Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  The shooting did start a week later. The British task force reached the vicinity of the Falklands at the end of April. On May 1, British aircraft bombed the airport at Port Stanley to deprive the Argentines of its use. On May 2 a British submarine sank the Argentine light cruiser General Belgrano, with the loss of more than three hundred officers and crew.

  The sinking eliminated any hope for a diplomatic solution. Britain smelled victory; the Argentines sought revenge or at least a salvaging of honor. They got some of both two days later when an air-launched Argentine missile blasted the British destroyer Sheffield, killing a score of British sailors and setting fires that ravaged and eventually sank the ship.

  REAGAN WAS COMPELLED to respond to the outbreak of fighting. He called no news conference but let himself be drawn into an exchange with reporters who shouted questions as he departed the White House for a brief trip out of Washington. “Mr. President, was the British attack on the Falklands expected?” one reporter asked. Another demanded, “What are we going to do about the Falklands attack?” A third yelled, “Mr. Presi dent, did you have any advance warning at all that this attack by the British was coming this morning, or was it a complete surprise?”

  Reagan’s aides groaned at these drive-by video shootings, believing they caught the president off guard. Sometimes they did. But they also gave Reagan a chance to choose the questions he wanted to answer. The others blew away in the draft from the helicopter blades.

  In this case he answered the third question. “Complete surprise,” he said. This wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough for the moment. Neither Reagan nor Haig had asked to be apprised of the details of British planning, and the president hadn’t been informed as to when the British assault was going to occur. Yet he was fairly certain it was going to happen, given Thatcher’s obvious resolve.

  Reporters soon tested the president’s accuracy. They learned that the British planes involved in the initial bombing had taken off from Ascension Island in the Atlantic, where the United States operated an air base under a World War II–era lease from the British. The administration had debated whether to allow the British strike to originate there. Jeane Kirkpatrick argued against giving permission, saying it would antagonize Argentina and jeopardize hemispheric solidarity. Bobby Ray Inman, the deputy director of the CIA, sitting in for William Casey, responded sharply. “It was the only time I ever lost my temper in a meeting with the president,” Inman recalled later. He branded hemispheric solidarity a “myth” and reminded the group that Britain had stood by the United States “since the War of 1812.” Reagan accepted Inman’s argument, and the British got the use of Ascension.

  But this left Reagan with some explaining to do. “Mr. President, how could you have been surprised about the attack if they took off from Ascension Island while we control the air traffic?” a reporter asked at the next opportunity.

  “Simply because there was no report of it to us,” Reagan replied.

  “Are they using our airstrips on Ascension Island to bomb the Falklands?”

  “There is a joint-use base there.”

  “If there’s a joint-use base, then how could we have been surprised?”

  “Well, I’ve never told the British when we took some plane off from there.”

  The bombings and the battle at sea were clearly preparation for a British landing in the Falklands. Reagan feared that they might also presage an extension of the fighting to the Argentine mainland. Brazil’s president was visiting Washington; he told Reagan that his diplomats had learned that the British were preparing to attack military bases in continental Argentina. “Our intelligence community confirmed that preparations for such attacks were under way,” Reagan recalled. He phoned Thatcher and warned her against widening the war. She refused to rule it out with Reagan at this point, though she had no intention of taking on more than she had committed to. “Whether or not such attacks would have made any military sense,” she wrote later, “we saw from the beginning that they would cause too much political damage to our position to be anything but counterproductive.”

  Reagan tried to postpone or prevent the collision of ground forces. He called Thatcher again. “I talked to Margaret but don’t think I persuaded her against further action,” he noted on May 13. Nor were the Argentines willing to back down. “Hundreds have been killed,” Galtieri told Vernon Walters, whom Reagan had sent in a last-ditch effort to forestall further fighting. “What can I tell my people they have gained by their sacrifices?”

  On May 21 the British went ashore, triggering a series of pitched battles. Reagan called Thatcher yet again. He spoke of a settlement by which Britain would stop short of total victory and the Argentine government would not fall. Thatcher was in no mood for compromise. “The prime minister is adamant,” Reagan wrote. “She feels the loss of life so far can only be justified if they win.”

  She also felt that Reagan was on her side, despite his diplomatic efforts. The Pentagon quietly increased its assistance to Britain, supplying Sidewinder missiles and the matting for a temporary airstrip, among other items. The president himself endorsed the British position in a conversation with Thatcher in early June. He and she had separately traveled to Paris for a meeting of the Group of Seven, the major economic powers. They spent an hour together at the American embassy discussing South Atlantic affairs. “The Prime Minister said that she had opened the discussion by thanking President Reagan warmly for the material help which the United States had extended to us,” the British account of the meeting recorded. “She regretted, but understood, that she could not make public the very valuable assistance which the Americans had given.” She reiterated her determination to carry the conflict through to the end. Yet she hoped the effects of a British victory would not destabilize South America. “The Prime Minister had made it plain that she was not interested in humiliating Argentina nor was she at war with the mainland. No one was more anxious for an armistice than she.”

