CHAPTER 6
THE GATHERING STORM

A serious foreign policy requires a comprehensive
central concept; without it, pronouncements are exercises
in rhetoric, and actions are driven by short-term tactical
consideration without coherence or sense of direction.

—HENRY KISSINGER, JANUARY 1982

ATINY CULTURAL SIGN of the changing national mood that followed Ronald Reagan’s election occurred in 1982, when the Hasbro toy company revived the GI Joe action figure. Originally created in 1962, the toy lost popularity in the aftermath of Vietnam, despite Hasbro’s offering new models that emphasized generic adventure instead of militaristic lethality. It didn’t work. Hasbro discontinued GI Joe in 1978, unconvincingly citing high oil prices as a constraint on manufacturing. Now GI Joe was back, along with a cartoon theme song, “Real American Hero.” By the end of 1983, more than two hundred million war-themed action figures would be sold. The revival of GI Joe coincided with the decline of another cultural totem: the antiwar TV show M*A*S*H ended in early 1983 after eleven years on CBS.

Reagan’s defense buildup, emphasized with high-profile announcements of the resumption of several major arms programs that Jimmy Carter had cancelled, such as the B-1 bomber and the neutron bomb, renewed morale in the military (as well as its private sector suppliers). Recruitment and retention in the armed forces were up, after lagging in the late 1970s. The quality of military recruits improved; the number of army recruits with high school diplomas increased from 54 percent in 1980 to 90 percent in 1984.¹ But a larger military budget is not a foreign policy, despite Reagan’s view of the necessity of patiently engaging in a buildup before engaging the Soviet Union in new arms negotiations.

While Reagan was patient, Europe was not. The Reagan administration had inherited the two-track intermediate-range nuclear force (INF) initiative of the Carter administration, according to which the United States would deploy 572 Pershing II and cruise missiles in the fall of 1983 if negotiations with the Soviets failed to reduce their growing number of intermediate-range missiles aimed at Europe. The Reagan administration was actually unenthusiastic about the INF program; it would have preferred simply to bolster the U.S. strategic ICBM force and to deploy more missile submarines to the region. Abandoning the missile deployment would have been politically ruinous for NATO and the United States, however. As summer yielded to fall in 1981, European leaders, reluctant to see U.S. missiles deployed on their soil, were growing increasingly anxious about the absence of INF negotiations and the Reagan administration’s near silence on the matter. A European peace movement was gathering strength, turning out 150,000 people in West Germany in the spring to oppose the NATO missile deployment plans. Left-leaning opposition parties were starting to make the INF deployment an issue, and even some members of West Germany’s ruling Social Democratic Party were turning against the plan. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski suggested that the European attitude should be summarized with the slogan “Better slave than brave.”

In the midst of this growing European nervousness Reagan made a remark that revived the talk of his potential for being a “mad bomber” adventurist. Over lunch with a group of out-of-town newspaper editors on October 16, 1981, Reagan was asked whether he thought there could be a limited exchange of nuclear weapons in Europe without it escalating into a full-fledged intercontinental nuclear war. Part of Reagan’s answer was: “I don’t honestly know…. I could see where you could have the exchange of tactical weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the button.”

American news outlets largely ignored the remark, probably because it was an unexceptional if syntactically challenged restatement of the well-established American doctrine of flexible response, but it was lavishly covered in the European press, where it touched off a furor. This was the last thing European leaders such as West Germany’s Helmut Schmidt wanted to hear. The persistent European fear was that they would become the casualties of a superpower confrontation—a fear the Soviet Union had adroitly exploited with the theme that America “would fight to the last European.” Reagan’s remark came hard on the heels of a statement from Secretary of State Al Haig that the United States might fire a nuclear “warning shot” against the Soviet Union in the early innings of a European war.² Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger disavowed Haig, and Reagan, at a subsequent press conference, prudently obfuscated the question. Nonetheless, Weinberger had to reassure nervous NATO defense ministers that American nuclear strategy had not come unhinged.

But below the level of Reagan, Haig, and Weinberger, there was incessant chatter, backed up occasionally with some official documents and statements, that the Reagan administration believed a nuclear war could be fought and won. NSC aide Richard Pipes told the Washington Post that he thought the probability of a nuclear war was about 40 percent.³ “Nuclear War a Real Prospect to Reagan Hard-Liners,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported in a typical headline on October 4. The most sensational comment came a few weeks later, when Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer published comments from an assistant secretary of defense named T.K. Jones that the United States could survive and recover quickly from a nuclear war if everyone dug holes in the ground and covered them up with a door and three feet of dirt. “If there are enough shovels to go around,” an unguarded Jones told the crafty (and far-left) Scheer, “everybody’s going to make it.”⁴ The remark generated a firestorm of criticism in the media and on Capitol Hill, while Jones became a non person in the Pentagon.

These media-blown tempests helped swell the ranks of the European peace movement. The week before Reagan’s remark in mid-October, 250,000 had turned out in Bonn; 150,000 turned out in London. In subsequent weeks protest marches would spread to Paris, Brussels, and Rome. Banners depicting Reagan as a wild cowboy were especially popular. At the same press lunch where Reagan talked of a limited nuclear exchange, he dismissed the European peace movement as a “propaganda campaign” that “can be traced back to the Soviet Union.” (Both American and European news media assiduously ignored this dimension of the story. The East German Communist Party, for example, provided $2 million a month to West German leftist groups, while the Soviets funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to Danish peace groups, and likely millions more that were not detected in other countries. The Soviets also actively attempted to foment discord among NATO through forged documents purporting to be secret cables from Haig and other American officials.)⁵

Reagan’s complete view of the problem, as expressed several times that fall, displayed a more sophisticated grasp of the strategic problem facing the Western alliance, as well as a clue to his own deepest instincts. The proposed American missiles, Reagan explained, would only re-create in Europe the same kind of deterrence (stalemate was the term Reagan used in place of deterrence) that existed between the superpowers through their strategic nuclear weapons. All of this, Reagan argued, set the stage for upcoming negotiations on limited-theater nuclear weapons in Europe—the second track of the two-track policy NATO had adopted in 1979.⁶

With new arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union scheduled to begin at the end of November, Europeans and a great many Americans doubted Reagan’s sincerity about arms negotiation because he adopted as his opening proposal an idea that was nearly as audacious as his economic plan: the “zero option.” The proposal was that if the Soviet Union would dismantle all of its intermediate-range missiles, NATO would forgo deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles in 1983. The idea had come from Weinberger aide Richard Perle, who proposed the deal in an interagency working group. The State Department vigorously opposed the proposal, saying that it was so one-sided—the zero option would require the Soviet Union to give up everything, while the United States and its allies gave up nothing—that the Soviets would never go for it. Although the State Department tried to block the zero option proposal from going up the policy ladder to the White House, Weinberger and Ed Meese took the idea straight to Reagan, who approved it.⁷ The president then decided that a high-profile speech presenting the zero option would help calm the political waters in Europe, even though it was exactly this kind of public pre-announcement of the American position by Jimmy Carter in 1977 that had offended the Soviets and derailed the SALT II negotiations for two years.

On November 18, Reagan laid out the zero option for the first time. Before detailing the proposal, he set out, with his usual mixture of tough and conciliatory tones, the case for believing in the Soviet Union’s aggressive intentions:

The defense needs of the Soviet Union hardly call for maintaining more combat divisions in East Germany today than were in the whole Allied invasion force that landed in Normandy on D-Day. The Soviet Union could make no more convincing contribution to peace in Europe, and in the world, than by agreeing to reduce its conventional forces significantly and constrain the potential for sudden aggression….

Consider the facts. Over the past decade, the United States reduced the size of its Armed Forces and decreased its military spending. The Soviets steadily increased the number of men under arms. They now number more than double those of the United States. Over the same period, the Soviets expanded their real military spending by about one-third. The Soviet Union increased its inventory of tanks to some 50,000, compared to our 11,000. Historically a land power, they transformed their navy from a coastal defense force to an open ocean fleet, while the United States, a sea power with transoceanic alliances, cut its fleet in half.

During a period when NATO deployed no new intermediate-range nuclear missiles and actually withdrew 1,000 nuclear warheads, the Soviet Union deployed more than 750 nuclear warheads on the new SS-20 missiles alone…. And the Soviets continue to add one new SS-20 a week…. They now enjoy a superiority on the order of six to one.

Having established the Soviets’ military advantage over the United States and their aggressive aims in Europe and beyond, Reagan turned to the zero option:

I have informed President Brezhnev that when our delegation travels to the negotiations on intermediate range, land-based nuclear missiles in Geneva on the 30th of this month, my representatives will present the following proposal: The United States is prepared to cancel its deployment of Pershing II and ground-launch cruise missiles if the Soviets will dismantle their SS-20, SS-4, and SS-5 missiles. This would be an historic step.

But Reagan did not limit his proposals to just the zero option. He had three other initiatives to go along with it: talks to reduce the level of conventional forces in Europe, talks to improve communication links between the superpowers to reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war, and most importantly, new talks aimed at reducing the number of strategic nuclear weapons (rather than merely limiting their buildup, as previous SALT treaties had done), which Reagan proposed to call START, for Strategic Arms Reduction Talks.⁸

The speech was given at 10:00 a.m. Washington time so that it could be broadcast in the early evening in Europe (an estimated sixteen million West Germans tuned in). There Reagan’s proposal was well received—Helmut Schmidt went as far as publicly taking credit for the idea.⁹ But was the zero option a serious proposal? Cynics (and Strobe Talbott) suggested that making an offer the Soviets would refuse was exactly what the Reaganites intended, hoping to scuttle any arms deal. The official Soviet line took the same view.¹⁰ The chief Soviet arms negotiator in Geneva, Yuli Kvitsinskiy, dismissed the zero option as “a formula for unilateral disarmament by our side, and, frankly, an insult to our intelligence.”

