Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  But Israel did not back off. Prime Minister Menachem Begin came for a visit. Reagan employed his charm. “We did some getting acquainted and surprisingly it was very easy,” he remarked that night. Begin broached the subject of the AWACS. “He of course objects to the sale,” Reagan noted. The president reiterated his desire to bring the Saudis into the peace process. He assured Begin of America’s commitment to Israel, at present and in the future. He thought his argument had a positive effect. “While he didn’t give up his objection, he mellowed,” Reagan said of Begin. The president was pleased at how he had handled the sometimes prickly prime minister. “I think we’re off to a good start.”

  He soon discovered he was wrong. Begin went from the White House to Capitol Hill, where he lobbied hard against the AWACS sale. Reagan felt double-crossed. “He told me he wouldn’t.”

  Begin’s lobbying initially proved more effective than Reagan’s. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent the administration’s request to the full Senate but with a narrowly negative recommendation. Reagan spun the defeat as positively as he could. “Frankly, I’m gratified that it was that close,” he told reporters. “I, of course, would have wished that it would have been the other way. If one of them had a headache and had to go home early or something, it might have.” He refused to be disheartened. “I still am going to continue believing that we can get it in the Senate vote on the floor.”

  He redoubled his efforts on behalf of the sale. He met personally or spoke by phone with most of the senators. He solicited and received endorsements from secretaries of state and defense in previous administrations. He sent a letter to Howard Baker, the majority leader, putting on paper the assurances he had made orally regarding his concern for the security of Israel.

  This time his efforts succeeded. The crucial vote in the full Senate favored the administration, 52 to 48. At a joint news conference, Howard Baker lauded the president’s efforts on behalf of the sale. “The president was our chief negotiator,” Baker said. “And at one time or the other I expect the president saw, virtually, maybe every member of the Senate or almost every member of the Senate. And with some of them he met more than once. I sometimes got ashamed of myself for calling down here and asking him if he would meet with so-and-so. And sometimes the president would say, ‘Well, I already did that.’ I’d say, ‘Well, I know, but you’ve got to do it again.’ ” Baker described one holdout whose mind had been changed by the president at the eleventh hour. “He said, ‘You know, that man down at the White House could sell refrigerators to an Eskimo.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m glad he could sell AWACS to you.’ ”

  REAGAN’S VICTORY ON AWACS simply increased the testiness of the Israeli government. Begin berated the administration for acting more like an enemy than a friend. Three times in the past several months Reagan had punished Israel for actions taken in Israel’s self-defense, Begin said. The Israelis had destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor, and the administration had suspended deliveries of aircraft. Israel had retaliated for the murder of Israeli civilians by attacking the Beirut headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and again the administration had stopped arms deliveries. Most recently, Israel had announced the annexation of the Golan Heights, and the administration had suspended a military cooperation agreement. All this came on top of the administration’s obsession with selling warplanes to Saudi Arabia.

  Begin blasted Reagan in language no Israeli prime minister had ever employed toward an American president. “Are we a vassal state of yours?” he demanded. “Are we a banana republic? Are we fourteen-year-olds who, if we misbehave, we get our wrists slapped?” Begin accused the administration of waging or condoning “an ugly anti-Semitic campaign” in the effort to win Senate approval of the AWACS sale. “First we heard the slogan, ‘Begin or Reagan,’ and then it followed that anyone who opposed the deal with Saudi Arabia supported a foreign head of state and was not loyal to the United States … Afterward we heard the slogan, ‘We will not let the Jews determine the foreign policy of the United States.’ ” Begin played a Jewish card of his own by promising that the Jews of America would support not the government of their own country but the government of Israel. “No one will frighten the large and free Jewish community of the United States. No one will succeed in deterring them with anti-Semitic propaganda. They will stand by our side. This is the land of their forefathers, and they have a right and a duty to support it.”

