Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  The White House response only reinforced McFarlane’s opinion that Weinberger was a fool. “He wasn’t really well qualified to be the secretary of defense,” McFarlane says in retrospect. Weinberger was adamant that U.S. troops not engage in any circumstance that might lead to a fight with Muslims, fearing the alienation of Saudi Arabia and damage to U.S. oil interests. The national security adviser, along with George Shultz, felt the Marines would advance American interests by deploying with the Lebanese Armed Forces, training the LAF to become an army worthy of its name. It was imperative that the American presence be viewed as trying to prevent terrorism and add stability, rather than as an invading army.

  Shultz talked to Howard Baker, the Senate majority leader, about congressional support to broaden U.S. involvement in Lebanon. That meant an unavoidable encounter with the War Powers Act. President Reagan was coming around to that inevitability on his own time. “Are we going to let the Syrians and the Soviets take over?” he asked Shultz. “Are we just going to let it happen?”

  This was a situation that Ronald Reagan hadn’t bargained for. When it came to the nitty-gritty of Middle East politics, he’d brought to office principles but not great depth. He’d intended to dedicate his first term to domestic policy—getting the tax bill passed and coping with what was needed to turn double-digit inflation and unemployment around—and here he was being sucked into a Middle East quagmire, into two thousand years’ worth of tribal infighting, territorial disputes, religious intolerance, instability, and crisis upon crisis, the particulars of which were ridiculously complex. The Druze, Shiite Muslims, Maronite Christians . . . It wasn’t like the movies, where you could tell the good guys from the bad guys by the color of the hats they wore. He was determined to do the right thing, but there were no simple answers on his one-page briefing papers. He depended on his advisers to steer him along the right path, but the route was pockmarked with disagreement and indecision.

  On September 28, 1983, the House authorized the deployment of Marines in Lebanon for an additional eighteen months. It was a true bipartisan agreement, which the Senate echoed a week later. Marine lives were steadily being lost in Beirut: three on August 29, two the last week in September, two more in early October. French troops were taking casualties as well. “We have to show the flag for those Marines,” Reagan said, agonizing over the lost and trying to rationalize further American involvement. “Our problem is do we expand our mission to aid the Lebanese army with artillery and air support?” he pondered in his diary. “This could be seen as putting us in the war.” The human cost haunted him. The father of a Marine who’d been killed in combat put it to him unequivocally: “Are we in Lebanon for any reason worth my son’s life?”

  Weinberger remained staunchly against the mission. He continued to press to have the Marines stationed in Beirut removed to battleships off the coast in the Mediterranean, but the president resisted. “Something’s got to be done,” Reagan determined. Cut bait? That wasn’t his idea of a forceful strategy. A strong American presence, he believed, would persuade the Syrians to pull back and disengage. His orders were to stay the course.

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  The stress and uncertainty were unrelenting. The president needed a breather, and there happened to be one on his schedule. On October 21, 1983, he and Nancy, along with George Shultz, Don Regan, and former New Jersey senator Nicholas Brady, flew south for a weekend of recreation at the Augusta National Golf Club. Augusta was a world away from Washington. Reagan was looking forward to the peace and quiet.

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  Ronald Reagan didn’t even scrounge a single good night’s sleep. The phone awakened him at four o’clock on Saturday morning. Bud McFarlane, who accompanied the group to Georgia as part of the presidential support staff, had gotten word from George Bush in Washington that Maurice Bishop, the prime minister of Grenada, and four members of his cabinet had been executed in a violent coup two days earlier.

