WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON, DC
MARCH 3, 1981
1:22 P.M.
Seated inside the Diplomatic Reception Room, President Ronald Reagan makes small talk with CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite as a sound engineer adjusts their lapel microphones. The two men sit opposite each other on simple wooden chairs. Behind them, the iconic Frederic Remington bronze sculpture Broncho Buster perches on a credenza. Reagan’s legs are crossed, and he rests his hands on his knees to keep them still as he speaks. Both men are dressed in dark suits, with Reagan’s maroon tie in subtle contrast to the blue and yellow favored by the newsman.
Walter Cronkite has been a major figure in broadcasting for forty years, and Reagan has specifically chosen him to conduct his first interview since taking office six weeks ago. The anchorman has personally known each president since Herbert Hoover and has an opinion on each.1 Cronkite finds Reagan to be “a lot of fun to be with, the kind of guy you really like to have as a friend.”
Despite that admiration, Cronkite has a job to do. In this instance, he must ask Reagan tough questions in an attempt to reassure the world that the president does not plan on waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. So far Reagan has done little to dispel that notion, taking the same hard-line stance against the Soviets that he took against Communists in Hollywood almost four decades ago.
The situation has grown worse in the past week. On February 24, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev gave a three-hour speech in front of a Communist Party gathering in Moscow. The seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev is a short, overweight man with enormous bushy eyebrows who has ruled his nation for almost seventeen years. During that time, he has pursued a ruthless path of aggression against the United States and the rest of the West, secretly building a nuclear arsenal and military that now dwarf those of America and NATO.2 This is in violation of several treaties between the two nations designed to keep world peace. Since the Nixon administration, the United States has pursued a policy of détente, in which the Soviet Union has often played the part of the aggressor and America has usually acceded to its demands in an effort to keep the peace.
It is a policy that Ronald Reagan abhors, and he is determined that Brezhnev understand that. “It has been a long time since an American president stood up to the Soviet Union,” he says to his son Michael in 1976. “Every time we get into negotiations, the Soviets are telling us what we are going to have to give up in order for us to get along with them, and we forget who we are.”3
At the time of Brezhnev’s speech at the Kremlin, many within the KGB fear that the Soviet Union can no longer keep up with the United States economically or militarily.4 A nation can be militarily successful for only so long. At some point, the economy must also be powerful, and this is where the Soviets are failing. The Cold War, that decades-old ideological conflict between capitalism and communism, could soon come to an end—and communism could lose.
For this reason, Brezhnev’s speech included an invitation that Ronald Reagan sit down at the negotiating table. Pretending to seek peace, Brezhnev was again bluffing. He wanted to bully the untested American president.
But Ronald Reagan is in no mood to be bullied—not by Leonid Brezhnev, nor by Walter Cronkite.
From the very first question, Cronkite attempts to put Reagan on the defensive. He asks about the “crisis” in American foreign policy, drawing comparisons between the United States military advisers in El Salvador and the early days of America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Reagan fires back in a cordial yet firm tone of voice. “No, Walter,” referring to the newsman by his first name, “the difference is so profound.”
The president continues for a full minute, rattling off the details of the growing Communist threat in Central America thanks to military groups controlled by the Russians and Cubans.
Cronkite replies with another pointed question about the “wisdom” of Reagan’s foreign policy. Reagan responds instantly, his command of the facts absolute. Back and forth they go for twenty minutes, two master communicators making sure their message is heard. And while Cronkite is speaking to the American people, Ronald Reagan is talking directly to Leonid Brezhnev. Every word of this interview, right down to each comma, will be transcribed and scrutinized in Moscow. Reagan wants the Russians to know one thing above all else: he is not Jimmy Carter.
Soon enough, the subject turns to Brezhnev’s demand for a summit meeting.
“You might have overdone the rhetoric a little bit by laying into the Soviet leadership, calling them liars and thieves,” Cronkite states, referring to a comment Reagan made at his first press conference. “The world, I think, is looking forward to some negotiations to stop the arms race, to get off this danger point.”
But Reagan does not budge.
“I do believe this,” Reagan begins, distancing himself from a détente that he considers phony. “It is rather foolish to have unilaterally disarmed, you might say, as we did by letting our defensive [sic], our margin of safety, deteriorate, and then you sit with the fellow who’s got all the arms. What do you have to negotiate with?”
* * *
Leonid Brezhnev is not pleased.
The Soviet leader sits in his Kremlin office on this cold winter day, craving the cigarettes that doctors are forcing him to quit. The last time he met with an American president was a year and a half ago, at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Austria. There, after signing an arms-control treaty that limited the Soviet Union and United States to the same number of missiles and long-range bombers, a jubilant Brezhnev embraced Jimmy Carter, kissing him on both cheeks. To the millions worldwide watching this display on television, Brezhnev seemed to want to appear both charming and lighthearted.
Soviet leader and Reagan nemesis Leonid Brezhnev in his Kremlin office
“He has the Slavic love of physical contact—back slapping, bear hugs, and kisses,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote in a confidential memo to President Gerald Ford in 1974. “His anecdotes and imagery, to which he resorts frequently, avoid the language of the barnyard. His humor is heavy, sometimes cynical, and frequently earthy.
“Brezhnev is a nervous man, partly because of his personal insecurity, partly for physiological reasons traced to his consumption of alcohol and tobacco,” Kissinger continued. “You will find his hands perpetually in motion, twirling his gold watch chain, flicking ashes from his ever-present cigarette, clanging his cigarette holder against an ashtray. From time to time, he may stand up behind his chair or walk about. He is likely to interrupt by offering food and drink. His colleagues obviously humor him in these nervous habits.”
