by Bob Spitz
Gorbachev proved his mettle in the Cabinet Room immediately following the treaty ceremony, during an interlude when the president was still basking in the glow of the treaty and not focused on what his guest was saying. Members of both delegations crowded into the cramped space, expecting to hear informal remarks from the leaders on their objectives for the summit. Reading from prepared notes, Gorbachev enumerated a list of items for discussion, including chemical weapons and troop reductions. He found it incomprehensible that the Soviets were actively destroying chemical weapons while the United States seemed to be replenishing its reserves. He also took issue with the president’s favorite Russian aphorism, doveryai no proveryai—“trust but verify”—at a time when the United States continued to propose verification of only state facilities. “That would include all the Soviet Union’s, but not all of the U.S.’s,” he complained.
The president appeared flustered. Without prepared talking points, he didn’t know how to respond to the specific issues Gorbachev had raised, ceding the microphone to George Shultz to offer a spontaneous rebuttal.
Before that, however, the president delivered a lame joke. “An American scholar, on his way to the airport before a flight to the Soviet Union, got into a conversation with his cabdriver, a young man who said that he was still finishing his education. The scholar asked, ‘When you finish your schooling, what do you want to do?’ The young man answered, ‘I haven’t decided yet.’ After arriving at the airport in Moscow, the scholar hailed a cab. His cabdriver, again, was a young man, who happened to mention he was still getting his education. The scholar, who spoke Russian, asked, ‘When you finish your schooling, what do you want to be? What do you want to do?’ The young man answered, ‘They haven’t told me yet.’ That’s the difference between our systems.”
Instead of the usual chuckles, the punch line was greeted in silence. A flush of embarrassment tided into Gorbachev’s face. The situation had called for a more statesmanlike response, and Reagan had failed to meet the moment. “I was disturbed and disappointed,” Shultz recalled, telling the president later, “That was terrible.”
“We can’t let this happen again,” Howard Baker agreed.
There’d be no more big meetings in the Cabinet Room. From now on, they’d confine the president to smaller get-togethers in the intimacy of the Oval Office, where he’d be prepared in advance and the agenda could be controlled.
Gorbachev meant business. He was determined to go the INF treaty one better by “entering a new phase, a phase of reducing strategic offensive arms.” He proposed a 50 percent reduction in strategic arms and expressed his desire to sign an agreement as they had the day before. There were disagreements about linking it to SDI, as there had been in Reykjavik, but Gorbachev brushed them aside. Earlier that morning, when Reagan assured him the United States was going forward with research and development in the interests of eventually deploying SDI, Gorbachev cavalierly said, “Mr. President, do what you think you have to do. And if in the end you think you have a system you want to deploy, go ahead and deploy. Who am I to tell you what to do? . . . We are moving in another direction.”
Anything more substantial would most likely be negotiated next year in Moscow, where Reagan had agreed to continue their talks. In the remaining time in Washington, Gorbachev expressed his desire to “meet American people outside the official events.” In a large respect, he viewed himself as the Soviet Union’s emissary, “sending out good vibes,” as he assured a contingent of U.S. senators. But so far, much to his consternation, he had been isolated from the general public for security reasons.
On December 10, he broke with the script. There had been a breakfast at the Soviet embassy with George Bush, who was actively campaigning for a 1988 presidential bid. Running late, the two men headed to an appointment at the White House to meet with a group of America’s top business leaders. As their motorcade inched along Connecticut Avenue, Gorbachev stared out the window, intrigued by the lunchtime crowd waving at them. At the corner of L Street, he shouted, “Stop the car!” and leaped out before his panicked security detail could intervene. Grinning broadly, he reached out to shake hands with people who converged around him, stunned and delighted by his presence. Others leaned out windows and hung over balconies. To each well-wisher, he said, “World peace.”
It was a brilliant public-relations maneuver. Reagan now had competition as the Great Communicator, as the Christian Science Monitor acknowledged in a pithy front-page headline. The Soviet premier—referred to affectionately by his American fan base as “Gorby”—had done some serious image-building during his five-day visit, displacing the legacy of his stone-faced, shoe-banging predecessors. Time even named him its “Man of the Year.” Most members of the business community at the White House joined the Gorby lovefest. Only one holdout claimed he was still suspicious of Gorbachev and hoped Americans were not overly eager to deal with him. “In the art of deal making,” said real-estate developer Donald Trump, “you should not want to make the deal too much.” It was only after the Russian told Trump that he loved Trump Tower and invited him to build a hotel in Moscow that the New York real-estate magnate changed his tune.