Not for the last time in his presidency, Reagan’s proposal was thought to be merely an opening position, from which concessions would inevitably follow.¹¹ The idea for the zero option had been batted around European capitals publicly for several weeks as a “possible negotiating position” (in the words of the Washington Post), which means it wasn’t to be taken seriously. “Unnamed officials” were quoted in the media suggesting that the zero option would be abandoned quickly.¹² Weinberger had actually opposed a NATO defense ministers’ resolution in late October calling for the zero option, and White House press secretary Larry Speakes had thrown cold water on the idea a week later with the comment that “the ‘zero option’ is something to look at under ideal conditions, but not at present.” Haig, meanwhile, said that the United States would merely seek “significant reductions” in the levels of Soviet missiles. Weinberger, Haig, and others thought the zero option was a sop to appease the European peace movement and might result in the cancellation of NATO missile deployment in return for only small reductions in Soviet missiles—in other words, a zero level for only one side.

One factor that propelled the timing of Reagan’s zero option announcement was the late November trip Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was scheduled to make to West Germany—his first visit to a Western nation since the invasion of Afghanistan two years before. The administration expected and feared that Brezhnev would offer some vague freeze proposal, which is exactly what he did. Brezhnev offered to remove some missiles and stop deployment of new missiles (which the Soviets were doing at the rate of about one missile a month) if the United States cancelled its INF deployment. The United States noted, however, that Soviet SS-20 missiles could still strike most of Europe from beyond the Urals, so removing missiles from Eastern Europe offered no change in the balance of terror. Brezhnev mixed this offer with his own tough rhetoric blaming the United States for “intensifying the arms race” and threatening “the emptying of Europe and turning it into its own tombstone.” Though Schmidt privately fended off Brezhnev’s overtures and reaffirmed West Germany’s commitment to NATO’s INF policy, the Soviet gambit did produce favorable media coverage. An Associated Press headline, for example, read: “Brezhnev Seen Ready for Euromissile Compromise.”

It was clearly the beginning of a significant Soviet peace offensive. It might have succeeded had its early momentum not been blunted by the second act in the Polish drama.

*  *  *

HAVING AVOIDED THE catastrophe of a Soviet invasion by the narrowest of margins in December 1980, Poland’s Solidarity movement attempted throughout 1981 to consolidate and extend its bold position, demanding a five-day workweek, higher wages, and an uncensored press. Emboldened by the success of the Gdansk shipyard strike the previous year, local Solidarity chapters increasingly resorted to short work stoppages. Despite government censorship of Solidarity publications (something it had promised not to do in the Gdansk accord), piece by piece Solidarity was winning concessions from the government, but in a chaotic fashion indicating that Lech Walesa’s grip on the union was unsure. Solidarity was threatening to displace the Communist Party as the leading force in Poland’s governance, which guaranteed that a showdown would ultimately come.

The inability of the Communist Party to get a firm hold over Solidarity led to a change in the nation’s leadership in February, with General Wojciech Jaruzelski being elevated from the post of minister of defense to prime minister. Jaruzelski’s appointment was initially popular because he was reputed to be a Polish patriot and much of the army was thought to be sympathetic, or at least neutral, toward Solidarity. But as it turned out, Jaruzelski did Moscow’s bidding and would eventually receive the Order of Lenin, the Soviet Union’s most distinguished medal; Caspar Weinberger later called him “a Russian general in a Polish uniform.”¹³ Jaruzelski would end up being the key figure in Poland’s subsequent upheaval.

In March 1981, the Soviet Politburo summoned the leaders of the Polish government to Moscow for a dressing-down. The Polish regime subsequently attempted to suppress Solidarity activities and arrest leading dissidents, but this only enraged Solidarity and led the union to threaten its ultimate weapon: a general strike. The prospect of a civil war was openly discussed. As the Soviet military once again mobilized for a possible intervention, Solidarity backed down. Both the Pope and, according to some reports, the Reagan administration passed along warnings to Solidarity that a general strike was too large a risk.¹⁴ In hindsight, Solidarity may have missed its best chance to bring down Communist Party rule.¹⁵

Over the summer Solidarity and the government conducted negotiations ostensibly as “partners” for Poland’s future. Despite a few government concessions on censorship, it was a sham. The government’s strategy all along had been to weaken and divide Solidarity, and it is likely that some of the firebrands arguing within Solidarity for radical action were agent provocateurs placed there by the government. Despite internal frictions and rising complaints about Walesa’s leadership, Solidarity did not break. At the end of summer the talks broke down, and nine hundred Solidarity leaders retreated to Gdansk for their own First National Congress to consider their next steps. As the Soviet navy conducted large-scale exercises offshore from Gdansk in an obvious attempt at intimidation, the Solidarity delegates called for a national referendum to limit the power of the Communist Party in Poland’s government, and issued a “Message to the Working Peoples of Eastern Europe” (pointedly including the Soviet Union) calling for their fellow workers to assert their right to have self-governing trade unions. Walesa remarked that this appeal was merely following Marx’s advice for proletarians of all nations to unite.

In Moscow, the Politburo was not amused. Brezhnev erupted at a special Politburo meeting, calling the Solidarity message “an insolent stunt.” He had been complaining for months that Poland’s Communist Party leader, Stanislaw Kania, was “indecisive and soft,” telling Kania bluntly in August that “there never had been a case when revolution triumphed over counterrevolution without a battle and without the use of force.” Following the September Solidarity meeting Brezhnev blistered Kania’s eardrums over the telephone. The Politburo followed up with a public letter demanding that Kania take stern measures “to prevent the imminent loss of socialism in Poland.” A few weeks later Kania was ousted and Jaruzelski elevated to the post of Communist Party leader in addition to being prime minister.

Unbeknownst to Solidarity, preparations to use the army to impose martial law had begun to be made as early as the fall of 1980, and they intensified in the middle of 1981. The KGB began printing martial law posters in August, before Solidarity issued its inflammatory appeal for the workers of other Eastern bloc nations to organize. The regime abruptly extended the conscription period for army draftees and sent new “military operational groups” to two thousand cities and villages across the country, supposedly to improve food distribution and keep order. Far from being clandestine, this deployment was prominently broadcast on Polish television news. Yet Solidarity’s leadership, increasingly frayed amidst growing criticism of Walesa, remained oblivious to the accumulating signals that the government was readying a crackdown.

When the hammer finally fell on the night of December 12, Solidarity was completely unprepared. Telephone communications were cut, a curfew was imposed, and tanks rolled through the streets throughout the country, surrounding Solidarity offices and other locations of dissidence. Solidarity’s leaders, many of whom were conveniently attending yet another conference in Gdansk, were easily rolled up. More than four thousand people were arrested. Lech Walesa was interned, and Solidarity was outlawed in an emergency decree.¹⁶ Jaruzelski’s declaration that Poland was in a “state of war” was accurate, for his well-executed crackdown amounted to a coup. Poland had invaded itself.

The manner in which the martial law decision unfolded in both Moscow and Warsaw, and the U.S. reaction to it, opens onto a crucial phase in the last decade of the Cold War. U.S. intelligence had known about the preparations for martial law in detail, thanks to Polish general Ryszard Kuklinski, who had been spying for the CIA for several years. Kuklinski’s reports of the coming crackdown were presented to Reagan and Vice President Bush, yet the United States sent no warning to Solidarity that a crackdown was coming. “It remains to this day one of the unsolved mysteries of the Reagan presidency why this invaluable information was never acted upon,” Reagan’s NSC aide Richard Pipes has written.¹⁷ For many observers besides Pipes (who had recommended to Reagan that he make a statement sometime in the fall), the lack of an American public statement or private warning either to Poland’s government or to Solidarity is the “dog that did not bark” in this pivotal Cold War episode.¹⁸

But the situation was not as clear-cut as hindsight suggests. Kuklinski had been spirited out of Poland in November—“a real cloak and dagger affair,” in the words of a U.S. agent who took part—after the KGB had gotten wind that the Americans had a mole in Warsaw. With Kuklinski’s information flow abruptly cut off, the United States had no knowledge of the timing of a crackdown. Also, there were some suggestions that U.S. warnings to Moscow in December 1980 had been counterproductive—perhaps even deliberately manipulated by Moscow and Warsaw—because they made Solidarity cautious when it should have been most aggressive.¹⁹ Another concern was that a new warning against the regime might embolden Solidarity into thinking the United States would offer additional support of some kind, as it had before the Hungarian uprising of 1956. (The AFL-CIO was already funneling money to Solidarity. The CIA wisely decided to stay away because, as CIA director William Casey put it, the AFL-CIO would do a better job.) But the principle of Occam’s razor probably supplies the main reason. As former CIA agent Douglas MacEachin put it, despite having “plenty of information on what the Polish regime was preparing to do, [the Reagan administration] did not believe they would do it.”²⁰

The Soviets had the same doubts about whether the Polish government would go through with it. Brezhnev complained at a Politburo meeting at the end of October that Jaruzelski “is not a brave enough man,” and contemplated replacing the general with yet another hard-line military officer. Even as Jaruzelski was pressuring the Soviets to commit troops to back up martial law, Moscow doubted up to the last minute whether he would go through with the crackdown. The Soviets sent a senior officer, Marshal Viktor Kulikov, to Warsaw on December 11, the day before martial law was imposed, to buck up Jaruzelski.²¹

If the Soviets thought Jaruzelski was halfhearted, it was a reflection of their own deep indecision about what to do. Although the Soviet military once again worked up contingency plans for securing Poland, the Politburo was set against intervening directly, even if Jaruzelski had flinched. Most of the Politburo minutes that have emerged from Soviet archives present a picture of unrelenting pressure on Poland to crack down amidst an overlay of pervasive doubt and hand-wringing. The minutes of one Politburo meeting even include discussion of whether it might be necessary to allow Poland to slip away from the Warsaw Pact.²²

These signs of restraint might be taken as early hints that the Moscow gerontocracy perceived that their empire was starting to slip irretrievably away. (Ironically, other Eastern European regimes such as Czechoslovakia and East Germany were eager to intervene.) More likely, however, wider geopolitics was the decisive reason for the Politburo’s restraint. As Timothy Garton Ash observed, “Every day that the Soviets did not invade brought encouragement for the opposition to American Cruise and Pershing II missiles in western Europe.”²³ Ash added that Solidarity knew this and did not like the Western European peace movement precisely because “it tended to weaken the West’s resistance to Soviet imperialism.”