But Brezhnev has a notorious dark side. Until recently, he womanized constantly, despite being married for more than fifty years. Physical ailments, however, have left him bloated and unable to speak without slurring, making sexual liaisons only a memory. His condition is so bad that the television broadcast of his February 24 speech to the Communist Party Congress was suddenly terminated after just six minutes. At this point, Brezhnev often seems incoherent, so much so that many Russians now mock him.
But they do so secretly. Brezhnev may be in poor health, but he still wields the power to make men disappear into the gulags of snowy Siberia or to vanish altogether.5 After Brezhnev overthrew former Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, sending him into house arrest on a farm outside Moscow, he made it clear that his role model was the ruthless Joseph Stalin, the World War II leader who murdered tens of millions of Russians and foreigners over the course of his brutal thirty-one-year reign.
Brezhnev is on a less extreme course. He and his KGB chief, the equally barbaric sixty-six-year-old Yuri Andropov, are fond of imprisoning dissidents and either declaring them insane or sending them to forced-labor gulags. There, the prisoners live on thin soup and hard black bread, laboring to chop down trees in temperatures as cold as seventy below zero. Soviet guards are known to shoot them on sight if they attempt to flee the barbed wire ringing their forest prisons.
Brezhnev copied the gulags from Joseph Stalin. So far, he has murdered approximately two million people in the camps. He is dedicated to Stalin’s belief that communism should rule the world and that all brutality is permissible in this quest.
Sensing weakness in the West, Leonid Brezhnev has sent Soviet troops into Vietnam, Egypt, and Afghanistan and to the Chinese border—and those are just the nations where these forces are in the open. Soviet troops can also be found hidden within Angola, Cuba, Central America, and a host of smaller nations in which Brezhnev plots to spread global domination. Wherever the Soviets go, atrocities follow. The body count extends far beyond military intrusions. In Afghanistan, children are routinely maimed, mutilated, and murdered by a nefarious device known as the “butterfly” mine. Dropped by Soviet helicopters, millions of these explosive devices flutter to earth like small insects. But when a child tries to capture one of these delicate figures, the liquid explosive inside detonates, instantly severing their hands.
Ronald Reagan knows all this and despises the Communist leadership. He also understands he has four, perhaps eight, years to implement his strategy to reduce the Soviet threat. Brezhnev is intent on maintaining power for as long as he lives. He has marginalized his political rivals, keeping them on the fringes of power. For example, a fifty-year-old up-and-comer named Mikhail Gorbachev has just been named a voting member of the Soviet Politburo but is limited to a role in the Secretariat for Agriculture.
Brezhnev “has given his regime such strength and stability that a move to oust him, short of his physical incapacitation, seems almost inconceivable,” the New York Times reports.
But the Soviet boss knows he must stay strong to maintain power. Now deeply angered by Ronald Reagan’s comments to Walter Cronkite, Brezhnev feels his lighthearted manner vanish. He furiously dictates a nine-page personal letter to Reagan. “The Soviet Union has not sought, and does not seek superiority,” he seethes. “But neither will we permit such superiority to be established over us. Such attempts, as well as attempts to talk to us from a position of strength, are absolutely futile … to attempt to win in the arms race, to count on victory in an atomic war—would be dangerous madness.”
* * *
Ronald Reagan receives Brezhnev’s letter at the White House on March 6. It is a Friday, and he is looking forward to a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat for a dose of the outdoors. He knows Brezhnev, having met him at Richard Nixon’s home in San Clemente, California, years ago, when he was still governor of California. World peace is contingent upon Reagan finding some way to relate to his Soviet counterpart. It is a delicate thing, to know that the fate of the world hangs on your next action.
“I didn’t have much faith in Communists or put much stock in their word,” Reagan will later write. “Still, it was dangerous to continue the East-West nuclear standoff forever, and I decided that if the Russians wouldn’t take the first step, I should.”
As he so often does in moments like these, Reagan consults with his advisers. This time, he turns to Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who has been insisting since the inauguration that he be given a more vital role in foreign affairs. Speaking in the Oval Office, he suggests to Haig that it might be good for Reagan himself to write Brezhnev a personal letter in reply.
But Haig is appalled. He knows the Soviets well from his years in the military as NATO commander, during which he often squared off against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact allies. In Haig’s estimation, Brezhnev’s letter is typical Soviet rhetoric. He suggests that Reagan allow him to draft the return letter.
Ronald Reagan defers to Haig. He considers his secretary of state his chief adviser on foreign affairs. Nineteen days later, on March 25, Haig sends his draft of the letter to the White House.
That date is notable because it is the same day that John Hinckley is dropped off at the airport in Denver by his mother. Also on that Wednesday, Ronald Reagan flies by helicopter to Quantico for an afternoon of horseback riding.
“It felt great,” Reagan writes in his journal that evening. “We should do this often.”6
As he has done so frequently over the years, Reagan uses the time astride the small brown mare to sort out his thoughts. Haig has been a nettlesome presence in the White House, constantly wheedling power where he can find it, often at the expense of Vice President George Bush. The letter that Haig has drafted reflects that temerity. Reagan considers Haig’s words inflammatory and not at all diplomatic.
The president sends the letter back to the State Department, asking for a new draft. Five days later his request is fulfilled.
But once again, it is not the letter Reagan has in mind. The date is March 30, 1981. Ronald Reagan has been in office sixty-nine days. But no letter will be written that day.
Instead, an act of pure evil intervenes.