Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  But Democrats seized on the “Trojan horse” and “trickle-down” language as revealing a basic dishonesty at the core of Reaganomics. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado charged Stockman with “one of the most cynical pieces of performance by a public official since the Vietnam era.” Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina called Stockman’s act the “best off-Broadway show we’ve ever had.” The media played the story for all it was worth. “The networks hammered us for two straight nights, less about what the article said (in my opinion) than what the Democrats said it said,” Baker remarked.

  Ed Meese and Mike Deaver wanted Stockman fired at once. The president had no choice, they declared. Baker disagreed. The administration needed Stockman’s skill with numbers, he judged. “I don’t know who the hell else we could have put in there at that time,” Baker recalled.

  But Stockman needed to be taught a lesson. Baker summoned him for a chat. Stockman had frequented Baker’s office during the nine months of Reagan’s presidency, until it had become familiar to him, even comfortable. “Today was different,” Stockman recounted. “A different James Baker was now sitting two feet away. He had just plunked himself down in his chair without saying a word. His whole patented opening ritual had been completely dispensed with. No off-color joke. No casual waltz around his big office before he sat down. No jump shot that resulted in the arched flight of a paperwad across the room and without fail into the wastebasket. This time it was all business, and his eyes were steely cold.”

  Stockman knew Baker had been hearing from Meese, Deaver, and others in the administration. Baker’s words indicated as much. “My friend,” he said, “I want you to listen up good. Your ass is in a sling. All of the rest of them want you shit-canned right now. Immediately. This afternoon. If it weren’t for me, you’d be a goner already. But I got you one last chance to save yourself. So you’re going to do it precisely and exactly like I tell you. Otherwise you’re finished around here … You’re going to have lunch with the president. The menu is humble pie. You’re going to eat every last mother-f’ing spoonful of it. You’re going to be the most contrite sonofabitch this world has ever seen.”

  Stockman absorbed the lecture. Baker asked him if he understood. Stockman nodded. Baker stood up to let him know the session was over. Stockman headed for the door. Baker fixed him again with his cold eyes. “Let me repeat something, just in case you didn’t get the point,” he said. “When you go through the Oval Office door, I want to see that sorry ass of yours dragging on the carpet.”

  BAKER’S PERFORMANCE WAS primarily for effect. He distrusted Stockman. “He was disloyal,” he later said. But Stockman was smart, and now that he had become a lightning rod, he could draw criticism that might otherwise have hit Reagan. He could be fired later if necessary. Meanwhile he had to learn to keep his mouth shut. He had to be whipped into better behavior.

  Baker knew he had to do the whipping because the president wouldn’t. Reagan was known to his staff as a softy, unable to blame anyone he considered to be on his side. “I’m reading an article about Dave Stockman supposedly telling all to a reporter in the Atlantic Monthly,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “If true, Dave is a turncoat—but in reality he was victimized by what he’d always thought was a good friend.”

  Reagan shared this sympathy with Stockman at their noon session in the Oval Office. Stockman arrived suitably chagrined and expecting a dressing-down. “I had lunch,” Reagan recorded in his diary. “He couldn’t eat. He stood up to it”—admitted speaking out of school—“and then tendered his resignation. I got him to tell the whole thing about his supposed friend who betrayed him; then refused to accept his resignation. Told him he should do a ‘mea culpa’ before the press and clear the misconception that had been created by the story.”

  Stockman remembered the session more vividly. “The president’s eyes were moist,” he wrote. “It was unmistakable—they glistened.” Stockman had expected anger; what he got was closer to sorrow. “Dave, how do you explain this?” the president asked. “You have hurt me. Why?”

  Stockman stumblingly told his story. But nothing came out right. Finally he gave up. “Sir, none of that matters now,” he said. “One slip and I’ve ruined it all.” He offered to resign.

  “The president responded by putting his hand on mine,” Stockman recalled. “He said, ‘No, Dave, that isn’t what I want. I read the whole article. It’s not what they are saying. I know, the quotes and all make it look different. I wish you hadn’t said them. But you’re a victim of sabotage by the press. They’re trying to bring you down because of what you have helped us accomplish.’ ”

  Reagan stood and offered Stockman his hand. “Dave, I want you to stay on,” he said. “I need your help.” He started toward his desk. But then he turned back. “Oh,” he said, “the fellas think this is getting out of control. They want you to write up a statement explaining all this and go before the press this afternoon. Would you do that?”

  49

  WILLIAM CASEY SWALLOWED his bitterness at being deprived of the State Department, but the dose didn’t suit his stomach, and the CIA felt his dyspepsia. “He was frustrated by its ponderous bureaucratic ways, the amount of time it took to accomplish straightforward tasks, its reluctance to look outward, its timidity, its lack of diversity,” Robert Gates said of his new boss. “The veteran of OSS arrived at CIA to wage war and found, instead of a clandestine dagger, a stifling bureaucracy.” Casey started a shake-up at once. “I would like to tell you about some personnel, organizational and conceptual changes I’ve made or am in the progress of making at the CIA,” he wrote to Reagan in May 1981. “It is a good outfit, composed of dedicated people with good spirit, but it has been permitted to run down and get too thin in top level people and capabilities.” Casey blamed Stansfield Turner for hamstringing the agency and the media for scapegoating it, but a more systemic problem was the pay cap applied to CIA personnel (and other federal officials). Able people could make far more outside the government than they could in the CIA; the result was that many left the agency just when they were reaching the prime of their careers.