  Grenada. The smallest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere had in fact been on the president’s radar almost since he’d taken office. As early as March 1982, he’d established the Crisis Pre-Planning Group to “think ahead about potential hot spots,” and the Caribbean sat near the top of the list. Normally, U.S. interests in Grenada would not be significant. According to a top-secret brief prepared by National Security Council researchers, “Grenada has no known natural resources, no important products, and is of negligible economic significance.” But the CIA had good surveillance showing Cuban workers building a powerful radio station and expanding Grenada’s tiny airport landing field with a 10,000-foot runway so that it could accommodate heavier aircraft. “Grenada doesn’t even have an air force,” the president observed in a speech a year later. “Who is it intended for?” It was a rhetorical question. “The Soviet-Cuban militarization of Grenada, in short, can only be seen as power projection into the region.” The NSC insinuated that the Soviets’ decision to move offshore in Grenada “could be a base for subversion,” enabling them to launch attacks from Colombia, Venezuela, and elsewhere in South America. And Grenada was perilously close to the Panama Canal. More than half of American oil imports passed through the Caribbean. He’d be damned if he gave the Soviets another footprint in the West.

  Reagan wasn’t losing sleep over the demise of Maurice Bishop. He’d been cozying up to the USSR since seizing power in 1979, expressing his admiration for Fidel Castro and staging anti-American rallies. Local teenagers patrolled Grenada’s streets with AK-47 semiautomatic rifles. Earlier in the month the president had authorized a covert plan to destabilize Bishop’s government and the island’s economy. But Bishop’s replacement proved to be an even worse character, Hudson Austin, a hard-line Marxist ideologue who, upon taking over, issued a twenty-four-hour curfew, warning that anyone seen in public would be summarily shot.

  The president, sitting in his pajamas in Augusta, listened to McFarlane’s briefing and conversed by a secure line to Washington with Vice President Bush, who’d been monitoring the situation. There were roughly a thousand Americans presently in Grenada, including 650 students at St. George’s University School of Medicine. “Their being there was a lucky break for us,” Ed Meese admits, forty years later. In truth, the students were never in any danger, but they were as good an excuse as any for sending in the troops. The island was “in chaos,” according to Bud McFarlane’s report. Bill Casey concurred. “Hey, fuck, let’s dump these bastards,” he intoned. So with some prompting from Vice President Bush, Eugenia Charles, the prime minister of neighboring Dominica and the titular head of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, “requested” U.S. assistance in restoring order and stability to Grenada, providing the legal cover they’d need to launch such a mission.

  “We certainly can’t refuse the five sovereign countries that are concerned about their security in our hemisphere,” Reagan said, somewhat disingenuously. As a precaution, he ordered a flotilla of Navy vessels headed toward Lebanon to detour to the Caribbean and asked McFarlane, who’d been his national security adviser for a grand total of four days, how long the Pentagon needed to prepare a mission to liberate the island and rescue the students. When he was told forty-eight hours, the president nodded and said, “Do it.” But he insisted on strict secrecy. The last thing he needed was word leaking out, giving the Cubans time to prepare and retaliate. Fortunately, Jim Baker and David Gergen, the administration’s two principal leakers, were sidetracked by attending the wedding of Bill Plante, the CBS White House correspondent. That, at least, gave the president a few hours’ head start.

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  The weekend golf game presented its own set of security issues. The course itself was closed to the public for what was being jokingly referred to as the George Shultz Invitational. The president, dressed jauntily in a yellow sweater, had held his own on the front nine, but at 2:15 p.m., as the foursome approached the sixte
enth hole, he was grabbed by Secret Service agents and then loaded headfirst into an armored limousine. A few minutes earlier, a blue Dodge pickup truck had crashed through the course’s cyclone gate. Its driver, a local man named Charles Harris, raced into the pro shop and fired a gunshot into the floor before taking hostages, among them David Fischer, Ronald Reagan’s personal assistant. The gunman demanded to speak to the president, which was out of the question. Such ultimatums were a weekly occurrence in Washington. The first such time was when a gunman who’d seized an abortion clinic threatened to kill the owner and several hostages unless the president appeared on TV, denouncing abortion. Reagan had vacillated that time, saying, “I don’t want anything to happen to those people.” “If you want to do it—fine,” said his legal counsel, Fred Fielding. “We’ll set aside fifteen minutes every Tuesday and Thursday and talk to the various groups that have demands.” Reagan got the message. But this time was different. Dave Fischer was at his side all day long; he was practically a member of the family.

