6. William F. Long and David J. Ravenscraft, “Decade of Debt: Lessons from the LBOs in the 1980s,” in Blair, ed., The Deal Decade, p. 222.
7. John Greenwald, “Let’s Make a Deal,” Time, December 23, 1985, p. 42.
8. Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 495.
9. John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 131.
10. Rostenkowski would later go to prison for fifteen months on charges of mail fraud after personal corruption on a wide scale came to light.
11. Roberts, “The Seduction of the Supply-Siders,” National Review, June 6, 1986, pp. 41–42.
12. Birnbaum and Murray say House Republicans simply made a mistake, but one wonders whether this is plausible.
13. Niskanen, Reaganomics, p. 99.
14. Quoted in National Review, July 18, 1986, p. 12.
15. See especially Paul Lettow’s account of staff resistance to Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism in Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, pp. 190–96.
16. Kenneth L. Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Politics of Disarmament (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 114.
17. A typical diary entry on this problem is from June 3, 1986: “A brief NSC meeting—in which we talked about yesterday’s N.S.P.G. [National Security Planning Group] meeting on leaks & how our account of the entire meeting was on the front page of today’s Wash. Post.”
18. The ACDA report identified nine specific Soviet violations of SALT II.
19. “Half Right and All Wrong on SALT,” New York Times, June 1, 1986, Sec. 4, p. 24.
20. “The Reagan Arms Strategy,” Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1986, p. 12.
21. The Soviets ultimately admitted that the Krasnoyarsk radar violated the ABM Treaty.
22. Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, held hearings and issued a report disputing the Reagan administration’s broad interpretation of the ABM Treaty. A number of Republican senators endorsed Nunn’s position, largely out of solicitude for the prerogative of the Senate, as the treaty-ratifying body, to have a say in the interpretation of treaties.
23. Wolf quoted in New York Times, November 12, 2006, Sec. 4, p. 3.
24. A few contemporary observers discerned that Gorbachev was up to something, and noted also Yeltsin’s strong stands. Archie Brown wrote in Foreign Affairs shortly after: “The evidence available on Gorbachev’s position suggests not only that he takes seriously the deficiencies of the Soviet economy, but also that he does not believe that tinkering with the economic mechanism will be enough.” A month after the Party Congress, Gorbachev told the workers of the Volga Car Works: “Can you manage an economy which runs into trillions of rubles from Moscow? It is absurd, comrades. Incidentally, it is in this—in the fact that we have attempted to manage everything from Moscow up until very recently—that our common and main mistake lies.” (“Change in the Soviet Union,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1986, pp. 1055–56.)
25. Also giving a reformist speech at the Twenty-seventh Party Congress was the newest candidate for full Politburo membership, Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin provoked the insiders with an attack on special privileges. Yeltsin asked the pregnant question: “Why, Congress after Congress, do we deal with the same problems over and over again?”
26. Cited in Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military, p. 96; Robert D. English, “The Road(s) Not Taken: Causality and Contingency in Analysis of the Cold War’s End,” in William C. Wohlforth, ed., Cold War Endgame (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 260.
27. English, “The Road(s) Not Taken,” p. 258.
28. Chernyaev diary entry, February 2, 1986.
29. Gates, In the Shadows, p. 380.
30. The split generally fell out between political appointees, who favored supplying Stingers, versus career bureaucrats, who opposed the idea. See Marin Strmecki, “The Stinger Finds a Home,” American Spectator, November 1987, pp. 19–21.
31. The news statement in its entirety read: “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.”
32. See Nicholas Daniloff’s account, Of Spies and Spokesmen: My Life as a Cold War Correspondent (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), p. 344.
33. Felicity Barringer, “Kiev Journal: In Chernobyl’s Zone, Streets Are Still Vacuumed,” New York Times, December 15, 1986.
34. “Chernobyl: Poverty and Stress Pose ‘Bigger Threat’ than Radiation,” Nature, September 5, 2005. The UN report concluded that about four thousand people remained at risk from the long-term effects of radiation exposure; this is far less than the tens of thousands of deaths predicted at the time.
