Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  Yes, a window had opened. The Democratic majority knew the force it was up against. As Jim Wright, the House majority leader, wrote about the president, “His philosophical approach is superficial, overly simplistic and one-dimensional. What he preaches is pure economic pap, glossed over with uplifting homilies and inspirational chatter. Yet so far the guy is making it work. Appalled by what seems to me a lack of depth, I stand in awe nevertheless of his political skill. I am not sure I have seen its equal.” Or, as Speaker Tip O’Neill put it, “The President has become a hero. We can’t argue with a man as popular as he is [right now]. I’ve been in politics a long time and I know when to fight and when not to fight.”

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  The Democrats weren’t prepared to put up their dukes—not yet, at least, not while the president remained sidelined with his wound. But in mid-May, the administration overreached, announcing plans for a reduction in Social Security benefits—as much as 31 percent for early retirees—and the gloves came off. For good reason, Social Security is called the third rail of American politics. The bill was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 96–0. The president pivoted to other, more winnable fights.

  He had been told by Vice President Bush that Potter Stewart intended to step down from the Supreme Court at the end of the current term, which meant an opportunity to appoint a judge with a conservative outlook. The Troika had discussed a replacement with Reagan early in April 1981, and William French Smith, the attorney general, was charged with submitting qualified candidates for consideration. “The president primarily wanted an originalist, someone who would be faithful to the Constitution,” Meese recalls. His and Smith’s marching orders were to find some “Constitutionally-oriented” women. Reagan seemed intent on making good on the campaign promise dreamed up by Stu Spencer—to name the first woman to the Supreme Court.

  Bill Smith’s list of eight nominees included four women, two of whom—Amalya Kearse and Sandra Day O’Connor—were leading candidates. The Troika wasn’t familiar with any of them. Republican hard-liners preferred two strong conservative jurists: Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork. They argued that this might be the president’s only chance for an appointment, and it should be someone philosophically compatible with him. But naming a woman captivated him, and Sandra Day O’Connor was particularly appealing. She’d been a Stanford Law School classmate and onetime date of William Rehnquist, an associate justice. What’s more, she came highly recommended. Nancy’s father also knew O’Connor through mutual friends in Arizona, where she sat on the State Court of Appeals, and he urged his son-in-law to seriously consider appointing her.

  The president liked O’Connor immediately. In their initial meeting, on the morning of July 1, it came to light that she was raised on a ranch, and that she had applied for a job at Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, a white-shoe California law firm whose policy was to hire women only as secretaries. Spurned, she returned home and practiced law in a small firm, ran for the state legislature, and advanced to the court. She had grit, and coming from the West was another plus.

  The president pressed O’Connor to reveal where she stood on abortion. The question opened a Pandora’s box to be sure, considering the strong emotions of the electorate. And the president’s advisers were divided about whether it was appropriate to apply a single-issue litmus test to a judicial appointment. “A woman’s so-called right to choose was a non-Constitutionalist’s position,” says Ed Meese, “and there was no question in our minds that Roe v. Wade was not a Constitutionally oriented decision.” Clearly, pro-choice people disagreed with equal fervor. But Ronald Reagan felt he had been duped into signing the therapeutic abortion bill as governor of California and was determined to be out in front of the issue should the Court take it up. Should Sandra Day O’Connor become the nominee—his nominee—he felt he had a right to know her position in advance. The question was awkward, but her response was unambiguous. O’Connor was personally against abortion, she said, but a woman’s right to choose was the law of the land—and as a judge, she defended the law. It was as simple as that.

  If that discouraged Ronald Reagan, he never said. O’Connor’s personal opposition to abortion might have been all that was required. Or perhaps he didn’t understand that, should she become a Supreme Court justice, in matters relating to Roe v. Wade she would not allow her personal opinion to sway her decisions. In any event, he decided “she was a woman of great legal intellect, fairness, and integrity—the antithesis of an ideological judge, and just what I wanted on the court.” However much antiabortion forces wanted to make the issue a litmus test, this choice would purposefully avoid it. Sandra Day O’Connor made a powerful impression. Never one to procrastinate when making a decision, Reagan announced that she was his choice on July 7, 1981, only a week after meeting her.

  It was not that day’s most significant development.

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  That morning, Drew Lewis, the transportation secretary, appeared in the Oval Office with sobering news. It looked as though the administration had exhausted all efforts to reach a salary compromise with the nation’s air-traffic controllers. Their union—the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO—was threatening a strike.

  PATCO had been one of the few unions to endorse the Reagan campaign in 1980, and the president felt beholden to it and its membership. What’s more, he was a lifelong union man and respected workers’ rights. But none of that factored in to the outrage he now felt. A strike? By PATCO? He’d never permit it, not on his watch. The air-traffic controllers were federal employees and, therefore, not permitted to strike. They’d taken an oath to that effect. He was holding them to it. “Dammit,” he fumed at a morning Cabinet briefing, “the law is the law.” He threw down the gauntlet: if the controllers went ahead and struck, he wanted them to know, “they have quit their jobs and will not be rehired.”