  Casey couldn’t do anything about the pay situation, so he concentrated on other matters. He explained to Reagan that the CIA comprised four major units: analysis, operations, technology, and administration. “As I size things up, the Analytical and Operations units are most in need of improvement and rebuilding,” he wrote. “The analysis has been academic, soft, not sufficiently relevant and realistic.” Casey said he was remedying the situation by switching the director of the operations unit to analysis. “I have frequently found that I get better intelligence judgments from the streetwise, on-the-ground Operations staff than I get from the more academic Analytical staff.”

  As for operations: “I spent most of the last three weeks talking to all the operational people and carefully sizing up all the activities of the Operations unit. It quickly became clear to me that there were too many components for any one man to manage adequately.” Consequently, Casey had divided the operations unit into two parts. Beneath a single operations chief would sit two deputies, one who would run the “worldwide clandestine service,” the other who would organize support activities. Casey described his thinking about the appropriate director of operations. “I had a tough bullet to bite,” he said. “The only one around of whom I had personal knowledge and experience which made me confident that he could impart the kind of thrust and drive that the necessary rebuilding will require is Max Hugel.” Casey reminded Reagan that Hugel had worked on the 1980 campaign. He had a previous background in military intelligence and a career in the corporate sector. He lacked experience in intelligence operations and was being criticized on that account, but Casey was willing to defend him. “Once I concluded appointing Hugel was the best thing to do, I felt I had to bite the bullet and take the flak. I’m confident it was the right thing to do.”

  Casey’s campaign to resurrect the CIA would define much of Reagan’s foreign policy, for good and il
l. His appointment of Max Hugel proved part of the ill, at once. “It was the appointment from hell,” Robert Gates recalled. Gates agreed that the agency was ingrown and required outside ideas and energy. But he thought the operations division was a bad place to put such an extreme novice. Gates wasn’t alone, and the veterans of the division deliberately made Hugel’s life difficult. “Leaks to the press about Hugel’s mistakes, mannerisms, and faux pas began nearly immediately,” Gates said. Hugel didn’t help himself by his ignorance. “Everyone was embarrassed to have him go to the Hill to testify or to the White House for meetings, and all kinds of stratagems were employed to keep him out of sight.” Casey eventually agreed that the appointment was counterproductive, and a minor scandal involving allegations of earlier insider trading gave him an excuse to let Hugel go. The allegations proved to be inaccurate, but Casey had no desire to bring him back.

  Casey learned a lesson from the affair, Gates observed, but the wrong one. “It was the first and last time Casey would challenge the DO”—Directorate of Operations—“institutionally. Badly burned, from then on he would work around the operations bureaucracy rather than try to change it. This would have dreadful consequences. Now he would indulge his instincts and play Donovan”—William Donovan, the legendary chief of the wartime OSS. “He would reach down into the clandestine service to kindred spirits and work directly with them.” And he would keep his own people in the dark, treating them as though they were the enemy. Bobby Ray Inman, Casey’s first deputy director, put it bluntly: “He customarily lied.”

  REAGAN LET CASEY play Donovan. But he insisted that his intelligence director meanwhile provide information on the Soviet Union. Reagan’s foreign policy, from the beginning of his administration, was dedicated to combating Soviet communism. Whatever contributed to the fight, he encouraged, though he didn’t always supervise it. What did not contribute, he rejected or ignored. Reagan instructed Casey and the CIA to compile the best estimates of the American intelligence community on the actions and motives of Soviet foreign policy. The exercise took several months; in the summer of 1981, Casey delivered his report.

  “We believe that Soviet military leaders regard military strength as the foundation of the USSR’s status as a global superpower and as the most critical factor underlying Soviet foreign policy,” the secret report asserted. “As it enters the 1980s, the current Soviet leadership sees the heavy military investments made during the last two decades paying off in the form of unprecedentedly favorable advances across the military spectrum, and over the long term in political gains where military power or military assistance has been the actual instrument of policy or the decisive complement to Soviet diplomacy.” The Soviets had been especially active in the nonaligned world, supporting leftists in Angola and Ethiopia since the mid-1970s and invading Afghanistan in 1979. “This more assertive Soviet international behavior is likely to persist as long as the USSR perceives that Western strength is declining and as it further explores the utility of increased military power as a means of realizing its global ambitions.” The Kremlin’s ambitions might provoke a confrontation with the United States. “Moscow still views such a prospect as extremely hazardous. However, in light of the change in the strategic balance and continued expansion of general purpose forces, the Soviets are now more prepared and may be more willing to accept the risks of confrontation in a serious crisis, particularly in an area where they have military or geopolitical advantages.”

