We are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.
—RONALD REAGAN, MARCH 23, 1983
Who is the scriptwriter? Reagan just could not invent
that SDI scheme! Washington’s actions are
putting the entire world in jeopardy.
—YURI ANDROPOV, LATE MARCH, 1983
IN HINDSIGHT 1983 emerges as the most significant and eventful year of the Reagan presidency. It was the year that both the Cold War and domestic affairs—chiefly the economy—reached decisive turning points.
A gloomy outlook greeted Reagan as the new year arrived. His public approval rating had slumped to 35 percent—the lowest ever for a postwar president at the beginning of his third year—and polls showed him trailing the two leading Democratic candidates for 1984, Walter Mondale and John Glenn. Reagan was discouraged, joking to his pollster, Richard Wirthlin, “Maybe I should get shot again.” A number of Reagan’s closest aides, including national security adviser Bill Clark, thought Reagan should not run for reelection.1 Nancy Reagan was inclined to agree. Time magazine’s White House correspondent, George Church, wrote that “Reagan does not feel the driving personal ambition that would make re-election a psychological necessity”—surely one of the greatest lingering misperceptions of Reagan among the media.2 In February, Reagan observed his seventy-second birthday; he was now older than Dwight Eisenhower when Ike left the White House at the end of two terms in 1961.
The economy had performed so poorly for so long that there was little optimism to be found. The New York Times reported on January 1: “The typical consensus forecast [for 1983] calls for only modest gains in industrial production, an unemployment level that may still be hovering around 10 percent next Christmas, and still further drops in both business investment and exports.”3 Reagan’s new chief economic adviser, Martin Feldstein, told the president to expect a weak economic outlook for 1983 and 1984, and in the official budget forecast predicted an anemic 2 percent increase in GDP for the year. “The mood in the White House was as foul as the weather,” wrote William Niskanen, Feldstein’s colleague on the Council of Economic Advisers. The New York Times said that “the stench of failure” hung around the White House, the Wall Street Journal discerned “a whiff of panic” in the administration’s mood, and in a column entitled “The End of Reagan?” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that “Mr. Reagan shows signs of slipping.” On ABC News, White House correspondent Sam Donaldson reported, “[T]here is a consensus in Washington that unless he changes his game plan, economically the grade for the next two years will almost certainly be an F.” Naturally there was a cacophony of calls to abandon Reaganomics; failure to do so, the New Republic warned in a typical example of the conventional wisdom, “could push us into another Great Depression.”
The 1983 deficit was now expected to reach $200 billion—more than 6 percent of the GDP, a peacetime record. The tax and budget deal of the previous year wasn’t achieving much. Reagan was already backing away from $26 billion in proposed budget cuts for fear that the inevitable scare stories would make such cuts politically impossible, but he was reportedly furious at news leaks that he was considering more tax increases. He fought back against his more timorous advisers by suggesting that perhaps the third leg of his income tax cut, scheduled to take effect on July 1, should be moved up to January 1.4
The battle lines over fiscal policy were obvious—it was going to be a rerun of 1982. On January 20 nearly five hundred Wall Street and business leaders signed a two-page ad in the Washington Post urging Reagan to do something about “the structural deficit.” This was code for Raise taxes again. When Reagan submitted his FY 1984 budget to Congress at the end of January, Capitol Hill Democrats immediately pronounced it dead on arrival in what was becoming an annual ritual. Reagan’s budget proposed a modified freeze on domestic spending, but some conservative Republicans in Congress, such as Newt Gingrich, wanted the freeze extended across the board to defense spending, an ominous prospect to the White House.5 The most startling item in Reagan’s budget was a standby contingency tax increase that would take effect automatically in 1985 if the deficit did not fall sufficiently. Congress was unenthusiastic about the standby tax and fortunately saved Reagan from this dreadful idea: Republicans feared it let Democrats off the hook to restrain spending, while leading Democrats clung to the position that the third year of Reagan’s income tax cut needed to be rescinded.
Reagan deliberately sanded down the ideological edges of his February State of the Union speech to Congress, and Democrats gave him a mock standing ovation when he said, “We who are in government must take the lead in restoring the economy.” “He sounded like a changed man,” the New Republic observed, while Stephen Roberts of the New York Times thought that “the President seemed monumentally uncomfortable and unenthusiastic.”
The final 10 percent cut in income tax rates was scheduled to come into effect midyear, but so gloomy was the mood from the brutal recession that few held out hope it would spur a significant change in the nation’s fortunes. “The economy,” said Alan Greenspan, then a private sector economist, “continues to drift along.” He expected business activity to be “extremely slow-paced.” The New Republic speculated that the United States had entered a “permanent recession.”
Despite this near-universal pessimism, the end of the recession had in fact arrived, though the lingering effects of the downturn would continue to hamper the economy. One of the earliest signs of the rebound came in late 1982, when the Federal Reserve’s industrial production index showed its first monthly gain in more than a year. General Motors quietly began recalling laid-off autoworkers. By the second quarter, retail sales were up 10 percent and the economy as a whole was growing at an 8.7 percent annual rate—higher than is typical for the early phase of an economic recovery. Over the course of the year unemployment, interest rates, and inflation would all drop rapidly while real after-tax per capita income would grow by 5.3 percent. Most significantly for supply-side theory, business investment began to take off, rising 8.4 percent even though Chase Econometrics, one of the leading private sector forecasting firms, had projected a 5 percent decline for 1983; the next year private sector investment would rise a robust 23.5 percent, when Chase had predicted only a 1.5 percent increase. In a sign of the rise of the high-tech sector, Apple Computer would reach $1 billion in sales for the first time in 1983. In late March, Reagan wrote in his diary, “Our program is working even better than we expected two months ago.” The stock market took notice, rising 20 percent by May—a gain it held through the end of the year, making it the best year for the stock market since the 1960s. Reagan began quipping, “Pretty soon they won’t be calling it ‘Reaganomics’ anymore.”
Not that the news media noticed the signs of a dramatic turnaround. One study of network news coverage in 1983 found that 85 percent of TV news stories about the economy were negative. Fortune magazine editor Paul Weaver observed: “It is hard not to conclude that their [the networks’] opinion of [Reagan] and his program was so low that they were determined to do everything within their legitimate discretion, and perhaps then some, to prevent their reportage from suggesting that the policies worked, or that a recovery was in full swing, or that the President might be in line for some credit for the expansion of the economy.”6 Time magazine’s William A. Henry wrote that “the most antagonistic major news organization was CBS, which had challenged the morality of Reagan’s approach almost from its outset.”7 Reagan took notice of this in his diary, writing in March 1983: “CBS evening news an almost total attack on our admin. They are beginning to look like a deliberate campaign.”
Much of the public proved remarkably impervious to the media myopia and the pessimism in Washington. For the first time in more than a decade, a majority of Americans told pollsters at the beginning of 1983—before most economic indicators turned positive—that they were optimistic about the year ahead. By midyear, Reagan’s approval ratings were becoming as buoyant as the economy, rising back to the crucial 50 percent mark.
With the economy recovering, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker worried that inflation would heat up again and wanted to tighten the money supply to ward off this prospect. The supply-siders understood that an economy undergoing a fundamental rotation needed more money growth rather than less, and that such money growth would not fuel inflation. Volcker argued for deliberately slowing the economy in his regular meetings with Reagan, but Reagan demurred, while Treasury Secretary Don Regan told Volcker to stop being such a “nanny.” Regional Federal Reserve banks pressed Volcker to cut interest rates—filing twenty-one requests in 1983—but the chairman wanted to tighten monetary growth through a modest interest rate hike, which he barely carried by a 7–5 vote of the Fed governors in May.8
In the meantime, Reagan faced a dilemma. Volcker’s term as chairman was up in the fall of 1983. Treasury Secretary Regan and other senior advisers, including James Baker and Ed Meese, wanted the president to dump Volcker and appoint a new chairman. After initially siding with the critics (and having that fact leak to the media in the spring) and leaning toward appointing Alan Greenspan as the new chairman, Reagan reversed course and reap-pointed Volcker in June, largely because the financial markets were still skittish about inflation and viewed the Fed chairman as an inflation fighter. Volcker also enjoyed support in Congress and among major business groups.
Other aspects of Reagan’s agenda were also improving. Oil imports from OPEC had fallen by more than two million barrels a day by the end of 1982, contributing to a drop in both energy prices and OPEC’s clout. In the spring Reagan vetoed a bill that would have reestablished federal authority to ration gasoline.
Reagan’s retreat on Social Security was completed in early 1983 when the commission he had appointed to find a solution to the program’s looming insolvency came in with its plan. The commission, headed by Alan Greenspan, reflected a typical bipartisan compromise—raising payroll taxes, temporarily reducing cost-of-living increases, and compelling more people to join the system (public employees and nonprofit organizations had been exempt). The result removed a political albatross for Reagan and Republicans, but at the cost of deferring for another generation fundamental debate about reforming the national Ponzi scheme. “I’m afraid our bi-partisan commission has failed us,” Reagan wrote in his diary, though what did he expect from a bipartisan commission? To the consternation of many conservatives, Reagan was looking less and less like the nemesis of the New Deal than like its rescuer.9
* * *
WHILE ECONOMIC AND fiscal policy was settling into an equilibrium of sorts, social issues that had been largely overlooked during the first year of the administration began to emerge from the shadows. The ratification period for the Equal Rights Amendment expired in 1982, and attempts in Congress to extend the ratification period or pass a modified amendment flopped. Behind the bitter fights over civil rights and the broader argument about constitutional construction lay the issue that might be called the Big One: abortion.
It has become commonplace in the years since Reagan to complain—or praise in a backhanded way, depending on the point of view—that he did little to reverse Roe v. Wade or the abortion culture.10 This overlooks White House lobbying on Capitol Hill in support of a constitutional amendment to restrict abortion in 1982 and collateral measures to limit federal funding of abortion. Both measures were blocked by a filibuster from Republican senator Bob Packwood. The administration acted on its own where it could, especially through two controversial regulations known as the “Baby Doe rule” and the “squeal rule.” The Baby Doe rule required hospitals to guarantee medical treatment to infants born handicapped, in an effort to stop the rare and unspoken practice of allowing deformed newborns to die—de facto infanticide. The administration also required federally funded family planning clinics to notify parents when they supplied contraceptives to minors. Liberals derided this measure as the “squeal rule” and immediately went to court seeking an injunction against it.
To mark the tenth anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, in the spring of 1983 Reagan published a long article in the Human Life Review (later re-published as a small book in 1984) entitled “Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation.” His political advisers were nervous about publishing such an article so close to his reelection campaign. He replied: “I might not be re-elected. We’re going with it now.”11 Reagan was the first sitting president to publish a book, and seldom has any president since Lincoln spoken so openly and forcefully about such a contentious moral issue. He was just as direct and unequivocal as Lincoln: “Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution.” Roe was an act of “raw judicial power,” Reagan said, comparable to Dred Scott: “This is not the first time our country has been divided by a Supreme Court decision that denied the value of certain human lives.” Some of Reagan’s language was bracing: “The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being.” The media said such a controversial article by a sitting president was “rare” and “unusual.”
Reagan’s article appeared a few weeks before the Supreme Court issued its first decision on abortion during his presidency, in the case of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health. By a 6–3 vote, the Court struck down the Ohio city’s attempts to place restrictions on second-and third-trimester abortions and require a twenty-four-hour waiting period. Reagan announced that he was “profoundly disappointed” by the ruling, but he and other conservatives were cheered that Justice O’Connor joined the two other dissenters (Rehnquist and Byron White, who were the two dissenting votes in the 1973 Roe case).12 O’Connor’s strongly worded dissent took dead aim at Roe, criticizing the ruling for forcing courts “to pretend to act as science review boards.” Roe “is clearly on a collision course with itself … [T]here is no justification in the law or logic for the trimester framework adopted in Roe.” It was widely noted that five of the six justices who voted to strike down abortion restrictions in the ruling were over seventy-five, which, one wire service news story observed, “could give President Reagan a chance to appoint more sympathetic successors.”
A new social concern fraught with political implications began to emerge from the shadows in early 1983. For the previous three years the infectious disease community had been tracking the mysterious rise of cases of severe immune system breakdown predominantly among homosexuals. By 1983 this obscure disease was on the way to becoming a mass epidemic, though scientists now think the disease had been spreading slowly in Africa as far back as the 1930s. (The first identified death from AIDS in Africa is thought to have occurred in 1959.) “Something unusual and frightening was happening,” Newsweek magazine wrote in an April cover story that broke the news to many Americans for the first time. There were more than thirteen hundred cases identified in the United States, with a mortality rate that approached 100 percent. The cause of the disease was as yet unidentified, though its transmission through blood contact had been established. French researchers announced in May that they had isolated a retrovirus, though it would be another year before American researchers confirmed the French finding.13 By then the number of diagnosed AIDS cases had grown to more than six thousand, with thirty-five hundred recorded deaths.
The fact that AIDS cases were overwhelmingly concentrated among homosexuals raised the issue of sexual behavior (Newsweek reported that one early survey of gay AIDS patients found that they averaged more than a thousand sexual partners) and ensured that it would become America’s first fully politicized disease. Pat Buchanan expressed the views of many social conservatives: “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war against nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” Initially gay rights groups and the gay media denied reports of a new sexually transmitted disease (“Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded,” read a New York Native headline in 1981) and resisted calls to close the bathhouses in San Francisco that were obvious AIDS hotbeds.
Inevitably homosexual AIDS patients became a new high-profile victim constituency group for Democrats, while Reagan would come under withering criticism for not paying more attention to the epidemic in its early stages, and most of all for not spending more on research into the disease. To be sure, in 1983 the National Institutes of Health was spending only $7.9 million on AIDS research, but eventually government funding for AIDS research would come to exceed spending for more common forms of lethal disease such as breast and prostate cancer. Leftist attacks on Reagan over AIDS would come to compete with civil rights agitators to reach the furthest hyperbole, such as gay activist Larry Kramer’s moniker “Adolf Reagan”: “Hitler knew what he was doing. How could Ronald Reagan not have known what he was doing?”14
The spring of 1983 also brought to fruition the work of yet another bipartisan commission, this one recommending reforms for public education. The National Commission on Excellence in Education generated disproportionately prominent headlines and public chatter because of its sensationally titled report, “A Nation at Risk.” The summary judgment was ominous: “a rising tide of mediocrity” in public schools was so severe that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Liberals and the education lobby naturally embraced the report as a justification for increased federal spending on education. The National Education Association, for example, argued that public schools required “additional billions of dollars—and a big boost from the Federal Government—to achieve their sweeping objectives.” The education establishment—which Reagan’s second-term secretary of education, William Bennett, would vividly label “the Blob”—missed the fact that the commission’s policy recommendations were largely Reaganite. It called for a lesser federal role in education; indeed, it was emphatic that states and localities should take the lead. As usual, Reagan stuck to his principles, telling USA Today, “We think there is a parallel between Federal involvement in education and the decline in quality over recent years. Improving the quality of education doesn’t require a big Federal program…. The road to better education cannot be paved with more and more recycled tax dollars collected, redistributed and overregulated by Washington bureaucrats.” Reagan added, “I know this idea is not too popular in some sophisticated circles, but I can’t help but believe that voluntary prayer deserves a place in our Nation’s classrooms.” Quite a contrast from the consensus surrounding the No Child Left Behind Act of the George W Bush years.
* * *
AT THE BEGINNING of the year an unnamed White House aide told the New York Times: “There is nothing about our political difficulties that an economic recovery and an arms agreement with the Soviets wouldn’t solve.” While the economic cloud was finally lifting, prospects for an arms agreement appeared remote. Late in 1982 Reagan got his long-sought chance to say nyet to the outline of a bad arms control agreement—but not to the Soviets. He had to say nyet to his own arms negotiators. This aggravated the domestic arms control controversy on the eve of the Euromissile deployment.
Negotiations over European-theater missiles had begun in Geneva in late 1981 and went nowhere. Here a significant personal drama occurred. Reagan had chosen Paul Nitze, one of the grand wise men whose career spanned the entire Cold War era, to lead the U.S. negotiating team. Nitze, a Democrat, brought enormous prestige to the post. During World War II under President Roosevelt, he participated in a review of the effectiveness of Allied bombing and in the interrogation of Albert Speer, Hitler’s prodigious minister of armaments, in the closing days of the war. He worked with Dean Acheson, George Marshall, and George Kennan in the drafting of the Marshall Plan, and was a principal author of NSC 68, the seminal 1950 report to President Truman that articulated new directions for U.S. strategic doctrine for the Cold War. After serving in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, where he was in the thick of the Cuban missile crisis and the Vietnam War, Nitze joined Nixon’s negotiating team that concluded the first SALT Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1972. But later in the 1970s, like many other hawkish Democrats, he broke with Jimmy Carter and opposed the SALT II Treaty. Nitze became a charter member of the Committee on the Present Danger, the bipartisan lobby group that in the late 1970s advocated a tougher U.S. stance vis-à-vis the Soviets. In between government assignments, Nitze made a fortune as an investment banker and as the developer of Aspen, Colorado.15 A man of sophistication and charm, he could also be direct and blunt, more than once calling Soviet negotiators liars to their faces. He was the very kind of man who by elite acclamation should be president, and the kind of man to whom, it might be thought, Reagan would show deference. Not a bit.
