by Bob Spitz
This is what the public wanted most in their president. For those on the wrong side of his domestic policy decisions, such as letting the Organ Donor Registry lapse and all but ignoring the AIDS crisis, the rhetoric might ring hollow. But they were a distinct minority. In the wake of the Challenger remarks, his approval rating climbed to an unheard-of 74 percent.
When the president finally delivered his State of the Union address on February 4, 1986, not a word was mentioned about the AIDS epidemic. The next day, facing fresh criticism for that absence, he addressed an audience of employees from the Department of Health and Human Services, telling them, “One of our highest public-health priorities is going to continue to be finding a cure for AIDS.” Later that same day, his new budget proposal called for deep cuts in AIDS research. His conservative base was opposed to candid talk about the disease and specific methods that spoke to its prevention. He also had to contend with remarks such as this statement by Pat Buchanan in a newspaper column: “The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
Just days after the State of the Union address, the administration faced another test of its values when the Philippines prepared for a historic election amid a crisis of corruption.
Most U.S. officials thought the Reagan administration should back away from the ruling regime, but the president’s judgment was colored by his personal feelings for Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippine head of state had ruled the country since 1965, his tenure branded by self-dealing and violence. Historically, elections challenging his presidency were “marked by considerable fraud,” to put it gently. In 1983, Marcos had ordered the assassination of a key rival, Benigno Aquino Jr., who was shot as he stepped off a plane from the United States. Nevertheless, Marcos was considered a frontline American ally, and as the president noted, the Philippines were a pillar “of great importance to the United States, anchoring our huge military stations there, Clark Air Base and the Subic Bay naval base,” for which the United States paid an annual $180 million stipend. Reagan considered Marcos a friend, an anticommunist partner. They’d established personal warmth and a rapport during meetings at the White House; Nancy Reagan and Imelda Marcos shared a country-club mentality and bonded over clothes. But political winds in the Philippines had shifted. Public outrage was steadily building against Marcos.
To reassert his command, Marcos called a snap election, hoping to get himself reelected before anyone could mount a serious challenge. Several rivals announced their candidacy, but the strongest opponent to emerge was Corazon Aquino, a political neophyte and widow of the assassinated opposition leader. She announced that if she won, she would put Marcos on trial for the murder of her husband. The prospect troubled Ronald Reagan. He was further alarmed by a conversation with New York Times managing editor Abe Rosenthal, who had interviewed Aquino and told the president over dinner that she was “a dazed, vacant woman . . . an empty-headed housewife [with] no positions.”
Events quickly deteriorated. Aquino’s populist candidacy caught fire with Filipinos, despite the fact that she was denied any access to the state-run media, which was controlled exclusively by Marcos confederates. Word filtered back to Reagan through U.S. State Department channels that “the Marcos people were considering abducting Mrs. Aquino.” Still, he refused to take a stand against Ferdinand Marcos. The president had been disgusted by the way the United States had abandoned the Shah of Iran, and he vowed not to repeat the mistake with Marcos. Yet he was caught between a rock and a hard place. If Marcos won the election by fraudulent means, Congress promised to cut off American assistance to the Philippines. And on February 4, 1986, when more than a million Filipinos turned out in Manila to show support for Aquino, it was clear that she stood a strong chance of unseating Marcos.
Everything depended on a free and honest election, which was highly unlikely, considering what was at stake for the Marcos regime. There were already indications of widespread intimidation, vote-buying, and violence. “The Philippine elections are looking more and more like the kind of elections they have in the Kremlin,” said Alan Cranston, who chaired a Senate committee established to track the process. In an attempt to contain the situation, Reagan sent a delegation of observers to the Philippines to monitor the election and report irregularities.