35. http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/gorbachev3/English.
36. Christian Neef, “Diary of a Collapsing Superpower,” Der Spiegel, November 22, 2006.
37. Peter Rutland, “Sovietology: Notes for a Post-Mortem,” National Interest, Spring 1993.
38. The matter of Kaddafi was not far removed from U.S.-Soviet relations. Reagan took up the issue in his February letter to Gorbachev: “And I must say that some recent actions by your government are most discouraging. What are we to make of your sharply increased military support of a local dictator who has declared a war of terrorism against much of the rest of the world, and against the United States in particular? … And more importantly, are we to conclude that the Soviet Union is so reckless in seeking to extend its influence in the world that it will place its prestige (and even the lives of some of its citizens) at the mercy of a mentally unbalanced local despot?”
39. Evidence found in East German secret police (Stasi) files following German reunification in 1991 revealed full East German knowledge of the bombing plot and enabled the successful prosecution in 1997 of five people for their roles in the bombing.
40. Weinberger oral history, p. 27.
41. The raid had to be conducted at night because the U.S. desire to minimize civilian casualties meant that warplanes had to come in very low, exposing them to antiaircraft fire. For a detailed account of the planning and execution of the raid, see Joseph T. Stanik, El Dorado Canyon: Reagan’s Undeclared War with Qaddafi (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003).
42. Anthony Lewis, “A Real Evil,” New York Times, April 17, 1986, p. A31. Within days Lewis began to have second thoughts and became more critical of the raid.
43. Stanik, El Dorado Canyon, p. 212.
44. Quotations from Anatoly Chernyaev’s notes of Politburo and Reykjavik advisory group preparation meetings, September 22, October 4, and October 8, 1986, available from the National Security Archive, http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB203/index.htm.
45. Human Events (September 20, 1986): “What particularly concerns conservative foreign policy analysts about the way the Administration is handling the Daniloff affair is that the President now looks as if he’s overly eager to go to another summit with Mikhail Gorbachev, a poor posture to be in when dealing with the Kremlin.”
46. Nofziger in Strober and Strober, eds., Reagan, p. 347.
47. After it was all over, a State Department evaluation confessed, “Reykjavik demonstrated once again how poor we are at guessing what the Soviets will do.”
48. The Soviet transcript of the Reykjavik summit, declassified and released in 1993, is more complete than the American transcript, and is available at http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB203/index.htm. There are numerous first-and secondhand accounts and analyses of the Reykjavik summit worth consulting, including Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, pp. 751–80; Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, pp. 215–50; Oberdorfer, The Turn, pp. 174–209; Talbott, Master of the Game (New York: Knopf, 1988), pp. 314–26; Winik, On the Brink, pp. 500–20; Adelman, The Great Universal Embrace, pp. 19–88; FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue, pp. 314–69; Lettow, Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, pp. 217–29.
49. Cited in English, “The Road(s) Not Taken,” p. 262.
50. Paul Kengor discusses the nature and evidence of this episode in Crusader, pp. 210–11.
51. In this regard see especially Angelo Codevilla, “How SDI Is Being Undone from Within,” Commentary, May 1986, pp. 21–29.
52. When the Soviets later claimed in Geneva not to have agreed to follow-up talks on sublimits, Nitze called the Soviet lead negotiator “a damn liar.” “There are times when diplomatic language is simply not adequate,” Nitze wrote. “This was one of those times.”
53. These quotations come from the more detailed Soviet transcript but in this case are likely a mistranslation, as Reagan was surely referring to his leaving office in 1988 as a result of the regular election cycle.
54. Matlock, Reagan and Gorbachev, pp. 237–38.
55. Thatcher, Downing Street Years, p. 472.
56. Geoffrey Smith offers a complete account of Thatcher’s November 1986 mission to Washington in Reagan and Thatcher (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), pp. 214–26.