Even though Soviet involvement with the coup was obvious from the martial law posters that had been printed in Moscow, the fact that the Soviets had the Poles do their own dirty work provided enough of a fig leaf for Western leaders to downplay the significance of Poland. West Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, said that martial law was a purely internal Polish matter. The day after martial law was imposed, Helmut Schmidt made a previously scheduled visit to East Germany’s Stalinist ruler, Erich Honecker, where Schmidt weakly declared that “Herr Honecker is as dismayed as I am that this was necessary.”²⁴ Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau said, “All countries should respect Poland’s right to settle its own problems its own way.” British Labour Party grandee Denis Healey said, “I think we should all pray for the success of General Jaruzelski.” Several European Communist parties ironically issued stronger condemnations than their centrist governments did.

Reagan, however, was livid over Poland. The National Security Council met almost daily about the Polish crisis over the next two weeks, in what Richard Pipes characterized as “an emotionally charged atmosphere inspired largely by Reagan’s mounting fury.” Reagan derided the “chicken littles” in Europe and once again compared the present moment to the 1930s, noting the failure of the democracies to stand up to totalitarian aggression and making reference to FDR’s “quarantine the aggressor” speech. This was “the last chance of a lifetime to go against this damned force,” Reagan said at the December 22 NSC meeting.²⁵

But what could the United States actually do to the Soviet Union? Nearly every option contained a dilemma, and the tougher options risked splitting the NATO alliance. Reagan’s advisers divided into two camps. Caspar Weinberger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Casey, and William Clark urged tough sanctions. “It is comfortable for the Europeans to do nothing,” Weinberger observed. Reagan was determined: “We should let our Allies know they, too, will pay a price if they don’t go along; that we have long memories.” Secretary of State Al Haig led the call for restraint. The division grew heated at times. Weinberger criticized the State Department’s option papers as “an eloquent plea for doing nothing.” Reagan mused about declaring the Helsinki Accord “null and void.” Haig: “Europe will go bonkers if we do that.” Reagan: “Why pretend we have an agreement if they violate it constantly?”²⁶

The blunt communications between Reagan and Brezhnev during this fortnight show how raw relations had become. Reagan fired off an indignant message to Brezhnev on the Direct Communications Link (the “hotline”) on December 23. “The recent events in Poland clearly are not an ‘internal matter,’ and in writing to you, as the head of the Soviet government, I am not misaddressing my communication. Your country has repeatedly intervened in Polish affairs during the months preceding the recent tragic events…. [N]othing has so outraged our public opinion as the pressures and threats which your government has exerted on Poland to stifle the stirrings of freedom.” Reagan reminded Brezhnev that Soviet actions violated several international laws, including the Helsinki Accords, “which you, Mr. President, personally initialed on behalf of your country.” Polish reform, Reagan added, was no threat to the Soviet Union. “The United States cannot accept suppression of the Polish people’s legitimate desire for such a process of renewal, particularly when it is imposed under external pressure.”

Brezhnev’s equally indignant reply arrived promptly two days later, on Christmas morning in Washington. “[Y]ou have placed your personal signature upon the fact that gross interference in the internal affairs of Poland is the official policy of the United States,” Brezhnev claimed. Soviet communications with Poland, Brezhnev explained, were merely “mutual relations between two political parties” (the Communist parties of the USSR and Poland) “completely equal and friendly”—the equivalent, one supposes, to the Nevada and California Republican parties exchanging campaign plans. “The Polish people do not sit in judgment of others, who would force their values on them…. American officials, yes, even you personally, are defaming our social and state system, our internal order. We resolutely repudiate this…. But one cannot help but notice that the general tone of your letter is not the way in which leaders of such powers as the Soviet Union and the United States should talk with each other…. It is not us, not the Soviet Union, which would bear responsibility should the further undermining of Soviet-American relations take place.”

Reagan was incredulous about Brezhnev’s reply. He sent a handwritten note to Admiral James Nance, who was presiding over the NSC because Richard Allen had taken a leave of absence in the wake of a typical Washington mini-scandal.²⁷ Reagan’s letter restated his argument in simple terms: “It seems to me we are supporting the right of the Polish people to vote on the gov’t they’d like to have. Mr B. [Brezhnev] is supporting the right of the gov’t to deny the Polish people a voice in their gov’t.” He also brought up the Yalta agreement’s promise of free elections in Poland, saying with droll understatement, “The Soviets violated that pact.” Reagan sent a follow-up message back to Brezhnev reminding him of this. In Richard Pipe’s words, Reagan’s statements and actions “broke with the Yalta syndrome that had tacitly acknowledged Poland as lying within the Soviet sphere of influence.”

Against the advice of Michael Deaver and the anxieties of Haig, Reagan went on TV December 23 to give a speech on the Polish crisis. (“My problem is the timing in a speech tomorrow,” Haig said in the December 22 NSC meeting, “will bring the specter of the terror of World War III on Christmas Eve.”) “The fate of a proud and ancient nation hangs in the balance,” Reagan said. “This Christmas brings little joy to the courageous Polish people. They have been betrayed by their own government…. I want emphatically to state tonight that if the outrages in Poland do not cease, we cannot and will not conduct ‘business as usual’ with the perpetrators and those who aid and abet them. Make no mistake, their crime will cost them dearly in their future dealings with America and free peoples everywhere. I do not make this statement lightly or without serious reflection.” The president urged Americans to emulate a sign of protest that Solidarity had adopted in Poland, placing a single lighted candle in a window—“a sign that the light of liberty still glows in their hearts.” Reagan did so at the White House.

Reagan’s December 23 hotline message to Moscow had warned, “Should the Soviet Union persist in aiding the course of continued suppression in Poland, the United States will have no choice but to take concrete measures affecting the full range of our relationship.” The largest economic weapon would be to declare Poland in default on $27 billion in loans owed to Western banks (Poland was technically in default already, having stopped interest payments months before). The primary repercussion of default would be on American and European banks, dealing a blow to bank balance sheets at a time when Western credit markets were already straining under high interest rates and tight monetary policy. West Germany claimed that some of its banks might collapse if Poland defaulted.

Henry Kissinger suggested that the United States suspend the INF talks in Geneva, but Reagan and Haig wanted to avoid specific linkage in arms control negotiations. Still, it was embarrassing for the Reagan administration to have Kissinger to its right. Instead of declaring Poland in default or reviving linkage, Reagan announced a few small-bore sanctions against Poland: canceling Export-Import Bank credit insurance, suspending commercial airline landing rights for the Polish airline Lot (Lot had only one flight a week to the United States), and denying access to U.S. water’s for the Polish fishing fleet. He later stripped Poland of its most-favored-nation trade status (Poland had been the only Eastern bloc nation with MFN status).

Haig and other critics within the administration argued that sanctions would mostly hurt the Polish people rather than the regime, though, as Timothy Garton Ash wrote, “[T]he only trouble with this argument was that the poor suffering Polish people showed embarrassing signs of supporting President Reagan’s line” and would have cheered tougher sanctions.²⁸ Haig also argued that tough sanctions would drive Poland into greater dependency on the Soviet Union, forgetting that such an effect would be a further burden on the Soviet economy. (The Politburo was already complaining before martial law about the food and matériel shipments required to keep Poland afloat.)

Outside the administration, critics across the political spectrum, from George Will to Lane Kirkland, blasted Reagan’s Polish sanctions for being weak and “symbolic,” though Jaruzelski claimed years later that the sanctions had been more damaging than the West knew.²⁹ Norman Podhoretz wrote, “Where Poland was concerned, the Administration seemed more worried about hurting a few bankers than about hurting the Soviet empire.”³⁰ National Review called the sanctions “marginal deprivations.” The Committee for the Free World placed a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for a tougher response. Human Events’ front-page article was savage: “It may seem rather harsh to say so, but the Reagan Administration is beginning to acquire the reputation of one that sounds a bit like Churchill but frequently acts like Chamberlain.”³¹ More damning than the criticism from Reagan’s ideological allies was the praise he received from liberals who normally disdained his every breath. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote a column entitled “Reagan Gets It Right,” and Jimmy Carter signaled his approval: “He’s comin’ toward me all the time.”