  Reagan thought Begin was way out-of-bounds, and he was severely tempted to say so. But he pragmatically bit his tongue and sought to calm the situation. He brushed aside a reporter’s question whether the rising tension foreshadowed a reconsideration of American policy toward Israel. “No, it’s just friends sometimes have some arguments, and I guess this is one of them,” he said. He was asked if he objected to Begin’s choice of words. “There was a little harsh tone to that,” he admitted. But he reaffirmed America’s commitment to Israel’s security.

  Yet he didn’t retreat from his decisions. He intended for the Arabs to understand that the United States hadn’t forgotten them. “We want them to know that we want fairness for them,” he said. He added, “I think we’ve made great progress.”

  At the same time, he dispatched Al Haig to Israel. The secretary of state got an earful, less from Begin, who was nursing a recently broken hip, than from Ariel Sharon, the Israeli defense minister. “Sharon is a brawny man who uses his bulk, his extremely loud voice, and a flagrantly aggressive manner, which I suspect he has cultivated for effect, to overwhelm opposition,” Haig recalled. “ ‘We are your ally and friend and should be treated as such!’ he shouted, pounding on the table so that the dishes jumped.” Haig could get loud himself, but on this occasion he held back. “If you act like an ally, General, you’ll be treated like one,” he told Sharon.

  Haig reported mixed results to Reagan on his return to Washington. Begin and Sharon seemed somewhat reassured, he said. But the Israeli leaders remained touchy about the situation with the PLO in Lebanon. “He fears they may—on slightest provocation—war on Lebanon,” Reagan wrote.

  THE TOUCHINESS ONLY increased. William Clark called Reagan a week later to report that Israel was on the verge of invading southern Lebanon to clear out the PLO. Reagan once more sought to talk the Israelis back. “We are trying to persuade them they must not move unless there is a provocation of such a nature the world will recognize Israel’s right to retaliate,” he wrote to himself. “Right now Israel has lost a lot of world sympathy.”

  Israel won back a little sympathy when it completed its long-scheduled withdrawal from the Sinai that spring. Reagan telephoned Begin to congratulate him on making a statesmanlike but difficult decision. “Many of his people resisted leaving the Sinai, and his army had to physically eject them,” Reagan wrote. “The army went in unarmed and did a magnificent job.”

  As matters turned out, the withdrawal from Sinai cleared Israeli decks for action in Lebanon. Six years of civil war had created a political and military vacuum in Lebanon that was filled by battling militias linked to various sects within Lebanon and certain of the neighboring countries. Syria sent regular troops into Lebanon to stake its claim to at least a portion of the apparently disintegrating country. The PLO operated in southern Lebanon, from which its fighters launched attacks against Israel. The Israelis responded with air strikes and threats of ground action. In June 1982, Palestinian terrorists in London shot and gravely wounded the Israeli ambassador to Britain. The PLO denied responsibility, blaming it on a dissident faction, but the Israeli government declined to distinguish among its enemies. Begin and Sharon sent the Israeli army into Lebanon.

  “I’m afraid we are faced with a real crisis,” Reagan wrote.

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  CRISES CAME IN clusters that season. Before Reagan could respond to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, he had to deal with a war in the South Atlantic over some islands most Americans hardly knew existed. The Falklands conflict was a throwback to the age of empire, yet it had re
sonance for the Cold War. For four hundred years Britain had claimed dominion over the Falklands, by virtue of discovery of the then-uninhabited archipelago off the coast of southern South America. For almost as long, Spain and then independent Argentina had disputed the British claim to the islands, which they called the Malvinas, citing the archipelago’s distance from Britain (nearly eight thousand miles) and its proximity to Argentina (about three hundred miles). Britain and Argentina eventually opened negotiations on the future of the islands, but the talks moved very slowly and, at the start of 1982, showed no signs of speeding up.

  At this point a recently self-installed government in Argentina decided to make an issue of the Falklands. The new president, General Leopoldo Galtieri, evidently hoped to confer retrospective respectability on his coup by a bold stroke in foreign affairs. In March 1982, Argentine marines in mufti landed on South Georgia, a British possession six hundred miles east of the Falklands. The purpose, apparently, was to test the British response; the civilian garb would allow the Argentine government to disavow the operation if it went badly.

