeks of the administration, and rattled the nation’s sabers against Cuba, threatening publicly at one point that the United States needed to “go to the source” of the trouble in Latin America. Privately he advocated that Reagan consider a naval blockade against Cuba, and said at one early national security meeting, “Give me the word and I’ll make that island a fucking parking lot,” leaving one to wonder whether Haig thought himself secretary of war rather than secretary of state.68 Reagan’s senior aides were alarmed and appalled—alarmed because Haig seemed to be arguing for an openly warlike policy in Latin America, and appalled because an early public fight over Latin America threatened to derail the effort to get the president’s tax cut plan through Congress.
Richard Allen, Reagan’s national security adviser, was the counterpoint to Haig in almost every way imaginable—stylistically as well as institutionally. Allen was low-key, laid-back, and scholarly rather than bombastic. He had been briefly on Nixon’s National Security Council in 1969, until he left after getting crossways with Kissinger. In the 1970s he became a leading critic of détente and wound up as the chief foreign policy adviser to Reagan. Reagan was keenly aware of the infighting that had gone on between the National Security Council and the State Department under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, and sought to avoid that prospect by downgrading the post of national security adviser. Not only would Allen’s office be in the basement of the West Wing, rather than the larger main floor office Kissinger had, but he wouldn’t even report directly to the president. Allen would be reporting through Meese. The NSC itself shrank along with Allen’s office space; the professional staff of the NSC, which had been as many as seventy-five under Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, was reduced to thirty-three under Reagan.69
The downgrade scheme didn’t work. The friction between NSC and State is endemic to the institutional overlap, and Reagan was not well served by having barriers between himself and Allen. Allen had the noble intention of acting as a mere staff coordinator between State, Defense, and the intelligence agencies, but in the real world of Washington, weakness in a national security adviser only encourages intransigence among the other principals. “You never really had a day,” James Baker said of Reagan’s early NSC arrangement, “when the secretary of state and the secretary of defense weren’t at each other’s throats.”70
Reagan especially liked to have people with an instinct for public argument in high-profile positions. Two in particular stand out: Jeane Kirkpatrick, whom Reagan selected to be United Nations ambassador, and Max Kampelman, the one significant holdover from the Carter foreign policy team, whom Reagan wanted to continue in his position as chairman of the U.S. delegation to the Helsinki Final Act monitoring conference in Madrid. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 lent formal legitimacy to the post-World War II borders of Eastern Europe, which was the Soviets’ chief aim in the agreement. This led to bitter criticism at the time, including from presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, that the agreement surrendered the West’s moral authority to use the language of the “Captive Nations” about Eastern Europe, and indeed the Soviets celebrated Helsinki as the greatest event since the defeat of Hitler.
However, the West did get a key concession in Helsinki—the commitment of the Soviets and Eastern bloc nations to respect human rights. The Soviets thought they could exploit divisions among European nations and bluster their way through the obvious hypocrisy of their human rights commitment in the follow-up conferences called for in the pact, and they were successful in doing so—until they ran up against Max Kampelman in 1980. Kampelman kept the Soviets on the defensive with relentless detailed accounts of their persecution of Jews and dissidents, and in one closed session even cited the secret 1973 speech in which Brezhnev offered his cynical account of how détente was a ruse to gain advantage over the West. It was an impressive performance that thoroughly irritated the Soviets—exactly the kind of public argument that delighted Reagan. Kampelman would later become one of Reagan’s top arms control negotiators.
The notable aspect of these appointments was that Kampelman and Kirkpatrick were both prominent Democrats. Both had been closely associated with Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign in 1968; Kampelman, in fact, was widely thought to have been Humphrey’s pick to be secretary of state had he won the election. That Reagan could reach out to former mainstream Democrats tells us a lot about him—and the drift of the Democratic Party. Kampelman and Kirkpatrick never would have served in a Reagan administration had Reagan succeeded in being elected president in 1968, the time of his first, halfhearted, but nearly successful run for the GOP nomination.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a professor of government at Georgetown University, had come to Reagan’s attention through her famous 1979 Commentary magazine article, “Dictatorship and Double Standards.” Kirkpatrick’s article was a sensation among political intellectuals, and several people passed the article along to Reagan. According to Kirkpatrick’s own account, Richard Allen handed Reagan a copy of the article shortly before the candidate boarded a plane in Washington to return to California. Reagan called Allen two hours later when he was changing planes in Chicago, asking, “Who is he?”
“Who is who?” Allen replied.