In Geneva Nitze opened with Reagan’s zero option, though everyone assumed that the United States would fall back on a compromise position at some point. The Soviets called for the United States to forgo basing any Pershing II missiles in Europe while maintaining the Soviets’ existing advantage. Judging that the formal negotiating sessions were going nowhere, Nitze daringly decided that the only chance for a breakthrough was through a personal initiative outside the Geneva meeting room.
Nitze enjoyed surprisingly cordial relations with the chief Soviet negotiator, Yuli Kvitsinskiy, and so he proposed that the two of them meet informally to see if they could break the deadlock. After weeks of prenegotiation, in July 1982 Nitze and Kvitsinskiy met up in the mountains outside Geneva and strolled down a logging road in what became known as the “Walk in the Woods.” Nitze told Kvitsinskiy that while the United States remained committed to the zero option, he knew it was not possible to reach zero at that moment. Nitze instead proposed a complicated interim agreement, the core element of which was a ceiling of seventy-five medium-range missiles for each side: SS-20s for the Soviets, but slower and short-range cruise missiles for the United States. While this represented a large reduction in the number of Soviet SS-20s, it meant that the United States would forgo basing the Pershing II missiles in Europe, which were the heart of the NATO European theater arsenal. And even with equal numbers of launchers (the term of art for the farce of arms control as it was practiced up to that date), the Soviets would still boast about a four-to-one advantage in nuclear warheads, since each SS-20 carried three warheads, while cruise missiles carried only one. Verification would be a difficult sticking point. Kvitsinskiy expressed skepticism that Moscow would go for it, but said he would present Nitze’s formula.
Nitze did the same in Washington, where it touched off a firestorm. It was not so much the substance of the proposal, which some of Reagan’s advisers thought was broadly acceptable, as bad timing and freelance tactics. In departing from his negotiating instructions without consulting Washington, Nitze had “signaled premature retreat” and represented “political and intellectual cowardice,” in the harsh judgment of Richard Perle.16 In late August Reagan expressed his displeasure to Shultz that Nitze had exceeded his instructions, while Weinberger reported separately that the president was furious with Nitze. When the matter finally came before Reagan in early September 1982, he wondered why the United States would want to give up preemptively its chief bargaining chip, the Pershing IIs. If the United States could give up Pershings, he asked Nitze, why couldn’t the Soviets give up their SS-20s? Nitze said that he did not think it realistic to go back to the zero option position in Geneva. Reagan replied: “Well, Paul, you just tell them you’re working for one tough son of a bitch.”17 As he had long wanted to, Reagan had said nyet to a weak arms deal—but to his own people, not face-to-face with a Soviet leader. That prospect now seemed far away.
All the while Nitze heard nothing from Kvitsinskiy in Moscow. It turned out that Moscow had rejected the proposal out of hand, which Nitze found out when he returned to Geneva in late September to convey Reagan’s thumbs-down. It is understandable why the Soviets did so. Moscow thought that the lack of progress on arms talks served its political objective of splitting Europe and the United States over missile deployment—especially if the impasse could be blamed on the United States.18 The Soviets worked hard to position the negotiations for this very result, and it looked for a while as though it might work. The State Department frankly doubted that West Germany would stick with the commitment to accept the Pershing II missiles at the end of 1983.
The “Walk in the Woods” formula remained closely guarded in Washington in the summer and fall, and when it eventually leaked out early in 1983 the news sparked outrage—against Reagan. Reagan’s rejection of Nitze’s proposal, the New York Times and other critics charged, showed that he was not serious about arms control. It did not matter to Reagan’s political opponents that the Soviets also had rejected the putative deal. The story line that Reagan had rejected a potential breakthrough was a fillip for the peace movement and sent the controversy over nuclear weapons to a new level of intensity.
One sign of the ferocity of the political divide over foreign policy came to sight in January 1983, when Reagan and Shultz decided to name thirty-six-year-old Ken Adelman as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). The appointment set off a furor in the Senate because Adelman had expressed a frankly realistic—that is to say, heretical—view of arms control. “Perhaps nowhere in life is the disparity greater between exalted expectations and a dismal track record than in arms control,” Adelman reflected. “No area of science, medicine, or even public policy would continue to elicit so much hope after so many years of unsuccessful effort. Arms control must be approached as one of the intangibles of life, a rite seemingly needed to satisfy some deep longing in our collective soul.”19 The Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows put the matter directly: “Certain agencies in Washington are ceded to certain interest groups…. Liberals think of [ACDA] as, by rights, their agency.” Picking someone who hadn’t drunk the arms control Kool-Aid was, Fallows suggested, like appointing an atheist chaplain.20 The Adelman nomination laid bare the Beltway establishment’s irritation that the Reagan administration thought it could appoint people who reflected its philosophy of governance to key positions in agencies that were de facto organs of Democratic Party policy preferences. One of the favorite epithets for Adelman was that he was “the James Watt of arms negotiations.”
Adelman’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee became a protracted struggle, with one Democratic staffer admitting to James Fallows that “we pursued every scum angle we could think of” to derail the confirmation. James Baker became nervous and wanted to drop Adelman, but Reagan refused to budge. The committee voted against Adel-man 9–8 (with liberal Republican senator Charles Mathias joining all eight Democrats on the committee against Adelman) but sent the nomination on to the full Senate anyway. Democrats considered a filibuster but lacked the votes to sustain it. Adelman was finally confirmed by the full Senate 57–42.
The Reagan administration had endured foreign policy confirmation controversies before Adelman, most notably the Senate’s rejection of Ernest Lefever to be assistant secretary of state for human rights in 1981, but the Adelman contretemps took on added significance because it occurred against the backdrop of a raging debate over American nuclear policy. Behind the partisan debate over nuclear weapons was the fundamental ideological divide between how liberals and conservatives see the world. Fallows put his finger on the problem with his observation that when liberals looked out at the world during the Cold War, they saw 1914—the fear that a misunderstanding or miscalculation would lead to an uncontrollable war. Conservatives, especially since the Soviet military buildup of the 1970s, saw the Cold War and the arms control process as 1938—a repeat of the Munich appeasement. Reagan had explicitly compared Jimmy Carter to Neville Chamberlain in 1979 (a rhetorical attack his political advisers had opposed) and spoke often of the lessons of Munich and appeasement. During the Senate debate over Adelman, for example, the Utah Republican Jake Garn said, “I guess Ronald Reagan is a warmonger just like Winston Churchill.”
But to a surprising extent that has only recently become better known, Reagan sympathized with the liberal fear that an accident or miscalculation could lead to an unlimited nuclear war. The great irony of Reagan is that he fully shared the liberals’ dread of nuclear weapons. The difference is that he was not inclined to surrender either to platitudes or to the Soviet Union. What he was willing to do was fuse both viewpoints. Even as he was pursuing his arms buildup and his tough anti-Soviet rhetoric, Reagan was continuing to express interest in negotiating with Moscow.
The problem with the arms control process was that the asymmetries between American democracy and Soviet Communist rule gave the advantage to the Soviets. Seymour Weiss, an arms control expert and former State Department director of political and military affairs, explained the problem well: “Historically arms control negotiations tend to have a kind of tranquilizing effect upon the American public, whether or not there are any results. Negotiations of the sort that we’re talking about are bound to stretch out over a period of years…. [The Soviets] can and do sit at the table and say ‘Nyet’ and hold to their position, whereas the dynamics in our own society creates pressure to get an agreement, to make concessions while our own defense programs are brought to a halt.” So Reagan was playing against the clock as well as against an ideological disposition.
Reagan was unperturbed. In fact, he was about the throw down the gauntlet in ways that upset nervous European allies and sent liberals into fresh paroxysms of outrage. It was a remarkably gutsy performance, given that much of his defense program was living on a knife-edge, with Congress closely divided over military spending and key weapons systems such as the MX missile. Moreover, Reagan’s public approval ratings on foreign policy were just as bad as his numbers on the economy: two-thirds of the respondents in one January Harris poll thought Reagan was doing a poor job on arms control, and 57 percent agreed that Reagan might start a nuclear war.21
However, Reagan was not without some concurrent surprises in his Soviet diplomacy.
* * *
UNSEEN BY PUBLIC eyes, Reagan in February held his first meeting with a senior Soviet official, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, upstairs in the private residence of the White House. The meeting arose at Shultz’s suggestion, and reportedly against the wishes of National Security Adviser Bill Clark. Clark is often portrayed as having opposed any high-level contacts between Reagan and the Soviets, but this is not true. In 1982 Clark pondered arranging a Reagan-Brezhnev meeting, and also considered his own back-channel overture to Dobrynin. Clark’s hesitation was about the State Department, whom he distrusted to manage summit diplomacy.
Shultz thought the time had come to contemplate the first steps toward a summit meeting, and Reagan cautiously agreed. Dobrynin spoke with Reagan for two hours (most commentators on this meeting say it was an unusually long meeting for Reagan because of his “short attention span”), with both men repeating general professions of peaceful intent toward each other’s nations. Reagan employed one of his favorite talking points—the fact that the United States had not used its nuclear monopoly in the late 1940s for purposes of conquest. Dobrynin replied that the USSR had also shown restraint by not using its conventional military superiority to conquer the rest of Europe after America substantially demobilized. “Sometimes we got pretty nose to nose,” Reagan wrote in his diary.
Reagan’s purpose in this meeting was to convey the simple message that he was ready to do business seriously with the Soviet Union, so rather than trump Dobrynin’s weak argument, the former labor negotiator pressed Dobrynin for concrete proof of benign Soviet intentions. He asked the Soviet ambassador to allow seven Pentecostal Christians who in 1978 had taken sanctuary in the American embassy in Moscow to emigrate from the Soviet Union. (Reagan had done one of his radio commentaries about their plight in 1978.) It was a simple thing, Reagan said, more akin to a personal favor than a policy concession. Most importantly, Reagan assured Dobrynin, if the Soviets granted his request, he would not take public credit or seek to embarrass the USSR. Reagan had previously brought up the Pentecostals in a personal letter to Brezhnev in 1981, also promising then that he would say nothing publicly about the matter. Brezhnev never responded.
The new Soviet premier, Yuri Andropov (who, unbeknownst to Westerners, had begun dialysis for kidney failure and was approaching death’s door), had told Dobrynin before the meeting, “Reagan is unpredictable. You should expect anything from him.”22 Presented with this proposal, Dobrynin reacted cautiously but positively. Although the Politburo did not like the idea, Dobrynin and his allies in the foreign ministry were able to push it through. The Pentecostals and their extended families were allowed to leave for Israel four months later. Reagan said nothing but reciprocated by approving a new long-term grain deal with the Soviets.
Even as Reagan was taking his first steps to thaw out relations with the Soviet Union, he was readying several bold public initiatives that kept everyone—Soviets and Democrats alike—in a high state of agitation. The first item on Reagan’s agenda was finding a way to outflank the nuclear freeze movement. For several months religious groups had been supplying moral authority to the movement. Even the theologically conservative Southern Baptist Convention passed a nuclear disarmament resolution in 1982, as did the American Lutheran Church and the United Presbyterian Church. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meanwhile, issued a highly dovish draft statement condemning nuclear weapons just a week before the 1982 election, leading National Review to dub the bishops “an adjunct of the Democratic National Committee.” This early draft rejected the idea of nuclear deterrence, the very cornerstone of American strategic doctrine, and suggested that nuclear weapons could not fit within classic Christian “just war” teaching.23 The final statement drew back from the worst of these views after European Catholic bishops defended nuclear deterrence in a series of pastoral letters of their own, but the damage had been done. (These pro-deterrence clerical statements received little attention from the media.)
The secular agitation for the freeze expressed itself as unalloyed nihilism. The existence of nuclear weapons, Jonathan Schell wrote in a surprise runaway bestseller, The Fate of the Earth, threatened nothing less than human extinction and the destruction of planet Earth itself. Not even the ability to travel to other solar systems offered Schell any hope, because “wherever human beings went, there also would go the knowledge of how to build nuclear weapons, and, with it, the peril of extinction.” Schell’s solution? World government to replace national sovereignty. Survival trumped all other considerations. Implicit in this line of argument was that there was nothing worth defending with nuclear weapons, even if built only as a deterrent. Schell wrote: “The nuclear powers put a higher value on national sovereignty than they do on human survival.”
Better Red than dead.24
The freeze agitation threatened the centerpiece of Reagan’s efforts to address the nation’s vulnerability in strategic nuclear weaponry—the MX missile. The MX was a highly accurate ten-warhead missile designed to replace the aging three-warhead Minuteman missile and to survive a Soviet first strike. But after the rejection of Jimmy Carter’s outlandish plan to shelter the missiles in a vast network of scattered silos linked by an underground railroad, the United States still had not come up with a basing system for the MX. When the Reagan administration announced in late 1981 that it would place a hundred MX missiles (half the number, by the way, that Carter had proposed to deploy—a significant fact that got lost in the discussion) in superhardened existing missile silos, which would do nothing to reduce the vulnerability of America’s land-based ICBMs, congressional support for the MX eroded badly. Leaders of both parties told the White House that Congress might not approve MX funding unless a better basing mode could be found.
Nearly a year later the Pentagon unveiled the best idea it could come up with: base all the MX missiles closely together, on the controversial theory that fratricide among incoming nuclear warheads would make it unlikely that the Soviets could take them out with a first strike. The idea was called “dense pack,” and it was as unconvincing as the name, as the scathing editorial cartoons quickly made clear. The Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly expressed their lack of enthusiasm for the idea, and near the end of 1982 the House of Representatives voted to cut off funding for the MX.
Another crucial appropriation vote was scheduled for May 1983, and to quell the congressional rebellion, Reagan appointed former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to head a commission to come up with a basing solution before the vote. Reagan gamely tried to stem the tide of anti-MX sentiment by prominently renaming the missile. He started referring to MX as the “peacekeeper missile.” Reagan was willing to trade away the MX missile in an arms control deal with the Soviets but didn’t think he’d be able to get a deal unless the MX was built and deployed.
This was the background against which Reagan traveled to Orlando, Florida, on March 8, just three weeks after his meeting with Dobrynin, to speak before the National Association of Evangelicals.25 The appearance called for a domestic policy speech—which therefore did not go through the usual State Department and NSC review—and indeed, most of it was about domestic concerns. But it shall forever be remembered for calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire”—a phrase the State Department never would have let through in a foreign policy speech. Shultz in his memoirs delicately noted that he had no prior knowledge that Reagan would use such language, adding that the “evil empire” phrase “had not been planned or developed through any careful or systematic process…. [M]any of our [European] friends were alarmed.”26
Some White House staffers dubbed it the “Darth Vader” speech. Communications Director David Gergen called the “evil empire” phrase “outrageous.” In fact, he and others had excised the line from Reagan speechwriter Tony Dolan’s early draft of Reagan’s 1982 Westminster speech before it ever reached the president. Gergen backed down this time when he discovered that Reagan himself had insisted on including the phrase and had actually toughened that section of the speech with some flourishes of his own.
The speech provoked outrage and contempt among liberals, who never seemed to notice or object to the much more extreme language the Soviets routinely used to describe the United States in official pronouncements. Historian Henry Steele Commager said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve seen them all.” The New Republic huffed that “the speech left friends and foes around the world with the impression that the President of the United States was contemplating holy war.” New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis complained that the speech was “outrageous” and “primitive.” “What is the world to think,” Lewis wrote, “when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology?” One remarkable aspect of the reaction is that U.S. critics used harsher language than the Soviets, who merely called the speech “provocative” and “bellicose.” The Soviet newspaper Pravda made a point of quoting negative Western media reaction, which made it unnecessary for them to tax their own phrasemaking vocabulary.
The reaction in the diplomatic community and among some European leaders matched the media’s apoplexy. Helmut Schmidt, who had been ousted as West German chancellor in October, was reported to have said that Reagan had thrown away twenty years of patient diplomacy with the Soviets. Told of this remark, Reagan replied (according to Cap Weinberger’s recollection), “What did patient diplomatic effort for 20 years get us? It got us an expanding Soviet Union and a continual expansion of their ability to enslave peoples and deny freedom. And it left us so vulnerable we couldn’t do anything when Afghanistan was invaded. That’s not much of an accomplishment.”27 Shultz wrote later, “How conscious of the implications of their words the president and his speechwriters were, I don’t know.” But Reagan told an interviewer a few weeks after the speech that his choice of language had been conscious and deliberate: “I made the ‘Evil Empire’ speech and others like it with malice aforethought.” The “evil empire” phrase stuck in the craw of liberalism and rankled as much as, if not more than, Reagan’s “welfare queen” theme.