57. Chernyaev’s diary, December 15, 1986.
58. James Schlesinger, “Reykjavik and Revelations: A Turn of the Tide?” Foreign Affairs, 1986 year-end special edition, “America and the World.”
59. Aaron Wildavsky, The Beleaguered Presidency (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991), p. 229.
60. Talbott, Master of the Game, p. 205.
61. Strober and Strober, Reagan, p. 356.
62. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, p. 85.
63. Cited in English, “The Road(s) Not Taken,” p. 262.
64. See Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), p. 289, n. 103; William C. Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War, p. 311 n. 2.
65. Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 272.
66. The Soviets would reiterate their “flexibility” on SDI testing “outside the laboratory” in the spring of 1987 in a back-channel communication through Senator Ted Kennedy. See Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, pp. 884–85.
67. Wildavsky, The Beleaguered Presidency, p. 233.
1. Telling this complicated story in its fullness fills several large single volumes, to which curious readers are advised to refer. See, e.g., Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Michael Ledeen, Perilous Statecraft: An Insider’s Account of the Iran-Contra Scandal (New York: Scribner’s, 1988); Peter J. Wallison, Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003), chs. 7–9; George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, chs. 37–39, 42; David M. Abshire, Saving the Reagan Presidency (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005); Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987); and the Tower Commission Report.
2. Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, p. 391.
3. Ibid., p. 412.
4. Doyle McManus, “Some Democrats Back Reagan; Liberals Split on Whether to Support Aid for Contras,” Los Angeles Times, December 22, 1985.
5. Robert Leiken, “Nicaragua’s Untold Stories,” New Republic, October 8, 1984.
6. Paul Berman, “Nicaragua 1986: Notes on the Sandinista Revolution,” Mother Jones, December 1986, pp. 23, 27.
7. McManus, “Some Democrats Back Reagan.”
8. Leiken, “Nicaragua’s Untold Stories.”
9. Farrell, Tip O’Neill, p. 671.
10. Quoted in Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, p. 461.
11. New Republic, April 11, 1986, p. 12.
12. “The Case for the Contras,” New Republic, March 24, 1986.
13. For example, see Reagan’s January 10, 1986, diary entry: “The answer is ‘yes’ we must come to their aid. This does not mean however use of Am[erican] troops.”
14. The diversion memo of April 4, 1986 can be found at http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/16-Diversion%20Memo%204–4-86%20(IC%2002614).pdf.
15. Terry Eastland, then a top aide to Attorney General Meese, later reflected critically on the decision not to invoke executive privilege: “Reagan also failed to defend the presidential office when he complied with the congressional request, unprecedented in its reach, for NSC and even presidential records of matters not involving allegations of executive malfeasance. Reagan refused to assert executive privilege—the power of a President to withhold certain information from Congress—thus setting an unfortunate precedent for the future” (Energy in the Executive, [New York: Free Press, 1992], p. 227). Perhaps, but as then-White House counsel Peter Wallison perceived, “[It] is appropriate to waive the privilege—as many presidents have done—when invoking it would do more harm to the presidency, or the president then in office, than waiving it…. I foresaw a long series of investigations looming before us, and believed that the President would be hurt far more by an appearance that he was covering up wrongdoing than by disclosure of any of the lapses that may have occurred” (Wallison, Ronald Reagan, p. 181).
16. Regan, For the Record, p. 50.
17. See Neil Livingstone, “What Ollie North Told Me Before He Took the Fifth,” National Review, January 30, 1987. “Far from constituting ransom to achieve the freedom of the American hostages,” Livingstone wrote of what North told him on November 14, “the military goods provided Iran were part of a rapprochement process designed to deliver Iran from the clutches of the Soviet Union and to block the Soviet drive to the Persian Gulf.” William F. Buckley, a long-ago veteran of the spy trade, may have smelled a rat. In an editorial note, Buckley said that National Review could not verify the details of the story and admitted the possibility that “North was having his breakfast guest on: that Ollie North was romancing, dealing in surrealisms, testing hypotheses.” For the kidnapping angle, see Eric Alterman, “Inside Ollie’s Mind,” New Republic, February 16, 1987, p. 14.
