Three Days in Moscow

by Bret Baier

  His speeches were by turns conversational and idealistic, burnished with stories (some embellished or loosely adapted) about real people in perilous or inspiring circumstances. He wanted audiences to respond emotionally, and he was skilled at imagining the impact words on a page would have when spoken. “Sometimes, speech writers write things that seem very eloquent on paper, but sound convoluted or stilted when you say them to an audience,” he observed in his autobiography. He urged his writers to use simple language—shorter sentences and single-syllable words whenever possible—and to keep the length to about twenty minutes. “Remember, there are people out there sitting and listening, they’ve got to be able to absorb what I’m saying.”

  The speechwriters in turn had great respect for Reagan’s gift for understanding and reaching out to an audience. He could, he told one aide, imagine them as individuals he was talking to one-on-one, as if he were among friends at a barbershop. He always saw himself as having a personal chat with listeners, talking to them as one would to friends, including jokes to break the intensity. In a drawer of the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, he had stacks of four-by-six and three-by-five cards with inspirational quotes, as well as jokes and one-liners, that would often make their way into the drafts. He had a selection of jokes specifically related to the Soviet Union. He dropped one of them into the Westminster speech: “The Soviet Union would remain a one-party nation even if an opposition party were permitted, because everyone would join the opposition party.” A later speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars gathering included this zinger: “By the way, did you hear that the Communists now have a million-dollar lottery for their people? The winner gets a dollar a year for a million years.”

  The jokes and one-liners served a higher purpose than merely producing a laugh, however. They created a laser focus on his main points and brought the audience to his side. Reagan’s use of humor demonstrated an instinctive grasp of human nature—the desire people have to be in on the joke.

  Reagan was a far more complex human being than his critics gave him credit for being or his adoring fans acknowledged. But the one consistent quality of his speeches was that they reached for higher ground, a nobler purpose. “We have every right to dream heroic dreams,” he’d said in his inaugural address, and he believed it.

  Heroic dreams, it would seem, were required. The world Reagan inherited when he took office was a landscape of failed promise and lost hope. Ever since Eisenhower’s unsuccessful effort to bring the Soviets to the table, US presidents had failed to make real progress, even dangerously backtracking during the Vietnam War era. Though Nixon, who was skilled at negotiating with adversarial governments, had tried to work with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, he had ceded the opportunity by choosing to court China. Jimmy Carter had made his position clear when he said, “We no longer suffer from an inordinate fear of communism”—relegating what Reagan believed was the greatest threat of the era to a mere standoff. Carter had mostly played defense with the Soviets after their incursion into Afghanistan in 1979. He had done all the usual posturing, mostly ineffectual, imposing economic sanctions and withdrawing from the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, but his response had been insufficient. Distracted by the Iran hostage crisis, he had missed an opportunity to confront Brezhnev from a position of strength. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan had urged the Carter administration to fight fire with fire by sending antiaircraft missiles to the Afghan rebels fighting the Red Army. Once in office, he continued to speak out about the invasion as a violation of human decency and international law, and he backed up his words with tangible support for the rebels.

  On the nuclear front, Reagan was unwavering. Despite heavy criticism, he decided to place intermediate-range missiles in Germany and Great Britain to counter the Soviet placement of missiles in Eastern Europe, aimed at the West. That hardened his critics’ contention that he was a warmonger. Almost lost in the outrage was his more nuanced position on the subject of nuclear buildup: he despised nuclear weapons and feared the consequences of a buildup. He considered it one of the highest purposes of his presidency to end the nuclear arms race. But he would do it his way—not by standing down, as the nuclear freeze movement would have him do, but by showing strength. “Peace through strength” was his mantra. It was a core principle, based on the conviction that only by challenging the Soviet Union from a position of power could the United States bring it to the negotiating table. Shultz agreed. “If you don’t have any strength, your diplomacy is in the ashcan,” he said. “You’ve got nothing to take to the table. And at the same time, if you don’t have any diplomatic process going on, it erodes your strength. A good diplomatic process helps your strength. So our key words were realism, strength, diplomacy.”

  In a dramatic call for a nuclear abatement quid pro quo, Reagan announced near the end of 1981 that the United States was willing to cancel the deployment of missiles to Europe if the Soviet Union would agree to dismantle its intermediate-range missiles trained on Europe. The Soviets shrugged off the notion. They didn’t trust the United States. But Reagan didn’t trust them, either. His views on détente had long been clear: “Détente—isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey before Thanksgiving?” he’d asked pointedly during the 1980 campaign. He reasserted that view often after he took office. When he was asked at a press conference whether détente was possible, he replied that the Soviets would lie, cheat, and steal to get what they wanted, so doing business with them was pretty difficult.

  When he said that so bluntly, people in the room gasped, their genteel sensibilities offended. Even some of his own staff blanched. But walking back to the Oval Office, he stopped and confronted NSC advisor Richard Allen, who was trailing him.