More significant than the Polish sanctions were Reagan’s actions against the Soviet Union. The first step was an embargo on the use of U.S. technology for the three-thousand-mile Yamil gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe, a multibillion-dollar project that promised to generate as much as $10 billion a year in hard currency earnings for the Soviet Union. The pipeline was a classic product of détente—a valuable piece of infrastructure built with Western technology and Western credit. Not only was the West selling the rope with which to be hung by the Communists, as Lenin’s famous phrase had it, but the West was financing that rope on highly favorable terms, amounting to a subsidy. The United States had worried that the gas pipeline would make Western Europe partially dependent on the Soviets for energy—the pipeline would supply a quarter of West Germany’s gas and a third of France’s—but had no way to prevent it. Reagan’s embargo on the use of U.S. technology prevented hundreds of millions of dollars in sales to Caterpillar Tractor and General Electric. Caterpillar, whose business was already slumping because of the recession, had a $90 million order from Moscow for two hundred state-of-the-art pipe layers, while GE had a $175 million order for turbine equipment, some of which had already been shipped to European warehouses. Both contracts were suspended.

More problematic was Reagan’s proposal to extend the embargo to European firms manufacturing pipeline components with American-made parts or under American license. This prospect caused an uproar among NATO allies, including Margaret Thatcher. (British firms stood to lose more than $300 million at a time when unemployment in Britain was 14 percent, and French, Italian, and West German firms stood to lose even more.) Thatcher warned the United States in January that “there was a clear danger of the American Government’s present policy damaging Western interests more than those of the East and provoking a major transatlantic quarrel of precisely the sort that it had long been the main objective of Soviet policy to bring about.” She additionally complained to Secretary of State Haig that the United States, in disdaining to impose a grain embargo on the Soviets because it would harm hard-pressed American farmers, was in a weak position to ask Europeans to sacrifice. “To say the least,” Thatcher wrote, “there was a certain lack of symmetry.”³²

Thatcher found a sympathetic ear in Haig, who argued vigorously against pipeline sanctions in Washington.³³ Reagan was adamant: “They can build their damn pipeline, but not with our technology.”³⁴ Thatcher’s opposition, however, gave Reagan pause, and he agreed to allow the State Department to explore whether agreement could be reached on restricting credit to the Soviet Union.

At the root of Reagan’s policy was the view that it was time to strike at the Soviet Union’s greatest weakness, its faltering economy, and especially its hard currency earnings from trade with the West. Indeed, there were signs that the Soviet Union’s foreign currency reserves were dangerously low. In January the Soviets began selling off large quantities of their gold reserves on the world market to raise cash, even though the price of gold was off more than 50 percent from a year and a half before.

The matter was in limbo for five months until late June, when Reagan abruptly decided to extend the embargo to foreign subsidiaries of American firms and their European licensees. Europe reacted angrily. Thatcher said she was “appalled” and denounced the embargo publicly. It was, she said, “a lesson in how not to conduct alliance business.” Reagan took the decision in part to prod the allies to quit subsidizing Soviet trade. At the G-7 summit in France a few weeks before, Reagan thought he had won some ground in getting the European allies to pledge to cut back easy credit for the Soviet Union, but the French were dragging their feet and trying to back out.³⁵

There is good evidence that Reagan chose to impose the extended pipeline embargo chiefly because he knew it would send Al Haig packing. (Lou Cannon makes this case in President Reagan: Role of a Lifetime.)³⁶ Haig had threatened resignation before, but this time the president would accept it with relish. Reagan had heard rumors that Haig was undermining administration policy in Europe, and in a rare face-to-face confrontation in the Oval Office in early June, Reagan told Haig that he would not stand for this insubordination. It was the culmination of months of rising friction between Haig and others in the administration over matters of policy beyond just the Polish sanctions. “It’s amazing,” Reagan wrote of Haig in his diary in March 1982, “how sound he can be on complex international matters but how utterly paranoid with regard to the people he must work with.” In addition to Haig’s abrasiveness, he had offended Nancy Reagan with a bout of ham-handed grandstanding at the G-7 summit a few weeks before, and gotten into a heated shouting match with William Clark, who was not a man given to raising his voice.

Haig agreed that Reagan should have a different secretary of state, but deferred a formal resignation. After the extended embargo was announced, Haig came to see Reagan again, complaining of being undermined by the White House staff and hoping he could talk the president into augmenting his power. Strange to the end, Haig showed Reagan the envelope with his resignation letter but did not hand it over. He didn’t need to. Reagan promptly announced Haig’s resignation and in the same statement named George Shultz as his replacement (though Reagan briefly considered Kissinger). “This has been a heavy load,” Reagan wrote of Haig in his diary that night.

On the specific issue of the pipeline sanctions, Shultz’s views were close to Haig’s. In November the Reagan administration ended the pipeline embargo, Shultz having gained a few minor concessions from Europe in return for the lifting of sanctions. The conventional wisdom is that Reagan’s pipeline policy was a failure, and while this is largely correct, it was not a complete rout. Reagan never could have stopped the Soviet pipeline project entirely, but he did slow its completion by at least a year and increased the cost to the Soviets. By the time the pipeline finally came online in the mid-1980s, gas prices, following oil prices, had fallen by half in real terms. The pipeline was less of a boon than the Soviets had hoped.

Yet the Polish crisis was significant far beyond the internal debate over sanctions policy and the pipeline embargo. The Polish crisis roused the administration from the foreign policy drift and improvisation of Reagan’s first year in office. In the months following the beginning of the Polish crisis, Reagan’s national security team began a process that generated several policy guidelines and decision directives that brought clarity and purpose to Reagan’s anti-Soviet principles. A year later, a grand strategy was in place to turn the tide of the Cold War.

*  *  *

THE OLD WASHINGTON adage “personnel is policy” played the key role in jump-starting Reagan’s foreign policy in the aftermath of Poland. Replacing Haig with Shultz completed a necessary turnover in foreign policy staff that enabled Reagan’s foreign policy apparatus to function more deliberately. The infighting and disagreement did not cease—it never does—but a focused effort began to bear fruit.³⁷

Shultz was a close friend and academic colleague of Milton Friedman, and was pictured on the cover of Time magazine after his appointment wearing an Adam Smith necktie, considered a certain marker of an intellectual—if not movement—conservative. (Ed Meese hardly ever wore any other tie.) But movement conservatives were wary of Shultz nonetheless. He had little background in foreign policy and was thought to be sympathetic to Kissinger-style détente. Some conservatives warned that Shultz would turn out to be “Reagan’s Cy Vance,” referring to Carter’s secretary of state. “Shultz,” Richard Viguerie complained, “is part of the elite, big-business establishment.”

Reagan, however, liked Shultz and was comfortable with him. The new secretary of state was “normally as excitable as a cigar store Indian,” in the words of National Review, but he was thought to be a team player. He therefore seemed a good corrective to the frenetic Haig; Shultz was the last person who would grab a microphone in a crisis to declare, “I’m in charge.” Beyond Shultz’s stolid virtue, what may have recommended him most to Reagan was a similarity that escaped notice: Shultz had been a labor mediator. In Shultz, the former union leader Reagan discerned someone who instinctively understood and could emulate Reagan’s bargaining approach to Soviet relations. Shultz would prove adept at this over the next few years.

Shultz represented one side of Reagan’s extraordinary equipoise, which balanced hard-line anti-Communism with a genuine idealism for reducing nuclear weaponry and reaching agreements with the Soviet Union. Reagan had the NSC to bolster his hard anti-Communism; he needed a supple hand at State to finesse the diplomacy. Conservatives nervous about Shultz should have taken cheer from some of his congressional testimony, such as this terse exchange with far-left California senator Alan Cranston in a Senate hearing:

SENATOR CRANSTON: Can you tell us what the United States, for its part, has done to contribute to the tension that exists between the United States and the Soviet Union?

SECRETARY SHULTZ: Nothing.

More important than Shultz at the time, however, was Judge William Clark, who officially became national security adviser in January 1982 after Richard Allen was forced to resign. The job of national security adviser had acquired a public mystique starting with Henry Kissinger, who made the post a locus of grand strategy and a virtual co-equal with the secretary of state. The real job of the national security adviser is to coordinate the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies that have foreign policy responsibility, but in practice this means mediating their inevitable clashes. Above all, the job requires pushing issues and decisions to the president. This can’t be done very well unless the national security adviser has direct and regular access to the president. Having Richard Allen report to Reagan indirectly through Ed Meese clogged up the whole apparatus, and foreign policy decisions were not being made. Clark demanded direct daily access to Reagan when he became national security adviser. In effect, the Baker-Deaver-Meese troika became a foursome. Clark rescued the national security interagency process from the doldrums it had suffered for the previous year. “Clark was the James Stewart of the Reagan Administration,” Michael Ledeen wrote. “Tall, lanky, a man of few words and little visible emotion, but whose demeanor bespoke an inner calm and an underlying loyalty to his leader … [H]e had qualities that, in retrospect, made him the best of Reagan’s national security advisers.”³⁸

In the fullness of time there would be considerable friction between Shultz and Clark, rooted in institutional as well as personal differences of opinion. This did not prevent the national security working group from producing a series of NSDDs (National Security Decision Directives) for Reagan’s signature that finally provided guidance for executing foreign policy toward the Soviet Union; in fact, the dynamic tension probably helped for a time. Clark had been widely criticized in 1981 when, during his confirmation hearings to be deputy secretary of state, he displayed scant knowledge of foreign affairs. This, ironically, was to Reagan’s benefit: a more conventional foreign policy figure never would have helped to promulgate the audacious Cold War strategy that now took shape.