18. Peter J. Wallison, Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), p. 200.
19. Michael Kinsley, “The Case for Glee,” New Republic, December 22, 1986.
20. Greg Grandlin, “Still Dancing to Ollie’s Tune,” http://www.tomdispatch.com (October 17, 2006).
21. Wallison, Ronald Reagan, p. 169. As Wallison observes: “It violated a management principle and a style of governing that he considered central to his success. It took me a while to recognize this, and I doubt that many others have yet understood it. For many people, and most politicians, it may not be credible to say that they willingly absorbed punishment because of their adherence to something so inconsequential as a management principle, but Ronald Reagan was not like most people or virtually any other politician.”
22. Abshire, Saving the Reagan Presidency, p. 89.
23. Privately Reagan still resisted this view, telling journalist Fred Barnes in an interview a few months later, “It was not trading arms for hostages.” Barnes’s account continued: “He was merely trying to influence the government that would succeed the man he called ‘the Khomeini.’ I glanced at Fitzwater and Griscom as Reagan spoke. They had that look of terror I’d seen on the face of Reagan aides at press conferences” (“Covering the Gipper,” Weekly Standard, February 5, 2001).
24. “Presidents Have a History of Unilateral Moves,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 1987.
25. See, e.g., Federalist 70, where Alexander Hamilton reviewed the arguments against a plural executive (such as a council) and sharing power with the legislative branch.
26. Another irony to note in passing: the omnibus spending bills to which the Boland Amendments were attached were themselves irresponsible acts on the part of Congress, as they violated the terms of the Budget Act of 1974 that required thirteen separate appropriation bills.
27. The most extensive treatment of this issue is Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989).
28. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter XIV (“Of Prerogative”), paras. 159, 160.
29. Iran-Contra was not the only such controversy over Reagan’s use of presidential foreign policy power going on at the time. In response to increasing Iranian harassment of oil shipping in the Persian Gulf, in May 1987 the United States embarked upon a scheme in which Kuwaiti oil tankers sailed under the U.S. flag and were thus extended the protection of the U.S. Navy. The navy conducted minesweeping operations and engaged Iranian gunboats in a number of minor skirmishes, usually to the detriment of the Iranians. The operation was not without significant battlefield risk, however. In May an Iraqi warplane mistakenly fired a missile at the USS Stark, a navy frigate, killing thirty-seven American sailors. (Iraq promptly apologized, claiming it had intended to strike an Iranian target, though the Stark had twice identified itself to the Iraqis as a U.S. warship. Iraq later paid $27 million in restitution.) As had been the case with the Grenada invasion, the 1982–84 peacekeeping excursion to Lebanon, and the Libya bombing raid of 1986, Congress wanted Reagan to invoke the notification and consultation requirements of the War Powers Resolution as well as starting the War Powers Resolution’s sixty-day clock, which mandated either an affirmative congressional vote or the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Reagan resisted until September, at which time he invoked not the War Powers Resolution but Article 51 (the self-defense clause) of the United Nations Charter (as he had done in the Libya air raid), pursuant to “my constitutional authority with respect to the conduct of foreign affairs and as Commander-in-Chief.” Congress backed down and did not pursue the matter further. Presidents of both parties have insisted the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, but so far no chief executive has sought a formal legal challenge to the statute. (See Fisher, Presidential War Power, pp. 144–45.)
30. There are numerous other examples of significant constitutional controversy over the propriety of executive acts, starting with Andrew Jackson and including Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and of course Richard Nixon and George W Bush.
31. Jefferson letter to J. B. Colvin, September 20, 1810 (http://www.TeachingAmericanHistory.org/library/index.asp?document-1916). Lincoln offered a restatement of Jefferson’s comment with his justification for the suspension of habeas corpus in 1861: “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government go to pieces? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the government should be overthrown, when it was believed that disregarding a single law would tend to preserve it?” (http://www.TeachingAmericanHistory.org/library/ index.asp?document-1063).
32. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, para. 165.
33. Fisher, Presidential War Power, p. 182.
34. Ledeen, Perilous Statecraft, p. 281.
35. Arthur Liman didn’t do much better than Nields. His first question to North when he got his turn to ask questions on the third day of North’s testimony was: “Colonel, is it fair to say that November 25, 1986 [the day Reagan fired North from the NSC], was one of the worst days of your life?” North: “I will tell you honestly, counsel, that I have had many worse days than that. Most of those days were when young Marines died.”
36. There were some striking echoes of that famous long-ago hearing, including a misleading composite photo of Reagan’s signature next to the text of the 1984 Boland Amendment. In fact Boland had been a short passage buried in an eight-hundred-page continuing resolution. Republicans pounced on this legerdemain and embarrassed Democratic counsel Liman.
37. William S. Cohen and George J. Mitchell, Men of Zeal: A Candid Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 165.
38. Suzanne Garment, Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 209.
39. Of the twenty-six members of the joint committee, seventeen had voted in favor of the 1986 Contra aid package.
40. Gephardt cited in Human Events, August 1, 1987, p. 639.
41. I am indebted for this interpretation to Dennis Teti’s excellent account, “The Coup That Failed: An Insider’s Account of the Iran/Contra Hearings,” Policy Review, Fall 1987, pp. 24–31.
42. The investigating committees also looked but did not find any corroborating evidence of the widely alleged U.S.-condoned drug trafficking by the Contras.
43. Martin Anderson openly doubted North’s account and speculated that North might have skimmed money from the process. See Anderson’s Revolution: The Reagan Legacy, ch. 31, “The Mystery of the Missing Money (1990).”
44. Richard Nixon wrote to Reagan the day after the speech: “The speech last night was one of your best,” Nixon wrote with emphasis. “You sounded and looked strong. You gave the lie to the crap about your being over-the-hill, discouraged, etc. If I could be permitted one word of advice: Don’t ever comment on the Iran-Contra matter again.”
45. Robert Kagan offers an excellent summary of Contra strategy and battlefield successes in 1987 in A Twilight Struggle, pp. 523–26.
46. “Will the U.S. Need to Invade Nicaragua?” Human Events, November 15, 1986.
47. Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, p. 503.
48. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, p. 957.
49. Quoted in Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, p. 549.
50. Lindsey Gruson, “For Contras in One Area, Growing Civilian Support,” New York Times, November 5, 1987, p. A1.
51. Kagan, A Twilight Struggle, p. 551.
52. Ibid., p. 611.
1. Biden’s early commitment drew criticism from a surprising source—Mario Cuomo: “It’s the worst kind of irony to condemn Bork on the grounds that he’s not open-minded about the law when you yourself haven’t waited for the hearings to take place.”
2. The seemingly inexorable politicization of so many civic organizations contributed to the origin of O’Sullivan’s First Law, coined by National Review editor John O’Sullivan in the early 1990s: “Any institution or organization that is not explicitly right-wing will become explicitly left-wing over time.”
3. “The Compassion Industry Against Bork,” Washington Post, October 1, 1987.
4. When President Carter nominated Abner Mikva to an appeals court in 1979, Biden rebuffed conservative complaints about Mikva’s activist liberal philosophy: “I think that the advice and consent responsibility of the Senate does not permit us to deprive the President of the United States from being able to appoint that person or persons who have a particular point of view unless it can be shown that their temperament does not fit the job.” Ted Kennedy said on the Senate floor: “If strong political views were a disqualifying factor from serving on the federal bench, then all of us here today—and every man and woman who has ever served in either house of Congress, or held political office—would be disqualified.” Kennedy had made a similar argument in 1967 in defense of Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court.
5. The irony of Tribe’s outspoken opposition was surely not lost on him. He became the “Bork of the Left,” and as such would be as unconfirmable as Bork were he ever to be nominated to the Supreme Court.