  Reagan picked up this thread. “President Reagan had expressed a keen wish to minimise the loss of life,” the British memo recounted. “He wondered whether persistent bombardment, rather than a frontal assault, might not help to achieve this.” Thatcher explained that bombardment, by lengthening the conflict, might actually increase casualties. Reagan replied that a long conflict would benefit no one. “He was worried about the situation in Argentina. He was not sure that Galtieri would fall, but if he did so it seemed likely that the Air Force commander would take over.” Reagan went on to say that Galtieri was getting what he had brought on himself. “President Reagan volunteered the view that Galtieri had authorised the invasion because he otherwise would have fallen from power within days. Large-scale strikes, sympathetic to the Peronistas, had been envisaged.”

  Reagan met with Thatcher again in London a few days later. They spoke in private, each reiterating previous positions. The president then addressed Parliament. He talked broadly of the need for solidarity in the struggle against aggression, focusing on the Soviet Union and its communist allies and proxies. But he included the conflict in the Falklands as part of the necessary effort to maintain the rule of law. “On distant islands in the South Atlantic young men are fighting for Britain,” he told his Westminster audience. “And, yes, voices have been raised protesting their sacrifice for lumps of rock and earth so far away. But those young men aren’t fighting for mere real estate. They fight for a cause, for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed.” Borrowing from Thatcher, he added, “If there had been firmer support for that principle some forty-five years ago, perhaps our generation wouldn’t have suffered the bloodletting of World War II.”

  The fighting continued until the middle of June, when the Argentine defenders of the Falklands suddenly lost heart and quit. “The speed with which the end came took all of us by surprise,” Thatcher remembered. But the lesson she drew from the war endured. “We have ceased to be a nation in retreat,” she told her compatriots. “Britain has rekindl
ed that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.”

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  THATCHER EMERGED FROM the Falklands War a hero, and to none more than Reagan. “She believed absolutely in the moral rightness of what she was doing,” the president remarked. He liked to think of himself as similarly stout in defense of the right, and Thatcher’s victory afforded a reminder that armed morality can indeed win.

  Yet there was collateral damage. The collapse of the Galtieri regime just days after the Falklands defeat left the Reagan administration on the hook for the two thousand contras the Argentine government had been supporting against the Nicaraguan government. Reagan found himself deeper in Central America sooner than he had expected.

  More obvious to the world was Reagan’s loss of his secretary of state. Al Haig had always been an awkward fit in the administration. James Baker judged him pretentious. “He had grandiose ideas,” Baker said. Bob Inman thought he lacked discretion. “He was a swashbuckler,” Inman recalled. Martin Anderson believed that Haig never understood or appreciated the president’s style of leadership. “He was somewhat contemptuous of the views of anyone who was not a certified, blue-ribbon foreign policy expert,” Anderson said. Anderson lacked a blue ribbon but was included in preparations for a presidential trip abroad, to Haig’s great annoyance. “He was baffled by Reagan’s insistence on including these foreign policy amateurs in the inner circle of the summit planning,” Anderson said. “The thing that seemed to annoy Haig the most was Reagan’s habit of involving trusted advisers in policy discussions on issues in which they were not expert.” When Anderson appeared at a final briefing before Reagan’s departure, Haig boiled over. “He straightened up, drew himself together like a small Charles de Gaulle, and bellowed, ‘What the hell are you doing in my meeting, Anderson?’ ”

  Anderson’s sarcastic response typified the attitude of the Reagan loyalists to Haig. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “anytime I get the chance to brighten your day, I take it.” The Reaganites lost few opportunities to vex Haig. His self-importance struck them not simply as arrogant but as demeaning to Reagan, whom they determined to protect. They kept Haig from seeing the president as often as Haig wanted, leaving him to wonder who was making the decisions. “To me, the White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship,” he wrote later. “You heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm? Was it Meese, was it Baker, was it someone else? It was impossible to know for sure.” When Haig complained to Richard Allen, the national security adviser replied, “Al, why don’t you just worry about the State Department?” Meese and Baker often spoke for the administration, on foreign policy among other matters; when Haig objected that their words lacked the precision required of diplomacy and suggested they leave that realm to him, they brushed him aside. “Sometimes, after hanging up the phone, I would have the impression that they regarded me as some sort of naïf who did not understand that publicity is the engine of politics,” Haig said.

  Haig found himself defending his territory on an almost daily basis. Caspar Weinberger crossed the line most irritatingly. “It is not easy to convince other governments or the public that the minister of defense of a superpower is talking off the top of his head on issues of war and peace,” Haig said. Yet that was the way of Weinberger, who knew budgets but not international affairs. “His tendency to blurt out locker-room opinions in the guise of policy was one that I prayed he might overcome. If God heard, He did not answer in any way understandable to me.”

  IT WAS THE leaks, however, that drove him crazy. “If I had some difficulty in wrenching opinions from the White House staff when I spoke to them in person, its members conversed with remarkable fluency through the press,” Haig said. He learned in the Washington Post that William Clark’s function at the State Department was not so much to be his deputy as to keep watch for the White House on his presidential ambitions. The New York Times told him that his nickname among Reagan staffers was CINCWORLD—Commander in Chief, World—on account of his grandiose airs. He read direct quotations from his confidential reports to the president and from his remarks at supposedly secret meetings of the National Security Council.