Regard for the “evil empire” speech has risen with the passage of time and especially since the demise of the Soviet Union. Incarcerated Soviet dissidents such as Natan Sharansky testified that the “evil empire” speech bolstered their morale: “Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth.” Seweryn Bialer, one of the West’s leading Sovietologists and a critic of Reagan, returned from a visit to the Soviet Union shortly after the speech to report that “President Reagan’s rhetoric has badly shaken the self-esteem and patriotic pride of the Soviet political elites.” A number of former Soviet officials admitted after 1991 that Reagan had been right all along.28 A rare clearly worded CIA report noted, “By describing the Soviet Union as ‘the focus of evil,’ President Reagan has singlehandedly deployed the one weapon for which the Soviets lack even a rudimentary defense: the truth.” Even Strobe Talbott, one of Reagan’s toughest critics, admitted, “He may have been impolitic, but he was not wrong.”29
The fireworks over the “evil empire” phrase distracted from the central argument of the speech, which was Reagan’s challenge to evangelicals not to embrace the idea of “moral equivalence” between East and West, which the nuclear freeze enthusiasm wittingly or unwittingly abetted. He did this by connecting the issue with the core of the dispute over the domestic issues of greatest concern to evangelicals—abortion, school prayer, and traditional values. Reagan attacked “modern-day secularism” as the source of contemporary liberalism. In a long passage that the president himself added to the speech, Reagan addressed the injunction a federal judge had issued against the parental notification rule on birth control. Hitting back hard with deliberate language, Reagan noted that while the well-intentioned purpose of health clinics that dispensed birth control was to prevent illegitimate births, it was significant that the bureaucrats referred to minors as sexually active rather than using the older moral term promiscuous. “I’ve watched TV panel shows discuss this issue, seen columnists pontificating on our error, but no one seems to mention morality as playing a part in the subject of sex.” This was “really only one example of many attempts to water down traditional values and even abrogate the original terms of American democracy,” Reagan explained. At the root of all these policy disputes, he argued, was a rejection of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Above all, Reagan inplied, liberalism didn’t take seriously the idea of sin.
This was the pivot from which Reagan introduced the Soviet Union and the problem of the nuclear freeze. The Soviet Union didn’t believe in sin or morality either, he said. Another of the passages Reagan wrote himself was:
A number of years ago I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the Cold War when Communism and our own way of life were very much on people’s minds. And he was speaking to that subject. And suddenly, though, I heard him saying, “I love my little girls more than anything.” And I said to myself, “Oh no, don’t. You can’t—don’t say that.” But I had underestimated him. He went on: “I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than to have to grow up under Communism and one day die no longer believing in God.”
Better dead than Red.
Reagan closed with a quotation from C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and the admonition that “in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
The “evil empire” thread distracted from the fact that, from a liberal point of view, the speech was even worse than they thought. He didn’t merely challenge the legitimacy of the Soviet Union; he turned the ideal of moral equivalency on its head by tracing a linkage between the corruption of Soviet Communism and the weakness of domestic liberalism. And Reagan was just warming up.
* * *
THE DUST HAD not yet settled from the “evil empire” speech when Reagan kicked up a fresh cloud two weeks later with an even more dramatic new theme: the Strategic Defense Initiative.30 Speaking from the Oval Office on March 23, he issued his call to make nuclear weapons obsolete by reviving ballistic missile defense—the very thing an earlier generation of American strategists thought destabilizing and detrimental to deterrence, and therefore bargained away with the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972. Mutual assured destruction, Reagan argued in the penultimate passage of the speech, is “a sad commentary on the human condition. Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?”
Friends and critics alike ascribe Reagan’s expansive conception of an impermeable missile defense—a veritable Star Trek-like shield that “could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil”—to his Hollywood-fueled imagination, especially one of his early movie roles as Lieutenant “Brass” Bancroft in Murder in the Air. In this 1940 movie (one of six Reagan made that year), Reagan’s character safeguards a new secret weapon, the Inertia Projector, that utilizes electric currents to destroy enemy aircraft.31 Murder in the Air was released in July 1940, on the eve of the German blitz on London, so this imaginative dream was plainly salient but seemingly farfetched: “The bomber will always get through” was Stanley Baldwin’s infamous dismissal of Churchill’s repeated calls in the 1930s for developing air defenses such as radar. The equivalent in the 1970s and 1980s from missile defense skeptics was “The missile will always get through.” Here again Reagan’s imagination might be compared with that of Churchill, who in 1926 anticipated not only the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles but also the possibility of advanced defenses against them. “It might have been hoped,” Churchill wrote in his melancholy essay “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” “that the electro-magnetic waves would in certain scales be found capable of detonating explosives of all kinds from a great distance.”
The emphasis on Reagan’s unconventional imagination in conceiving of missile defense as the pathway to supplanting the suicidal barbarity of mutual assured destruction does a disservice to the richness of the full story and to what it reveals about Reagan’s force of will and his disregard of the conventional wisdom. It is one of the best refutations of the commonplace view that Reagan was wholly dependent on his staff and aloof from important policy decisions. The emergence of robust missile defense, later named the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), owed to a confluence of many factors, but the decisive factor was Reagan himself.
The idea of ballistic defense was not new; the United States had worked on the idea back in the 1950s and deployed the rudimentary Nike-Zeus system in the early 1960s. Although the United States formally gave up on serious missile defense by embracing the doctrine of mutual assured destruction and signing the ABM treaty in 1972, the idea never completely died out in the defense establishment. A few political leaders, especially Wyoming senator Malcolm Wallop, pushed the idea on Capitol Hill in the late 1970s, and researchers grasped that breakthroughs in computing technology, optics, and space-based lasers used for antisatellite purposes could be employed for ballistic missile defense as well. Reagan’s first budget revisions in 1981 included a significant increase in spending for Pentagon research on missile defense.
Meanwhile, the difficulties with the MX missile basing were undermining American strategic planning and weakening the rationale of mutual assured destruction. The blunt truth was that the United States simply could not find a basing mode for a new ICBM; the Soviets, with their more extensive territory (not to mention lack of democracy), did not have this problem. Between the restiveness on Capitol Hill and the popularity of the nuclear freeze movement, Reagan was slowly losing the initiative on defense. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (in particular Naval Chief Admiral James Watkins) saw missile defense as a way of salvaging the MX missile, while Reagan’s political advisers thought missile defense could be used to deflect the nuclear freeze and would provide a bargaining chip to use in arms control talks with the Soviets.
The idea to embrace a high-profile revival of missile defense began to take shape in a series of White House meetings in late 1982 and early 1983. The famed physicist Edward Teller appeared on William F. Buckley’s PBS program Firing Line in August 1982 and, in the course of advocating missile defense, complained that the White House was not listening to him. Reagan saw the broadcast and invited Teller to the White House the following month. Teller thought the meeting went poorly. The problem was that Reagan couldn’t hear him very well—Teller’s thick accent made him hard to understand in any case—and the meeting went off the rails when it turned to a funding request for Lawrence Livermore Lab (funding requests in meetings with Reagan were a White House staff no-no). Teller also advocated a space-based X-ray laser system that would require a nuclear detonation to operate, and employing nuclear weapons to counteract nuclear missiles made Reagan uncomfortable. He wanted a non-nuclear technology.
The idea of missile defense limped along until February 11, 1983, when Reagan met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review options for American strategic doctrine. General John Vessey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, raised the idea of missile defense and asked Reagan: “Wouldn’t it be better to protect the American people rather than avenge them?” Such a defense, Vessey added, would be “more moral.” The Joint Chiefs had not developed the idea very thoroughly; it was merely one of several defense initiatives for Reagan to consider. They thought that it would become a matter for extended study in the usual maw of the Pentagon and National Security Council before eventually becoming a modest weapons development program aimed principally at defending America’s ICBM force from missile attack, thereby enhancing deterrence. Neither the Joint Chiefs nor any of the Pentagon experts believed at that point that missile defense could be extended to protect the bulk of America’s population.
The Joint Chiefs underestimated Reagan, who pounced on the idea and suggested that the Pentagon proceed full speed ahead. Reagan had scheduled a major speech to defend his defense budget for March 23, and he decided he would use the occasion to announce the missile defense initiative. He wanted to describe the initiative in the most expansive terms—as a means of protecting the American people from nuclear annihilation and making nuclear weapons obsolete. “If there is one thing I do not mean by this, gentlemen,” Reagan told his advisers two days before the speech, “it is some kind of a string of terminal defenses around this country.”32 Reagan’s science adviser, George Keyworth, duly complied with Reagan’s wishes and drafted much of the language that Reagan would eventually use on March 23.
All of this occurred at dizzying speed within the last five days before Reagan’s speech. As the draft speech circulated through the usual channels, nearly everyone around Reagan got cold feet. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, having elevated the idea to Reagan directly, were uncomfortable. Deputy National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, while supporting the idea generally, tried to talk Reagan out of it. Edward Frieman, a member of the White House Science Council, said, “I almost fell out of my chair when I saw it.” (Frieman had just produced a report skeptical of the potential for comprehensive missile defense.) No one on the Science Council aside from Keyworth supported it; one member submitted his resignation because of it. Richard Darman, according to Keyworth, was “violently opposed.” Secretary of State Shultz objected strongly to language describing the initiative as “a revolution in our strategic doctrine.” The line came out, but the implication remained; Shultz was not mollified. He called Keyworth a “lunatic” in an Oval Office meeting in front of Reagan. He warned Reagan that the Soviets would react badly, that the idea as presented would be “destabilizing.” Shultz complained strongly to Bill Clark and Robert McFarlane: “I feel you guys are leading the president out on a limb, and people will saw it off. The Chiefs should have their necks wrung.”33 To his own staff, Shultz complained, “We do not have the technology to say this.” His chief arms negotiator, Richard Burt, was dismayed, telling Shultz, “Not only is a nuclear-free world a pipe dream, but a speech like this by the president will unilaterally destroy the foundation of the Western alliance.”34 Lawrence Eagleburger huffed, “The president seems to be proposing an updated version of the Maginot Line.”
For once Shultz found the Pentagon on his side. Caspar Weinberger did not stand in the way of Reagan’s proposed speech despite his lack of enthusiasm for it, but his chief deputies, Richard Perle and Ron Lehman, traveling with Weinberger at a NATO meeting in Portugal, spent most of the night on March 22 on the telephone to Washington trying to derail the speech. Lehman thought it would upset the NATO allies. He was right: Margaret Thatcher wrote later, “I differed sharply from the President’s view that SDI was a major step towards a nuclear-free world—something which I believed was neither attainable nor desirable.” The specter of the United States protected behind a missile shield could perversely have the result long sought by Soviet foreign policy if it led to the decoupling of American and European security. But she would eventually change her mind: “Looking back, it is now clear to me that Ronald Reagan’s original decision on SDI was the single most important of his presidency.”35 Perle thought it would backfire and damage Reagan’s arms buildup. Like Reagan, Perle didn’t care much for mutual assured destruction (“mutual assured suicide,” Perle called it), but thought Reagan’s speech was too abrupt a way to introduce a potential revolution in America’s strategic thinking. He also thought the idea technically frivolous, saying it was “the product of millions of American teenagers putting quarters into video machines.”
Aside from Clark and Keyworth, then, Reagan had almost no support for the idea. Keyworth dutifully drafted an alternative “wimpy” speech that reflected the State Department’s perspective, and forwarded it to the president. Reagan rejected it. Only two hours before Reagan was to go on the air, Shultz told him, “I have to say honestly that I am deeply troubled.” Reagan was unmoved but gave Shultz permission to share the speech in advance with Dobrynin. The Soviet ambassador responded to Shultz’s news, “You will be opening a new phase in the arms race.” Back at the Politburo, Andropov reacted harshly, saying, “Engaging in this is not just irresponsible, it is insane…. Washington’s actions are putting the entire world in jeopardy.” It was one more sign to Andropov that the United States was planning to attack, and it abetted the Soviet fear that, despite their own missile defense program, they could not match a determined American effort. “It wasn’t SDI per se that frightened Soviet leaders,” Robert Gates wrote; “after all, at best it would take many years to develop and deploy an effective system. It was the idea of SDI and all that it represented that frightened them.”36 Years later Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh, confirmed Gates’s assessment, saying that “SDI frightened us very much” and “had a long-lasting impact on us.” Although Soviet scientists were skeptical SDI could work, Bessmertnykh said it prompted Soviet leaders to reconsider their position.37
American media and Capitol Hill were nearly as apoplectic as Andropov. The New York Times called it “a pipe dream,” while the Chicago Sun-Times said Reagan’s speech was “an appalling disservice.” Liberals were incredulous, seeing that the idea of missile defense represented a new frontier for the arms race. But the dismay was not limited to liberals. Senate Budget Committee chairman Pete Domenici was livid, according to David Stockman, because missile defense represented a potentially significant increase in defense spending at a time when Senate Republicans were trying to hold the line against cutting the Pentagon’s budget. (And Stockman didn’t like SDI either.)
Senator Ted Kennedy and other Democrats thought they had hit on an effective ridicule for the idea by dubbing it “Star Wars.”38 It is questionable whether attempting to denigrate Reagan’s idea by associating it with the most popular movie franchise in history was an effective tactic. Even as common-sense Americans understood Luke Skywalker and the Force to be fantasy, at the same time Americans like audacious imagination. SDI, by whatever name, polled very strongly after Reagan elevated it to the front burner of American public discourse. The idea should not have come as a surprise to anyone who had paid attention to Reagan or to the signals his administration had been giving off since before they arrived in Washington. Reagan had prominently criticized the ABM Treaty and professed support for ballistic missile defense in the 1970s. The 1980 Republican platform had called for a renewal of ballistic missile defense. Cap Weinberger had brought up the subject of reviving such defenses in his Senate confirmation hearings in 1981.
Reagan’s introduction of missile defense is nowadays considered a political and diplomatic masterstroke that contributed significantly to the arms reduction breakthroughs of the late 1980s and the eventual end of the Cold War. However, the ultimate irony of Reagan’s grand conception of SDI was that it arguably set back progress toward near-term deployment of a partial, practical missile defense system. A close reading of Reagan’s March 23 speech shows that he never directly claimed that an impenetrable shield for the whole nation could be built. (That would come later; in a 1986 speech, Reagan would lay out the possibility that SDI “might one day enable us to put in space a shield that missiles could not penetrate, a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from the rain.”) But his capacious description of the initiative made that implication inescapable. Calling it “a vision of the future that offers hope,” Reagan asked: “What if free people could be secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they could reach our own soil or that of our allies? I know it is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century…. I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” (emphasis added). Even more disorienting was Reagan’s subsequent suggestion that he would be willing to share missile defense technology with the Soviet Union in the fullness of time.39 What was this?
This was not at all what the Joint Chiefs and the advocates of missile defense had in mind. The Pentagon wanted a point defense for America’s ballistic missile arsenal that would complicate Soviet strategic planning. But what began as a gambit to help the MX missile, blunt the momentum of the freeze movement, and create a bargaining chip for arms negotiations became a much larger thing in Reagan’s hands. Frances FitzGerald’s account of the SDI story nails it: “The President surely saw what would have been obvious to anyone in his position: You can’t tell the American people that you will make them half safe.”40 And so the idea of an effective missile defense to bolster deterrence had morphed into a program that sought perfect missile defense to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle.
This meant that the technical requirements for a comprehensive missile defense system were increased by orders of magnitude. By saying that the task might take “decades,” Reagan transformed strategic defense from a near-term deployment project using off-the-shelf technology of proven effectiveness to a research program that sought to anticipate and conquer all possible Soviet countermeasures that might be devised over a similarly long time horizon. There is no surer way of slowing a new government initiative than to turn it into a research project.
Although neither Reagan nor his advisers ever said anything about devising a system that would be fully seamless against Soviet missiles, the Pentagon panel appointed after Reagan’s speech to scope out SDI research and development chose an overall effectiveness target of 99.75 percent. In a manner that aped the arms control process, the national debate over SDI transformed quickly from a political and strategic debate into a largely technical debate. The air was thick with arcane discussion of possible Soviet counter-measures such as decoy warheads, reflective missile coatings, spinning rockets, and so forth. SDI research became the ideal means to throw up political and bureaucratic roadblocks to the actual deployment of a system, even though several aspects of effective missile defense were feasible at the time.41 The Office of Technology Assessment issued a report concluding that the prospects for effective missile defense were “so remote that it should not serve as the basis for public expectations or national policy.” Opponents of SDI in Congress used the technical debate to constrict appropriations for the program. Reagan himself would later acquiesce to some of the delaying tactics of the bureaucracy, leading SDI supporter Angelo Codevilla to compare Reagan to Stanley Baldwin.