In August 1982 Reagan issued a formal request for a top-to-bottom review of American policy toward the Soviet Union. Richard Pipes had long wanted to produce a background policy paper explaining a new strategy for Soviet relations, but the NSC’s dysfunctions and opposition from the State Department prevented much progress in 1981. Pipes, among others, had argued that the time had come to reorient America’s Soviet policy from containment to transformation. The Soviet Union’s expansionism, he wrote in an early NSC paper, would not cease until the Soviet system either collapsed or was thoroughly reformed. Pipes discerned that Soviet economic weakness could be exploited, and that a reformist faction might come to the fore in Soviet leadership in the near future. The Soviet Union was ripe for change, provided the West raised the cost of Soviet imperialism and actively encouraged internal reform.³⁹

Reagan read an early draft of Pipes’s analysis and indicated his agreement with it. Even as the policy review process was under way, Reagan began incorporating the evolving strategy into his public rhetoric, first in short phrases that were easily overlooked, but starting in 1982 in a more prominent way. Over the course of his presidency Reagan made five historic speeches about Cold War relations.⁴⁰ The first was his speech in June 1982 in Westminster Hall in London. There is an obvious symmetry to this speech: its debt to Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Missouri, made in the presence of Harry Truman, is evident. Churchill’s speech might be said to have been the official announcement of the beginning of the Cold War. Here, at another location named Westminster, Reagan began to lay out an understanding of how it might end. Reagan quoted or referred to Churchill directly throughout the speech. He associated himself with Churchill’s understanding of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, but then went on to suggest that a turning point was at hand. An extended excerpt is necessary to capture the sweep and boldness of the speech:

We’re approaching the end of a bloody century plagued by a terrible political invention—totalitarianism. Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression. Yet optimism is in order, because day-by-day democracy is proving itself to be a not-at-all-fragile flower. From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30 years to establish their legitimacy. But none—not one regime—has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root….

[Churchill] also had that special attribute of great statesmen—the gift of vision, the willingness to see the future based on the experience of the past. It is this sense of history, this understanding of the past that I want to talk with you about today, for it is in remembering what we share of the past that our two nations can make common cause for the future….

What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil? Sir Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitability of war or even that it was imminent. He said, “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have to consider here today while time remains is the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries.”

Well, this is precisely our mission today: to preserve freedom as well as peace. It may not be easy to see, but I believe we live now at a turning point.

In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the Fifties and is less than half of what it was then. The dimensions of this failure are astounding….

While we must be cautious about forcing the pace of change, we must not hesitate to declare our ultimate objectives and to take concrete actions to move toward them…. The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.

This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity.

Now, I don’t wish to sound overly optimistic, yet the Soviet Union is not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world.

A central feature of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech and his Cold War strategy was the importance of Anglo-American unity. It was not an accident, as the Marxist cliché goes, that Reagan made this speech in London, in the presence of Margaret Thatcher (who, being unfamiliar with teleprompters, was impressed that Reagan spoke without a single note).⁴¹ Notably, the day after his London speech Reagan delivered a far more conventional address to the West German Bundestag, a speech that featured none of the bold language about Communism’s weakness.⁴² Reagan had already demonstrated the importance of Anglo-American unity by backing—against considerable opposition from senior members of his cabinet—Thatcher’s military campaign against Argentina to retake the Falkland Islands in the south Atlantic, a campaign that was climaxing as Reagan arrived in England.

Reagan’s rhetorical larceny in the Westminster speech—the idea that it was Soviet Communism, not the capitalist West, that faced a revolutionary crisis—“infuriated the Russians more than anything Reagan had said or done since taking office,” according to Pipes. Reagan was delighted; “So, we touched a nerve.”⁴³ The reaction in the Western media was not so far removed from the Soviets’ shock. The New York Times headline read: “President Urges Global Crusade for Democracy: Revives Flavor of the 1950s in a Speech to Britons.” “Reviving the flavor of the 1950s” was not meant as praise. George Ball, one of the elder statesmen of Democratic Party foreign policy figures, was dismissive: “Crusade for democracy? I thought we had gotten over that a long time ago.”

While Reagan’s Westminster speech is the most vividly recalled aspect of his June 1982 European trip, perhaps the most important event did not involve a speech: his private visit with Pope John Paul II in Rome on June 7. The media focused on the embarrassment of a jet-lagged Reagan falling asleep briefly during the Pope’s public welcoming remarks, but naturally they were unaware of what was taking place behind closed doors between Reagan and the Pope, who met alone without advisers or even translators for nearly an hour. The Pope later told his closest aides that Reagan had assured him that he was committed not merely to ending the arms race but also to abolishing nuclear weapons outright. The Reagan administration had already begun sharing intelligence information about Poland with the Vatican (though the Pope surely had better Polish intelligence than the CIA) and discussed actions the United States was taking to provide clandestine aid to Solidarity, but biographer George Weigel’s considered judgment is that “the claim that the two men entered into a conspiracy to effect the downfall of European communism is journalistic fantasy.”⁴⁴

They didn’t need to concoct a conspiracy: both men had a long record of deploring the state of the Captive Nations.

*  *  *

THE NEW UNDERSTANDING of the Cold War that Reagan began articulating in his Westminster speech found formal policy expression in NSDD 75, which Reagan finally signed six months later in January 1983. With NSDD 75 the Reagan Doctrine was born (though this was not yet the public title). The directive declared that henceforth U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union would consist of three elements. The first element was to contain and over time reverse Soviet expansionism, and the third element was negotiations to reach agreements that would enhance American interests. The second element was the most significant:

To promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced. The U.S. recognizes that Soviet aggressiveness has deep roots in the internal system, and that relations with the USSR should therefore take into account whether or not they help to strengthen this system and its capacity to engage in aggression.

Beyond these three central elements, there was lots of Reaganite language, such as “U.S. policy must have an ideological thrust which clearly affirms the superiority of U.S. and Western values of individual dignity and freedom, a free press, free trade unions, free enterprise and political democracy over the repressive features of Soviet Communism.” The directive called specifically for “exploiting Soviet weaknesses and vulnerabilities,” trying to pry Eastern European nations out of the Soviet grip, and putting pressure on the Soviets to withdraw from Afghanistan. Several measures were outlined to end or reduce Western economic support for the Soviet Union. The directive ended on a sober and prophetic note:

The policy outlined above is for the long haul. It is unlikely to yield a rapid breakthrough in bilateral relations with the Soviet Union. In the absence of dramatic near-term victories in the U.S. effort to moderate Soviet behavior, pressure is likely to mount for a change in U.S. policy. There will be appeals from important segments of domestic opinion for a more “normal” U.S.-Soviet relationship.

While NSDD 75 suggested it was a long-term strategy, the Reagan team displayed some awareness that circumstances in the Soviet Union might be conducive to rapid change. The lengthy supporting analysis that went into generating the final language of NSDD 75 noted, “Economic problems, the loss of ideological commitment, a growing malaise in society and the succession process now underway should impinge more on the consciousness of the leaders in the Kremlin in the coming decade than they did in the past.”⁴⁵ But the analysis drew back from concluding that the Soviet Union could potentially collapse in the next decade: “the prospect for major systemic change in the next few years is relatively low.”

*  *  *

WHILE REAGAN WAS outlining a forceful new approach to taking on Soviet Communism, the American Left demonstrated that anti-anti-Communism was still its decisive sentiment.

In the fallout from the Polish crisis, the Nation magazine organized a forum of left-leaning intellectuals and activists in New York. The forum did decry Solidarity’s suppression—after all, Solidarity’s frequent appeals to “worker self-management” threw off overtones of syndicalism that appealed to the leftist romanticism for “authentic” socialism—but it found a way to balance the scales through the gambit of moral equivalence between East and West. The predominant theme was: “Let Poland be Poland, but let El Salvador be El Salvador.” American interference in El Salvador, it was argued, was no different from Soviet interference in Poland; American support for the Contras in Nicaragua was much the same as Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Revisionist Cold War historian Ronald Steel had articulated this viewpoint in the New York Times, writing: “The Administration is trying to punish the Russians for what the Polish military regime is doing. This is as logical as Soviet punishment of the United States for the actions of the junta we support in El Salvador.”⁴⁶

There was one problem: famed literary critic Susan Sontag didn’t stick to the script. In her comments at the forum Sontag said: “Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?” Communism, Sontag concluded, was just “facism with a human face.” (This represented a surprising reversal on Sontag’s part; in 1969 she had written: “It is self-evident that the Reader’s Digest and Lawrence Welk and Hilton Hotels are organically connected with the Special Forces napalming villages in Guatemala.”⁴⁷)

Sontag’s fellow leftists were outraged. She was attacked for being “divisive” and for “hijacking” the forum. The Nation quickly ran a string of rebuttals, with the magazine’s editors noting that “there are few takers for the equation she makes between Communism and fascism.” She was called a “turncoat” and a “converted sinner.” Daniel Singer verged on self-parody by dismissing Sontag’s observations with the comment “Susan Sontag, as far as I know, does not come from a working-class family.” Her speech, Singer said, “could easily be printed in, say, Commentary.” (In another sign of self-parody, in the middle of the indignant responses to Sontag was an advertisement for a Nation magazine cruise on the Volga River. We’re not Soviet sympathizers! We just like to vacation there.)