“Who is this Jeane Kirkpatrick?”
“Well, first, he’s a she.”71
Reagan wrote to Kirkpatrick in December 1979 to praise the article. Her article, Reagan wrote, “had a great impact on me … Your approach is so different from ordinary analyses of policy matters that I found myself reexamining a number of the premises and views which have governed my own thinking in recent years.” If possible, Reagan closed, “I should very much like to have the opportunity to meet with you and to discuss some of the points you have raised.”72
Kirkpatrick’s appointment was said to be unpopular with some Reagan insiders such as the Kitchen Cabinet, who held against her that she was a Democrat and therefore not a Reagan loyalist. Reagan’s decision to give Ambassador Kirkpatrick cabinet rank (following the precedent of Andrew Young under Jimmy Carter) irritated Haig because it meant that Kirkpatrick would have direct access to Reagan and wouldn’t need to operate exclusively through State Department channels. Haig—and later George Shultz—regarded Kirkpatrick as a “diplomatic menace” (according to Lou Cannon), and at various times State Department officials acted to undercut her.
But Kirkpatrick had the enthusiastic confidence of the person who counted most—the president. And she did so because she shared his understanding that, as she put it at her Senate confirmation hearing, “[s]peech is an action”—especially in a speech-oriented forum such as the United Nations. She was the ideal person to reprise Pat Moynihan’s robust performance of 1975. Kirkpatrick also shared with Reagan an unapologetic view about the so-called dark days of the Cold War in the Truman-Eisenhower years. To the contrary, Kirkpatrick said, “[T]he years of the Cold War were a relatively happy respite during which free societies and democratic institutions were unusually secure. The West was united, strong, and self-assured.” At cabinet meetings Reagan would beam at Kirkpatrick and say: “You’ve taken off that sign that we used to wear that said ‘kick me.’”
Reagan’s most controversial senior-level foreign policy appointment was William Casey, whom Reagan sent to sort out the CIA. Casey had become chairman of Reagan’s faltering 1980 campaign on the day it turned the corner, the New Hampshire primary in February. He was best known as a Wall Street lawyer and investment banker who had been chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under President Nixon (he had wanted to head the CIA under Nixon, but got SEC instead). Critics thought him unqualified to head the CIA, which, with the notable exception of George H. W. Bush, typically had been led by Company men or military figures with long ties to the foreign policy establishment. One of Casey’s critics was former president Gerald Ford, who said that he was “absolutely surprised” that Reagan selected Casey for the CIA. “He was not qualified to be the head of the CIA,” Ford later said, “and his performance justifies my statement.”73
In fact Casey brought considerable depth to the job. He had served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and had read widely on foreign affairs and intelligence, surely more widely than the members or staff of the congressional intelligence committees. The deeper background he brought to the CIA was his experience with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner to the CIA, during World War II. The OSS, led by the legendary William “Wild Bill” Donovan, had a reputation as a daring, swashbuckling clandestine organization unfettered by either bureaucracy or political constraint. As a member of the OSS, Casey had organized teams of spies to be dropped behind German lines late in the war. Casey’s appointment was thought to herald a return to the old rough-and-ready ways of the OSS. For conventional thinkers Casey’s “OSS mentality” was the root of his problems; others would count his “OSS mentality” as his greatest asset.
CIA deputy director Robert Gates described Casey as “aggressive, inventive, inexhaustible, [and] as unbureaucratic as anyone can be … Casey was one of the smartest people I have ever known and certainly the most intellectually lively.”74 Another of Casey’s top deputies, Herbert Meyer, recalled that it was typical for Casey to tell State Department analysts in interagency meetings, “That’s the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard in my life.” Though Casey was sixty-seven at the time he became director of central intelligence (DCI), he was a fount of nervous energy. He couldn’t sit still in meetings, often fidgeting with paper clips or chewing on the end of his necktie. Gates remarked that “watching Casey eat was not for the squeamish.” Casey was most famous for his supposed lack of diction; his “mumbling” became so legendary in Washington that Reagan quipped that Casey was the only CIA director in history who didn’t need to use a scrambler phone. On some minutes of National Security Council meetings, Casey’s indecipherable comments were recorded as “??????.” This seems to have been partly an artifice, though, as many of Casey’s interlocutors recall crystal-clear diction on important occasions. Casey seems to have reserved his mumbling for congressional testimony and reporters’ phone calls.