The technical debate obscured the fact that the root of liberal outrage was that Reagan was challenging arms control orthodoxy.42 Questioning the doctrine of nuclear deterrence was, Reagan aide David Abshire said, “like a Christian questioning the Trinity.”43 “The opponents of SDI,” Colin Powell said later, “did not want us to aggressively pursue the research because, Lord forbid, we might be able to do it, in which case all of their thinking about mutual assured destruction would be down the tubes.”44 That the Soviet Union was aggressively pursuing its own missile defense program, and was obviously alarmed at Reagan’s SDI announcement, seemed to have little or no effect on Reagan’s critics, though it was usually a debate-ending rejoinder to ask (as Reagan often did), “If SDI can’t possibly work, why are the Soviets so worried about it?”
In fact Reagan’s speech deeply shook the Soviets. Andropov, hospitalized at the time of the speech, summoned his top aides to his bedside, where he worried that Reagan’s initiative might mean that “[t]he USSR will just stop being a superpower.” Soviets said missile defense as Reagan described it was not technically feasible, but Andropov looked down the road:
It looks like it can’t be done now as such a system can be broken by various means. However, in 10 to 15 years’ time the situation might change. But what if not in 10 to 15 years, but in five years? One can’t set hopes upon the forecasted time…. The situation is too serious, and I am not going to disregard both of the possible scenarios, even the possibility to create an efficient anti-missile defense system. Irrespective of the fact of whether the system is practicable or not, it is a real factor in today’s U.S. policies. And we can’t ignore it.45
While the technical debate over SDI’s feasibility would rage on for the rest of Reagan’s presidency, few at the time perceived that it was a political masterstroke. Christopher Hitchens noted that SDI “had the effect of making liberal noises about a nuclear ‘freeze’ seem tinny and irrelevant.”46 It was awkward for the Left to oppose defending the homeland from foreign missile attack.
Liberal peace activists and the media wasted no time looking for a way to put Reagan back on the defensive. The ideal media sensation came to hand when a ten-year-old Maine schoolgirl, Samantha Smith, wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov expressing her worry about “Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war.” The Soviet propaganda machine made the most of it, releasing a supposed personal reply from Andropov in April that included contrivances such as “It seems to me, and I take it from your letter, that you are a courageous and honest girl, resembling in some way Becky, Tom Sawyer’s friend from the well-known book by your compatriot Mark Twain. All kids in our country, boys and girls alike, know and love this book.” Andropov concluded the letter with an invitation for Smith to make an all-expense-paid two-week trip to the Soviet Union so she could see firsthand how peaceful they were. “It was almost as if,” the Omaha World-Herald observed, “Andropov had taken a line from ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.’”
Andropov’s transparent gesture propelled Smith into instant celebrity status. Print and TV network reporters descended upon Smith’s hometown of Manchester and set up a stakeout outside her home. New York Times senior foreign correspondent John Burns filed several stories, and People magazine produced its usual spread. Smith was booked on the Tonight show with Johnny Carson (twice), the Today show with Jane Pauley, and Nightline with Ted Koppel. Reporters from France, England, Australia, Bulgaria, and Germany rang up for telephone interviews with the schoolgirl “diplomat,” as the media called her. There was talk of nominating her for the Nobel Peace Prize. The media reported that Smith had sent a letter to Reagan as well, but it did not yield a White House invitation.47 The subtext of most stories was incredulity that Reagan couldn’t grasp the wisdom of a ten-year-old girl that was perfectly obvious to the adolescents in the news media. Only a few media accounts acknowledged the plain truth of the matter—that the Soviet Union was using Smith as a propaganda gesture.48
Along with her parents—and a media contingent of sixty-eight—Smith made her two-week trip to the Soviet Union in July. ABC World News Tonight sent Sam Donaldson to report on Smith’s visit to a youth camp and Red Square, though a hoped-for audience with Andropov never came off because of the Soviet leader’s ill-health. Soviet spokesman Vladimir Pozner, a fixture on American television in the 1980s (especially The Phil Donahue Show), gleefully announced that “there are many Soviet citizens who have written and who write to President Reagan. He has chosen not to reply which is, of course, his prerogative.”49 Smith returned home and dutifully reported that the Soviets were peace-loving people.
The story didn’t end there, and it didn’t end happily. The Today Show had Smith on for an encore where she challenged Ken Adelman on U.S. military spending. She addressed an international youth conference in Japan. A book project was hatched. She hosted a ninety-minute TV show in 1984, Samantha Smith Goes to Washington, in which she interviewed presidential hopefuls. But in 1985, on her way back home from London, where she had been filming a TV sitcom, Smith and her father were killed in a plane crash. Smith is remembered as a symbol of youthful idealism; CBS News offered a retrospective on her as recently as 2004. It is just as easy to see her as a victim of the media’s insatiable appetite for instant celebrity and sentimental story lines.
* * *
REAGAN COMPLETED THE trifecta of outrages against liberal dogma in April when he broke his long silence on another contentious point of his foreign policy—Central America. Congressional opposition to Reagan’s Central America policy was rising as the initial Boland Amendment compromise on aid to the Nicaraguan Contras was unraveling. Nearly every congressional committee appearance by administration foreign policy principals was contentious or inflammatory—even behind closed doors and away from the cameras. With the administration unable to speak directly and publicly about its ostensibly covert support for the Contras, the liberal and leftist opposition was free to mount an unanswered attack against the Contras along with propaganda favorable to the Sandinistas. As Lou Cannon put it, “The contras were introduced to the American people by those who opposed their existence rather than by Reagan.”50
By coincidence Pope John Paul II had visited Central America in March, where a dramatic confrontation with the Sandinistas provided fresh evidence of the ideological character of the Nicaraguan regime. The Pope had previously told the three Catholic clergy serving in the Nicaraguan government that they had to relinquish either their government posts or their holy orders, but the three, thoroughly infused with Marxist liberation theology, pointedly refused. The Pope confronted one of the recalcitrant clergymen at the arrival ceremony at the Managua airport, and a photo of the Pope wagging his finger in reproach appeared prominently in the media around the world. More notable was the heckling the Pope endured during a large open-air Mass later in the day. The Sandinistas had placed their supporters close to the altar, and when the Pope began to criticize liberation theology in his sermon, the Sandinista mob began to shout while the sound engineer turned down the Pope’s microphone. As millions in the region watched on live television, John Paul angrily shouted “Silencio!” and managed to regain a measure of control. “Millions were shocked at the vulgarity of Sandinista misbehavior,” John Paul’s biographer George Weigel wrote; the Sandinista claim that the heckling had been a spontaneous reaction was “a clumsy lie.”51 The Pope’s rough treatment was an example of the routine harassment of Catholic clergy who didn’t fall into line supporting the Sandinistas.
As Nicaragua festered, further American aid to El Salvador was in jeopardy. Congress had required that aid be contingent upon the State Department’s certifying at six-month intervals that El Salvador was making progress on human rights and other political reforms. Progress was halting, to say the least, amidst the pressure from the extreme Left and Right in the beleagured nation. “What this amounted to,” Shultz rightly complained, “was congressional micromanagement of the U.S. economic and security assistance.” The uncertainty over the U.S. commitment was making the Salvadoran government tentative in its own actions; if the United States might pull the plug (as it had in Vietnam), Salvadoran commanders figured, then they had better conserve ammunition. Critics in Washington predictably argued that American military assistance “was not being used.” American military advisers in El Salvador passed word back to the Pentagon that the military situation was deteriorating. The Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that the guerilla insurgency might succeed in toppling the government by the end of the year.
Beset by political opposition, the Reagan administration was racked with infighting over Central American policy. The National Security Council and the Pentagon wanted to increase the number of American military advisers in El Salvador from the current 55 to 160 or more, and step up covert action against Nicaragua. The State Department thought this looked like the same slippery slope as the Vietnam analogy, and favored instead a two-track approach that would seek regional negotiations involving all the nations of Central America while military assistance and covert action continued. The cooler heads in the State Department (which included Shultz) worried that a confrontational policy in Nicaragua would lose the already tenuous congressional support, but hardliners in the White House accused State of having an appeasement mentality. Shultz and National Security Adviser William Clark bickered often (“Bill Clark was very difficult for me to deal with,” Shultz said of this period). The divisiveness was so severe that when, in February, UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick traveled to Central America, delivering a personal letter from Reagan to the various heads of state communicating Reagan’s resolve to contain Nicaragua and stabilize El Salvador, the State Department cabled ambassadors in the region that she should be ignored.52
By the spring Reagan had come around to the State Department’s two-track policy. On April 27, he went before a joint session of Congress to give his first major speech on Central America. Reagan explained the significance of Central America in strategic terms, noting that El Salvador was closer to Texas than Texas was to Massachusetts, and that two-thirds of America’s foreign trade passed through the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. He said, “The Caribbean Basin is a magnet for adventurism,” and he mentioned a place that would become more familiar a few months later—the tiny island nation of Grenada, where a large new military airfield was being built.
Reagan went on to describe in detail Nicaragua’s substantial military buildup and active role in the subversion of its neighbors, though he did not, significantly, mention the Contras by name or U.S. support of their efforts. He praised the progress of democracy and reform in El Salvador amidst the ruinous tactics of the guerillas. “The goal of the professional guerilla movements in Central America,” Reagan bluntly summarized, “is as simple as it is sinister: to destabilize the entire region from the Panama Canal to Mexico.”
But before laying out the administration’s request for additional military and development aid to go along with a push for negotiations, Reagan felt it necessary to disavow any intention of deposing the Nicaraguan government (“We do not seek its overthrow”) and to address directly the Vietnam syndrome: “Now, before I go any further, let me say to those who invoke the memory of Vietnam, there is no thought of sending American combat troops to Central America.” This represented a necessary rhetorical gesture against the relentless liberal refrain that Reagan wouldn’t be happy until American troops were fighting in the jungles of Central America.
The concession to liberal opinion was counterbalanced with a pointed appeal to liberalism’s old Cold War tradition. Reagan restated the Truman Doctrine and associated his outlook with that of the thirty-third president:
President Truman’s words are as apt today as they were in 1947, when he, too, spoke before a joint session of the Congress: “At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternate ways of life. The choice is not too often a free one…. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures….” The countries of Central America are smaller than the nations that prompted President Truman’s message. But the political and strategic stakes are the same. Will our response—economic, social, military—be as appropriate and successful as Mr. Truman’s bold solutions to the problems of postwar Europe?
The irony of invoking the Truman Doctrine was deliberate. Truman’s 1947 speech was highly controversial at the time but had the effect of flummoxing Republicans, who were divided between traditional isolationists and the more commercially minded internationalists. Reagan turned this circumstance on its head, as it was now liberals and Democrats who, in the aftermath of Vietnam, were bitterly divided over foreign policy.
This division was laid bare in the immediate sequel to Reagan’s speech. Senator Christopher Dodd gave the official Democratic response, in which he demonstrated that the Vietnam syndrome held him and much of his party in thrall: “We cannot afford to found so important a policy on ignorance—and the painful truth is that many of our highest officials seem to know as little about Central America in 1983 as we knew about Indochina in 1963…. [I]t is a proven prescription for picking a loser. The American people know that we have been down this road before and that it only leads to a dark tunnel of endless intervention.” Dodd proved himself fully credulous over the Salvadoran guerillas’ willingness to negotiate for “power sharing,” which had always been a formula for slow-motion surrender to Leninist dictatorship. (The liberal advocates of negotiations for power sharing in El Salvador curiously never suggested that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua consider power sharing.)
But Dodd’s response didn’t go down well with some Democrats. House majority leader Jim Wright of Texas said Dodd’s language was “florid,” “hyperbolic,” “inappropriate,” and “as destructive as the McGovern view of Vietnam.” “It is a dangerous exercise for people to club the president in a delicate matter of foreign policy,” Wright added, though, as we shall see, this is exactly what Wright himself would later do after he succeeded Tip O’Neill as Speaker of the House in 1987. Wright was especially skillful at talking out both sides of his mouth about Central America, and though he supported Reagan’s aid package to El Salvador, he voted with most House Democrats a week later to cut off aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.
Wright’s straddle exposed the fissure through the heart of the Democratic Party, which was partly along generational lines. Those Democrats like Dodd who had come of age during or after Vietnam rejected the containment consensus of the Cold War, while older Democrats who came of age during World War II and the early years of the Cold War were much more likely to see matters as Reagan did. The most significant of the latter group was Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson, who had been saying publicly for months that the subversion of Mexico, and the concomitant problems this would pose for the United States on its border, was the object of Soviet policy in Central America. Jackson told the New York Times in March, “Mexico is the ultimate objective of those forces seeking to destabilize countries in Central America.” The same day he appeared on ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley, pointing out that with a revolutionary Mexico “any U.S. government would be faced with the demands to bring our troops home from Europe and to reduce our commitment in the Pacific.”
Although Reagan’s televised speech boosted public approval of his Central America policy substantially, that summer the Senate joined the House in voting down further Contra aid and approved aid to El Salvador at only about half the level he sought. Reagan’s policy was in trouble, and Jackson thought he had a solution. He suggested that Reagan attempt to reforge a consensus by setting up a twelve-member bipartisan commission on Central America policy. Reagan jumped at the idea, but startled observers across the political spectrum by recruiting Henry Kissinger to be the commission’s chairman. The Left issued its usual complaints about Kissinger, but so did the Right. Senator Jesse Helms said, “There may be someone in this broad land further down on my list of choices, but I can’t think of anyone.” At the very least the establishment of the Kissinger Commission, which was directed to deliver its recommendations the following February, kicked the can down the road for a few months.
* * *
OVERSEAS, MEANWHILE, AMERICA’S key NATO allies were going through an equally rancorous debate as the fall missile deployment date approached. “Every week there is new evidence that the West European leaders might be wavering,” Strobe Talbott reported in Time magazine in early 1983. “If NATO were forced to postpone deployment, either because of the German election results or a further breakdown in NATO solidarity, then the game would almost certainly be over, and the U.S.S.R. would have won the whole pot.”53
West Germany was the key: if it backed out, other nervous NATO governments would likely follow, calling for a postponement that would give the Soviets the upper hand in the Geneva negotiations and little incentive to reach any agreement. As chancellor, Helmut Schmidt was one of the key instigators of the original NATO decision to deploy missiles, but elements of his party, the center-Left Social Democrats (SPD), began pushing to rescind the missile deployment. This weakening of SPD resolve proved to be Schmidt’s undoing: in the fall of 1982 the small but pivotal Free Democratic Party (FDP), Schmidt’s coalition partner in the government, removed its support for Schmidt and entered into coalition with Helmut Kohl’s center-Right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), making Kohl the new chancellor. However, the coalition had a razor thin majority of just seven votes in the Bundestag, and in January 1983 Kohl called an election for March, explicitly seeking a mandate from West German voters for the NATO missile deployment.
In the campaign that followed the Soviet Union made clear that it preferred an SPD victory (the SPD party platform now officially embraced neutralism and endorsed the Soviet negotiating position over Euromissiles). “In the year from November 1982 to November 1983 the Soviet Union pulled all available levers of West German politics,” wrote Jeffery Herf, the preeminent American observer of West German politics during this crucial period.54 The Soviet press took the unsubtle line that an SPD victory was necessary to save “Europeans from a nuclear Auschwitz.” Soviet officials including Andropov and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko issued open threats of additional missile deployments if the NATO deployment went forward. Vice President Bush visited West Germany in the middle of the campaign to offer tacit support for Kohl and was greeted with thousands of peace protestors; when Soviet foreign minister Gromyko turned up for a visit, there were, tellingly, no peace protests putting symmetrical pressure on the other superpower.
The missile question dominated the election campaign, sparking several wrenching debates in the Bundestag and among West German elites that were extraordinary for their direct confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past and for their arguments over fundamental views of the causes of war and peace. (In all, the Bundestag debated the missile deployment thirty-seven times between 1979 and the fall of 1983.) Leading figures argued bitterly about the lessons of the 1938 Munich agreement between Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, the intractable nature of totalitarian governments, and the purported moral equivalence of the United States and Soviet Union. Novelist Günter Grass and other German Leftists compared the missile policy to the 1943 Wannsee Conference where the Nazi “final solution” was decided.55 Kohl bluntly charged that the SPD was a security risk for West Germany, showing that the fault lines of West German politics resembled those of American politics.