6. Suzanne Garment, “The War Against Robert H. Bork,” Commentary, January 1988, p. 26.
7. Richard Vigilante, “Who’s Afraid of Robert Bork?” National Review, August 28, 1987, p. 25.
8. Cited in Ethan Bronner, Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America (New York: Union Square Press, 2007 [originally published 1989]), p. 174.
9. Wildavsky, The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism, p. 209.
10. Robert H. Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 19.
11. What Bork said of Bowers v. Hardwick is precisely what the Supreme Court subsequently decided, on the very logic Bork noted, in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).
12. The Ninth Amendment is not the only clause that requires republican imagination to interpret; for example, there is Article IV, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”
13. See Harry V. Jaffa, Storm Over the Constitution (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999); Hadley Arkes, Beyond the Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
14. National Review, September 25, 1987, pp. 18–19.
15. Bork entered dictionaries with the definition “to deny Senate confirmation of a nominee, especially for a U.S. Supreme Court or federal judgeship, by use of sustained public disparagement” (Encarta World English Dictionary).
16. One direct-mail consultant told the Wall Street Journal that he had five anti-Bork client organizations. More than thirty organizations submitted requests to testify against Bork.
17. Reagan initially shrugged off Ginsburg’s pot smoking, writing in his diary, “I don’t see any reason why I should withdraw his name.” But as support for Gins-burg collapsed on Capitol Hill, Reagan relented.
18. Jan Crawford Greenburg, Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), pp. 52–53.
19. Though it bears noting these rates were down from their historic highs of over 16 percent (short) and 13.4 percent (long) in 1981.
20. Reagan’s four appointees were Preston Martin, Martha Seger, Wayne Angell, and Manuel Johnson.
21. This was a new record in nominal dollars, but represented a slight decline in its proportion to GDP, which had been 6.3 percent in 1983 and 5.4 percent in 1985.
22. American Banker magazine, however, noted in February 1987: “A major improvement in the U.S. foreign trade deficit now appears to be well under way.”
23. Cited in Matt Rees, “The Hunt for Black October,” The American, September/October 2007, p. 48.
24. Quoted in Landon Thomas, “The Man Who Won as Others Lost,” New York Times, October 13, 2007, p. B1.
25. Thomas E. Ricks, “Ruder Says Trading Halt Is a Way to Ease Volatility Caused by Program Trading,” Wall Street Journal, October 7, 1987.
26. James B. Stewart and Daniel Hertzberg, “Terrible Tuesday: How the Stock Market Almost Disintegrated,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 1987, p. A1.
27. Among the companies publicly announcing buybacks on the twentieth were Shearson Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, Honeywell, ITT, four of the regional Bell telephone companies, and U.S. Steel.
28. Paul Craig Roberts, “Monetary Policy Caused the Crash—Too Tight Already,” Wall Street Journal, October 22, 1987.
29. Warren Brookes, “Takeover Boom Spurs Competitiveness,” Detroit News, December 14, 1987.
30. Gerald Seib and Ellen Hume, “Administration Seems Paralyzed in Wake of Bork Fight,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 1987, p. 1.
31. Lance Morrow, “America’s Agenda After Reagan,” Time, March 30, 1987, p. 28.
32. Economist, September 12, 1987, p. 11.
33. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).
34. Alexei Arbatov, “What Lesson’s Learned?” in Kiron K. Skinner, ed., Turning Points in Ending the Cold War (Palo Alto, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1988), p. 47.
35. Human Events, November 28, 1987.
36. James Goldsmith, “America, You Falter,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 1987.
37. It was actually his second veto; he had vetoed the identical bill in November 1986, but as the lame duck Congress didn’t have time to cast an override vote, the new Congress passed the identical bill as its first order of business in January 1987.
38. There was also a regulatory component to the act for nonpoint-source water pollution that Reagan found objectionable. “This new program threatens to become the ultimate whip hand for Federal regulators,” Reagan said in his veto message.
39. Human Events, September 5, 1987. Quote: “If the President continues to embrace Baker’s advice, he may yet end his eight years in office as the man who not only permitted the Soviets to establish a major beachhead on the American continent, but who also presided over the greatest increase in the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson gave us the Great Society.”