On February 8, before the vote count was official, Marcos declared himself the winner. Nevertheless, “a very disturbing pattern” of widespread cheating and fraud was reported by Senator Richard Lugar, who headed the president’s fact-finding group. The Philippine government was rigging the tally, Lugar found; ballots were being destroyed, returns falsified. One Marcos critic was chased and killed by six masked gunmen in the town square of San Jose de Buenavista; the bodies of ten opposition leaders were found in the Quirino Province. A day or two later, Reagan was told that Aquino had won more than 70 percent of the vote, yet on February 15, the Philippine National Assembly formally announced that Ferdinand Marcos had been elected to a new six-year term. “I am the President,” he gloated victoriously.
Despite evidence to the contrary, Reagan declared during a contentious news conference that the United States was remaining neutral. His ambassador to the Philippines, Stephen Bosworth, cabled that “the election has effectively cost Ferdinand Marcos his remaining political legitimacy and credibility,” but the president remained unwilling to accept that view. According to George Shultz, “Ronald Reagan still had no intention of abandoning Marcos, nor could he conceive of Marcos’s departure from office.” It didn’t help matters that Don Regan had already served notice that even if Marcos won fraudulently, “if it’s a duly elected government and so certified, you’d have to do business with it.”
Marcos flat-out refused to step down, but the people of the Philippines had other designs. On February 23, 1986, Aquino supporters mobilized in the streets of Manila as government troops prepared to confront them. It was a tense standoff that eventually culminated in the army’s refusal to fire its weapons. “The Marcos era has ended,” Philip Habib, Reagan’s special emissary, notified the president. George Shultz agreed: “He’s had it.” It was time to move on.
At Reagan’s behest, the White House sent a message to Marcos offering him and Imelda sanctuary in the United States. On February 25, they fled Malacañang Palace to Clark Air Base and were airlifted to Guam, with an entourage of eighty-nine aides, suitcases and crates bulging with jewelry and gold bars, and $7 million in cash looted from the Philippine treasury.* Later, it was determined that perhaps as much as $10 billion had been siphoned off by the Marcoses and stashed in secret offshore shell companies and bank accounts in places ranging from Hong Kong to Aruba. Documents showed they owned copper mines in the Philippines, land in Corpus Christi, Texas, and office buildings in New York City. “What we have here is an international mass burglary achieved through classic political skimming,” said Representative Jim Leach, a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee investigating Marcos’s hidden wealth.
The Reagan administration, on February 6, had given safe passage to another dictator, Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, flying him, his wife, his children, and twenty of his relatives on a U.S. Air Force plane from Port-au-Prince to asylum in France, where they lived lavishly, having stashed $400 million—the spoils of an impoverished nation—in foreign banks.
While the evacuations of Marcos and Duvalier were hastened to avoid civil war and bloodshed in their respective countries, they signaled a shift in U.S. policy that propping up authoritarian governments opposed to communism could not be taken for granted. “The Reagan administration deserves credit,” Newsday asserted in an editorial, asking: “Is it possible that the U.S. government has finally learned how to shed its ties with repressive governments?”
There might have been a mixed assortment of answers to that question had the public been aware of the plans being drawn in the third-floor office of the Old Executive Office Buildi
ng, where Oliver North was stepping up efforts to find secret funding for the Contra war in Nicaragua.
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Only hours after Marcos had fled the Philippines, Ronald Reagan approached Congress for $100 million in Defense Department funds for renewal of military aid to the Contras. He presented the legislators with a stark choice. “If the Sandinistas are allowed to consolidate their hold on Nicaragua, we’ll have a home away from home for Muammar Qaddafi, Arafat and the Ayatollah,” he argued. “If we don’t want the map of Central America covered in a sea of red, eventually lapping at our own borders, we must act now.”
The White House turned up the heat on congressional leaders who continued to oppose the policy. Republican Henry Hyde led the charge in the House, Red-baiting his colleagues across the aisle. Wyoming representative Dick Cheney did his share, too. Democrats, fearing “another Vietnam,” complained that administration officials and their congressional allies were stooping to slur tactics to impugn their patriotism. In response to the criticism, the president softened the allegations, suggesting that Democratic naysayers were “inadvertently” supporting Communists. But Pat Buchanan, his director of communications, was characteristically more candid. In an op-ed piece published in the Washington Post, he said, “With the vote on Contra aid, the Democratic party will reveal whether it stands with Ronald Reagan and the resistance, or Daniel Ortega and the communists.”
