Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  CERTAIN EVENTS OF the late 1970s seemed to support Kirkpatrick’s view. Nicaragua had been badly ruled for decades by the Somoza family and their cronies, who grew increasingly distasteful to various elements of Nicaraguan society. During the 1970s the dissidents aligned in the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front, which included elements ranging from moderate reformers to committed communists. Carter had to decide whether the Somoza regime was preferable to the Sandinistas and, if it was, whether it was salvageable. Neither question allowed a definitive answer. Had Anastasio Somoza, the current jefe, so alienated Nicaraguans as to have lost all credibility? If the Sandinistas won, would the moderates or the radicals among them take charge? Would keeping Somoza in power require the use of American troops? Would the American people stand for this in the wake of Vietnam?

  Carter tried to split the difference. He jawboned Somoza to clean up his act and allow moderates to participate in Nicaraguan politics. He cut back on military assistance without terminating it entirely.

  Somoza responded not as Carter hoped. Gunmen presumed to be associated with the regime murdered the most visible moderate, editor Pedro Chamorro. The killing strengthened the radical elements of the insurgency, who attacked the capital and briefly captured the national palace, along with a thousand hostages. Somoza’s hold on power slipped.

  But not until a Sandinista victory was all but assured did Carter openly call for Somoza’s ouster. By then, Carter had lost whatever leverage he might have had in Nicaraguan affairs. The Sandinistas gave him no credit for assisting their revolution, which swept to victory. Conservatives in the United States blamed him for not defending Somoza and defeating the leftists.

  Carter’s Iranian problem was similar. The shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, owed his position partly to the United States, which in 1953 had joined forces with Britain to help overthrow the populist prime minister, Muhammad Mussadiq, in favor of the shah. Yet the shah showed scant gratitude. He led the price hawks in OPEC, the international oil cartel, as they hiked prices fourfold during the 1970s, and he ignored American warnings that he was losing touch with the Iranian people. Carter confronted another dilemma. Should he insist that the shah reform and accept the inevitability of change? Or should he stand by the shah for fear that change might jeopardize America’s position in the Middle East? As with Nicaragua, it was impossible to know which part of the insurgency carried the most weight. Moderates in the anti-shah movement promised an improvement over the shah, both for Iranians and for the United States. But Islamic radicals damned the United States and the West with every second breath.

  Again Carter waffled. He lectured the shah on human rights but declined to cut off military aid. He brought the shah to Washington on a visit that provoked demonstrations by anti-shah Iranians in the American capital, counterdemonstrations by pro-shah Iranians, and scuffling between the two groups. Washington police fired tear gas to break up the crowd; the gas drifted onto the White House grounds and into the eyes of Carter, the shah, and their entourages. Carter recalled the moment as an augury. “The tear gas had created the semblance of grief. Almost two years later, and for fourteen months afterward, there would be real grief in our country because of Iran.”

  Carter felt the grief personally and politically. The shah’s grip on power diminished, as did his health. He was dying of cancer and grew increasingly detached from everyday events. In early 1978 police fired on theology students in the holy city of Qom and killed two dozen. The incident caused the unrest to spread, eventually driving the shah into exile and delivering power to a small group of Islamists led by Ruhollah Khomeini, the principal ayatollah, or Shiite religious leader. As on Nicaragua, Carter was condemned from both sides. Khomeini and the new rulers of Iran blasted America as the “Great Satan,” while American conservatives blamed the president for losing another ally to forces hostile to American interests.

  Carter’s credibility sank further when a crowd in Tehran stormed the American embassy and seized several dozen diplomats and staff. Some were shortly released, but fifty-two remained in captivity. Carter vowed to stay in Washington and labor night and day until the fifty-two hostages were freed. Yet his very vow worked against him. The Iranian regime realized the hostages were a valuable bargaining chip and held on to them. Carter himself became a hostage, imprisoned in the Oval Office, the symbol of good intentions gone fecklessly awry.

  30

  REAGAN COULDN’T RESIST such an easy target and saw no reason to try. The only thing that might have prevented his running for president again would have been faltering health. But he avoided the heavy drinking that took his father young, and he inherited good genes from his mother, who lived almost a full eight decades before dying in California in 1962 at the age of seventy-nine. He got plenty of exercise and fresh air at his ranch. He felt as strong as he ever had. He had no reason to think he didn’t have many years of solid health ahead.

  So his formal announcement of candidacy in November 1979 surprised no one. He personally addressed a ballroom full of well-heeled Republicans in New York, and he spoke to the nation at large in a recorded, televised version of the same speech. He again raided Franklin Roosevelt’s rhetorical library, giving Roosevelt’s famous phrase a conservative spin: “A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny: that we will support the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual.” As ever, he called for a reduction in the size of the federal government. He promised tax cuts, which would force Washington to shrink. He decried regulations. He proposed to increase defense spending. He reiterated his earlier criticisms of Carter as weak in foreign policy and misguided at home. Referring to what was widely dubbed the “malaise speech,” in which Carter had asked Americans to look within to find the source of the country’s unhappiness, Reagan declared, “Leaders in our government have told us that we, the people, have lost confidence in ourselves; that we must regain our spirit and our will to achieve our national goals. Well, it is true there is a lack of confidence, an unease with things the way they are. But the confidence we have lost is confidence in our government’s policies.”