Kohl’s coalition won a substantial victory on March 6, capturing 45.8 percent of the vote, which along with the FDP’s 6.9 percent provided an ample margin of sixty seats in the Bundestag. Washington breathed a sigh of relief. “The election of March 6 was a turning point in postwar history,” Jeffrey Herf argues. “The outcome was a defeat for the Soviet Union’s diplomatic offensive and for missile opponents in West Germany.”56 Freed from the responsibility of having to govern, however, the SPD moved further to the left in the aftermath of the election. Opposition to the missile deployment, now defeated at the ballot box, would become more vocal and move to the streets. Kohl’s government braced itself for a “hot autumn,” and refused to disclose publicly where the new American missiles would be based.
A similar debate occurred in Britain at the same time. In April Thatcher called a new election for early June. The opposition Labour Party announced its fifteen-thousand-word campaign program, “New Hope for England.” It called for unilateral nuclear disarmament, which meant canceling the deployment of U.S. cruise missiles, along with steep cuts in defense spending and the renationalization of British industry. Several political observers in the U.K. dubbed the Labour platform “the longest suicide note in history.” A letter to the London Times by a prominent university physicist arguing in favor of not merely disarmament but outright surrender to the Soviet Union was debated seriously for weeks. Thatcher, riding high in the aftermath of the successful Falkland Islands campaign the year before, had her Conservative Party issue its own election manifesto, reaffirming without equivocation her reformist philosophy.
In between the West German and British elections there occurred the most important G-7 summit of the decade in Williamsburg, Virginia, in May. Despite being in the closing weeks of an election campaign, Thatcher attended anyway. Although the summit focused on economic interests, it was decided to issue a strong resolution reiterating Western resolve for the missile deployment. The French and the Canadians objected to the strong draft statement that the United States and Britain proposed; Canada’s Pierre Trudeau advocated “speaking more softly” to the Soviet Union. This prompted one of Reagan’s pencil-throwing gestures (it was always said that the way to detect if Reagan was angry was if he threw his pencil or his reading glasses down on the table), and Thatcher spoke sharply to Trudeau. “I thought at one point Margaret was going to order Pierre to go stand in a corner,” Reagan wrote in his diary. When Kohl proposed compromise language that Thatcher found weak, the Iron Lady showed her legendary spine, telling Kohl: “I’m in the middle of an election. I bent over backwards for your election. Now it’s your turn. I have taken a strong position, and I want a strong statement here.”57 French president François Mitterrand proposed new compromise language that Reagan and Thatcher found surprisingly strong, and with Mitterrand’s course correction Trudeau’s opposition wilted, but the Williamsburg summit made clear that the Western alliance remained solid on all fronts.58 The Soviets noticed; at a Politburo meeting a few days later, Moscow Communist Party secretary Viktor Grishin complained, “The resolution of the ‘Big Seven’ that they will put the missiles in Europe has an offensive character.”
Two weeks later Thatcher crushed Labour in the election, gaining for her party the largest parliamentary majority in forty years. It was a good omen for Reagan as he pondered his own reelection prospects a year ahead.
* * *
SUCH WAS THE state of play as Reagan left Washington at the end of June for the first of three summer trips to his California ranch. Summer passed with its usual languor in Washington, with only the semicomic interruption of Interior Secretary James Watt trying to ban the Beach Boys from playing on the Mall on July 4 because, according to Watt, rock and roll music attracts “an undesirable element.” Instead Watt’s decision attracted the undesirable attention of Beach Boys fan Nancy Reagan, and the ban dissolved into the Potomac humidity. Reagan good-naturedly sent Watt a plaster model of a foot with a hole in it. Watt would be gone from Interior before the fall leaves changed, following the September announcement of an Interior Department advisory committee in which Watt violated the pieties of diversity in describing his appointees: “I have a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” Crude and obsolete language, to be sure, but Watt’s real sin was transgressing the chief dialectical convention of modern liberalism, which is that while we are to be always conscious of race and ethnicity, we are never to be explicit or direct about it. Watt was explicit. For that he had to go. Even Gerald Ford and Bob Dole said so.
Otherwise the summer of 1983 passed without major incident. Pioneer 10, a U.S. space probe launched in 1972, became the first man-made object to leave the solar system, while astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Lab announced the first direct evidence of a solar system around another star. Sally Ride became the first female astronaut to fly in the space shuttle in late June, followed by the first black astronaut, Guy Bluford, in August. Libya invaded Chad again, and the United States responded by holding military exercises in the Egyptian desert. Iran and Iraq escalated their three-year-old war, with heavy losses on both sides. Poland finally lifted martial law.
The media tried but largely failed to make hay out of the controversy over the stolen 1980 Carter campaign debate briefing book that came to light in the spring.59 At a mid-July press conference, Reagan was asked: “Would you deny the possibility that all of this is little more than Washington Post-National Enquirer-style summer theater?” Reagan: “Oh, you’re tempting me.”
On July 1 the third and final phase of Reagan’s income tax cut went into effect. Some 1.1 million new jobs had been created through mid-year, and the pace of job growth was accelerating, with 345,000 new jobs generated in June. In July automakers reported a 48 percent jump in sales over the previous year. A new $2 billion grain deal with the evil empire was unveiled, and three weeks later Reagan approved the sale of Caterpillar pipe-laying equipment to the Soviets. In August, 675,000 unionized telephone workers went on strike against AT&T, then on the eve of its historic breakup. There was little disruption in phone service, and the strike was settled in three weeks. National Public Radio, facing bankruptcy, received a bailout from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Unknown to everyone including most of Reagan’s senior staff, Reagan sent a handwritten letter to Andropov in July, in response to a letter he had received from Andropov in which the Soviet leader expressed the desire to eliminate the nuclear threat and improve relations. In the spring Reagan had indicated a new flexibility in arms control, offering as a concession a proposal for an “interim agreement” by which the United States would reduce its planned European missile deployment if the Soviet Union would agree to reduce its intermediate-range warheads to an equal number. The Soviets rejected it, insisting that the independent British and French nuclear warhead arsenals be included in any arms deal. The Geneva arms control talks adjourned on July 14 and were scheduled to resume on September 6.
However, Andropov’s letter encouraged Reagan. After months of harsh anti-Reagan rhetoric from the Soviets, it appeared possible they were turning a new page. “Historically,” Reagan wrote back, “our predecessors have made better progress when communicating has been private and candid. If you wish to engage in such communication you will find me ready. I await your reply.” In other words, Reagan was ready for a summit.
Andropov didn’t grasp the opening, replying a month later with a repetition of an offer to redeploy Soviet missiles that the United States had already rejected. Reagan was disappointed but in a conciliatory mood, according to Shultz, as the president returned to his California ranch to relax for the last few weeks of summer. By degrees it appeared superpower relations were easing, with the prospect of a summit becoming more likely. Late in the spring, in the aftermath of his private meeting with Dobrynin, Reagan wrote to a friend that “we have more contact with the Soviets than anyone is aware of and whether to have a meeting or not is on the agenda at both ends of the line.”60 “There is a faint hint of tango music in the air,” Strobe Talbott wrote in Time. “Neither side,” Newsweek reported on August 29, “wanted to spoil a perceptible thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations.”
* * *
THE AIR OF incipient comity in late summer was shattered on August 31, when midafternoon Washington time a Korean Airlines 747, Flight 007, en route from New York to Seoul, disappeared from air traffic control radar screens in the Far East. It took air traffic controllers and American intelligence agencies several hours to piece together what had happened. By 10:30 p.m., American intelligence was growing more certain that the unthinkable had occurred: the Soviets had shot the civilian airplane out of the sky. Sixty Americans, including a congressman, were among the 269 passengers. Bill Clark telephoned Reagan at the ranch with the initial unconfirmed report of the incident. Reagan, true to form in a crisis, reacted calmly, telling Clark that the United States should be careful not to overreact to what was arguably an atrocity akin to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. “Let’s pray that it’s not true,” he told Clark. When Reagan received confirmation the next morning—on another telephone call from Clark during a horseback ride—he immediately packed and returned to Washington.
In the course of its overnight flight after refueling in Alaska, KAL 007 apparently strayed off course over Soviet territory near military installations on Sakhalin Island. How and why KAL 007 veered off course remains controversial. In those days polar routes to the Far East had to take a circuitous southern zigzag to avoid Soviet territory, though this required more jet fuel and added to the length of the flight. Did the Korean pilots deliberately cut corners in an attempt to save time and fuel? Unlikely; the Soviets had forced down another wayward Korean Airlines 747 in 1978, killing two passengers in the process. The leading theory is pilot error—that the pilots misprogrammed the in-flight navigational aids and the autopilot upon taking off from Alaska and never noticed they were off course.61 Conspiracy fetishists and grassy-knollers on the Left, such as Seymour Hersh, claimed that the Soviets confused KAL 007 with an American spy plane (or that KAL 007 was itself on an espionage mission); U.S. spy planes—none of them 747s—had deliberately approached Soviet airspace in the region around this time, and there had been a spy flight that night, code-named Cobra Ball. But Cobra Ball was hundreds of miles away from the KAL 007 flight track, and U.S. intelligence was able to demonstrate that the Soviets had tracked the Cobra Ball flight and KAL 007 separately. In fact, the Cobra Ball flight was back on the ground in Alaska by the time the Soviets fired on KAL 007.
American intelligence intercepts proved that the Soviets tracked the plane for more than two hours, and that the fighter aircraft that finally fired on the 747 observed the plane from a variety of close positions for about twenty minutes. The pilot later claimed that Soviet airmen were not trained to recognize civilian aircraft, though the 747, with its distinctive hump, is one of the most easily recognized airplanes in the world, and moreover the Korean plane had its civilian running lights on. Most damning were the intelligence intercepts of the pilot receiving orders from the ground to fire on the plane: “Invader has violated state border. Destroy target.” It was later learned that the order had been cleared with senior defense officials in Moscow, the head of whom was subsequently promoted.
As international reaction reached a fever pitch—Reagan alternately called the act an “atrocity,” a “crime against humanity,” and a “massacre”—for five days the Soviets denied that they had shot down the plane. A few cool heads in the Kremlin wanted to admit that a mistake had been made and apologize for the loss of life, but Andropov, who was hospitalized at the time, rejected the idea. Faced with this intransigence, the Reagan administration took the unusual decision of releasing the intelligence intercepts of the communications between the ground and the Soviet pilot. Reagan played a portion of the Russian-language tape in a televised address (much of which Reagan wrote himself), dramatically narrating the events it described. Presented with this embarrassing proof, the Soviets retreated to the line that KAL 007 had been a spy plane and an American provocation, and therefore justifiably shot down.62 (There was one other indirect casualty of the KAL 007 incident: Senator Scoop Jackson died on September 1 of a heart attack a few hours after blasting the Soviet Union for its “dastardly, barbaric act against humanity” at a Seattle press conference. Jackson had been in poor health, but it was hard to dismiss this cold warrior’s sudden death as a pure coincidence.)
The dilemma for Reagan was what concrete steps should be taken in reaction. Weinberger and others wanted Reagan to cancel further arms talks and Shultz’s imminent Madrid meeting with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko. Don Regan wanted economic sanctions or a boycott; at the very least, the recent grain sales deal should be cancelled. Members of Congress wanted a mass expulsion of Soviet diplomats based in the United States, many of whom were KGB spies anyway. Reagan didn’t like any of these options and settled for a number of weak-sounding measures such as slowing cultural exchanges and extending limits on landing rights for Soviet civilian airliners that had been in place since the Polish crisis the year before.
Many conservatives were not happy. “Conservatives Dismayed by Limp Response to Soviets,” read the Human Events front-page headline in mid-September. “The President,” Human Events blasted, “for whatever reason, is acting for all the world like Ramsey Clark.” New York Times columnist William Safire said Reagan “has sounded off more fiercely than Theodore Roosevelt and has acted more pusillanimously than Jimmy Carter.” The Washington Times lamented that Reagan “did no more than pelt the swaggering offender with the adjectives of pious outrage.”63 George Will wrote: “Thank God it is not December or some dunce would suggest dimming the national Christmas tree.” A Gallup poll showed a small majority of the public thought Reagan hadn’t been tough enough, though, in typically cognitively dissonant fashion, large majorities opposed cutting off arms talks or instituting sanctions. Reagan was defensive: “I know that some of our critics have sounded off that somehow we haven’t exacted enough vengeance. Well, vengeance isn’t the name of the game…. Short of going to war, what would they have us do?”
States and private entities undertook a number of anti-Soviet steps of their own: Ohio and New Hampshire banned Russian vodka from their state liquor stores, and in California longshoremen refused to unload Russian timber from a freighter. Other symbolic steps were more colorful. One video game operator changed the display to show as the target “Andropov, Communist mutant from outer space.”
Shultz kept his previously scheduled meeting with Gromyko in Madrid on September 7, and it was one of his finest moments, as it prompted the first tiny crack in Soviet diplomatic intransigence. By prior agreement Shultz was to host Gromyko at the American ambassador’s residence, but when Gromyko’s limousine pulled up, in front of a gallery of several hundred reporters and photographers, there was only a low-level State Department aide to greet Gromyko at the door. Shultz was pointedly absent. The meeting table was left spare, with not even a glass of water for Gromyko. Shultz opened, as he deliberately did in every meeting with Gromyko, with a particular case of Soviet human rights abuse (in this instance, jailed dissident Anatoly Sharansky) as well as KAL 007. Gromyko insisted that he would not discuss either subject, and rose from the table as if to walk out. Shultz rose from the table but made no effort to persuade Gromyko to stay; to the contrary, he called Gromyko’s bluff: “Fine—go,” Shultz said sharply.
Gromyko remained standing and kept talking; he didn’t want the blame for having ended the meeting abruptly. At length he backed down and sat down. No real progress was made in the two hours of acrimonious back-and-forth that followed, and after the meeting ended Shultz went before the media outside and said, practically before Gromyko’s limousine was out of the driveway, that the Soviet’s responses were “totally unacceptable.” Shultz’s veteran State Department interpreter told him that in nearly two decades of participating in high-level meetings with Soviet officials, he had never seen such a blunt encounter.64
With Gromyko scheduled to appear at the United Nations two weeks after the KAL 007 incident, New York governor Mario Cuomo and New Jersey governor Tom Kean denied permission for Soviet planes to land at civilian airports in either state, much to the annoyance of Shultz and the State Department, which relished the thought of watching Gromyko squirm in his seat as the United States played the tape of the incident in the UN General Assembly. Instead, Gromyko cancelled his scheduled UN appearance, blasting the United States for not living up to its obligations as host of the United Nations. The United States offered to let Gromyko land at an air force base in New Jersey; the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Charles Lichenstein, sarcastically added, “We won’t even shoot it down if it strays from its designated path.” Gromyko declined.
Lichenstein’s sequel cheered conservatives. If the UN membership thought the United States was inadequately discharging its host duties, Lichenstein said, the United Nations was welcome to leave for a more accommodating locale: “We will be at the dockside, bidding you a fond farewell as you set off into the sunset.” Both the State Department and White House press secretary Larry Speakes disavowed Lichenstein’s off-the-cuff comment and said it did not reflect American policy, but Reagan, in a typical let-Reagan-be-Reagan moment, defended it when queried by a reporter: “I think the gentleman who spoke the other day had the hearty approval of most people in America in his suggestion that we weren’t asking anyone to leave, but if they choose to leave, goodbye…. Maybe all those delegates should have six months in the United Nations meetings in Moscow and then six months in New York, and it would give them the opportunity to see two ways of life. And we’d permit them.” On Capitol Hill, twenty-four House Democrats sent a letter to Reagan demanding that Lichenstein be fired because of his remarks.
Reagan’s measured reaction to KAL 007 was shrewd. With this one rash act, the Soviets threw away three years’ worth of effort through the European peace movement to split the NATO alliance and prevent the Euromissile deployment. The Soviets’ uncompromising reaction further isolated them; in addition to their intransigence, they increased the intensity of their personal attacks on Reagan. Cartoonists in the state-controlled press had previously depicted Reagan as a six-shooter-toting cowboy; now they depicted him as Hitler and added swastikas to their images. At home liberal complaints about Reagan’s “evil empire” theme fell temporarily mute, and the incident blunted congressional opposition to Reagan’s next defense budget plan, especially the MX missile. Columnist Mary McGrory wondered whether Andropov was acting as “chairman of Reagan’s re-election committee.” A few liberals persisted in casting blame on the United States. George McGovern told the Washington Post: “We ought to be very thankful that this man Andropov seems to be a reasonable guy and somewhat restrained [given that] the Reagan-Weinberger approach is one of intense confrontation.”
Reagan’s restraint was in service of his larger object of achieving a genuine arms reduction deal, though he knew intuitively that such a breakthrough was now further away. In fact, a few weeks later Reagan offered new arms control proposals whose emphasis on flexibility represented a substantial concession to the Soviet negotiating position. He started using language of a “build-down” of nuclear arms. Andropov was not interested, this time rejecting Reagan’s entreaties with old-style anti-American vituperation. Reagan said to Shultz in mid-October, “If things get hotter and arms control remains an issue, maybe I should see Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.”65 Reagan had no idea just how much hotter things were going to get over the last two months of the year.