  “Oh, say, Dick.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The Russians—they do lie, cheat, and steal to get everything they want, don’t they?”

  “They sure do, Mr. President,” Allen agreed.

  Reagan grinned at him. “I thought so.”

  What had sounded like an off-the-cuff remark—a gaffe, even—had actually been carefully planned. People could be as shocked as they wanted, Reagan figured; his goal was to make sure the Soviets knew he was onto them.

  In mid-May, when he first saw a draft of the Westminster speech, which had been thoroughly whitewashed by State and Defense Department editors, he was disappointed. It pulled so many punches that it felt like a limp handshake. Frustrated, he sent off a copy to Washington Post columnist George Will, whose opinion he valued, asking him to take a look at it. Will’s reply came back shortly. “It called to mind the old axiom: A camel is a horse designed by a committee,” he wrote. “It reflected the State Department, where everyone has interests and no one has ideas.”

  That was just as Reagan had thought. He was relieved when William Clark, who had replaced Richard Allen as national security advisor in 1982 after a minor scandal had forced Allen’s resignation, told him that chief speechwriter Anthony Dolan had been working on the speech for a couple of months. Maybe he had something ready.

  Dolan, a bearded thirty-three-year-old wordsmith with a gift for soaring prose and a conscience honed by a lifetime of Catholic faith and conservative ideals, had a gift for channeling the president. Dolan would tell you that he knew Reagan because he’d been an acolyte since he was a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in Connecticut. In particular, the young Dolan was attracted to Reagan’s powerful anti-Communist message. “We had a truck that was the Tombstone Float,” he recalled of his youthful political adventures. “On it were tombstones of all the countries that had fallen under communism. And the U.S.A. was at the end, with a tombstone that had a big question mark on it. It would go through Bridgeport, and in the Hungarian and Polish neighborhoods people would applaud wildly.”

  Having been a student of Reagan’s words for nearly a lifetime, Dolan felt comfortable writing for him. A speechwriter’s job, he believed, was not to put words into a president’s mouth but to be in tune with him—to hear his own
words and speak them back to him. “They always thought I had some secret way of getting to Reagan, as he’d choose my drafts,” Dolan said. “But I was just giving him back what he was saying in the sixties.” When White House reporters would mention his job title, Dolan would say, “Ronald Reagan is his own chief speechwriter.”

  Dolan knew Reagan would want to see a consensus draft, so he included language from an NSC paper by Richard Pipes, among other sources. But he focused primarily on the context Reagan had been bringing to the Cold War since the 1960s. Rather than harsh anti-Communist rhetoric, Dolan elevated the tone and made it resemble other speeches Reagan had been giving that year, where he said the Cold War contest was just part of the struggle against twentieth-century “statism” and totalitarianism, both Nazism and Communism, a struggle that made the Soviet Union “a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.”

  When Reagan saw Dolan’s draft, he immediately recognized his familiar content and told his advisors he now had something to work on. Reagan did several revisions, adding and subtracting, rewriting.

  The draft Reagan sent out was distinctly Reaganesque and this predictably set off alarm bells with the moderates at the White House and State Department. The ongoing battle between true believers, whose motto was “Let Reagan be Reagan,” and the more pragmatic staffers, who sought to guard Reagan against the consequences of using inflammatory rhetoric, was reignited every time he was to make an important speech. But while there would be more back and forth over the Westminster draft, the version Reagan had worked on essentially survived.

  The setting and the ceremonial nature of the event were quite dramatic. At the allotted hour, the Reagans arrived at Westminster Palace. The speech would take place in the beautiful Royal Gallery, a large hall lined with royal portraits and lit by the glow of stained-glass windows. Severely damaged by a bomb blast during World War II, the Royal Gallery had been restored to its former splendor and was used for visits of foreign dignitaries and other ceremonies. When the members and guests were seated—as predicted, many members stayed away in protest—Thatcher escorted Nancy to a front-row seat. Then the State Trumpeters played the Royal Fanfare to signal Reagan’s entrance into the gallery, accompanied by the lord great chamberlain, the hereditary officer of state and representative of the queen.

  Reagan began to speak, firmly and decisively, laying out his view of the stark contrast between repressive powers and free nations.

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

  That was a hard truth, he said, one that many people had trouble facing in their desire to be fair to both sides and seek ways to coexist peacefully. But there were not two sides, he emphasized. There could be only one winner in the fight:

  If history teaches anything it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly. We see around us today the marks of our terrible dilemma—predictions of doomsday, antinuclear demonstrations, an arms race in which the West must, for its own protection, be an unwilling participant. At the same time we see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?

  Then he delivered the most memorable and controversial line with a highly charged attack on the entire premise of the Communist state:

  What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.