  HIS TIMING COULDN’T have been better. Polls revealed that barely three out of ten Americans approved of Carter’s performance. Yet Reagan stumbled out of the gate. Hoping to preempt questions about his age, he observed in an interview with NBC that he was younger than most world leaders. Tom Brokaw countered, “Giscard d’Estaing of France is younger than you.”

  “Who?” Reagan responded.

  “Giscard d’Estaing of France,” Brokaw said again.

  Reagan clearly didn’t know who Giscard was. His staff later claimed that Reagan hadn’t heard the question, but they dropped this line when they realized that Reagan would suffer less from voters concluding he didn’t know who the president of France was than from their discovering he was partly deaf.

  The initial miscues might have damaged Reagan more had he not received, during the second month of his campaign, an incredible gift from, of all places, the Kremlin. Americans weren’t the only ones alarmed by the Iranian revolution; Soviet leaders feared that radical Islamism would leap into the largely Muslim Soviet republics of central Asia. Moscow had been building a barrier against the Islamists by supplying support to the Afghan government of Muhammad Daoud Khan, but Daoud suffered credibility and likability problems comparable to those of Somoza in Nicaragua and the shah in Iran. His end was similar, too, for he was overthrown in 1978. (In his case he and his family were slaughtered.) His successors, Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, battled increasingly confident Islamist militants and then each other, with Amin arranging Taraki’s murder in September 1979. Moscow gave Amin a chance to suppress the Islamist uprising, but it grew only stronger, inspired in part by the Islamist triumph in Iran. Desperate to keep the Islamists at a distance, the Kremlin in December 1979 airlifted troops over the mountains into Afghanistan. Soviet lea
ders contended that Amin had invited the intervention, which therefore didn’t qualify as an invasion. Amin’s sudden death cast doubt on this explanation, which few in Afghanistan or the outside world had credited anyway. The Soviets installed a new regime and commenced a bloody campaign against the Islamists.

  The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan knocked the scales from the eyes of Jimmy Carter. Such, at least, was Carter’s explanation of the change in policy he immediately ordered. “My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week than in the two and one-half years before that,” he told a reporter on the final day of 1979. “The action of the Soviets has made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time that I’ve been in office.”

  Carter proceeded to act on his epiphany. In his State of the Union address in January 1980 he described the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as “the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War,” and in unmistakable terms he warned the Russians against moving any closer to the warm waters and oil fields of the Persian Gulf. “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

  Carter’s reversal could hardly have been more dramatic. And it played into the hands of Reagan and other critics of détente. In explaining how wrong he had been about the Soviets, the president conceded that Reagan and the others had been right. And in threatening war should the Red Army move farther south, he was doing precisely what they would have done, or said they would have done.

  Carter showed his seriousness by asking Congress for a big increase in military spending, which Congress approved. He canceled grain sales and other commercial aspects of détente. He withdrew permits to Soviet vessels to fish in American waters. He effectively ordered the U.S. Olympic team to stay home from the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow. And he never uttered the word “détente” in public again.

  Carter’s capitulation on détente, combined with the continuing ordeal of the American hostages in Iran, might have guaranteed his defeat for reelection by any credible Republican. Or it might not have. Americans have rarely cast their ballots for president with international issues foremost in mind. Domestic questions, starting with the state of the economy, have mattered far more. Do I have a job? Will I keep it? Can I afford what I need to buy? These questions demand answers from nearly every voter every day. Foreign policy questions arise less often and almost always less pressingly.

  It was the economic questions with which Reagan most effectively skewered Carter. The American economy had performed quite satisfacto rily during the two decades after 1945, lifting standards of living and supporting the government activities Americans desired and voted for. But during the 1960s the economy began to wobble. Revived Germany and Japan sent more and more goods to America, creating an imbalance of trade and putting pressure on the dollar. Meanwhile, heavy federal spending on the Great Society and the war in Vietnam caused inflation to creep upward, adding to the pressure on the dollar as foreign dollar-holders divested themselves of their depreciating asset. The strains eventually forced the Nixon administration to pull the plug on the international monetary system that had been in place since the war. The fixed links of other currencies to the dollar and of the dollar to gold disappeared; the greenback became just one currency among many floating on a shifting sea of money traders’ hopes and fears.

  The sea grew stormy when the OPEC oil producers took advantage of growing demand in the early 1970s to quadruple prices. The 1973 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors added a political element to the oil question as Arab producers proclaimed an embargo against shipments to the United States for its support of Israel. The embargo lasted only months, but the price increases persisted, adding to the troubles of the American economy.