* * *
WHILE THE WORLD’S attention was focused on the KAL 007 incident and the imminent Euromissile deployment, the Middle East continued to fester. The United States remained deeply involved in Lebanon, working diplomatically to arrange a pullback of Israeli and Syrian troops dug in around Beirut, while simultaneously trying to mediate the various Lebanese factions. In April a powerful truck bomb at the U.S. embassy in Beirut had killed sixty-three (including seventeen Americans, among them eight CIA agents); construction to harden the embassy against just such an attack had not been completed. It was a rare occasion when Reagan’s political sense failed him; he compared the unfinished work to protect the embassy against terrorist attacks to a home-remodeling project that was behind schedule. U.S. intelligence quickly concluded that Iranian-backed terrorists, with help from Syria, were responsible for the bombing. Lou Cannon commented: “The destruction of the U.S. embassy was seen in retrospect as a signal that the holy war declared against America by Shiites in Iran four years earlier had been extended to Lebanon.”66 Reagan and his foreign policy team did not grasp this fact with sufficient seriousness.
Reagan disliked dealing with the Middle East, partly because it was a peripheral front in the Cold War, and partly because he didn’t understand the religious fault lines of the region. To William F. Buckley Reagan wrote in a letter: “Bill, the Middle East is a complicated place—well, not really a place, it’s more a state of mind. A disordered mind.”67 To another correspondent Reagan wrote at about the same time: “Sometimes I wonder if the Middle East was the cradle of the world’s three great religions because they needed religion more than any other spot on earth.”68
Reagan had floated a comprehensive Middle East peace plan in the fall of 1982 that for the first time included a U.S. endorsement for Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank. Even Jimmy Carter approved, but Yasir Arafat did not, so the plan withered, as have nearly all Middle East peace initiatives. In the spring of 1983 the United States brokered a formula between Israel and Lebanon for the withdrawal of Israeli forces. The deal was contingent on Syria withdrawing after Israel, and the State Department was naively confident that the Saudis would pressure Syria to go along. Fat chance; Syria not only gave a flat no but purposely humiliated the State Department by declaring Philip Habib, the U.S. Middle East envoy, to be persona non grata in Damascus. The Israelis didn’t want to wait for hell to freeze over to withdraw; their pullout over the summer left a vacuum in Beirut, which various indigenous and Syrian-backed militias rushed in to fill.
With Lebanon’s own armed forces weakened and split along religious lines, Reagan followed Shultz’s view that the contingent of American marines, supplemented by French and Italian forces, was necessary to keep the fragile peace in Beirut. Congress agreed, with Tip O’Neill providing important support in the House for a resolution authorizing the deployment for a further eighteen months under the terms of the constitutionally dubious War Powers Act. The irony of the Lebanon affair is that it was the supposed hard-liners around Reagan—especially Weinberger and Clark—who were most opposed to continued deployment of American forces in Lebanon. Weinberger and Clark began arguing for the redeployment of marines to ships offshore, which was a mere fig leaf for withdrawal.
The multiple diplomatic missions to Syria’s implacable Hafez Assad served only to increase tensions within the Reagan administration; Shultz and Bill Clark were clashing, with Deputy National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane (who had willy-nilly become Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East) caught in the middle. Assad concluded that the United States could be pushed out of Lebanon if the cost in blood was increased. Late in the summer, marines hunkered down in a vulnerable position as the Beirut airport began taking increasing fire from various militias now occupying the high ground that the Israelis had vacated. By degrees the American-led multinational contingent came to be seen less as a peacekeeping force than as an adjunct to the Lebanese government, whose Christian leader, Amin Gemayel, was not acceptable to many Muslim factions, let alone the Syrians. By mid-September, four marines had been killed and twenty-eight wounded from the constant hostile mortar and small-arms fire. The Reagan administration responded by authorizing air strikes and the presence of navy ships (including the World War II-era battleship New Jersey) to shell the hillside positions. With Pentagon military leaders increasingly uncomfortable—and intelligence analysts warning that the marines could be a target of terrorist attacks—Weinberger made the case for withdrawal to Reagan on October 18. Worried that precipitous American withdrawal would plunge Lebanon into chaos, Reagan demurred.
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LEBANON WAS NOT the only foreign crisis on Reagan’s mind. Even as Lebanon was festering, affairs involving the USSR-Cuba-Nicaragua axis reached a flash point on the flyspeck Caribbean island of Grenada, the scene of a bizarre and unlikely Marxist revolution that in 1979 had deposed the democratically elected government through a military coup.69 Reagan had been mentioning the tiny island ominously for more than a year, warning, for example, in an overlooked line of his March 1983 SDI speech: “On the small island of Grenada, at the southern end of the Caribbean chain, the Cubans, with Soviet financing and backing, are in the process of building an airfield with a 10,000 foot runway. Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended for? The Soviet-Cuban militarization of Grenada, in short, can only be seen as power projection into the region.” Shortly after this speech came an incident Reagan had mentioned in his April 27 speech on Central America policy: the Libyan transport plane, loaded with arms, that Brazil interdicted when the aircraft stopped to refuel en route to Nicaragua. The plane’s manifest said its cargo consisted of medical supplies, but Brazil’s inspectors found a planeload of arms. Reagan noted in his speech that had the Grenadian airfield been ready, the Libyan plane could have refueled there instead. This turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg: Grenada experienced occasional nighttime power outages that coincided with Soviet and Cuban ships unloading and distributing cargo to various locations on the tiny island.
The real worry over Grenada went unpublicized, however. Among the escalating war of words over the Euromissile deployment, the Soviets had threatened an analogous deployment if NATO went ahead. Cuba had been out of bounds since the 1962 agreement that ended the Cuban missile crisis, and Nicaragua was too risky as well as too valuable as a base for destabilizing the mainland of Central America. Might the Soviet Union deploy missiles to Grenada, hoping to trade them for the removal of our Euromissiles, just as they had bargained NATO missiles from Turkey in 1962? More than a few intelligence analysts thought the possibility plausible.70 A Mexican journalist, José Pérez Stuart, noted the presence of a KGB general and nearly a hundred Soviet technicians on the island in September. At the very least the United States thought it likely that the Soviets would deploy advanced MiG fighter planes to Grenada, which would fall short of a Cuban-missile-crisis-level provocation, but would still complicate the military posture of the region.
But a funny thing happened on the way to consolidating Grenada as a clone of Cuba and a base for the Soviets. In mid-October Grenada’s revolutionary Marxist leader Maurice Bishop was ousted in a coup led by an even more radical faction that thought Bishop’s Leninism was insufficiently pure. (Had there been doubts about Bishop’s fidelity to Marxist revolution?) Bishop had held a secret meeting with Bill Clark in Washington in the spring of 1983, where Clark attempted to persuade Bishop to move away from Cuba. Taking over for Bishop was the deputy prime minister, Bernard Coard, who seems to have learned his radical Marxism in Western universities, having attended Brandeis on a full scholarship, as well as the University of Sussex in Britain, which may help explain the unusual fervency of the Grenadian revolution. Castro was upset by Coard’s coup; he issued a head-turning public condemnation, calling Coard “the Pol Pot of the Caribbean.” News quickly filtered out that Coard had summarily executed Bishop and several of his cabinet ministers and political supporters by firing squad. Further chaos and a possible civil war were thought likely. The British governor-general on Grenada, Sir Paul Scoon, had gone into hiding, but managed to get out word of the deteriorating scene.
At the White House the concern turned from a possible Soviet missile intrigue to a more existential problem: the status and safety of American citizens on Grenada, particularly the several hundred American students who attended medical school on the island. Around the time of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979–80, the New Jewel Movement that had promulgated the original Grenadian revolution threatened to take American medical students as hostages, and why not, since it had proven so successful in Iran. Grenada refused American diplomatic requests to send an airplane or a passenger ship to evacuate American citizens. The NSC began making contingency plans for a military rescue operation, and a naval flotilla bound for Lebanon was diverted to the southern Caribbean just in case. When the Grenadian government refused a State Department request to send an envoy to see to the safety of American citizens, planning for a military intervention intensified.
As head of crisis management, Vice President Bush chaired the National Security Council meetings evaluating the situation. The State Department reported that neighboring Caribbean nations were extremely worried about Grenada and hoped for firm U.S. action, eventually asking the United States to support a military intervention. Bush and Weinberger were reluctant; Bush wanted to see if the United States could arrange some kind of multinational force that included other Latin American nations. Reagan rejected the idea, saying it would delay action and would likely leak out, eliminating the element of surprise. Shultz, significantly, was strongly in favor of intervening, which helped tip the deliberations of the NSC. But the decisive voice was Reagan’s. Shultz recalls Reagan asking: “What kind of country would we be if we refused to help small but steadfast democratic countries in our neighborhood to defend themselves against the threat of this kind of tyranny and lawlessness?”71 On Friday, October 21, it was tentatively decided to launch an invasion the following Tuesday, October 25.
To keep up the appearance of business as usual, Reagan and Shultz went on a previously scheduled weekend golf outing to Augusta, Georgia, while final planning for the invasion, code-named Operation Urgent Fury, quietly continued in Washington. In the early morning hours on Sunday came the awful news that a terrorist suicide truck bomb had blown up the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 marines—the largest loss of uniformed men since the Vietnam War. The enormous truck bomb packed the equivalent of twelve thousand pounds of TNT, making it one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. A simultaneous suicide bomber killed fifty-eight French soldiers two miles away. The Iranian-backed Hezbollah was undoubtedly behind the bombing; American intelligence noted that the Iranian embassy packed up and moved out within hours of the blast.
Reagan returned to Washington directly, where his advisers wondered whether to call off the Grenada invasion. The Beirut bombing was a hard blow emotionally for Reagan—he later called that Sunday “the worst day of my presidency”—but he was unwavering about the Grenada mission. Weinberger still opposed the invasion, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Reagan about the political fallout. It is impossible to overstate the extent to which the lingering shadow of Vietnam hung over the military leadership at this late date, despite Reagan’s forceful attitude and generous Pentagon budgets. John Poindexter, then deputy national security adviser, said, “We used to say that [Joint Chiefs chairman] General John Vessey was a charter member of the Vietnam Never Again Syndrome.” Admiral William Crowe, the chief of naval operations, said, “Anytime anyone has proposed the use of military force, Vietnam was right there, in the middle of the table.”72 Reagan told the Joint Chiefs to leave the politics to him. Mindful of the insufficient forces of Jimmy Carter’s Iranian hostage rescue fiasco in 1980, he ordered the Joint Chiefs to increase their forces. Reagan was suspicious that the so-called construction workers at the Grenada airport were well-trained Cuban soldiers.
On Monday evening Reagan summoned congressional leaders to the White House to inform them of the imminent action. Tip O’Neill said he understood the rationale but thought an invasion premature. He complained, “Mr. President, I have been informed but not consulted,” and left the White House family quarters in a huff, according to Shultz. (O’Neill would later briefly claim that “Grenada was really about Lebanon.”) House majority leader Jim Wright thought the situation didn’t yet merit the use of force. Democratic Senate leader Robert Byrd said he opposed the operation, and would say so once it became public. House GOP leader Bob Michel offered his strong support, but Senate GOP leader Howard Baker was surprisingly tepid, calling the operation “bad politics.” The president’s advisers were nervous; Reagan told them to relax: “You can always trust Americans.” Reagan also spoke by phone early in the evening with Margaret Thatcher, who was furious that the United States was taking preemptive action in a British Commonwealth territory.
In the ordinary sense Operation Urgent Fury was a walkover. American forces rolled up the Cuban soldiers—who were far more numerous, well trained, and well armed than expected—and seized control of the Point Salines airstrip and other key targets. But beneath the surface a number of fiascos rekindled doubt that the Pentagon had truly reformed itself amidst Reagan’s defense buildup or had learned from the Iranian hostage rescue debacle. Instead of a simple offensive, Operation Urgent Fury was unduly complicated, involving army Rangers, navy SEALs, marines, the Eighty-second Airborne Division, and Delta Force. Several of the discrete operations miscarried and were salvaged only by superior backup firepower from the air. Initial Delta Force and Ranger forces were pinned down in several locations, while a SEAL team assigned to rescue Governor-General Scoon was surrounded and trapped for nearly ten hours. There were problems with incompatible radios between units. In one notorious incident, a commander used a credit card to place a long-distance call over a public telephone to reach another American officer to request fire support. An American airplane mistakenly bombed a mental hospital, killing twenty-one patients. Overall intelligence was very poor; some army units had to land with photocopied tourist maps. The CIA had no presence on the island, a legacy of the deliberate shrinkage of the CIA’s clandestine service during the late 1970s. One advance SEAL reconnaissance team drowned at sea, while another had its raft motor fail, leaving it adrift far from land, depriving follow-on forces of crucial intelligence. The exact whereabouts of the American students, who were scattered at various locations, was not known, and U.S. forces had to improvise. All the students were safely secured eventually, but it could have ended badly. It took two days for U.S. forces to subdue the island. An after-action review later concluded that a stronger Cuban defense force might have thrown American forces back into the sea. Nineteen American soldiers were killed and 115 wounded.
As the Joint Chiefs expected, there was a political uproar at home. The news media were furious that they had been excluded from covering the operation and barred for several days from sending any reporters to Grenada. CBS News president Edward Royce complained: “We are saddened to bear witness to this new, unchecked censorship, leading to an off-the-record war.” NBC News anchor John Chancellor declared on air, “The American government is doing whatever it wants to without any representative of the American public watching what it is doing.” The Los Angeles Times huffed about “the public’s right to know.” Richard Nixon gamely commented that while news reporters indeed accompanied troops ashore on the D-Day landings in 1944, “[I]n those days the media was on our side.” Conservative columnist Joe Sobran remarked on the good sense of the White House; after all, he wrote, you don’t take the enemy with you on your military ventures. The public overwhelmingly agreed; letters to news organizations ran as high as eight to one in favor of excluding the media.
In a typical display of moral confusion, the New York Times editorialized that “the cost is the loss of the moral high ground: a reverberating demonstration to the world that America has no more respect for laws and borders, for the codes of civilization, than the Soviet Union.” (The Times returned to the subject with an extra helping of snark a month later: “So the invasion is finally justified because Americans needed a win, needed to invade someone. Happy 1984.”)
Leading liberals adopted the Times’s line. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan complained: “The Soviet Union has no right to impose its will upon the people of Poland. How then, at the same time, can we insist that we have a right to impose our way of life upon another people in this hemisphere?” Representative Ted Weiss said, “Ronald Reagan has adopted the tactic of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the new American standard of behavior” and introduced an impeachment resolution in the House, which the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed almost unanimously. Representative Charles Rangel charged Reagan with having “embarked upon a frightening course of gunboat diplomacy.” Jesse Jackson called for “reparations” to the people of Grenada (who, polls showed, were grateful for the U.S. intervention, by a margin of nine to one). The Southern Christian Leadership Conference said the invasion made the United States into “the villain of the Western Hemisphere,” and the National Conference of Black Lawyers said it was a “violent and criminal” act.
Liberals who should have known better went the same way. Presidental front-runner Walter Mondale charged that Reagan’s invasion “undermines our ability to effectively criticize what the Soviets have done in their brutal intervention in Afghanistan, in Poland, and elsewhere.”73 Could it really be that liberals were unable to distinguish between Hitler’s invasion of France and the Allied invasion of France on D-Day? So it seemed. George Will noted tartly, “The logic of Mondale’s position is that all uses of force, by Castro or Reagan, Hitler or Lincoln, are censorable, regardless of the aims or outcomes.”