Up until now, bipartisanship had always been more or less a mainstay of the Congress. “Republicans and Democrats went to dinner with each other,” recalls Ken Duberstein; “their families socialized. Tip O’Neill’s poker games were full of Republicans. We understood each other and wanted to govern.” But the tradition of cooperation and teamwork—the show of respect for different opinions—was eroding, due in large part to a growing ideological divide. The civil voice of opposition gave way to hard-line rhetoric. If you disapproved of prayer in school, you were godless; if you supported abortion, you sanctioned killing. If you refused aid to the Contras you were unpatriotic. In one-on-one encounters, Ronald Reagan was a master of smoothing over rough edges, but during his administration the political polarization became more acute. The shift happened in degrees, masked in part because the president himself covered such partisanship with his trademark warmth.
The president did what he could to maintain harmony, but the Contra issue pushed him into the fray. He applied gentle arm-twisting to holdouts on his aid policy, phoning legislators who resisted, sometimes two or three times a day. He even appeared on television, showing a map of Central America bathed in red and urging Americans to pressure their congressmen to support him. Public opinion, however, was downright cool. Few people perceived a Sandinista threat to their lives, nor were they concerned about Nicaragua. As a result, there was no collective outcry when, on March 20, the House ultimately rejected the $100 million Contra aid package.
The president took it personally. “H—l of a way to run a country,” he wrote in his diary that night. In his view, it was “a dark day for freedom.” After the vote was in—and before the dark day was out—he was back in the huddle with his National Security Planning Group staff to hatch an alternate Latin America strategy. He was determined to liberate Nicaragua, which he considered to be in the grip of “an outlaw regime” more harmful than those in the Philippines and Haiti. He often cited Jeane Kirkpatrick’s argument that authoritarian right-wing regimes were not as detrimental to American interests as totalitarian communist ones. “A second Libya,” he called the Nicaraguan peril, “right on the doorstep of the United States.”
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As if to underscore the threat of “a second Libya,” Muammar Qaddafi steered his country straight into a violent confrontation with the United States.
The president had reached his limit of tolerance for the erratic Qaddafi. He was worse than a nuisance. Evidence of the Libyan dictator’s support of terrorism was overwhelming. In 1984 alone, the State Department identified fifteen terrorist incidents traced directly to Libya, including the mining of the Red Sea and a failed attempt to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. And there was strong evidence that Libya was behind the December 1985 terrorist attacks at El Al ticket counters in the Rome and Vienna airports, in which twenty people, including five Americans, were killed. In response, on January 7, 1986, Reagan issued an executive order severing diplomatic ties with Libya. Privately, he told John Poindexter, “The next time we have an incident, a smoking gun that we can pin on Qaddafi, I want to respond.”
He didn’t have long to wait. Soon after the diplomatic rift was announced, Qaddafi vowed publicly to attack any vessel that sailed within 150 miles of shore—his so-called Line of Death—in the Gulf of Sidra, on Libya’s northern coast. This was a clear violation of international navigation laws, which defined territorial waters as extending only twelve miles beyond a country’s coast. Qaddafi defied anyone to challenge his edict, knowing that the American Navy routinely patrolled the gulf. “We are ready to die for it,” he announced in March, promising to send suicide squads to strike U.S. targets should American naval vessels cross his 150-mile line.