  London protested the landing but lacked the local muscle to evict the Argentines. Encouraged, the Galtieri government readied ships, planes, helicopters, and troops for an assault on the Falklands.

  American intelligence caught wind of the preparations. Reagan had reversed Jimmy Carter’s policy of shunning the Argentine government for human rights violations, instead cultivating Buenos Aires as an ally in the battle against Latin American leftism. When the Falklands crisis began, the Argentine regime was funding a small army of contras against the Nicaraguan government. American attachés and diplomats nonetheless kept watch on Argentina, and they reported the ship and troop movements to Washington.

  Margaret Thatcher received similar news from her own sources. The British prime minister was determined to retain the Falklands, and she prepared to fight to defend them. Yet she hoped not to have to. Britain would certainly lose the first round of a South Atlantic war, because an adequate task group would require weeks to reach the islands. At that point British marines would have to root out the Argentines by bloody force. “Our only hope now lay with the Americans,” Thatcher recalled. The Americans were friends of Britain and sponsors of Galtieri and his colleagues; surely the Argentines would heed the counsel of President Reagan. Thatcher called Reagan and urged him to talk sense into them.

  Reagan hoped he could. The last thing he wanted was a war between two of America’s allies. In such a conflict he would come under pressure to choose sides. If he did, he would certainly antagonize the party he opted against. If he declined to choose, he might antagonize both.

  He called Galtieri on April 2. “Talked for forty minutes trying to persuade him not to invade,” he wrote in his diary. “I got nowhere.” Galtieri insisted that Argentina’s claim to the Falklands could not be surrendered or compromised. A new twist complicated the historic tangle. “Now we learn there is a possibility of oil there,” Reagan wrote.

  THE ARGENTINE OCCUPATION of the Falklands commenced even while Reagan was trying to talk Galtieri out of it. Argentine marines landed at Port Stanley, the capital of the colony, and seized the town’s airport and harbor. The small garrison of British marines resisted ineffectually. The islands’ population of two thousand stood by as observers.

  The news of the landing required hours to reach London and Washington, as unsettled atmospheric conditions in the Southern Hemisphere disrupted radio communications. By the time Thatcher got the word, she was already organizing the naval force she vowed would retake the islands. The British media sizzled with anticipation of war. The national stiff upper lip appeared when readers learned that Prince Andrew was serv ing on the Invincible, one of the ships that would take part in the assault. “There could be no question of a member of the royal family being treated differently from other servicemen,” Thatcher remarked unremarkably.

  The time required by the task force to reach the Falklands allowed Reagan to dispatch Al Haig to mediate between the British and the Argentines. Haig discovered that Thatcher was in no mood for mediation. She conspicuously kept him waiting for an interview. “The United States Secretary of State, Mr. Haig, wished to visit London that day,” the minutes of Thatcher’s cabinet meeting on April 7 recorded, paraphrasing the prime minister. “It should be explained to him that Ministerial preoccupation with the Parliamentary debate made this impossible but that he would be very welcome the following day, on the basis that he would not come as a potential mediator but as a friend and ally of the United Kingdom.”

  When Thatcher did see Haig, she let him know Britain would brook no compromise with Argentine aggression. “She rapped sharply on the tabletop,” Haig wrote later, “and recalled that this was the table at which Neville Chamberlain sat in 1938 and spoke of the Czechs as a faraway people about whom we know so little and with whom we have so little in common. A world war and the death of over 45 million people followed.” Her government would not repeat Chamberlain’s mistake, Thatcher said. She rejected Haig’s proposal, approved by Reagan, of an international peace force that would administer the islands and oversee a transition to self-determination. Britain would make no bargains under duress, she said.