Standing out among Democrats with a more nuanced view was Senator Pat Moynihan, who thought that a rescue operation of U.S. citizens was justified, but not a full-scale invasion to replace the sitting government, as though such a discrete operation could be calibrated on a tiny island. The invasion was, he argued, a violation of the UN Charter and the charter of the Organization of American States (OAS).74 It was “an act of war,” he said, adding, “I don’t know that you restore democracy at the point of a bayonet.” Moynihan’s neoconservative friends and admirers were startled: was this the same Moynihan who had spoken so resolutely against the Soviet threat, and the corruption of the UN, while UN ambassador just a few years before? The same Moynihan who had said that “so long as the ideas underlying Jimmy Carter’s UN policy are dominant in the Democratic Party, Democrats will be out of power—and rightly so.” “Moynihan was the obvious heir to Scoop Jackson,” one unnamed neoconservative told Policy Review. “Now with Scoop’s death and Moynihan’s defection, the Jackson Democrats have nowhere to go.”75 National Review said that Moynihan’s “metamorphosis” had made him “a national disaster.” The New Republic’s Morton Kondracke observed, “The new Moynihan seems to put primary emphasis on the American government’s obeying rules, rather than gaining geopolitical advantage in the struggle of systems that the old Moynihan considered the central concern of the contemporary world.” One of Moynihan’s own former staffers wrote: “Those who are looking for unflinching resolve in opposition to the Soviets should stop thinking of him as one of their number.”76
In fact Moynihan had been edging to the left since Reagan’s election in 1980. Some of his tergiversations could be attributed to his contrarian temperament, and some to the political calculation of self-preservation. Although reelected comfortably in 1982, he continued to fear a challenge from the Left in a Democratic primary in New York. That Moynihan felt compelled to move toward the Left (partly under the advice of his new young political director, Tim Russert) showed how strong the leftward undertow in the Democratic Party had become (as Senator Joe Lieberman would find out twenty years later). To be sure, Moynihan’s disagreement with the Grenada invasion (and also Reagan’s Nicaragua policy) derived from his view that the Soviet Union and Marxism were in decline. As he said in a 1982 speech, “The truth is, the Soviet idea is spent…. [I]t summons no loyalty. History is moving away from it with astounding speed…. It is as if the whole Marxist-Leninist ethos is hurtling off into a black hole.” Moynihan therefore thought “[O]ur grand strategy should be to wait out the Soviet Union; its time is passing.”77
While this view marked out Moynihan from other liberals and conservatives who saw the Soviet empire as a durable state, it evaded the underlying dilemma practical statesmen must face: a blind fealty to international law will be to the disadvantage of law-abiding nations in the face of a major power bloc that refuses to abide by it equally. Liberalism in the 1980s had no serious answer to the lawlessness of the Soviet Union and its allies other than to continue to “negotiate” while Marxist revolution marched on to the ruin of more countries like Grenada. Reagan had been right that, as he put it in 1982, Grenada “bears the Soviet and Cuban trademark.” In fact the whole Eastern bloc syndicate was represented. Among the non-Grenadians captured on the island and eventually deported were forty-nine Soviets, ten East Germans, three Bulgarians, fifteen North Koreans, and seventeen Libyans, along with nearly eight hundred Cubans. American forces uncovered an arms cache that would have sufficed to supply a ten-thousand-man force. A million rounds of ammunition were found in a false floor of the vacated Cuban embassy.
Documents captured on Grenada offered Americans for the first time an inside look at a Marxist-Leninist revolution in progress. Political scientists Paul Seabury and Walter McDougall, who produced an edited volume of the captured documents, described them as having been written in “the suffocating prose of badly educated sociology students.”78 Included in the voluminous cabinet memos, government directives, diplomatic cables, and letters to foreign governments were intensive plans for external propaganda, transforming the island’s schools into indoctrination factories, complete censorship, and establishing neighborhood informant networks on the Cuban model to detect dissidents, who were then arrested and jailed. (About 1 percent of Grenada’s population was jailed on politcal charges at the time of the U.S. invasion.) The documents were compelling evidence that the Cold War was far from moribund and that Marxist revolutionary ardor was hardly a spent force. Although it may have been true that genuine belief in Marxism-Leninism was on the wane in the Soviet Union, the Soviet propaganda and indoctrination apparatus operated in Grenada as if it was 1917. “Grenadians were given the whole Soviet world view,” said Michael Ledeen, who reviewed the captured documents for the State Department. “They were not simply becoming a Communist country. They were becoming a part of the Communist movement.”
Though the documents do suggest some friction between the Soviets and Cuba, the diplomatic and military ties with the Soviet bloc were extensive and important. Among the documents was a memo of a Moscow meeting between Grenada’s top military commander and Soviet chief of staff Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, who boasted that “over two decades ago there was only Cuba in Latin America, today there are Nicaragua, Grenada, and a serious battle is going on in El Salvador.” (Reagan would later quote this statement in his speeches about Central America.) Equally revealing were the records of the Marxist junta’s friendly contacts with the office of Democratic congressman Ron Dellums of California, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and of substantial efforts to influence political opinion in the United States with the enthusiastic cooperation of Dellums and his staff. Small wonder that Dellums described the American invasion as a “crime against humanity executed by people who deserve to be condemned as war criminals.”
Liberal outrage over Grenada fell suddenly mute when the evacuated students arrived back in the United States a few days later. Upon climbing down the airplane steps, the first students knelt down and kissed the ground. There had been commentary in the press that the students had not faced any serious danger, but that was not how they told it. One student, Jeff Geller, came to the White House a week later (nearly four hundred of the evacuated students accepted the White House invitation) and told a temporarily chastened White House press corps: “Prior to this experience, I had held liberal political views which were not always sympathetic with the position of the American military…. Well, let me say I learned a lot from this experience. To you, President Reagan, thank you for bringing us back to the United States.” Young Americans for Freedom produced a poster with a photo of the students celebrating their repatriation with the headline: “What’s the difference between students in Grenada and hostages in Iran? President Ronald Reagan.”
The public agreed. Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin, had been conducting a rolling poll during the span of days that included the Beirut barracks bombing and the Grenada invasion. Reagan’s approval rating had slumped during the forty-eight hours following the Beirut catastrophe but rebounded after Grenada. Suddenly Speaker O’Neill and other leading Democrats changed their tune, with O’Neill now saying that Reagan was “justified” in taking action. The ultimate political success of Grenada led Reagan and others to proclaim (not for the last time) that the Vietnam syndrome was over.
The success of the Grenada invasion also blunted the blow from the Beirut bombing and postponed the political backlash over Reagan’s Lebanon policy. When Reagan went on TV three days after Grenada to talk about both issues, he couldn’t help poking at the de facto isolationism of contemporary liberals: “You know, there was a time when our national security was based on a standing army here within our own borders and shore batteries of artillery along our coasts, and, of course, a navy to keep the sea lanes open for the shipping of things necessary to our well-being. The world has changed. Today, our national security can be threatened in faraway places. It’s up to all of us to be aware of the strategic importance of such places and to be able to identify them.”
Reagan was greeted as a hero when he later visited Grenada, where free elections resumed in 1984. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega compared Reagan’s trip to Grenada to Adolf Hitler’s entry into Vienna after the German occupation of Austria in 1936. There is evidence that the Sandinistas were genuinely frightened, however. Grenada marked the first time that American military force had been used to roll back a Communist government. If it could be done once, it might be done again—or at least so thought the Sandinistas. When word reached Reagan that Castro was musing that Cuba might be next, Reagan said to Robert McFarlane, “That’s fine. They might be.”79 The Nicaraguans took no chances. Sandinista comandante Tomás Borge called up the American ambassador with the message that if the United States ever wanted to evacuate Americans from Nicaragua, all the United States had to do was call and the Sandanistas would help facilitate it. The significance of the Grenada invasion cannot be overstated. It conveyed what Churchill liked to call a “moral effect” out of proportion with the small scale of the enterprise. The military operation ranked alongside Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981 for its sobering effect on world perception of Reagan’s toughness. It removed the last lingering doubts in Europe about America’s staying power, which, despite Reagan’s rhetoric and defense buildup, persisted. In the spring of 1983, Stephen Haseler, leader of Britain’s Social Democratic Party, put his finger on the matter: “There have not been, to put it bluntly, any clear-cut American victories, specific events which are widely seen to ‘tilt the ground’ decisively in America’s direction.”80 With Grenada, America finally had an unambiguous win for the scoreboard.
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IN THE MIDDLE of the growing crises of Lebanon and Grenada in mid-October, Bill Clark decided to step down as national security adviser. Clark had been talking with Reagan about leaving since January. The constant friction between Shultz and Weinberger, and the relentless undercutting Clark received from James Baker and Mike Deaver, who abetted a ferocious media campaign against Clark, had worn him to the breaking point, and, in his own view, diminished his ability to serve Reagan adequately in the post. The NSC process was becoming dysfunctional again. Clark wanted to return to his quiet life as a rancher in California and had never intended to stay in Washington beyond two years. Reagan had prevailed upon him to stay on as national security adviser at the end of 1982, and now convinced him to replace James Watt as secretary of the interior, which Clark found more agreeable. Conservatives inside and outside the White House were dismayed at his departure from NSC. Jeane Kirkpatrick said, “It is an unmitigated disaster for him to leave. That decision shouldn’t have been made. And, once made, it should have been rescinded.”
Clark’s departure set in motion another power struggle. Baker and Deaver saw an opportunity to solidify their power over Meese, and Reagan initially decided to name Baker his new national security adviser and Deaver to be Baker’s replacement as chief of staff. But when confronted with ferocious opposition from Clark, Meese, Casey, Kirkpatrick, and Weinberger, Reagan changed his mind, much to the annoyance and disappointment of Baker and Deaver. (“You don’t have enough confidence in me to make me chief of staff!” an angry Deaver shouted at Reagan in the Oval Office.) The opposition contained an element of payback. A few months before, Baker and Deaver had attempted to enlist Clark in an intrigue to ease out Meese, but miscalculated; Clark sided firmly with Meese and scuttled the plan. Casey, Meese, and others urged Reagan to select Kirkpatrick as Clark’s NSC replacement, but Shultz objected.
Faced with these irreconcilable factions, Reagan chose Clark’s deputy, Robert McFarlane, as the compromise pick to be national security adviser, which ensured that the Pentagon-State Department and Weinberger-Shultz feuds would continue. McFarlane, a Marine veteran, had a quiet demeanor that led some to dismiss him as “a quintessential staff man.” New Right activist Paul Weyrich disparaged McFarlane as having been “created by God to disappear into crowds,” but this was unfair and inaccurate. Michael Ledeen, among others, discerned McFarlane’s “distinctly hawkish instincts” that comported with Reagan’s hard line side. But he lacked Clark’s personal ties to Reagan that made Clark so effective.81
“It was an unhappy day all around,” Reagan wrote in his diary of the staff discord. Later in his memoirs, Reagan wrote, “My decision not to appoint Jim Baker as national security adviser, I suppose, was a turning point for my administration, although I had no idea at the time how significant it would prove to be.”82
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IN THE AFTERMATH of the harsh rhetoric of the spring and summer, the KAL 007 incident, and the invasion of Grenada, the year now reached its climax—and what is said to have been the most dangerous moment in U.S.-Soviet relations since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. As the deployment of U.S. missiles in Europe approached, some evidence suggests that the Soviets believed the United States was on the brink of launching a surprise nuclear attack and that the Soviet Union may have pondered a preemptive attack of its own.
It almost happened by accident. In the middle of the night in Moscow on September 26, a launch warning alarm went off at Serpukhov-15, an underground early warning command center. Soviet satellites linked to their early warning computers flashed that five American Minuteman ICBMs were in flight heading for Soviet territory. An American surprise nuclear attack was under way. The commanding officer on duty, forty-four-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, later said, “I had a funny feeling in my gut” that it was a false alarm. He delayed passing the warning up the chain of command while he cross-checked with ground-based radar, which showed nothing. Soviet early warning officers were trained to expect that any American attack would be massive. “When people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles,” Petrov recalled thinking. Nonetheless, senior Soviet commanders later sharply questioned and second-guessed Petrov for not promptly alerting Moscow. Eventually the false alarm was traced to defective computer software that misread a satellite reading of a reflection of the sun on cloud tops.83
That was not the only worrisome glitch in the Soviet nuclear command and control system. At the time of this incident, the Soviets were still redesigning a remote firing control system comparable to the president’s nuclear suitcase, known as the “football.” To remedy the lack of command mobility for Soviet leaders, Moscow was developing an automated launch system for its massive ICBM force—the Soviets called it the “Death Grip” system—that would ensure the destruction of the United States even if the United States decapitated the Soviet command structure in a first strike.
From November 2 through 11—at the same moment the American Pershing and cruise missiles were to begin arriving in Europe—the NATO member countries scheduled an extensive military exercise spanning an area from Norway to Turkey and involving more than three hundred thousand military personnel. Code-named Able Archer, this exercise differed from periodic NATO exercises of the past in that it was to involve NATO heads of state, including President Reagan, in nuclear-release simulations. The Soviets feared Able Archer was a pretext for a surprise American attack.
That the Soviets found this threat plausible perhaps came from reflecting on their own war planning; in June 1982 the Soviets had conducted a full-scale simulation of their European war plan, which consisted of a seven-hour nuclear war against the United States and Western Europe. The Soviet war plan called for using exercises as a cover for building up to an actual offensive attack. Surely, Moscow thought, the West would use the same ruse. (In addition, the Soviets conducted nineteen nuclear weapons tests in 1983, along with multiple tests for several new types of missiles.)
There are several tantalizing aspects to this episode that remain controversial among scholars and inside observers. The first concerns Andropov’s paranoia about an American attack, which his defense minister, Dmitri Ustinov, fully shared.84 Although available minutes of Politburo meetings from 1983 show the Soviets fearing that the West was gaining political advantage, there were voices of sobriety arguing that the United States would never launch a suicidal first strike. At a Politburo meeting in May, where Andropov rambled about “Reagan’s anti-Soviet, militaristic intentions” and claimed that “an anti-Soviet coalition is being formed out there,” Andrei Gromyko argued, “The United States, as is known, is talking about the fact that they can only strike in response to aggression. I think that they without enough reason wouldn’t dare to use nuclear missiles. Against the first strike are also Canada, England, France, and West Germany.”85 Anatoly Dobrynin, undoubtedly reflecting the awareness of perceptive Soviet leaders, said that “the existing political and social structure of the United States was the best guarantee against an unprovoked first strike against us.”86 While Dobrynin noted that every Soviet leader since Khrushchev had worried seriously about an American attack, “I personally never believed that any president was ever planning a nuclear attack.”
But Dobrynin was isolated from Politburo deliberations and only learned inadvertently that Andropov had urgently ordered his intelligence services in the United States to look for signs of an imminent attack. KGB agents were tasked with monitoring U.S. military bases at home and abroad; counting the number of windows with lights on at the Pentagon, as if this would be an indication of serious war planning; monitoring blood banks and meatpacking plants in Britain and the United States to see if supplies were being stockpiled; and befriending Western bankers and clergymen, supposing that financiers and religious leaders somehow would have advance knowledge of a decision for war. Agents received reprimands from Moscow if they didn’t submit semi weekly reports on the metrics for “abnormal activity” in Western government and defense bureaus. “It can be assumed,” one of the KGB communiqués to its agents read, “that the period of time from the moment when the preliminary decision for [a nuclear first strike] is taken up to the order to deliver the strike will be of very short duration, possibly 7 to 10 days.”87 Near the end of Able Archer on November 8 or 9, Moscow sent an urgent message to KGB officers in the West stepping up surveillance demands to their maximum level, erroneously reporting that U.S. and NATO military bases had gone on high alert.
A number of persistent American actions lent a small amount of verisimilitude to Soviet paranoia. Beyond the overt episodes, such as the Grenada invasion and the arming of the Contras and the Afghan mujahadeen, both the U.S. Navy and Air Force had conducted psychological operations (psy-op) missions to probe Soviet military weaknesses and responses. In one unpublicized episode, navy attack submarines shadowed Soviet submarines and according to a prearranged plan pinged with active sonar every Soviet sub at the same time to demonstrate our tracking capabilities. The navy had also worked out ways of avoiding Soviet ocean surveillance systems and had conducted surprise exercises close to Soviet territory.88 In the murkier field of covert intelligence, the CIA had confounded the KGB’s aggressive attempts to steal advanced Western technology—as many as five thousand Soviet military components used stolen or copied Western technology, according to a 1985 assessment—by surreptitiously supplying false or defective blueprints and computer programming code. One sabotaged software package led to an enormous explosion of the Siberian natural gas pipeline. Before long the Soviets grew to distrust the products of their own intelligence nets.89
These capabilities were no doubt unsettling to the Soviets. As a CIA analyst reviewing the period wrote: “The Soviets had learned a disturbing lesson about what Washington could do in a wartime situation or other crisis…. Moscow did not know what the U.S. would do.”90 When U.S. overseas military bases went on a higher state of alert in late October following the Beirut bombing, the Soviets took it as one more sign of possible attack and accordingly raised the alert status of Warsaw Pact forces in Poland and East Germany. The urgent message to overseas KGB posts ordering a superalert followed in early November.91 The alert status of forces on Soviet territory remains a matter of speculation. It was known at the time that Soviet combat flight operations had been suspended between November 4 and 9 (the middle of Able Archer) and that the Soviet Fourth Air Army had increased its readiness status. According to some accounts, Soviet forces began preparations for a retaliatory nuclear strike. Senior Soviet officials, including Gorbachev, subsequently said that they were unaware of heightened alert status, though these demurrals should not necessarily be taken at face value.92
Even without the behind-the-scenes drama over Able Archer, in public comments throughout the fall a common theme emerged: U.S.-Soviet relations were at their most dangerous level since the Cuban missile crisis. Soviet spokesman Georgi Arbatov told a reporter that “the situation is worse now than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis.”93 George Kennan said that the situation had “the familiar characteristics, the unfailing characteristics, of a march toward war—that and nothing else.” French president François Mitterrand said, “[T]he present situation is comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Russian scholar Suzanne Massie, who was shortly to begin quietly advising Reagan on Soviet affairs, recalled meeting in Moscow with a high-ranking KGB official who masqueraded as a cultural specialist. “You don’t know how close war is!” he told Massie. Massie returned to Washington to convey the message that “the heated Soviet reaction was much more than the usual Soviet truculence, that they felt cornered, and that it was an extremely dangerous time.”94 Some American observers adopted the Soviet line. Princeton Sovietologist Stephen Cohen said: “All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Soviet-phobia … a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.”