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Gorbachev turned out to be a man of his word. On February 8, 1988, he announced the withdrawal of 115,000 Soviet troops from Afghanistan, promising that the last would be out by the summer of 1989 (sooner if Reagan agreed to stop financing the Afghan mujahideen rebels, which the president refused to do). And Gorbachev began to speak more positively about democracy and capitalism. This was astonishing. Gorbachev’s turn of the Soviet system toward openness—glasnost—and reform—perestroika—were the first real signs of change after decades of repression and stagnation. For openers, he legalized small-scale private enterprise and promoted free discussion within the Communist Party. He’d also instituted term limits, as well as secret ballots for legislative and party posts. Reagan had famously called Russia the Evil Empire, but he was having second thoughts. “Yes,” he stressed, “it was an evil empire,” but the nickname pertained to the old Soviet model of Communism. He read Perestroika, Gorbachev’s manifesto for restructuring the Soviet system, and declared it “an epitaph: Capitalism had triumphed over Communism.” That might have been an overly broad evaluation, but the manifesto certainly supported his belief that “the forces of Communism were in retreat.”
The rollback hadn’t spread to Nicaragua. The Sandinistas remained firmly entrenched in their control of the government. And despite the existential damage of Iran-Contra, President Reagan was still committed to undermining them. He pressed Congress for more aid to the Contras to the tune of $270 million. “This is not the time to reverse progress,” he implored. When Congress balked, the request was reduced to $43 million and later to $36.2 million, until it was finally defeated outright, a clear rebuke to the White House. “True humanitarian aid,” House leaders instructed the president, “would not include weapons and ammunition.” Nor would the CIA be involved any longer in supplying any aid to the Contras.
The cutoff of U.S. aid forced the Contras to reconsider their prospects for continuing the fight against a much more powerful foe. On March 21, 1988, they met with Sandinista leaders and signed a cease-fire agreement that effectively ended a decade of internal strife. Both sides worried, however, that U.S. operatives would undermine the truce, as they had done in the past. “We are afraid that the field commanders are under a lot of pressure from Washington,” a Sandinista official said. But the two sides seemed determined to honor the peace. To support it, the U.S. House and Senate passed a bipartisan $48 million nonmilitary aid package to cover the Contras’ expenses.
Only a week earlier, a federal grand jury investigating the Iran-Contra affair had returned a twenty-three-count indictment of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and two other key participants, Richard Secord and Albert Hakim, on charges of obstruction of justice, conspiracy, wire fraud, and theft of
government property. If found guilty, each of the defendants faced decades of prison time, setting up speculation as to whether the president would pardon them. Poindexter had testified that he was the highest-ranking administration official to approve the diversion of funds to the Contras and decided not to inform the president, affording him deniability in the end.
“I have no knowledge of anything that was broken,” Reagan said again during a press conference at the White House, with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir at his side. “From all the investigation and everything else, we don’t know where that money came from and we don’t know who had it and we don’t know where it went.” That would have been disingenuous enough had a reporter not confronted him with a follow-up about Bud McFarlane’s guilty plea to four misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. “He just pleaded guilty to not telling Congress everything it wanted to know. I’ve done that myself.” The president knew the comment was a mistake the moment it was out of his mouth. Without delay, he turned and fled with Shamir, but not before whispering to his guest, “Oh, boy. Just for that careless remark . . . they’ll go wild about Reagan wants to lie to Congress or something.” Unfortunately for the president, the whisper was picked up by a microphone, giving reporters the kicker to their stories.
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As America’s sorry relationship with the Contras limped to an end, the president shifted his attention from Nicaragua to Panama, where another sorry relationship, with an even more flawed U.S. client, military dictator Manuel Noriega, was reaching its endgame. Noriega had been one of the CIA’s most valuable intelligence sources in Latin America, but he was a brutal despot, and his personal fortune stemmed from drug trafficking and money laundering. According to John Poindexter, “Panama had been helpful in support of the Contras, and the CIA had been using Noriega in sensitive operations.” But he’d been warned: his defiant criminality was becoming an embarrassment. And he was weird. He had a voodoo room in his residence that showcased dolls with pins sticking in them, and a bowl containing slips of paper denoting names on a “hit list”—Ronald Reagan, Bill Casey, George Bush, Poindexter. On February 4, 1988, the Justice Department indicted Noriega on drug trafficking and racketeering charges. Two months later, President Reagan froze all assets of the Panamanian government, tightening the squeeze on its obstreperous leader.
Negotiations with Noriega stretched on for four months. He promised to resign, reneged, demanded a payoff to leave, then withdrew it, enjoying his success in “screw[ing] around with the gringo,” as he put it, and manipulating the political system. Reagan promised that the United States would not use military force to push Noriega out of power, but the dictator’s persistent arrogance made it tempting. If not for George Bush, the Panamanian leader would have been long gone. Noriega’s ties to Bush during his tenure as CIA chief had the potential to compromise his presidential campaign. An indictment, especially, might disclose sensitive transactions. Bush was dead-set against pursuing any arrangement to oust Noriega, insisting “we should sit back and analyze the situation for a couple of weeks.” Or more: at least until after the election. “If we back away,” George Shultz argued, “we leave this guy in charge of a whole country and with all his drug affiliations and Cuban support.”