  The result was a state of economic affairs Americans had never experienced. Inflation bred unemployment, a development that puzzled many economists. In standard economic theory inflation and unemployment were thought to be inversely related. Rising unemployment forced workers to accept lower pay and depressed consumer demand, thereby limiting producers’ ability to raise prices. But the standard theory no longer seemed to apply. Unemployment and inflation rose simultaneously, prompting the coinage of a new term, “stagflation,” to denote the novel and discouraging situation. And Republicans popularized a new metric, the “misery index,” the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates, to measure it.

  Reagan appeared best placed to benefit politically from the economic troubles, which the Republicans naturally imputed to Carter. Of the plausible Republican candidates, he was the only one with a national reputation and a national following. Yet George Bush, who had served in the House of Representatives before accepting a series of appointive positions, decided to challenge Reagan for the nomination. Bush was a New Englander who had migrated to Texas and raised a family there without becoming a Texan (his eldest son, by contrast, also called George, would be Texan through and through). Bush began the pre-primary season far behind Reagan, but he hoped to raise doubts in voters’ minds regarding Reagan’s age and overall fitness for the presidency. Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee and Representative John Anderson of Illinois put their names forward on the chance Reagan and Bush both would falter. Gerald Ford amused himself dropping hints that he might run again, but he amused himself even more playing golf in Palm Springs and ultimately abandoned the charade.

  Reagan initially underestimated Bush. The Texas transplant pitched a tent in Iowa ahead of that state’s quirky caucuses and shook hands and kissed babies all around the state. Reagan’s people discounted Iowa, believing the race wouldn’t start until the New Hampshire primary. In previous seasons they might have been right, but Iowa got more attention than usual because Edward Kennedy, senator from Massachusetts, was challenging Carter for the Democratic nomination. Reporters in Iowa for the Democratic fireworks couldn’t avoid covering the Republican contest as well. And in that contest Bush beat Reagan by a small margin but one large enough to knock the crown off the head of the nominee apparent. “It was a big surprise,” James Baker admitted afterward. Baker, having opposed Reagan on Gerald Ford’s behalf in 1976, now opposed him on behalf of Bush, a personal friend from Houston. He ran the Bush campaign. “It gave us a lot of momentum,” he said.

  The upset and shift of momentum surprised Reagan as much as anyone else, and it prompted him to campaign harder than before. The vigor of his campaigning, in the New England winter, went far toward allaying concerns about his age. He joined several other candidates for a debate in Manchester the week before the primary, and although he didn’t particularly distinguish himself, neither did Bush, who thereby lost some of that “Big Mo,” as he called the trend in his direction.

  A second debate was the event that stuck in the minds of those following the campaign. The Bush camp wanted a one-on-one with Reagan, the better to gather the moderate stop-Reagan vote. Reagan’s side was split. Some of his advisers thought a head-to-head would allow Reagan to finish Bush off with a single blow. Others preferred a Reagan-against-the-rest, which would diminish Bush by lumping him with the rest. The two campaigns eventually agreed to a one-on-one. But then they began arguing about who would pay for the debate. The Bush team shortsightedly balked, and when Reagan’s handlers agreed to pick up the tab, they realized it gave them control over crucial details and terms of the event.

  Reagan himself wasn’t privy to the haggling, but his instinct was to include the other candidates, who were complaining at their exclusion. Word went out to them to show up at the gymnasium in Nashua where the debate was to be held. They arrived at the appointed hour and engaged Reagan in discussion while Bush’s managers complained to moderator Jon Breen of the Nashua Telegraph that their man had been deceived. Breen agreed and refused to let the four extras—Ho
ward Baker, John Anderson, Bob Dole of Kansas, and Phil Crane of Illinois—participate. Bush walked onto the stage and took his chair. Reagan did the same, but he was followed by the extras, who, lacking chairs, stood on the stage behind Breen.

  Bush didn’t know what to do, so he stared straight ahead and said nothing. Reagan argued that the four ought to be allowed to speak. Breen, guided by what he thought were the ground rules, rejected Reagan’s request. When Reagan, encouraged by the capacity crowd of two thousand, continued to argue for the broader inclusion, Breen directed the sound technician to turn off Reagan’s microphone.

  Reagan had always been able to play some emotions better than others. One of his best was righteous indignation, which he exhibited now. “I’m paying for this microphone!” he declared. The other candidates should have their turn at it.

  Breen refused and the room dissolved in chaos. Many shouted for Reagan, very few for Bush. The excluded four mugged for the crowd, pointing favorably at Reagan and dismissively at Bush. They ultimately left the stage, and the one-on-one debate proceeded. But it was anticlimactic and got little coverage in the next day’s news, which was all about how Reagan had taken charge and shown his personal ascendancy over Bush. As Bush press aide Pete Teeley told his candidate afterward, “The bad news is that the media are playing up the confrontation. The good news is that they’re ignoring the debate, and you lost that, too.”