Casey had no strong friends or sponsors on Capitol Hill. Senator Barry Goldwater, the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had pushed strongly for someone else (Admiral Bobby Ray Inman) to head the CIA, and did not hide his disappointment that his man did not get the nod from Reagan. Some observers attributed Goldwater’s coolness to Casey all the way back to 1966, when Casey had challenged a Goldwater-backed candidate for a House seat in New York. Casey’s complicated financial history raised congressional and media eyebrows, and several early mistakes generated a rocky relationship with Congress that never abated and which would prove to be a significant liability for the Reagan administration.
Casey reciprocated the Hill’s hostility. One of his senior deputies, Duane Clarridge, said that Casey “had a lot of contempt” for congressional oversight committees. With good reason, Casey thought that Congress had intruded too much on the intelligence community with its post-Watergate reforms. The Church-Pike committee hearings in the mid-1970s had developed in response to the refrain from liberals and their media echo chamber that the CIA was a rogue elephant, but the overreaction to CIA missteps of the 1960s and 1970s had nearly euthanized the beast. The reforms, combined with a wave of retirements and dismissals during the Carter years, led to an incredible 90 percent turnover in the CIA’s supergrade employees (those with civil service rank of GS-16 through GS-18) between 1975 and 1980.
On top of these problems, morale at the CIA was low. Casey’s predecessor, Admiral Stansfield Turner, had not been popular at Langley. The wariness some CIA employees might have had about Casey’s overtly political background was mitigated by the fact that the new DCI was close to Reagan, which would count for a lot. Sure enough, Reagan made the post of CIA director a cabinet-level job, which cemented Casey’s status at the CIA and within the administration. (Lou Cannon reports, however, that Casey and Reagan met alone only five or six times.)
What Casey found at the CIA was a stifling bureaucracy; Gates wrote that it had slowly turned into the Department of Agriculture. Casey had been around Washington long enough to know that the CIA bureaucracy would not be susceptible to sweeping reform schemes; he had said as much at his confirmation hearings, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee, “This is not the time for another bureaucratic shake-up of the CIA.” He also had the requisite distrust of the CIA’s inertia. The Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky recalled visiting Casey with a proposal for nasty deeds against the USSR. “It’s just great,” Casey told him, “but let me give you some advice: don’t tell anyone in the CIA about it; they’ll screw it up.”75
He focused instead on trying to get specific divisions of the CIA to conceive of their mission in radically new ways. Casey and Gates did shake up CIA analysts when they announced that henceforth the accuracy of individual reports would be taken into account when it came time for promotions. (Resentful CIA bureaucrats remembered this humiliation eight years later and quietly opposed Gates’s nomination by President George H. W. Bush to become CIA director.) Casey brought in new faces from the outside, leased a building in Rosslyn to separate some of his new initiatives from the routine atmosphere of Langley, and became his own case officer after a fashion, traveling abroad frequently to talk firsthand with station chiefs and agents in foreign countries.
Critics believed that Casey and Reagan wanted a revival of cloak-and-dagger clandestine operations, and the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal is offered as the simple proof of this criticism. While this was one element of the Casey program, he was after something more fundamental: he understood that intelligence was not a value-free, depoliticized social science but rather was served and informed by political purpose. As Robert Gates succinctly put it: “Bill Casey came to CIA primarily to wage war against the Soviet Union.”
Casey got along smoothly with Weinberger, Allen, and Kirkpatrick and generally saw foreign policy questions the same way. But of course the Reagan foreign policy team divided into factions, with the prickly Haig, most notably, constantly at odds with everyone. Most accounts of Reagan’s early foreign policy suppose that infighting among Reagan’s advisers accounts for the lack of clear direction in the first year of Reagan’s presidency. But perhaps no policy was the right policy. Reagan understood, as Haig did not, that what was most needed in 1981 was patience. He believed that productive relations with the Soviet Union were possible but that it required the recovery of America’s confidence and assertiveness. Speeches alone wouldn’t make this a reality. Effective policy would require waiting for some opportunities, or perhaps creating some. And so Reagan understood, intuitively at least, that relations with the Soviet Union might have to get worse before they got better.