  Haig hoped for better luck in Buenos Aires. A large crowd shouting nationalist slogans greeted him after a long flight. He assumed the reception had been orchestrated for his benefit, but he thought it significant nonetheless. Galtieri proved as determined as Thatcher. The Malvinas were Argentine, Galtieri said; on this there could be no compromise. “We cannot sacrifice our honor.” Like Thatcher, Galtieri placed the current events in a larger context. “Our crisis today can easily result in the destabilization of South America and thereby weaken the defense of the West,” he said. He added, with deliberate significance, “I cannot fail to express to you that I have received offers of aircraft, pilots and armaments from countries not of the West.”

  Haig didn’t know how to read this remark. The Soviets might well be trolling in the troubled waters of the South Atlantic, but the Argentine government would have to do an ideological backflip to accept aid from the headquarters of communism. Yet Argentina could count on the support of nearly all of Latin America, even if Galtieri’s hint of a Soviet connection came to nothing.

  Reagan continued to resist choosing between London and Buenos Aires. “Both sides want our help,” he noted. “We have to find some way to get them to back off.” The president adopted a public position midway between the disputants. “We’re friends with both of the countries engaged in this dispute,” he told reporters. “And we stand ready to do anything we can to help them. And what we hope for and would like to help in doing is have a peaceful resolution of this with no forceful action or no bloodshed.”

  Media reports, however, cast doubt on the president’s assertion of evenhandedness. ABC News and the Washington Post related that the administration was allowing the British navy to use a channel on an American communications satellite and that American intelligence agencies were sharing information with London on Argentine military activity.

  Reagan bristled on reading the reports, all the more because they were said to be confirmed by sources the Post identified as “senior administration officials.” The president didn’t know who the leakers were, but he blamed the media for the story’s dissemination, which he privately called “a most irresponsible act,” not to mention a dangerous distortion of the truth. “We are providing England with a communications channel via satellite but that is part of a regular routine that existed before the dispute. To have cancelled it would have been taken as supporting the Argentines.” In public he kept still. Asked point-blank about the reports of American intelligence aid to Britain, he said he couldn’t respond without endangering efforts to achieve a diplomatic resolution. “The safest thing is to not comment.”

  Eventually, though, he tipped his hand. Thatcher’s resolve convinced Haig that the only way to avoid a war was for Argentina to compromise. When Galtieri s
tood firm, Haig remarked to reporters that if fighting commenced, the United States would supply military assistance to Britain. Reagan wished the secretary hadn’t said so much, but he chose to explain rather than disavow the comment. “That would only be in keeping with our treaties, bilateral treaties that we have with England by way of the North Atlantic alliance,” he said. “At this moment we’ve had no request for any such help from the United Kingdom. But I think what the secretary was saying is, we must remember that the aggression was on the part of Argentina in this dispute over the sovereignty of that little ice-cold bunch of land down there, and they finally just resorted to armed aggression, and there was bloodshed. And I think the principle that all of us must abide by is, armed aggression of that kind must not be allowed to succeed.”

  Reagan again tried to talk the Argentines away from the brink. “Spent half an hour on the phone with President Galtieri,” he wrote in his diary. “He sounded a little panicky and repeated several times they want a peaceful settlement.” But Galtieri wouldn’t remove his troops from the islands, and he wouldn’t retreat from his claim of Argentine sovereignty.

  Thatcher remained as adamant as before. “It was not Britain who broke the peace but Argentina,” she wrote to the president. “Any suggestion that conflict can be avoided by a device that leaves the aggressor in occupation is surely gravely misguided. The implication for other potential areas of tension and for small countries everywhere would be of extreme seriousness. The fundamental principles for which the free world stands would be shattered.”

  Reagan agreed, though he declined to speak as forcefully as Thatcher. He concluded that there was little he could do. “As of noon things looked hopeless,” he wrote on April 17. He increasingly blamed the Argentines as the days passed. “The shooting could start,” he wrote on April 23. “It would be a war mainly because an Argentine general-president (result of a coup) needed to lift his sagging political fortunes.”