  As the president saw it, the government had been negotiating with PATCO in good faith. He understood the union’s complaints—“too few people working unreasonable hours with obsolete equipment” and too demanding of a workload in a high-pressure job. Reagan had expressed as much in a letter to Robert Poli, PATCO’s president, promising to deliver “the most modern equipment available and to adjust staff levels and work days.” But Drew Lewis reported that air-traffic control was presently overstaffed and that the workers had rejected an FAA offer to reduce their workload by 6 percent, along with a $10 million investment in new equipment. When it came to a pay increase, the two sides were far apart: the FAA proposed $50 million, the union was demanding six times that amount.

  Reagan was worried—not about the money as much as the repercussions of an unlawful strike. The union had threatened to walk out a few years earlier, and the government had caved in to its demands. The president was determined not to let that happen again, a variation on his position that “we do not negotiate with terrorists.” “The foremost factor in the front of his mind,” according to Ed Meese, “was that air-traffic controllers were guarding our skies.” If they struck, he’d consider it “desertion in the face of duty.” There were thousands, tens of thousands, of flights each day; not only passengers, but the American economy, depended on a smoothly running system. The president wasn’t about to allow air traffic to grind to a halt or, as the New York Times put it, “have airplanes fall out of the sky.”

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  In the meantime, his Supreme Court nominee was facing headwinds. Reagan had certainly expected Republicans to get behind his choice, but as soon as word circulated that it would be Sandra Day O’Connor, opposing voices, mostly from the right, rose in unison to condemn her. Two hard-liners, Senator Don Nickles and Representative Henry Hyde, launched the attack. They phoned the White House on July 6 to warn that “her appointment would cause a firestorm among Reagan supporters” and “trigger a nasty political protest.” In short order, they were joined by Jess
e Helms and Strom Thurmond, who expressed similar dismay in a call to Ed Meese. O’Connor’s record on social issues, it seemed, flouted conservative sensibilities. In particular, they protested her vote in the Arizona legislature against reversing Roe v. Wade; her sponsorship of a family-planning act that critics misconstrued as a license for minors to get abortions without parental consent; her support for the Equal Rights Amendment; and her participation as keynote speaker for the International Women’s Year conference, “the bête noire of pro-family advocates.” It didn’t help that Tip O’Neill hailed the president’s appointment of O’Connor as “the best thing he’s done since he was inaugurated.”

  Ultimately, the opponents to O’Connor’s nomination relented and she was confirmed by a vote of 99–0. Political opposition was to be expected when it came to Supreme Court appointments. What was new here, however, was the conservative right’s concerted effort to loop religious leaders into the resistance. Calls started pouring into the White House from evangelical theologians, officials of the United States Catholic Conference, and fundamentalists like the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who preached that “good Christians” needed to be up in arms about the nomination. Good Christians were what Falwell labeled the Moral Majority in conservative America. This definition angered no less a conservative than Barry Goldwater, who upon hearing it said, “Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.”

  This backlash set a new high-water mark for the reach of religion into politics. It also set the stage for other incursions to come. The president was already enmeshed in a skirmish about school prayer. In 1962 and 1963, the Supreme Court had declared that religious prayer in public schools violated First Amendment rights guaranteeing the separation of church and state. But Reagan believed that voluntary prayer in school was a basic right—that it had been “practiced and revered from the early days of the colonies”—and felt the Constitution bore that out, if it was interpreted properly. He announced his intention to propose a constitutional amendment to allow voluntary prayer in public schools, reversing twenty years of precedent. It reflected his effort, he said, to foster “faith in a Creator who alone has the power to bless America.” The religious right, led by Jerry Falwell, agreed wholeheartedly and was pushing to make school prayer a national policy.

  This was dangerous territory for a president. Religion was like quicksand; it sucked other, more pressing policy into the muck. But with this proposal, new terrain had opened up in American politics. Intentionally or not, Ronald Reagan had touched off an emotionally charged stampede, and ideologues were rushing in to stake their claims.

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  Reagan took it upon himself to give the Soviet Union a strong dose of another kind of religion. He was convinced that the Carter administration had ceded too much ground to the Communists. “Our strategic forces were growing obsolete,” he concluded, “and nothing was being done to reduce the threat of a nuclear Armageddon that could destroy much of the world in less than a half hour’s time.”

  The U.S. military establishment suffered from years of neglect. “There was a perception that the Russians saw us as a declining power, losing confidence, disarming, and accommodating,” says John Lehman, Reagan’s secretary of the Navy. The Navy, in particular, was in distress, with a third of its fleet unfit to set sail. “Morale was bad—every enlisted family in our Oceana squadron was eligible for food stamps, and the dope problem was very real. Our big carriers were obsolete. We were outflanked in nuclear might.” The Air Force claimed to be in similar shape: it lost more fighter aircraft in accidents than were being produced, and its ballistic missiles were past their sell-by dates. Platforms were simply deteriorating with age. America had to rearm, Reagan insisted, to reassert itself militarily, to push back on the Soviets.