The moral equivalence between East and West revealed in the Sontag affair found broad assent within mainstream liberalism and the media—an example of how far-Left opinion has a magnetic effect on supposedly mainstream liberal opinion. The moral ambivalence of the Left was the fundamental source of the fierce undertow against Reagan’s foreign policy designs throughout his presidency.

The malignancy of liberalism’s moral ambivalence is best seen in the stark divergence of opinion over two closely related strands of Reagan’s anti-Communist policy. There was broad bipartisan support for modest aid to the rebels fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan (in fact Congress sometimes appropriated more Afghanistan aid than Reagan asked for), but Democrats and some Republicans fiercely opposed aid to the Contra rebels fighting against the pro-Soviet Sandinista regime of Nicaragua.

In the case of Afghanistan the fact of Soviet aggression could not be obfuscated. Aid to the Afghan rebels began modestly under Jimmy Carter but was augmented significantly under Reagan, culminating in his second term with Stinger missiles that enabled the Afghan resistance to target high-altitude Soviet helicopters and airplanes. This direct challenge to the Soviets’ power in their own backyard proceeded with little criticism or opposition in Washington, even though the nitty-gritty work of distributing weapons and training the mujahadeen (as the Afghan holy warriors came to be called) was farmed out to the Pakistani military and intelligence services and hence was out of direct U.S. control.

But the challenge to Soviet proxies in Nicaragua and to the guerilla movement that Nicaragua and Cuba were supplying in El Salvador drew strenuous opposition from the earliest days of the Reagan administration, and indeed nearly became the undoing of the Reagan presidency in the Iran-Contra scandal, as we shall see. Aid to the Nicaraguan Contras was the single most controversial issue of the Reagan presidency.

El Salvador and Nicaragua need to be understood as a single problem, even though the Reagan administration sometimes proceeded as though each nation required a separate policy response. Policy toward El Salvador was beset with multiple difficulties. The chief American concern was the leftist rebel insurgency that, if successful, might herald a domino effect in Central America (most of the nations in Central America had a leftist guerilla insurgency of some dimension) culminating in the destabilization of already shaky Mexico. The well-armed Salvadoran rebels were exacting a frightful death toll on the Salvadoran army (casualty rates were as high as 12 percent according to some estimates), and the CIA thought both El Salvador and Guatemala were in imminent danger of collapse.

A military junta currently governed El Salvador, and it had an abysmal human rights record. Roving gangs of far-right death squads meted out vigilante justice not only to leftist rebels but even to innocent moderates who stood in their way, including a Catholic bishop, several American nuns, and relief workers. Even if the leftist guerillas didn’t succeed, it was feared the far right might. Reagan administration policy tried to thread the needle of getting the military junta to manage a transition to a popular democracy. Making the democratization of El Salvador a policy goal became necessary to maintain congressional support for aid.

Without fanfare Reagan dispatched fifty-five American military advisers and $25 million in military aid to El Salvador shortly after taking office. So skittish was the Pentagon that the American officers were permitted to carry only sidearms; one officer was sent back to the United States for carrying a rifle. Reagan made the move quietly because the American public was nervous and typically confused about the region. Polls consistently found a large majority (69 percent in a 1983 poll, for example) agreeing with the statement that a pro-Communist government in El Salvador “would be a security threat to the United States.”⁴⁸ Yet majorities also expressed opposition to military aid to El Salvador. Reagan assiduously avoided talking publicly about Central America in his first year of his presidency, and equivocated when the media raised the subject. When asked about El Salvador at an early press conference, Reagan was defensive: “We’re there at the request of the government. We’re supporting a government which we believe has an intention of improving the society there for the benefit of the people, and we’re opposed to terrorism of the right or left.”

Reagan’s modest military aid to El Salvador summoned all the reflexes of the Left, which saw this first increment of American military involvement as a sign of another Vietnam. Indeed, for the Left, Central America in the 1980s would become, in the words of Robert Leiken, a liberal who got caught up in the maelstrom, “the most passionate issue since Vietnam.” Walter Cronkite’s first question in a March 1981 TV interview with Reagan was: “How do you intend to avoid having El Salvador turn into a Vietnam for this country?” The “most trusted man in America,” whose turn against the Vietnam War in 1968 was a heavy blow to Lyndon Johnson, was sending a clear signal that he had prejudged prospective American action in Central America. The successful elections in El Salvador in March 1982 (turnout was estimated at about 80 percent, in the face of persistent threats against voters from the guerillas) did little to dampen the controversy or vindicate Reagan’s Central America policy.

For the Left, Reagan’s aid to El Salvador wasn’t merely imprudent or risky—it was an unjust cause. Just as the Left openly sided with the Vietcong in the 1960s, some American leftists, especially the organization CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), supported a guerilla victory and extolled the virtues of the guerillas. Hollywood lefty Ed Asner, for example, said that “the rebel forces are now the most effective institution in El Salvador committed to health delivery.”⁴⁹ (CISPES also received funding from the New World Foundation, whose chairman at the time was Hillary Rodham Clinton.)⁵⁰

The Left’s affection for the Salvadoran guerillas became a full-blown love affair when it came to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. During the 1980s thousands of Americans made pilgrimages to Nicaragua (as many as forty thousand Americans a year, the Sandinistas claimed) and came back, like the Potemkin tourists of a previous generation, extolling the virtues of the regime. Paul Berman wrote that “[b]ackwater Nicaragua was the world center of the New Left,” and Washington Post reporter Edward Cody quoted an unnamed American tourist saying, “Nicaragua seems to be a way station on a trip back through the 1960s.” University of Massachusetts professor John Brentlinger, author of a large book on Nicaragua, wrote that Nicaragua is “a deeply spiritual country trying to become independent and build a new version of socialism.”⁵¹ The Boston Globe editorialized that Nicaragua was “a serious, popular, mostly well-intentioned and frequently competent national experiment not altogether unlike our own revolution.”⁵² The Reverend Jesse Jackson proclaimed that “the Sandinistas are on the right side of history.” Such sentiments could fill a small encyclopedia.⁵³ The usual trendy enclaves of Burlington, Vermont, and Berkeley, California, adopted Managua as a sister city, and the Boston city council declared Ernesto Cardenal Day in honor of the Sandinistas’ minister of culture. So fashionable became the Nicaraguan cause that it became de rigueur to pronounce the nation’s name with an affected Spanish accent: “knee-car-AH-gew-ah.”

A few steps removed from the rabid anti-Americanism of the far Left was the guilt reflex of moderate liberals, who argued that the Sandinistas weren’t really Marxist-Leninists inclined to ally with the Soviet bloc, or if they were, it was the United States’ fault for having pushed Nicaragua toward the East. This argument was especially popular among “Watergate babies”—Democratic politicians first elected in 1974, in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam—such as Representative Michael Barnes of Maryland, who would later say that Reagan’s belligerence “has pushed the Sandinistas further away from the negotiating table and into the willing embrace of the Soviets.” But otherwise sensible Democrats such as Lee Hamilton, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also embraced this view. The National Security Agency monitored telephone calls between Sandinistas and Democratic congressmen discussing how to undermine Reagan’s policy.⁵⁴ This was near the heart of the phenomenon that Jeane Kirkpatrick called “the blame America first crowd.”

But the liberal argument, as Peter Rodman wrote, “got the sequence of events startlingly wrong.”⁵⁵ In 1981, long before Reagan began to take steps against the Sandinistas, Humberto Ortega, brother of the regime’s president Daniel Ortega, declared openly: “Our revolution has a profoundly anti-imperialist character, profoundly revolutionary, profoundly classist; we are anti-Yankee, we are against the bourgeoisie, we are guided by the scientific doctrine of the revolution, by Marxism-Leninism.” Indeed, the Sandinistas were probably more enthusiastic about Marxism-Leninism than the Soviet Politburo was at that time, and were certainly more enthusiastic about the Soviet Union than the American Left was. Sandinista foreign minister Miguel d’Escoto, upon being awarded the Lenin Prize in Moscow, said, “I believe the Soviet Union is a great torch which emits hope for the preservation of peace on our planet.”⁵⁶

Even liberals who were not bewitched by the Sandinistas found fault with the Reagan administration’s hostility toward the regime, blaming the revolutionary ferment in the region on poverty and oppression rather than ideology. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), the most fervent opponent of Reagan’s Central America policy, put it this way in a speech attacking Reagan: “If Central America were not racked with poverty, there would be no revolution. If Central America were not racked with hunger, there would be no revolution. If Central America were not racked with injustice, there would be no revolution. In short, there would be nothing for the Soviets to exploit. But unless those oppressive conditions change, the region will continue to seethe with revolution—with or without the Soviets.” This understanding of the matter raises the question of why most poor nations did not experience revolutionary conditions, never mind the inconvenient fact that nearly all revolutionary movements of the era drew their inspiration from Marxism-Leninism and their weapons from Moscow and Havana.

Nonetheless, to the extent that poverty and despotism create fertile soil for revolutionary movements, Reagan was eager to assert his core principles as a remedy. Rather than appease his foreign and domestic critics with more foreign aid, Reagan decided to pick an ideological fight with liberalism and especially the premise of the international community that Western colonialism and exploitation were the principal causes of what it liked to call the “North-South” divide between rich and poor nations. If conservative economic policy was fit for the United States, it was fit for export too. Here we see an example of how Reagan carried his central principles into all reaches of policy.