  Margaret Thatcher smiled approvingly from the front row. The speech, she wrote in her memoir, was “remarkable. . . . It marked a decisive stage in the battle of ideas which he and I wished to wage against socialism, above all the socialism of the Soviet Union.” The point, she believed, was not only to defend against communism but to “put freedom on the offensive.”

  Reagan had recognized a kindred spirit in Thatcher from their first meeting, which had taken place when he and Nancy visited England during the Carter administration. He’d begun contemplating a presidential run in 1980, but it was still in the future. While in England, Justin Dart, one of his old kitchen cabinet advisors, had offered to introduce him to a friend who was the first woman to lead the British Conservative Party. He was very impressed with Thatcher and immediately judged that she would make a wonderful prime minister. “Of course,” he wrote, “it never occurred to me that before many years would pass, Margaret and I would be sitting across from each other as the heads of our respective governments.” Once in office, he and Thatcher bonded over a shared antipathy to socialism and a commitment to winning the Cold War. That’s not to say that their relationship was a lovefest. It was far more complicated and intellectually rigorous than that, and they didn’t always agree.

  For example, at the time of the Westminster speech Great Britain was embroiled in a war in the Falkland Islands. Reagan’s advisors thought the invasion smacked of colonialism, and Reagan debated the proper course to take with Thatcher. In one late-night phone call, he urged her to offer a more evenhanded cease-fire deal that would give the Argentinians a role to play—a suggestion she vociferously challenged. Reagan lost that argument, but when he hung up the phone, he was smiling. “Isn’t she marvelous?” he asked Deaver, who had not liked her aggressive tone with the president. “Shows such spunk. Just marvelous.” On the subject of the Soviet Union, however, they had no debate. The “Iron Lady” would be Reagan’s most powerful and effective counterpart in the fight he was determined to win.

  The takeaway from Reagan’s speech to Parliament was that it was a robust defense of democratic principles on behalf of the United States and Europe, based on Reagan’s philosophy of “peace through strength.” It also offered hope that the Cold War would end and that freedom would reign. Reagan believed that words were among the greatest weapons in an arsenal, and his were fighting words, although only about one-third of the members attended to hear them. Among those who did, the TV cameras captured smirks of disapproval. The general media reaction ranged from apathy to disdain. “Unmemorable,” judged the Guardian. “Vintage Reagan,” journalist Sam Donaldson said, not meaning it as a compliment. Many thought Reagan’s prose was naive, not fully grasping his strategy.

  The Westminster speech was a firm opening salvo in a battle whose ultimate aim was peace. But before peace could happen, Reagan believed, we needed to stop beating around the bush and pretending that the Soviet way had legitimacy on a par with that of the United States. That was a substantially different posture from the one held by Soviet experts at the time and indeed by some members of Reagan’s own foreign policy team. The standard belief was that the United States and the Soviet Union were of relatively equal strength and competing philosophies. Reagan didn’t see it that way. He devised a simple test for legitimacy, one the Soviets didn’t pass: a nation could not survive without freedom, without human rights, without a religious spirit, and with the force of its power directed at keeping its citizens under the gun. Standing on the wrong side of history, isolated, it would inevitably fail. The free world didn’t have to bring the Soviet Union to its knees; it would collapse of its own weight.

  That was a point he’d been making repeatedly over the years. Furthermore, an aggressive arms race was decim
ating the Soviet economy and sending the government on the hunt for loans to prop up its system. Shultz had seen the decline firsthand as secretary of the Treasury under Nixon. “One of my jobs there was economic relations with the Soviet Union,” he said. “So I went back and forth, and I saw their agricultural program was a total failure. Their health system was no good. Their own people—you would talk to them privately on the side, and they were very worried about their economy. So I could see all these weaknesses.”

  Things hadn’t improved. Writing in his diary after a briefing on the Soviet economy, Reagan noted, “They are in very bad shape and if we can cut off their credit they’ll have to yell ‘Uncle’ or starve.” It bears mentioning that Reagan’s position on the matter had been virtually unchanged for twenty years. In the early 1960s, he had written about his frustration with US efforts to accommodate the Soviet Union. “If we truly believe that our way of life is best aren’t the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged so that the contrast is apparent?” he asked. “Inhuman though it may sound, shouldn’t we throw the whole burden of feeding the satellites on their slave masters who are having trouble feeding themselves?”

  According to Kenneth Adelman, who directed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for five years during Reagan’s presidency, Reagan wasn’t just introducing a new strategy but a new paradigm. “Reagan’s view was, ‘We’re legitimate, they’re illegitimate. We have to deal with them on issues because they’re here, but that doesn’t mean that they’re legitimate to deal with.’ That attitude really came through, and that was a gigantic change. That somehow you’re on the ass-end of history, you’re curtains.” That, of course, drove the diplomats and moderates crazy and seemed at first blush totally contrary to the goal of rapprochement.

  The esteemed writer and commentator Charles Krauthammer saw it in an intriguing light. In a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation, he said that what he found most striking about the speech was its