  “What it all meant, what it all served, who was turning the faucets, were questions that could not be answered with certainty,” Haig reflected. His protests to Baker, Meese, and the other staffers yielded nothing. “Al, it’s just newspaper talk,” Meese told him. “Don’t pay any attention.” The leaks continued.

  Reagan’s practice was to ignore intra-administration squabbling. “Sit down and work it out” was his standard response. Yet he wondered why Haig, of all those in the administration, seemed so beset. Haig complained at discovering secondhand that George Bush was being named chairman of the administration’s crisis council, a post that would normally have been held by Dick Allen as national security adviser. “Al thinks his turf is being invaded,” Reagan remarked in his diary. “We chose George because Al is wary of Dick. He talked of resigning. Frankly I think he’s seeing things that aren’t there. He’s secretary of state and no one is intruding on his turf. Foreign policy is his, but he has half the cabinet teed off.”

  Haig repeatedly threatened to resign, and Reagan repeatedly talked him out of it. But one thing and then another kept popping up. Reagan, for obvious reasons, didn’t see Haig’s overwrought performance on the day the president was shot, but he heard about it afterward. And he heard about it again, and again. In November 1981 he got a call from Haig, who had just found out that columnist Jack Anderson was going to report that the secretary of state would be fired shortly. Anderson’s source was an unnamed White House official. Reagan assured Haig that there was no truth to the story. He called Anderson and told him that Haig was the best secretary of state the country had had in years. Anderson killed his column and ran Reagan’s endorsement instead. “Of course he wouldn’t reveal the White House source,” Reagan remarked in his diary.

  Reagan didn’t bother trying to discover the source. But he gradually concluded that something about Haig caused unresolvable friction. Amid the Falklands crisis Haig got into a carping match with Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose sympathy toward Argentina angered Margaret Thatcher and the British as well. Thatcher complained to Reagan that Kirkpatrick had attended a dinner hosted by the Argentine ambassador even as the Argentine invasion of the Falklands unfolded. From Haig’s perspective, Kirkpatrick’s actions and statements cast doubt on his ability to speak for the president in his efforts to defuse the crisis.

  Reagan tried to get Haig and Kirkpatrick to work together. He met separately with the two and urged them to display greater team spirit. He judged the meetings a success. “I think we can get a lid on it with no further damage,” he remarked to himself.

  He was wrong. Haig grew ever more convinced that the White House staff was conspiring to do him in. His shuttle diplomacy between Britain and Argentina began just as Reagan was to leave for some meetings with friendly Caribbean leaders. “I was startled to hear reports from the White House that I had undertaken the Falklands mission as a means of upstaging Ronald Reagan in his visits to Jamaica and Barbados,” Haig recalled. “The White House term for my peace mission, I was told, was ‘grandstanding.’ ” He read a report in the New York Times that he had refused an airplane from among those assigned to the administration and insisted on something fancier. In fact he had. But the issue wasn’t style or comfort. “The issue was working space and communications.” The plane he wanted was better equipped. Haig declined to level accusations regarding this leak, but one of his assistants told a reporter that the Times story must have been planted by Jim Baker.

  The charge simply fed the fire. Unidentified White House officials told reporter Hedrick Smith that Haig’s job depended on the success of his Falklands peace mission. “You can say H
aig needs a win,” one of them declared. When Haig didn’t deliver, the secretary heard the knives being sharpened. “Shortly after my return,” he recounted, “a lifelong friend who has never failed to tell me the truth, and who is in a position to know the truth, called to say that there had been a meeting in the White House at which my future had been discussed. ‘Haig is going to go, and go quickly,’ James Baker was quoted by my friend as saying. ‘And we are going to make it happen.’ ”

  BAKER DID WANT him to go, but chiefly because he had become a distraction and a burden to the president. “He was suspicious of everybody,” Baker recalled of Haig. “He was fighting with everybody.” Baker later granted that Haig had some cause for complaint. He told of a day when Michael Deaver dressed up in a gorilla costume and paraded outside a cabinet meeting, in a gibe at Haig’s belief that the White House staff were out to get him. On a London visit Deaver deliberately assigned Haig a military helicopter that was noisy and windy, in contrast to the quiet civilian model the White House staff rode in. “I don’t blame him for being pissed off,” Baker said. But he added, “I had nothing to do with it.”

  Whoever was responsible, Haig’s days were numbered. The Falklands War was just ending when Haig presented the president with a list of the slights he had suffered at the hands of White House staff and other cabinet secretaries. “Mr. President,” Haig said, “I want you to understand what’s going on around you. I simply can no longer operate in this atmosphere. It’s too dangerous. It doesn’t serve your purposes. It doesn’t serve the American people.” He again offered to resign but said his resignation would not take effect until after the November elections, to avoid embarrassment to the president.