Reagan first showed that he intended to take Reaganomics global in the fall of 1981, when he upended the carefully prepared agenda of the North-South Summit in Cancún, Mexico. The summit was the culmination of a process several years in the making by the so-called G-77 nations of the developing world, in a plain counterpoint to the G-7 industrialized nations, which held their own annual summit. In 1980 an international commission chaired by former West German chancellor Willy Brandt had issued a report calling for a “New International Economic Order” that would would require “a large scale transfer of resources to developing countries” and “a start of some major reforms in the international economic system,” including international regulatory and perhaps even taxing authority.⁵⁷ (High on the Third World wish list was transferring control of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to the United Nations, from which it would become even easier to extract cash on favorable terms.) This was simply fancy dress for class conflict theory at the international level. Although Peter Bauer’s path-breaking work on Third World economic development was just beginning to burst onto the intellectual scene, it was still axiomatic in 1981 that the wealthy nations, with their multinational corporations, were responsible for Third World poverty, and therefore owed large amounts of foreign aid almost as reparation.⁵⁸

The Cancún summit in October 1981 was supposed to be the opening round of “global negotiations”—essentially a settlement conference—to determine how much the North would cough up to the South. The Wall Street Journal accurately described the Cancún meeting as the Third World’s “most spectacular reach for the American wallet.” The Reagan administration signaled in advance that it might not agree to such an agenda at Cancún; moreover, Reagan’s budget proposed cutting foreign aid. A few days before the summit convened, Reagan fired a preemptive shot in a speech to the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia:

To listen to some shrill voices, you’d think our policies were as stingy as your Philadelphia Eagles’ defense. There is a propaganda campaign in wide circulation that would have the world believe that capitalist United States is the cause of world hunger and poverty…. Others mistake compassion for development and claim massive transfers of wealth somehow miraculously will produce new well-being. And still others confuse development with collectivism.⁵⁹

Reagan went on extol open markets, private enterprise, individual initiative, low taxes, and limited government as the true path to prosperity for the developing world. (He also took a shot at the Soviet Union for having “nothing to offer.”) The fastest-growing nations, Reagan observed, were the ones providing more economic freedom to their people. Although Reagan’s view would be amply vindicated in Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s subsequent research (not to mention the growth in the developing world in the latter half of the 1980s and 1990s), his speech got a rude reception. The Third World, Fortune magazine observed, is “accustomed to lecture others, not to being lectured at themselves.” Media and diplomats in the developing world immediately pronounced that Reagan risked being “isolated” at Cancún and blasted American intransigence. In a White House planning meeting before departing for Cancún, Reagan made clear that he was inclined to up the ante, telling Secretary of State Haig, “Shouldn’t we ask the countries at the beginning of the session what happened to all the aid we’ve given in the past?”

However, the State Department feared being blamed for scuttling global development talks, and thus Reagan relented slightly at Cancún, agreeing to enter global negotiations on development but with the caveat that aid programs should emphasize private sector initiatives. In early 1982 Reagan attempted to jump-start his ideas with a full-fledged Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). The CBI was more than just John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress with a new name. Reagan called for expanded free trade between the United States and Latin America, along with investment tax incentives and a dollop of foreign aid directed mostly to the private sector. It represented a logical extension of his 1980 campaign call for a “North American accord” that eventually found fulfillment in the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central America Free Trade Agreement.

But the CBI was a sideshow at best. Any aid or development program takes a long time to work even under the best circumstances, and the administration’s political-economic initiatives would prove inadequate against the revolutionary determination of the Sandinistas and the political whirlwind in Washington. Even before Reagan took office the Sandinistas had assembled an army twice the size of Somoza’s hated national guard and begun shipping large quantities of Soviet-bloc weapons to the guerillas in El Salvador.⁶⁰

*  *  *

THE STORY OF Ronald Reagan’s handling of Central America features several ironies. As usual, his senior staff was divided over how to proceed. Defense Secretary Cap Weinberger was openly wary that any American involvement in the region could lead to a Vietnam-style “involuntary escalation,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were concerned that a Central American campaign would undermine Reagan’s broader rearmament effort. But the most significant figure in the administration who shared this wariness was Reagan himself. This is the first irony of the Central American story. Although liberals liked to say that Reagan was “obsessed” with Nicaragua (the New York Times’s Anthony Lewis used this term), he was more than reluctant to get the United States involved in the region. Hence in the early months of his administration Reagan attempted to placate the Sandinistas much as Jimmy Carter had.

In the summer of 1981 Reagan and Haig dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders to Managua to attempt a deal with the Sandinistas. Enders offered to emulate the deal President Kennedy made over Cuba in 1962: the United States would not interfere with Nicaragua—and would even resume economic aid—if Nicaragua would cease its role in El Salvador and Guatemala. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, complaining that Enders was “arrogant,” rejected any deal with the United States outright, telling Enders that the Sandinistas were “interested in seeing the guerillas in El Salvador and Guatemala triumph.” Ortega later told Fidel Castro that he saw Enders’s message as a sign of U.S. weakness and as a green light for the Sandinistas to consolidate their rule in typical Marxist-Leninist fashion, which they proceeded to do, jailing political opponents, shutting down the independent newspaper La Prensa, and postponing elections until 1985. “Enders’ trip to Managua,” Robert Kagan wrote in his magisterial treatment of American policy in Nicaragua, “had itself been a sign of the administration’s weakness…. It was not fear of the United States that prompted the Sandinistas to take a hard line in their foreign and domestic policies, but rather their lack of fear.”⁶¹

The Sandinistas had read American public opinion correctly and knew that Reagan faced more political constraints in his policy toward Central America than toward the Soviet Union.⁶² Herein lies the second irony of the Central American story: the powerful Soviets feared Reagan more than did the rulers of Nicaragua, a weak nation with fewer than four million people. But there was foxy wisdom at work, for if the Soviet Union fell, Nicaragua would instantly become irrelevant to world politics and of little concern to the United States—as in fact happened in the fullness of time.

Although Reagan had signed a finding in March 1981 authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations to interdict arms shipments to El Salvador, the president was skeptical when the National Security Planning Group (NSPG) came to him on October 16 with a plan to arm a resistance movement in Nicaragua. In his diary he called this “the most profound decision I’ve ever had to make.”⁶³ He expressed doubt that the plan would work and worried about civilian casualties. Even after the NSPG improvised modifications aimed at reducing direct U.S. involvement and lowering civilian casualties, he still wouldn’t approve the plan because, in Thomas Enders’s estimation, Reagan was “profoundly averse to violence.”⁶⁴ The Washington Post later quoted an unnamed White House source as observing, “Ronald Reagan has the reputation of being a gunslinger, but he [was] the most cautious, conservative guy in those meetings.” Instead, in a bizarre gesture Reagan sent Haig to Mexico to hold a secret meeting with Cuba’s vice president, but Haig’s mission went nowhere, since the Cubans, like the Sandinistas, could see that the United States was playing a weak hand.

With all avenues for a negotiated settlement at a dead end, on December 1 Reagan finally authorized the covert action program. Over the next year the United States sent $20 million in military aid to a small force of five hundred Nicaraguan exiles trained by—follow the bouncing ball—Argentina. Reagan’s advisers and the CIA considered it a low-intensity option, “the least controversial means of applying pressure on the Sandinistas to change its policy toward El Salvador,” in Robert Kagan’s words.⁶⁵ There was little chance that the small Contra force could succeed in toppling the Sandinista regime; CIA director William Casey explicitly affirmed this in public testimony.

In ordinary usage, covert implies top secret, but the obvious contradiction is that in modern American politics, “covert” operations are highly public, making them a bit of a farce.⁶⁶ It was never likely that U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan Contras would remain secret; in fact the general idea was reported the day after the first meeting with Reagan in November 1981, and detailed information about the Argentinean connection was splashed on the front page of the Washington Post in March 1982, touching off the usual flurry of mock surprise, even though congressional leaders had been fully briefed from the beginning.

Properly understood, covert action suggests a strategy that limits the responsibility of the United States—just as the Contra situation demanded. Legally the United States could not openly back the overthrow of the recognized, sovereign government in Managua. The Contras naturally had other ideas, and their pressure wouldn’t have been effective unless there was a prospect that they might topple the Sandinistas. Critics of Reagan’s policy suspected that removing the Sandinistas was Reagan’s real aim, despite the administration’s denials. Congressional resistance to Reagan’s policy reached a critical mass in December 1982, when House Intelligence Committee chairman Edward Boland (D-Mass.) succeeded in attaching an amendment to the Pentagon’s 1983 budget appropriation banning any U.S. support “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.”

Boland’s amendment, the first of several bearing his name in the 1980s, was the beginning of much mischief, and was the third irony of the unfolding story of Reagan’s Central American odyssey. Congressional liberals were un-enthusiastic about Boland’s amendment and initially opposed it; they wanted to kill off Contra aid entirely. Representative Tom Harkin of Iowa and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut offered budget amendments in their respective chambers that would have barred all U.S. aid to the Contras from any source. Boland rejected the Harkin-Dodd terms, saying, “I believe that it sets a bad precedent.” In the Senate, the liberal Republican senator John Chafee, not a great enthusiast of Reagan’s foreign policy, asked on the Senate floor: “Are we going to tie the hands of the President? After all, it is the President who sits at the top of the heap in this…. I do not believe we have ever imposed a draconian restriction such as proposed by the Senator from Connecticut.” These early hesitations about the propriety and prudence of trying to tie the president’s hands in the conduct of foreign policy would loom large in Reagan’s second term.