The president agreed to “roundtable it with the guys.” On May 16, 1988, in a meeting in the Oval Office, he listened to the arguments. Shultz and Colin Powell, the new national security adviser, urged making a deal with Noriega to leave Panama in exchange for dropping the indictment. Money was involved, a golden parachute, so to speak, but it was a small price to pay for ridding Panama of Noriega. Jim Baker, Bush’s surrogate, argued vehemently against the deal, warning Reagan that such an agreement would be “as big a problem for him as ‘Irangate.’” Baker and Bush enlisted Republican congressional leaders to shore up their opposition by mounting a strong campaign against Noriega’s ouster. But Reagan’s patience with the Panamanian dictator was exhausted. There was only so much screwing with the gringo a president could endure. After four months and rounds of fruitless negotiations, Ronald Reagan threw in the towel. Let his successor deal with the Noriega problem, he decided. If the election returned a Republican to the White House, it would wind up in George Bush’s lap.
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There were too many hot spots—and too little time left.
Throughout the spring of 1988 the Reagan administration expended energy in the Middle East and Afghanistan to reduce the powder-keg tensions that were threatening to blow. Roadblocks, however, proved insurmountable at every turn. Peace in the Middle East seemed more remote than ever. There was no letup in the Iran–Iraq War, which had already claimed more than half a million lives. The PLO had intensified its uprisings. The Israelis were unwilling to trade territory for peace, and the Arab nations vowed never to compromise. And even though Mikhail Gorbachev issued orders drawing his troops down in Afghanistan, both the Soviet Union and the United States determined to continue supplying arms to the opposing factions as civil war raged between the Communists in the cities and the mujahideen in the mountains and valleys. The CIA had already invested more than $2 billion in weapons to support the Islamic militant Taliban, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were establishing a fundamentalist regime.
Toward the end of the second term, the leadership from the Oval Office felt even more disengaged. The president seemed more distant than usual, often running out of steam early in the day. He relied more on jokes than jawboning, trotting out old stories as a smoke screen for his vulnerabilities. Conservatives especially felt the disconnect. Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the New Right, concluded, “Reagan is a weakened president, weakened in spirit as well as in clout.”
In the months that remained in his presidency, Ronald Reagan trained his foreign-policy focus on one opening where he felt he could have a real impact and produce lasting change. He believed Mikhail Gorbachev was making an earnest effort to reshape communism and transform the Soviet Union. “He was the first [of its leaders] not to push Soviet expansionism,” Reagan explained, “the first to destroy nuclear weapons, the first to suggest a free market and to support open elections and freedom of expression.” The president saw a strong opportunity to promote Soviet–American relations by resuming the dialogue he and Gorbachev began in Geneva in 1985 and continued in Washington, D.C.
Plans for a Moscow summit began taking shape in the spring of 1988, with the signing of START as its historic centerpiece. The issue of strategic arms, the backbone of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, presented a more complex negotiation than the intermediate-range missiles of the INF treaty—and carried greater implications for the country’s long-term security. Eliminating five thousand land- and sea-based ballistic missiles would be an enormous achievement, but the many harmonious parts of such an ambitious treaty proved too hard to achieve in a few months’ time. Reagan knew as early as February that a START agreement remained out of reach for the Moscow summit, but he resolved to meet with Gorbachev to legitimize their ongoing efforts to end the Cold War.
In any case, during his visit he intended to press Gorbachev on human rights issues. It had been a sticking point between them in past meetings. Reagan had no right poking his nose into the internal matters of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had insisted. “We want to build contacts among people in all forums,” he said, “but this should be done without interfering in domestic affairs, without sermonizing or imposing one’s views or ways, without turning family or personal problems into a pretext for confrontation between states.” But the plight of Jewish dissidents and the refuseniks gave the president a way to approach the subject from a different angle: religious freedom. Perhaps, he ventured, if people were permitted to worship as they wished, maybe they wouldn’t be so intent on leaving the Soviet Union. Still, there were 1,200 Soviet Jews he knew of who sought to emigrate. He had given Gorbachev a
list of their names in Reykjavik, to little effect, and he’d brought them up again during the Washington summit. This time, he decided more action was necessary.
He’d received a gut-wrenching letter from a precocious Russian twelve-year-old named Vera Zieman, whose parents were refuseniks. It described in plaintive detail the “excruciating legal and social limbo” her family had lived in since they’d applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union. To the president, Vera sounded almost like a model American teenager. She “reads John Updike, finds Nancy Drew too predictable, and recites T. S. Eliot,” her letter said. Nevertheless, she was shunned by classmates and ostracized for her parents’ beliefs. She reported that for weeks after being questioned by the KGB, she screamed in her sleep. “It’s very hard for me here,” she complained. “Sometimes I’m very frightened.”
Here was an example the president could exploit in his bid to keep human rights at the forefront of the summit. In fact, he and Nancy determined to visit Vera and her parents just as soon as they arrived in Moscow. But the Soviet deputy foreign minister sent word to Colin Powell that “the Ziemans would never be allowed to emigrate if Reagan insisted on visiting them.” Instead, the president prepared several speeches designed to address the issue vigorously without jeopardizing individuals still waiting to leave.