  Yet Moscow was not uninterested in better relations with the West. “The Soviets will continue to stress the importance of the arms control dialogue with Washington as the key to bilateral relations,” the intelligence report declared. “And they will seek to resuscitate détente as the most promising way of constraining US military policies, of advancing their military and political objectives, and of controlling the costs and risks of heightened international tensions.” If their overtures succeeded, they would continue on this path. If not, they would alter course. “If they conclude that there is no prospect in the near term for meaningful results from renewed SALT, they may decide to go beyond the SALT II constraints, seeking to place the onus for failure on the United States and to exploit the breakdown to widen cleavages in the Atlantic Alliance.”

  The Kremlin perceived an opening in Europe, the intelligence paper said. “The Soviets see a lack of Western consensus—for example, in implementing NATO’s program to modernize its long-range theater nuclear forces (LRTNF). They seek to exploit these differences with a dual purpose: to pursue certain economic and political interests with the Europeans even if Soviet relations with the United States deteriorate, and to generate pressures on West European governments to influence Washington toward greater flexibility in its dealings with the USSR.”

  Yet the troubles in Poland surrounding the rise of the Solidarity movement offset some of the Soviet advantage farther west. “Poland presents the USSR with the most threatening and complex challenge to its vital interests to emerge in Eastern Europe in the postwar period. Soviet leaders are prepared to use military force to preserve Soviet domination if they become convinced that changes taking place in Poland jeopardize the USSR’s hegemony over Eastern Europe. However, because they know that the political, military and economic costs of intervention would be extremely high, they may bring themselves, so long as Poland’s commitment to the Warsaw Pact is assured, to live with a much-modified Communist system in Poland.”

  50

  MUCH OF BEING a big-state governor prepares a person to be president: staffing, budgets, relations with the legislature and the media. But governors get no preparation in the crucial realm of foreign policy. The occasional senator who finds his way to the White House has an edge on the governors, as the Senate ratifies treaties and joins the House in funding foreign policy. Governors who become president have to learn foreign policy on the job.

  Reagan had an advantage over some other governors elevated to the White House, in that he had to run three times before being elected president. His first race, in 1968, being tardy and timid, gave him little grounding in foreign policy. But he studied, thought, and spoke a great deal about international affairs in preparing for and conducting his campaigns in 1976 and 1980.

  Even so, making decisions on foreign policy was a different matter from making promises or critiquing the decisions of others. Reagan’s on-the-job training took place primarily in meetings of the National Security Council and the smaller, more focused National Security Planning Group. Reagan was an apt pupil, though not uniformly attentive. Bobby Ray Inman recalled that Reagan often sat silently through the first fifty minutes or so of an hour-long meeting. The president would nod occasionally, but Inman noticed that the nods didn’t always follow comments calling for assent or disagreement. His mind was clearly wandering. Yet several minutes from the end, he would perk up as Ed Meese began asking a series of short, sharp questions designed to elicit the views of the participants. Reagan would take this in, then adeptly summarize the meeting on the basis of the questions and answers.

  At the start of his foreign policy training, however, Reagan was fully engaged. His first NSC meeting involved the Caribbean basin. “There are 33 states in the region, 19 independent and 14 self-governing,” Richard Allen said by way of introduction. “They are small, beset by problems, and vulnerable to outside force.” The national security adviser proposed a comprehensive approach to the region. “The wisdom of a comprehensive policy is that we would thereby recognize that any action taken with respect to one country or one issue will have an impact on others in the area.”

  Al Haig jumped in. “This area is our third border,” the secretary of state said. “There is no question that it is in turmoil. The middle class in the region is demanding a greater stake in societies which can’t easily cope with the need for change. Yet these countries could manage if it were not for Cuba. Cuba exploits internal difficulties in these states by exporting arms and subversion.” El Salvador was Cuba’s principal target. “S
ix hundred tons of arms are going into El Salvador in various ways.” Nicaragua was Cuba’s accomplice, and because it still received some American aid, it was susceptible to American pressure. “The first order of business is to show the Nicaraguans that we will not tolerate violations”—of regional agreements not to interfere in other countries’ affairs—“as did the past administration.”

  Reagan spoke up. “My own feeling, and one about which I have talked at length, is that we are way behind, perhaps decades, in establishing good relations with the two Americas,” he said. The previous administration had gone about things just backward. “We must change the attitude of our diplomatic corps so that we don’t bring down governments in the name of human rights. None of them is as guilty of human rights violations as Cuba and the U.S.S.R. We don’t throw out our friends just because they can’t pass the saliva test on human rights. I want to see that stopped. We need people who recognize that philosophy.”

  Caspar Weinberger argued for action. “The problem stems from Cuba,” the defense secretary said. “With some covert aid, we could disrupt Cuban activities.” The covert route was necessary because the American people didn’t understand the threat to American interests from Cuba’s actions. But while the covert operations proceeded, so should an educational effort. “We need to explain to people that this is a dangerous situation for the U.S. and that we may have to move strongly.”

  Reagan thought El Salvador was the place to make a stand and a statement. “El Salvador is a good starting point,” he said. “A victory there could set an example.”

  William Casey suggested that time wasn’t on America’s side. The British were pulling out of Belize; the longtime colony was slated to achieve independence in a few months. This had serious implications for regional security, the CIA director said.