40. “White House Watch,” New Republic, March 16, 1987, p. 14.
41. There were several other minor skirmishes that dismayed the right. HHS Secretary Bowen fired an HHS deputy, Jo Ann Gasper, in 1987 after she moved to cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood. Don Devine, director of the Office of Personnel Management in Reagan’s first term, had done something similar, and it played a role in the Senate’s refusal to confirm him to a second term at OPM.
42. See Anderson, Revolution: The Reagan Legacy, pp. 120–21, 180–81, 186–87. FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights, first outlined in his 1944 State of the Union message, called for guaranteed rights to employment, housing, health care, education, and “protection from economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.” This was also the speech in which FDR equated Republicans with the fascists against whom the nation was fighting in World War II: “One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis—recently emphasized the grave dangers of ‘rightist reaction’ in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.”
43. “In sum,” the FCC’s report said, “[T]he fairness doctrine in operation disserves both the public’s right to diverse sources of information and the broadcaster’s interest in free expression. Its chilling effect thwarts its intended purpose, and it results in excessive and unnecessary government intervention into the editorial processes of broadcast journalists.”
44. Yakovlev’s memo is available from the National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB168/yakovlev03.pdf.
45. Diary entry, October 29, 1987.
46. Henry Kissinger, “A New Era for NATO,” Newsweek, October 12, 1987.
47. Hedrick Smith, “The Right Against Reagan,” New York Times Magazine, January 17, 1988, p. 38.
48. Will, Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (New York: Free Press, 1997).
49. Patrick Glynn, “Reagan’s Rush to Disarm,” Commentary, March 1988, p. 26.
50. Buckley to Reagan, January 24, 1988, reprinted in William F. Buckley Jr., The Reagan I Knew (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 207.
51. “Richard Perle’s INF Treaty,” Human Events, December 19, 1987, p. 3.
52. Oval Office interview with print reporters, December 23, 1981.
53. Quoted in Smith, “The Right Against Reagan,” p. 38.
54. August 8, 1987; August 29, 1987; March 5, 1988; December 3, 1988.
55. November 9, 1987; February 23, 1988; May 23, 1988.
56. September 16, 1987; February 29, 1988; April 10, 1988; May 27, 1988; July 13, 1988.
57. September 28, 1987; March 10, 1988.
58. BBC Moscow World Service in English, August 15, 1987.
59. Ibid., August 10, 1987.
60. Peter Robinson, e-mail communication with author, December 5, 2002.
61. See “U.S. Aide Urges E. Germany to Tear Down Berlin Wall,” Chicago Tribune, October 13, 1988, p. 4.
62. Leon Aron, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 177.
63. Ibid., p. 187.
64. Diary entry, February 25, 1987.
65. Politburo session, December 17, 1987, available at the National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB238/russian/Final1987–12-17Politburo%20Session.pdf.
66. National Review, December 31, 1987.
1. Reagan’s veto of the 1986 CR was prompted in part by a provision allowing the rehiring of the fired air traffic controllers. Following this example, Reagan might have vetoed the CRs with the troublesome Boland Amendments.
2. Diary entry, February 25, 1988.
3. National Security Council memorandum of conversation, March 11, 1988, available at http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB251/4.pdf. On the issue of the Soviets’ self-esteem, Massie told Reagan that she “perceived a feeling of malaise among the Soviets she talked to, mostly educated persons and intellectuals. Rising expectations born of Gorbachev’s reforms were tempered by the realization of the basic inertia of the working force—nothing seemed to be happening. ‘Soviet society is undergoing an agonizing reappraisal,’ she said, likening the Soviet people to someone breaking out of concrete.”
4. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, pp. 1096–97.
5. National Security Council memorandum of conversation, April 29, 1988, available at http://www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB251/9.pdf.
6. Jeffrey Hart, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” National Review, June 24, 1988.
7. Brian Crozier, “The Collapse of Communism,” National Review, August 5, 1988.
8. Reagan of course held a position of strict neutrality during the primary season, but privately favored Bush, in part as a reward for his dutiful vice presidential loyalty.