  Reluctantly, Reagan tried several times to make contact by phone with the gunman. “This is the President of the United States. This is Ronald Reagan. I understand you want to talk to me.”

  His appeals were greeted by radio silence. Finally, however, the hostages were released and the assailant apprehended. Everyone was rattled by the incident; dinner would be a subdued affair. The Secret Service detail urged Reagan to return to Washington, but he refused, determined to salvage another day or so of relaxation. To get a jump-start, he and Nancy turned in early.

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  At 2:30 that morning, Ronald Reagan was roused once again by a call from Bud McFarlane.

  “Mr. President, I have bad news,” he began. In a voice filled with anguish, McFarlane informed the president that a yellow Mercedes truck filled with 2,500 pounds of dynamite had burst through the wrought-iron fence of the BLT—the Battalion Landing Team headquarters—at the Beirut airport in Lebanon, where more than three hundred U.S. Marines were barracked. The truck exploded on impact in the center of the building, causing the four-floor concrete structure to lift off its foundation and collapse on the sleeping Marines. The blast touched off an arsenal of ammunition and rockets stored in the BLT. Most likely hundreds of young Americans lay dead under the rubble. In a simultaneous suicide attack, another truck slammed into the barracks of a French paratroop regiment in the Ramlet al Baida area of West Beirut, two miles away, exploding and killing many of the 110 men sleeping there.

  Ronald Reagan, along with George Shultz, in their pajamas and robes, rushed into the living room of the golf-course cottage, where McFarlane was engaged in gathering information from military sources. “The president was distraught,” McFarlane recalls. “He tried to take in what I was telling him, but the horror of it was beyond any of our grasp.”

  “Who . . . who did it?” Reagan stammered. “How could this happen?”

  “The indications are it’s terrorists from the Beqaa Valley,” McFarlane reported. “Bill Casey is already on the case.” The only thing definite at this point was that casualties were going to be high. The dead and wounded were being airlifted by helicopter to the Iwo Jima and El Paso, amphibious assault and cargo ships in the Mediterranean, or flown to the British Royal Air Base in Cyprus. “We’re going to know more, but we’d better go back to Washington immediately and begin to focus on this.”

  The president agreed. They’d go back as soon as the sun came up. But he insisted, “We cannot let this stand. We must engage with whoever did this, so get the guys together and come up with a plan.”

  The situation in Washington was chaotic. By the time the presidential party arrived in D.C. early Sunday morning, the American death toll had risen to 207 servicemen (it would climb to 239). The French loss was 58. The press wanted details—answers. Legislators, too. “Congress was in an uproar,” Tip O’Neill recalled. How could this have happened? Who was responsible? So far, the facts were few and far between. The CIA was still gathering details about the bombing and its aftermath. Enough intelligence had already materialized to determine that it was “a well planned and professionally executed attack” most likely coordinated by “twelve persons who rapidly left the Iranian ‘Special’ Embassy in West Beirut . . . less than 15 minutes after the incident,” ten of whom “have been identified as Syrian military officers.” Security at the BLT was less than adequate. The truck had been waved through an army checkpoint without a search; it wove through a parking lot that was unattended before crashing through the building’s main gates. “The sentry on guard could not get his weapon loaded in time to stop the truck . . . ” a Marine corporal stationed in Lebanon reported, “because we’re not allowed to have [a magazine] in our weapon.”

  “Remind me never to go away again,” the president muttered to Cap Weinberger as he entered the Situation Room just after 9:00 a.m. Reports described him variously as looking “haggard” and “grief-stricken,” but those words didn’t do justice to the emotions churning inside him. He’d been raised by his mother to abhor human cruelty, and the horrid loss of life exceeded his worst imaginings. His vision coming to office was to guide the nation through its brighter moments. He wasn’t naïve; he knew that the rolls of history listed innumerable tragedies. But his predilection for seeing more light than dark made it difficult for him to comprehend so much ugliness at once.