This necessity, more than a conflict of personalities, accounts for the slow start on foreign policy. One of Reagan’s first directives to his cabinet and senior staff was that there were to be no high-level contacts with the Soviet Union for the first several months of his administration. Reagan wouldn’t have his first meeting with Ambassador Dobrynin until 1983. Cap Weinberger said publicly that it would be “at least six months” before arms talks with the Soviets could resume, a statement that did not endear him to Haig, since arms control talks were a matter for the State Department to determine. A number of small signals were sent to make the Soviets understand that the United States would not do business as usual. Ambassador Dobrynin’s access to the underground parking lot and private entrance at the State Department was revoked, and he was not informed until he showed up one morning at his customary entrance and was turned away by a low-level guard. Now he had to go in the front door, past the media gantlet, just like the ambassador from Peru or Botswana. Georgi Arbatov, one of the Soviet Union’s smoothest agitprop spokesmen, had his visa restricted, cutting off his hitherto unlimited ability to travel around the United States.
On the other hand, Reagan confounded his tough rhetoric and blunt gestures with the contradictory step of lifting the embargo on grain sales to the Soviet Union that President Carter had imposed after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan had criticized the embargo during the 1980 campaign in his appearances in the farm states (especially in Iowa, site of the all-important first caucus of the election season) and promised that he would lift the embargo if elected. He made the cogent argument that the grain embargo unfairly asked just a single segment of American business—farmers—to make a sacrifice. At his first presidential press conference in late January, Reagan said, “You only have two choices with an embargo: You either lift it, or you broaden it.” He returned to the theme in early March in a televised interview with Walter Cronkite: “[I]f we were going to go that route, then it should have been a general embargo.” Reagan also noted that the embargo had had little effect on the Soviet Union because none of our allies had gone along with it; other grain-exporting nations, such as Argentina, filled the gap, taking away market share from American farmers.
While Reagan had those arguments on his side, the decision to lift the embargo was not easy to reach, nor did it pass without arousing controversy. When the cabinet first discussed the issue, on February 4, Ed Meese and Agriculture Secretary John Block called for lifting the embargo immediately, while Haig and others argued against the move, saying it would look like a unilateral concession to the Soviets. Reagan agreed to defer the decision but could not delay for long after the Senate, in mid-March, voted 58–36 in favor of lifting the embargo, a tribute to the strength of farm state senators. The president lifted the embargo on April 24, at the very time when tensions over Poland were heating up, and with only short notice to our allies. Notable conservatives pounced on the decision. George Will, for example, wrote that the Reagan administration loved commerce more than it loathed Communism. The front page of Human Events, meanwhile, ran the headline “Reagan’s First Major Foreign Policy Mistake?”
Lifting the grain embargo was not helpful in achieving the near-term objective of Reagan’s foreign policy, which was to smash up the last remaining filigree of détente without openly saying so. Reagan was seeking to strike a tougher attitude toward the Soviet Union without foreclosing the possibility of genuine negotiations. It was necessary to be artful and indirect about this purpose because of diplomatic requirements involving the skittish European alliance. Occasional lapses into candor, including from Reagan himself, always set off a furious reaction in the media and among the diplomatic corps. In mid-March, an unnamed high administration official made some incautious remarks (the official thought he had been speaking off the record) to a Reuters reporter that caused a full-scale ruckus:
A high U.S. official said today the Reagan administration believes détente is dead and broad negotiations are pointless until Moscow abandons what he called “The most brazen imperial drive in modern history.” The official, who asked not to be identified, said the administration planned to confront the Soviet Union on its own terms despite what it realized would be heavy pressure from the allies, especially West Germany, for a more conciliatory line…. The official said, “Nothing is left of détente,” and “Détente is dead …” He said Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system in the direction followed by the West “or going to war. There is no other alternative, and it could go either way.”76
The anonymous high official was Richard Pipes of the National Security Council, the Polish-born Harvard scholar who had published several articles on the inherently expansionist tendencies of the Soviet Union and why the Soviets thought they could prevail in war against the West, including nuclear war. (The Soviets had, unsurprisingly, protested Pipe’s appointment to the NSC.) The predictable furor erupted, with one European newspaper blaring the headline, “Reagan War Threat Horrifies West.” Haig, while privately agreeing with Pipes, publicly professed to be “outraged,” and apologized to the West German foreign minister for the critical comments that appeared in the article. The White House issued a statement saying the official quoted in the article was not authorized to speak for the administration.
But aside from the sensational war talk, there was a glimpse at the source of the uncertainty about policy: Pipes said that the administration’s replacement for détente could be either “warmed over containment” or perhaps something “as radical as the President’s economic program” (emphasis added). What might that look like? No one could—or would—say at this point.
A clear direction in the details of foreign policy might have been reached sooner but for the most harrowing moment of the 1980s—the moment that almost derailed the entire Reagan revolution both in domestic and foreign policy.