  Détente, especially the Kissinger doctrine of fence-mending with the Soviet Union, had failed, in Reagan’s estimation. He called it “a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims.” He strongly believed, as he said repeatedly, that it “would be of great benefit to the United States if we started a buildup.” If the Russians pumped money into their military machinery, America had to see them and raise the stakes. An arms race—always a touchy proposition. In its favor, he had bipartisan cooperation. John Tower, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and his Democratic counterpart, Henry “Scoop” Jackson, were in perfect harmony when it came to national security. There was bipartisan support on the House side as well. When the president asked for a considerable hike in financial resources for the military, Congress responded with a hearty “yea.” Despite a weak economy, on July 16, 1981, the House ratified a $136 billion military appropriation bill that had already been approved by the Senate, the single largest military authorization in history. There was plenty in the pot for new, powerful weaponry: Navy F-14 fighters, Trident submarine missiles, B-1 stealth bombers, M-1 tanks, and a stipend to underwrite the MX missile program—“enough,” as one official put it, “to blow the fucking Russians to kingdom come and back.”

  And yet the risk of war had always troubled Ronald Reagan. In early April, while he was convalescing in the hospital, the president began writing a letter to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, that sought to extend the hand of peace. “I wanted to let him know that we had a realistic view of what the Soviet Union was all about, but also wanted to send a signal to him that we were interested in reducing the threat of nuclear annihilation.” It was a simple, straightforward appeal that basically said, “If we could sit down together like two rational individuals, we could dispense with hostilities and broker a lasting peace.” Disarmament was a real possibility, he suggested, even a world without nuclear weapons.

  The president’s advisers were conflicted. Dick Allen, to whom the handwritten letter was given for analysis and editing, understood what had prompted the missive. “Reagan had looked into the jaws of death and thought, ‘I’ve got a chance to do something important here.’” Allen thought the letter was a “brilliant stroke.” But his colleague Al Haig called it “naïve”; Haig thought “it was crazy and would ruin foreign policy.” No matter what, Allen decided, the letter had to be restructured, and he set about giving it a diplomatic polish. Reagan regarded the redraft like a child who receives a plaid vest for Christmas. “This isn’t what I had written,” he lamented, “but I suppose they are the experts.”

  Mike Deaver happened to be in the Oval Office at the time. “You know, Mr. President, those assholes have been running the Soviet business for the last forty years, and they haven’t done a very good job of it,” he said. “Why don’t you just tell them to stick it and send the goddamn letter?” Reagan agreed with the instincts, but in the end, the State Department version found its way into Brezhnev’s hands. According to Richard Perle, the assistant secretary of defense, the Soviet leader quickly dismissed it.

  Brezhnev discovered he had misjudged the president. When Reagan launched the massive military expansion of the United States, the Soviets got the message. They viewed the U.S. buildup of armaments as the work of a madman prepared to push the button at the slightest provocation. In response, they stepped up production of their SS-20s, the medium-range nuclear missiles they’d scattered throughout Eastern Europe. Reagan answered by offsetting the SS-20s with a deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe.

  Thus began an ominous game of chess that neither side could win and that was creating a political backlash across Europe. Out of the American policy process emerged an alternative to the madness: if the Soviets dismantled their SS-20s, the Americans would agree to cancel deployment of their cruise missiles and Pershing IIs. This approach came to be known as the Zero Option. It was the brainchild of Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle. “Ronald Reagan loved it,” Perle recalls. “It appealed to his view of eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons. He thought it shifted the burden to the Soviets. If they agreed to it, this was great
for the U.S., and if they didn’t agree, we had significantly improved our political position by proposing the elimination of these weapons, while placating the pacifists and peace marchers all over Europe.” The State Department, however, was vehemently opposed. Haig viewed the Zero Option as “a frivolous propaganda exercise.” He felt that nuclear weapons were “still the greatest guarantor of peace and stability.” If the president pursued the Zero Option, he maintained, “it would be a mistake he would have to modify within the year.”

  Reagan refused to back away from the approach. At every meeting at which the Zero Option was discussed, Haig or one of his underlings pushed to modify the plan in order to give them more muscle in negotiations with the Soviets. “I remember one meeting in which Paul Nitze, our arms-control negotiator who was about to leave for a round of talks in Geneva, pleaded for authority to back off Zero Option,” Perle recalls. “He was so frustrated. ‘What am I going to say to Futsinski?’” he asked the president, referring to the Soviet negotiator.

  Reagan replied, “You just tell him that you work for one tough son of a bitch.”

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  Ronald Reagan was flexing his muscles. When PATCO members rejected the government’s offers to resolve their salary and labor differences and announced a strike to begin on August 3, 1981, thirteen thousand controllers vowed to walk off the job. “They cannot fly this country’s planes without us,” the president of the union warned, “and they can’t get us to do our jobs if we are in jail or facing excessive fines.” He warned Transportation Secretary Drew Lewis, “If passengers are killed, it’ll be your responsibility.”