  The agenda that morning was extremely complicated. Not only did the circumstances in Beirut beg for analysis and insight, the joint chiefs were well under way with plans for an invasion of Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury, as it was called, was scheduled to commence at dawn Tuesday and was already mired in logistical snags. Weinberger had been reluctant to endorse any kind of intervention, feeling there was not enough information for the military to act. Time was short; there was little coordination among the armed-service divisions. And the pre-landing intelligence was pathetic. “Grenada wasn’t part of the Army map service,” says Ed Meese, who sat in on the meeting, “so they had to rely on gas-station maps. In effect, they’d be improvising the entire invasion.” A contingency plan was to drop a small band of Navy SEALs and Army Rangers into Grenada at midnight on Monday in order to get the lay of the land for a Tuesday campaign. The president would make a final go/no-go decision by five o’clock Monday night, at which point he’d review the situation and have the joint chiefs update the plans.

  In the meantime, he ordered his team to begin taking measures to retaliate against the terrorists in Beirut. Francois Mitterrand warned him against such a venture. “There are Soviet officers in uniform twenty kilometers from Beirut,” Mitterrand said. “Attack Syria, and you attack Moscow.” But Reagan was undeterred. “I want you to be absolutely confident about who did this, where they trained, the evidence, the proof,” he instructed Bill Casey. “I intend to go after them.”

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  At 5:00 p.m. on Monday, October 24, 1983, Ronald Reagan issued the order that the invasion of Grenada would proceed. A strategy had been prepared over the weekend by the NSC’s deputy director for political-military affairs, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, which the president approved. To comply with the War Powers Act, Reagan summoned congressional leaders to the White House that night to inform them of his plans. The briefing was a classic cloak-and-dagger affair. The leaders, knowing nothing of the president’s motives, were each told to cancel his evening plans and not even inform his wife of his whereabouts. They were picked up individually in unmarked cars and driven to a garage in the basement of the Executive Building, where a private elevator led directly to the residence. At eight o’clock, Tip O’Neill, Robert Byrd, Howard Baker, Jim Wright, and Robert Michel arrived in the family quarters, and the president laid out the operation. “This is moving right now,” he told them. O’Neill, for one, had serious reservations. “They’re invading Grenada so people will forget what happened yesterday in Beirut,” he thought, unaware that the operatio
n had been in the works for days.

  “What does Mrs. Thatcher think about all this?” the Speaker asked. Grenada was part of the British Commonwealth. Surely, the prime minister’s opinion weighed heavily in the decision to launch.

  “She doesn’t know about it,” the president responded awkwardly.

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he was interrupted: Margaret Thatcher was on the phone. She’d gotten wind of the operation—and she was steamed. Ed Meese, who was sitting with the legislators, could hear only Reagan’s side of the conversation as he struggled to explain. “We had to Margaret. . . . Yes, Margaret . . . no Margaret. . . . We really had to, Margaret. . . . I’m sorry, Margaret. . . . I’m really sorry, Margaret. . . .” Several times, she demanded “in the strongest language” that he call off the invasion, reminding him that “the United States has no business interfering in [a British protectorate’s] affairs.” The fact of a request for help from the eastern Caribbean states had no favorable effect on her. Thatcher remained adamant that he cancel the invasion. It was as uncomfortable a conversation as the president ever had with her, and when he returned to his guests, he wore an embarrassed grin. “That was tough,” he announced.

  With the congressional leaders, he faced an easier audience. The way the meeting evolved they could do little more than listen. Naturally, the Democrats were opposed to the operation, fearing it might be a rehearsal for a future invasion of Nicaragua, but at this point there was nothing they could do. “The decision had been made, orders had been given,” Jim Wright later reported. The landing of Navy SEALs was already under way. The president assured everyone he was taking full responsibility; none of them would be blamed if anything went wrong.