In an effort to reassert the right of navigation, Ronald Reagan scheduled a naval maneuver in the Gulf of Sidra for later in March and ordered the Sixth Fleet into the area just in case. The Sixth Fleet was no small show of force—it comprised three aircraft carriers with 240 warplanes, twenty warships, and several nuclear-powered submarines. Its presence promised to goad Qaddafi’s air force into an aggressive response. As early as 1981, Libyan boats had fired on U.S. aircraft flying over the gulf, and intelligence pointed to another imminent attack. As expected, on March 24, Libya launched two SA-5 missiles against U.S. planes. Navy pilots responded by knocking out the radar installation that had guided the missiles. Seventy-two Libyans were killed without a single U.S. casualty. The next day, Qaddafi sent messages to his embassies in Berlin, Paris, Rome, and Madrid to plan a series of terrorist attacks “causing maximum casualties to U.S. citizens and other Western people.”
More than ever, Ronald Reagan was determined to subdue the man he called “the crackpot in Tripoli.”* He’d already sanctioned a strategy of disinformation—“a little psychological warfare,” George Shultz called it—designed to keep Qaddafi off balance in his own country. But some harder evidence was needed to justify stronger measures.
Qaddafi delivered on cue. On April 5, 1986, the president was awakened by John Poindexter, who informed him that a bomb at La Belle discotheque in West Berlin had killed a U.S. soldier and wounded 155 people, about a third of whom were American servicemen. “We have unmistakable proof that Libya is responsible,” Poindexter told him. U.S. intelligence had intercepted Libyan mail claiming that the bombing had been carried out successfully “without leaving clues.” It was the smoking gun the president had sought.
Reagan ordered an immediate military action, signing a National Security Division Directive the next day. “We have five specific targets in mind,” he wrote in his diary—the Tripoli air base, the Benghazi naval base, a terrorist training camp, Qaddafi’s desert encampment, and his command headquarters. But leaks about the operation prompted two postponements. And U.S. allies still had to pledge their support. France and Spain refused to allow American jets to fly through their airspace, but Margaret Thatcher granted permission to launch eighteen U.S. F-111s from bases in Mildenhall, England; another fifteen jets were to take off from aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean.
The president was determined to keep the mission a secret. To throw the press off the scent, he pretended to keep a scheduled visit to the annual Paul Laxalt lamb fry. “We let the White House staff and the Secret Service get dressed in black tie, thinking they were going to that event,” recalls Jim Kuhn. “The motorcade was lined up, our advance guys stood by, the press was ready to cover it.” At the eleventh hour, Pat Buchanan was given Reagan’s address to the nation to w
rite rather than letting any details leak out through the usual team of speechwriters.
On the evening of April 14, under cover of darkness, the squadron pounded its targets in Libya: “the headquarters, terrorist facilities and military assets that support Muammar Qaddafi’s subversive activities,” as the president reported in a televised address. Qaddafi’s home, the Bab al-Azizia compound in the desert, was among the buildings hit in the raid by a missile that had gone astray. Two of his young sons were injured when bombs blew out the walls of their living quarters, and an adopted infant daughter was killed, though the dictator escaped unharmed. A longstanding executive order forbade the United States from assassinating foreign heads of state, so Qaddafi himself had not been targeted. “If he had been killed,” Poindexter admits, “it would have been fine by us.” Reagan secretly hoped the Libyan leader had been in one of the targeted locations. During a reflective moment in the Oval Office, he confided to Jim Kuhn, “The one that missed had Qaddafi’s name on it.”
No matter—the mission, which lasted a total of eleven minutes, sent an unqualified military and public-relations message. It effectively isolated Qaddafi on the international stage, while bathing the president in a triumphant light. His prime-time televised address only hours after the operation presented a strong, uncompromising leader, in command, explaining how once the United States had exhausted all diplomatic options with Libya, he had resorted to force to curb Qaddafi’s reckless behavior. “He counted on America to be passive,” Reagan said with unsparing tenacity. “He counted wrong.” The president’s standing, measured by overnight opinion polls, soared to new heights. Seventy-five percent of Americans supported his handling of the raid.
But he’d made one mistake. He had agreed to trade arms for hostages.