9. William Raspberry, “There Is No Black Agenda,” Washington Post, November 18, 1988.
10. National Review, February 5, 1988, p. 18.
11. Tom Bethell, “Ducks and Bees,” American Spectator, February 1985.
12. Mansfield, America’s Constitutional Soul, p. 60.
13. Cited by Fred Barnes, “Odds on Mike,” New Republic, April 18, 1988.
14. “Dukakis’s Deceptions,” New Republic, October 10, 1988.
15. Quoted in Fred Barnes, “Sticky Wicket,” New Republic, June 13, 1988.
16. Robert Kuttner, “Incompetent Ideology,” New Republic, December 5, 1988.
17. Peter Brown, Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond (Washington, DC: Regnery-Gateway, 1991), p. 124.
18. This quotation and several others from this section are compiled in Joshua Muravchik, “Why the Democrats Lost Again,” Commentary, February 1989, pp. 13–22.
19. Clinton quoted in Brown, Minority Party, p. 125. In the New Republic Martin Peretz posed this question: “Who among the liberals even will be willing to say that school districts may insist that their students wear white blouses or shirts as a modest way of bringing some visual order and esprit de corps to the chaos of urban education?” President Bill Clinton did, in 1996.
20. William Schneider, “Tough Liberals Win, Weak Liberals Lose,” New Republic, December 5, 1988.
21. One of the Democratic winners in 1988 was Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, who knocked off incumbent liberal Republican Lowell Weicker. Reagan so disliked Weicker that he wanted to donate to Lieberman’s campaign; chief of staff Ken Dubertsein had to talk him out of it.
22. Cited in Fred Barnes, “Sore Winners,” New Republic, December 5, 1988.
23. Molly Worthen, The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 260.
24. The reference to Vienna is to the Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) negotiations about conventional forces in Europe. These long-running talks had been stalled for years.
25. A few weeks before arriving in New York, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would stop jamming transmissions of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, release more than a hundred political prisoners, and allow greater freedom of religious practice.
1. Mark Kramer, “The Collapse of the Soviet Union,” Journal of Cold War Studies 5, 1 (Winter 2003): p. 3.
2. Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, pp. 2–4.
3. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (New York: Vintage, 1999 [originally published by Random House, 1990]), p. 158.
4. Cited in Kotkin, Armageddon Averted, p. 92.
5. Gorbachev wrote in the New York Times the week of Reagan’s funeral: “I don’t know whether we would have been able to agree and to insist on the implementation of our agreements with a different person at the helm of American government…. [Reagan] was not dogmatic; he was looking for negotiations and cooperation” (New York Times, June 7, 2004).
6. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: Harper, 2008), p. 281.
7. Nation, June 28, 2004.
8. George W. Breslauer and Richard Ned Lebow, “Leadership and the End of the Cold War: A Counterfactual Thought Experiment,” in Richard K. Hermann and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Ending the Cold War: Interpretations, Causation, and the Study of International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 184.
9. Joshua Green, “Reagan’s Liberal Legacy,” Washington Monthly, January/February 2003.
10. Thomas B. Silver, “Reagan’s Failure,” unpublished paper, on file with author.
11. William Voegeli, “The Trouble with Limited Government,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2007, http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1495/article_detail.asp.
12. Lawrence Lindsey’s copious book on the subject, The Growth Experiment, laments the lack of a solid empirical basis for evaluating the effect of tax cuts on federal revenues: “One yearns for down-to-earth numbers. There are none to be had” (p. 77).
13. Lindsey again: “The great American middle class, people earning between $20,000 and $60,000 in the early 1980s, saw their tax share fall from 67 percent to 60 percent between 1981 and 1986. It was they who received the bulk of the Reagan tax cuts” (p. 83).
14. Viscusi, “The Misspecified Agenda,” in Feldstein, ed., American Economic Policy in the 1980s, p. 457.