Here we should take note of an important asymmetry between the strategic outlook of the Soviet Union and the West. For the West, the lesson of Munich was the dominant background against which superpower relations were conducted. Never again would the Western democracies capitulate to the political demands of totalitarians or allow an imbalance of military capability to tempt a dictatorship. For the Soviets, the looming background for their approach to superpower relations was not Munich in 1938 but Hitler’s surprise attack of June 1941. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the Soviet chief of staff at the time, commented: “Soviet military doctrine can be summed up as follows: 1941 shall never be repeated.”95 In 1941, the Soviets had missed or misinterpreted the signs of Hitler’s impending invasion; now they proceeded according to a worst-case scenario.
The new U.S. national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, recognized the Soviets’ apprehension about Able Archer, which contributed to the ultimate decision not to have Reagan participate in the NATO exercise (the White House instead scheduled Reagan for a trip to the Far East). “I had serious misgivings about approving the drill as originally planned; there was concern with how Moscow would perceive such a realistic drill,” McFarlane told political scientist Beth Fischer, one of the first scholars to delve into this crucial episode.96
But there is another aspect of this episode that bears scrutiny, and it concerns Reagan’s attitude toward his commander-in-chief responsibilities. Although Reagan had been briefed, as are all incoming presidents, on how to operate the command authority card he kept in his pocket for activating the nuclear “football” to transmit launch codes, he had waited at least a year and a half into his presidency before he participated in a complete briefing and rehearsal of the actual operating plan for a nuclear war. SIOP (Single Integrated Operating Plan) was the protocol for targeting and decision making in the event of a war with the Soviets, and it was customary for presidents to participate in SIOP rehearsals as the plan was periodically modified. So strong was Reagan’s aversion to thinking about nuclear war that he kept finding excuses to avoid scheduling a full SIOP briefing, much to the dismay of his aides.97 Beth Fischer noted, “Reagan was nearly the first modern president not to receive the SIOP briefing.”98 A week after sitting out Able Archer, which was merely a European-theater version of a full-dress SIOP exercise, Reagan received an update of the SIOP plan, and he described it in his diary as “sobering.”
A complete SIOP briefing is undoubtedly a grim exercise. It includes explaining the various pre programmed strike options from which a president might have to choose under intense pressure, including the targets to be destroyed and the number of casualties that would be inflicted. These plans are among the most closely held military secrets, but most strike options involved the simultaneous launch of as many as 4,200 warheads.99 Above all, the SIOP thought process made clear that it would be very difficult to control escalation, but to have any hope of limiting a nuclear war, a president would need full command of the SIOP options. A conventional analytical mind like Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton probably found SIOP exercises to be an abstract potentiality and duly compartmentalized them to mitigate their mental horror, though we do know that the hardheaded Henry Kissinger once recoiled from the subject, saying in an SIOP meeting in 1973 that “to have the only option that of killing 80 million people is the height of immorality.” For the anecdotally oriented, highly imaginative Reagan, a dress rehearsal was probably as vivid as the real thing, and we know that back in the late 1970s Reagan lamented that the strategic situation of the United States paralyzed the president between unacceptable choices—surrender or self-destruction.
While some of Reagan’s own aides privately doubted whether, in the face of a real Soviet attack, he would give the order to retaliate, both our allies and the public discounted Reagan’s repeated indications of his sincere abhorrence of nuclear weapons. Even with the benefit of hindsight, the opening of classified materials, and the publication of several fine studies on the subject, it remains difficult to square in the same person the seemingly contradictory positions of, on one hand, pursuing a large arms buildup and employing aggressive rhetoric about an adversary and, on the other, a sincere desire for productive negotiations to abolish nuclear weapons.100
An additional dimension of Reagan’s outlook deepens the mystery, and this centers on his occasional mention of the biblical Armageddon. As far back as his governorship in California, friends and acquaintances recall Reagan remarking about how biblical prophecies of the end times were falling into place.101 During the 1980 campaign Reagan had said to evangelical broadcaster Jim Bakker, “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.” Liberals who found Reagan’s mention of Armageddon to be disturbing would have been apoplectic had they known of his more private thoughts. After Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in June 1981, he wrote in his diary: “I swear I believe Armageddon is near.” In February 1983 he wrote to his former speechwriter Peter Hannaford: “Lately I’ve been wondering about some older prophecies—those having to do with Armageddon. Things that are news today sound an awful lot like what was predicted would take place just prior to ‘A’ Day.” Reagan knew this was extraordinarily sensitive, as he added: “Don’t quote me.”102 Reagan’s speculations about the details of the “end times” are a matter of conjecture. It is certainly possible to infer that avoiding Armageddon was prominent in Reagan’s underlying statecraft. Is it also possible that part of his aversion to rehearsing nuclear war stemmed from fearing that such a task might implicate him in the role of the anti-Christ?103
Matters reached a head when a disturbing report came in from London. British intelligence had recruited the KGB’s Oleg Gordievsky as an agent, and Gordievsky told of the Soviet fear of an imminent Western attack and the heightened alert status. Although Soviet defectors tended to embroider their information to increase their prestige and value to the West, U.S. intelligence had noticed a sharp increase in urgent signals traffic from the Warsaw Pact during the Able Archer exercises as well as other signs of Soviet discomfort. The CIA had assumed that this activity was a calculated response intended to show that the Soviets were paying attention, but after examining Gordievsky’s claims along with other information, the agency concluded that the situation was more serious than initially thought.104 For one thing, the CIA had predicted several months before that the Soviets would step up KGB intelligence gathering if they suspected a possible Western attack and, more ominously, that “[i]f [the Soviets] acquired convincing evidence that a U.S. intercontinental strike was imminent, they would try to preempt.”105
When CIA director Bill Casey brought these findings to Reagan in December, the president was shocked, saying to McFarlane, “I don’t see how they could believe that—but it’s something to think about.”106 Reagan had been thinking about it, noting in his diary on November 18 that the Soviets were “so paranoid about being attacked.” He thought the idea ridiculous: “What the h—l have they got that anyone would want.” Still, the fear that the two superpowers could blunder through miscalculation into a nuclear war had been growing in Reagan’s mind, making him, as he explained in his memoirs, “even more anxious to get a top Soviet leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union.” Spurred by these events, a decisive change of tone and direction started to take shape in the White House, though it should be understood that such a shift had always been Reagan’s intention. Reagan instructed his foreign policy team to begin drafting a major speech charting a new direction for U.S.-Soviet relations.
To the now-popular view that the world violence and tense atmosphere of the fall shook Reagan into a more accommodating posture must be added the idea that it was beginning to dawn on Reagan and a few of his advisers that a turning point had been reached. At the end of November, Herbert Meyer, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council within the CIA, wrote a remarkable memorandum to CIA director Casey, titled “Why Is the World So Dangerous?” Meyer’s answer was breathtaking: “Present U.S. policies have fundamentally changed the course of history in a direction favorable to the interests and security of ourselves and our allies…. [I]f present trends continue, we’re going to win the Cold War,” probably within twenty years. Meyer thought this prospect made the world a more dangerous place in the short run, as surely some perceptive Soviet leaders, “more likely at the third or fourth echelons,” recognized that their future was bleak, and as such, some actions, including possibly launching a war, “may no longer be too risky to contemplate.” “From now on the Cold War will become more and more of a bare-knuckles street fight.” The next few years would be “the most dangerous years we have ever faced.”
Meyer admitted that he could offer little hard proof for his conclusion, saying that it required “a leap of the imagination.” His most audacious speculation was astounding for its prescience:
It has long been fashionable to view the Cold War as a permanent feature of global politics, one that will endure through the next several generations at least. But it seems to me more likely that President Reagan was absolutely correct when he observed in his Notre Dame speech that the Soviet Union—“one of history’s saddest and most bizarre chapters”—is entering its final pages. We really should take up the President’s suggestion to begin planning for a post-Soviet world; the Soviet Union and its people won’t disappear from the planet, and we have not yet thought seriously about the sort of political and economic structure likely to emerge.107
* * *
WHATEVER REAGAN’S PRIVATE doubts about Soviet paranoia and the need for real negotiations, one thing he thought would bring war closer would be the failure to go through with the Euromissile deployment. And there was still one last piece of high political drama before the deployment would be completed. On the eve of the deployment, Hollywood decided to insert itself into the middle of events. ABC television produced a two-hour drama depicting an all-out nuclear war as it would be experienced in Lawrence, Kansas. Hollywood had offered up many nuclear war films before, but never before had a movie depicted the aftermath of a nuclear explosion so graphically or been tied as closely to immediate circumstances.108
The Day After was calculated to play off the controversy over the nuclear freeze. After two decades the movie does not hold up well, and not just because of the women’s feathered hairstyles. Even its $7 million budget—three times the average cost for a TV movie at that time—couldn’t make up for flat acting and the plodding didacticism of its dialogue. Small wonder that the New York Post called it “a 100 mega-yawn bomb.” Typical was the clichéd use of the barbershop conversation:
CUSTOMER #1: I really don’t think either side wants to be the first one to use a nuclear device.
CUSTOMER #2: It’s not a question of who, but where. Over whose real estate? Say we explode a nuclear bomb over their troops, on our side. The fallout would drift over to their side.
CUSTOMER #1: They’re crazy. How do they think it’s going to stop with just one bomb?
BARBER: I’ll tell you what crazy is. Crazy is not staying out of other people’s business. We shouldn’t be over there in the first place.
CUSTOMER #2: The thing that bothers me is that damn launch-on-warning.
CUSTOMER #3: What’s that?
CUSTOMER #2: That’s when one side tells the other side that they’re going to fire their missiles as soon as they think the other guy’s missiles are already on the way.
CUSTOMER #3: You know—use ’em or lose ’em.
CUSTOMER #4: What do you really think [are the] chances of something like that happening way out here in the middle of nowhere?
CUSTOMER #3: Nowhere? There’s no “Nowhere” anymore.
The movie featured lots of skeletons vaporizing in mushroom clouds, reminded us that cockroaches would be the only guaranteed survivors, and made sure to include John Lithgow, playing the part of a college professor, gravely intoning Einstein’s famous dictum that while he didn’t know how World War III would be fought, he knew that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.109 Though the movie was politically shallow, ABC attempted to lend it gravitas by hosting a town-hall-style news show immediately after the broadcast, featuring luminaries such as Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz.
ABC tried to deny that the movie had any political motive or angle and removed direct references in the film to the Pershing and cruise missile deployment. This fooled no one; the movie’s screenwriter, Ed Hume, gave it up, saying, “It’s sympathetic with disarmament,” while ABC vice president Alfred Schneider incautiously told the New York Times, “Graphically you are showing the core of the argument of those who are for the nuclear freeze.” National Review criticized ABC for making “a $7 million contribution to the faltering Soviet campaign against the deployment of the Pershing II,” and Janet Michaud, executive director of the Campaign Against Nuclear War, confirmed National Review’s assessment when she said that “ABC is doing a $7 million advertising job for our issue.” But just to be sure, nuclear freeze groups spent several hundred thousand dollars on advertising and set up toll-free phone banks to sign up recruits.
Controversy over the movie raged for weeks before its air date on November 20 (it was theatrically released in Europe shortly after), no doubt to ABC’s delight, since this was ratings sweeps period. A nine-year-old girl in Kansas City sent a letter to Reagan suggesting that the United States and Soviet Union exchange workers who would dismantle the nuclear arsenal of the other nation. Somehow the Associated Press thought this frivolous missive worthy of a national wire story. The mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, wrote to the president offering to host a summit between Reagan and Andropov. Nuclear freeze groups obtained advance copies of the movie and organized their favorite device, the teach-in, in hundreds of churches and community centers around the country. ABC prepared a half million copies of a viewer’s guide that, like the movie, implied that nuclear deterrence was a failure. The publicity about the movie generated the second-largest TV audience in history, with an estimated one hundred million tuning in to the broadcast.
The White House was deeply concerned about The Day After. Reagan’s senior staff got an advance screening more than a month ahead of the broadcast date (Reagan watched it alone at Camp David) and found the experience devastating.110 Reagan wrote in his diary that it was “profoundly depressing.” David Gergen told the Associated Press that the film could be “potentially the most emotionally powerful thing ever shown on American television.” White House aides held a series of meetings to come up with a response, and contemplated having Reagan give a TV address to rebut the movie’s effect. Attacking ABC directly wouldn’t work, the White House thought, so Reagan’s aides worked the phones to friendly journalists and had the Republican National Committee distribute talking points to party officials in all fifty states.
The White House needn’t have worried to this extent. Reagan aides who had seen the advance screening noticed that the movie had less of an emotional effect on TV; the regular commercial breaks for advertisements greatly mitigated the force of the broadcast. The irony is that ABC had difficulty selling advertising for the movie—except to Alan Cranston’s pacifist-oriented presidential campaign—but in the end advertisers couldn’t resist the cheap rates (ABC discounted ad prices by 75 percent) offered to reach a Super Bowl-sized audience.111 Many of these ads for hearty American totems such as pickup trucks and baked goods may have had a calming effect on viewers; the normality of American commerce underscored the hyperbole of the film’s tendentious plot. Polls taken before and after the movie’s broadcast showed that it had no effect on public opinion about American defense policy.112 The freeze movement had made its last throw, and lost.
Two days later the West German Bundestag ratified the deployment of Pershing missiles by a final vote of 286–226. The first missiles were uncrated two days after the vote; in all, 108 Pershing and 96 cruise missiles were deployed in West Germany; Britain took 160 cruise missiles; Italy took 112; tiny Belgium and the Netherlands each took 48. The NATO alliance had shown its durability and resolve in the face of massive internal and external pressure. The New Republic offered a significant editorial concession to Reagan’s leadership: “It is hard to think of a single Democratic candidate for President who would have toughed it out the way Mr. Reagan did.”113
The Soviets walked out of the Geneva talks the next day, with Marshal Ogarkov charging at a rare Soviet press conference that the United States “would still like to launch a decapitating nuclear first strike.” Gromyko blustered to Italian foreign minister Giulio Andreotti that “we will turn Italy into a Pompeii.” A few weeks later, the Soviets walked out of two parallel negotiations—on strategic nuclear weapons (START) and the talks to reduce conventional forces in Europe. For the first time in fourteen years, there were no arms control talks under way between the United States and the Soviet Union. Reagan reacted coolly, telling aides, “They’ll be back.” Meanwhile, he was preparing to send Congress a forceful report on the Soviets’ consistent cheating on past arms control agreements.
It was too much for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which moved the hands on its “Doomsday Clock” from 11:48 to 11:57.114 The European press was full of editorials decrying “the new Cold War,” as though the old one had ended. Time magazine chose Reagan and Andropov as their “men of the year,” though in Andropov’s case, Kremlinologist Dimitri Simes noted, it was the first time a ghost had been selected for the honor. By year’s end Andropov had not been seen in public for nearly six months. The Soviets continued to insist that he was merely suffering from a severe cold, surely the longest-running rhinovirus in medical history. He failed to show up in late December for the annual Communist Party Central Committee meeting, a public spectacle analogous to the president’s annual State of the Union appearance in Congress. There was increasing speculation that a succession struggle was under way and some thought that the military was running the country.
In his interview for the year-end issue of Time, Reagan reflected this concern:
There is one new development that I have worried about for some time. That is the extent, lately, to which military leaders in the Soviet Union are, apparently without any coaching or being briefed by the civilian part of government—at least there is no evidence of that—taking it upon themselves to make statements, and rather bellicose statements. There has not, in the past, been evidence of top military leaders going public with attacks on the U.S. and seeming to enunciate policy on their own. We have to be aware of this and pay a little attention to this, to see if they have become a power on their own.
Time also asked Reagan about his “evil empire” statement:
QUESTION: When you made the remark containing the phrase “focus of evil,” which certainly nettled the Soviets, did you feel that it was appropriate? Would you make it again?
REAGAN: No, I would not say things like that again, even after some of the things that have been done recently.