The Reagan administration embraced Boland’s compromise amendment (it ultimately passed the House 411–0; the unanimity of this vote should be taken as the first sign of a policy muddle to come) because they felt confident that Contra aid was well within its limits. They would come to rue this decision.

A THIRD SKIRMISH line in the Cold War erupted in 1982 in the Middle East. In early June, Israel invaded Lebanon, ostensibly to protect itself from PLO attacks originating from Lebanese territory near Israel’s northern border. In recent years the PLO had exploited the chronic instability and occasional civil war in Lebanon to establish a home base from which to continue its low-intensity war against Israel. The rising tempo of the PLO’s cross-border provocations could no longer be answered with tit-for-tat retaliations. Prime Minister Menachem Begin had led the Reagan administration to believe that Israel would confine its military operation to clearing out the area adjacent to Israel’s border, but when Israeli forces advanced quickly to the outskirts of Beirut and settled in for a protracted siege, Washington felt deceived, and suspected that Israel intended to wipe out the PLO or at least expel it from Lebanon. Reagan signaled his displeasure to Begin in a face-to-face meeting in the Oval Office—Reagan had come to share Washington’s near-universal dislike of the diminutive Israeli leader—but Begin was intransigent. As U.S. diplomats attempted to arrange a cease-fire, Israel continued to pound PLO strongholds in Beirut with artillery and from the air.

Israel ultimately drove the PLO from Beirut to Algeria, and the war had several lasting consequences that were felt far beyond the region. The ferocity of the Israeli offensive exacted a high toll on Israel’s moral authority. In previous wars Israel could legitimately claim to be responding to Arab aggression, but the siege of Beirut turned Israel into the brutal aggressor in the eyes of the world. Reports of massive civilian casualties—exaggerated it turned out—led to media comparisons of Israel to the Nazis. (This comparison even appeared in the American press.)⁶⁷ The invasion also shattered Israel’s internal unity over defense and foreign policy. For the first time, large-scale antiwar protests occurred in Tel Aviv, with Lebanon portrayed as Israel’s Vietnam.

The war strained U.S.-Israeli relations to the breaking point. Reagan, who had strong pro-Israel sentiments, had to intervene personally to get Israel to stop the intense shelling of West Beirut in August, telling Begin over the telephone that Israel’s actions amounted to a “holocaust.” Begin, a survivor of Stalin’s gulag, did not react well to the comparison.⁶⁸ After a series of cease-fires failed to hold, Reagan decided in August 1982 to send a contingent of eight hundred U.S. Marines into Lebanon as peacekeepers. The decision split the administration, with Secretary of State Shultz strongly backing the mission and Weinberger and the Pentagon opposing deployment. It was a decision Reagan would come to regret and was the source of some of the harshest judgments about his presidency. Lou Cannon argued that Lebanon was “the greatest disaster of the Reagan presidency” and that “Reagan’s actions in Lebanon demonstrate his deficiencies when confronted with cabinet conflicts he could not resolve by reliance on his basic script.”⁶⁹

While Reagan’s interventions failed to quell Lebanon’s instability or advance the Camp David peace process, they did have some significant consequences for the wider U.S.-Soviet confrontation. PLO leader Yasir Arafat had been predicting for more than a year that Israel would invade Lebanon, and it is likely that Arafat was hoping to draw Israel and Syria (which had signed a recent defense pact with the Soviet Union) into direct conflict.⁷⁰ He got his wish. Armed with the latest Soviet tanks, warplanes, and antiaircraft missile systems, Syrian forces engaged Israel on the ground and in the skies over Lebanon. The outcome was one-sided. Israel destroyed Syria’s entire air defense system and shot down ninety-two Syrian warplanes, including dozens of MIG-23s, the Soviets’ best, without the loss of a single Israeli plane. On the ground Israel enjoyed considerable success destroying Syrian T-72 tanks.⁷¹ This represented a startling turnabout from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, where Israel experienced considerable losses.⁷²

Syria grumbled openly about the poor performance of their Soviet-supplied weaponry, and the Soviet press blamed Syrian incompetence for the result. Behind the scenes, however, Soviet military leaders were stunned, and recognized that the result could not be attributed solely to poor training of Syrian pilots and soldiers. Reports filtered out that Soviet military commanders had warned the Politburo that they were falling dangerously behind American military technology. General Nikolai Ogarkov, the chief of the Soviets’ General Staff, remarked candidly to American reporter Leslie Gelb: “In the U.S. small children play with computers. Here, we don’t even have computers in every office of the Defense Ministry. And for reasons you well know, we cannot make computers widely available in our society.” The CIA judged that the Soviet Union had less than 10 percent as much computer capacity as the United States and the gap was widening. Ogarkov added presciently: “We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution.”⁷³ American military strategists reached the same conclusion, though expressing themselves more laconically. General David Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Washington Post that “we don’t have to be quite as pessimistic as we have been in the past about these [weapons] systems.”

The Soviet Union was curiously quiescent throughout the Lebanese crisis, in marked contrast to its saber-rattling during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. To the contrary, a diplomatic note from Brezhnev to Reagan refrained from implying any Soviet action should the United States fail to restrain Israel, and the Soviets appeared deliberately slow in resupplying Syria’s equipment losses.⁷⁴ Both Syria and the PLO publicly complained about the lack of meaningful Soviet support during the Israeli action. Suddenly the sense of Soviet ascendance in the region that had been so palpable in 1980 was on the wane.

A key reason for Soviet reticence may have been that sclerosis had taken hold of Soviet leadership. As recently as 1977 Brezhnev had declared, “Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends: the energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the mineral treasure house of central and southern Africa.”⁷⁵ But by mid-1982 Brezhnev was near death and the Politburo was struggling over his succession. Reagan had lost patience with Brezhnev, marking up a five-page letter from him in May 1982 with sarcastic notes in the margin, culminating with the summary comment at the end, “He’s a barrel of laughs.”

When Brezhnev finally expired in November 1982, Reagan rejected advice to go to the funeral in Moscow, sending Vice President Bush and Shultz instead. (Reagan went to the Soviet embassy to sign a condolence book and offer a prayer for Brezhnev’s soul. “There’s a strange feeling in that place,” Reagan wrote in his diary; “no one smiles.”)⁷⁶ Yuri Andropov, longtime head of the KGB, had become Brezhnev’s heir apparent in the spring when he leapt over several more senior Politburo members to be named Communist Party secretary, so it was no surprise when he immediately took the reins. But as Shultz recalled upon meeting the seventy-one-year-old Andropov after Brezhnev’s funeral, “He looked more like a cadaver than did the just-interred Brezhnev.”⁷⁷ Shultz’s impression was not deceiving; within a few months Andropov would need to be visibly propped up in public appearances.

Andropov’s past as head of the KGB raised concern in the West. He had presided over the crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956, was an instigator of the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the internal exile of Andrei Sakharov, and was suspected of having given the order for the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II the previous year. Western intelligence services also thought Andropov was one of the prime movers behind the recent reductions in Soviet cultural exchanges and travel to the West, as well as an architect of the crackdown in Poland. Surely he would be a hard-liner and embrace expansionist policies. In his first major speech he made certain to hit all the high notes of the Communist liturgy, such as “The principle of proletarian internationalism was and remains the core of the foreign policy of our Leninist party.”⁷⁸

Yet the Western press hurried to portray Andropov as a cosmopolitan liberal, and by implication the ideal partner with whom to make peace. Princeton Sovietologist Stephen Cohen wrote that Andropov was “the most reform-minded senior member of Brezhnev’s Politburo.” The Washington Post reported that the new Soviet leader “collects abstract art, likes jazz and Gypsy music,” and wears Western-tailored suits. The Wall Street Journal said that Andropov “likes Glenn Miller records, good scotch whisky, Oriental rugs, and American books” such as, improbably, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. Time reported that he listened to Chubby Checker albums, the Christian Science Monitor that he was a poet “of a comic variety.” The New York Times said that Andropov was fluent in English, though no American diplomat or reporter could recall having ever spoken with him in English.⁷⁹ These traits meant, according to the Times’s Harrison Salisbury, that Andropov was “different” from the other crude, shoe-banging Soviet leaders; he was “cosmopolitan.” It was “Uncle Joe” and “the Spirit of Glassboro” all over again.⁸⁰

There was scant evidence for any of this—so little was known about Andropov personally, in fact, that the CIA couldn’t even say whether his wife, Tania, was still living. Edward Jay Epstein called it “a portrait worthy of ‘Saturday Night Live’: the head of the KGB as one wild and crazy guy.” It may have been deliberate misinformation; the flattering news stories were thinly sourced to a handful of dubious émigrés and defectors.

Henry Kissinger was not fooled for a minute. “How,” the ubiquitous Dr. K. asked, “did the man who headed the Soviet secret police for 15 years suddenly emerge as a closet liberal?” Richard Nixon regarded Andropov as potentially “the most formidable and dangerous adversary” of any recent Soviet leader. In fact, despite some reformist instincts, Andropov was deeply hostile to the United States. He had once defined détente as being exemplified by the “friendly and cooperative relation” between the Soviet Union and Finland. But such was the will to believe that Cold War tensions could be lifted through acts of goodwill and mutual understanding that these tall tales of Andropov received prominent embrace in Western media.⁸¹

Shultz wrote, “I was uneasy about this new Soviet leader.” He was right to be. Just a year earlier Andropov had told the Politburo that Reagan was readying a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. He was now taking the reins as the most dangerous and fateful year in the entire Cold War struggle unfolded.