Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Sapia-Bosch and North recommended other actions that were deemed too sensitive to reveal when their memo was declassified a quarter century later. But George Shultz, in his memoir, indicated what they had in mind. “The CIA sent briefers to me to outline a plan under which a force of 50 to 175 Korean commandos would stage out of Venezuela and run an assault into Paramaribo to overthrow Bouterse,” Shultz wrote. The secretary of state could hardly believe what he was hearing. “It was a hare-brained idea, ill thought out, without any convincing likelihood of success and with no analysis of the political consequences at home or internationally.” He added, “The whole thing depended on impossibly intricate timing and a presumption that the Koreans would be taken as members of the local population. That was crazy. I was shaken to find such a wild plan put forward seriously by the CIA.”

  Reagan nonetheless used the threat of invasion as leverage for diplomacy. He named William Clark as his emissary to Venezuela and Brazil. The journey was secret, but its point was clear. “Our message,” Clark recalled later, “was, ‘Look, either you take care of the situation, of the Soviet foothold, the Cuban foothold … either you take care of it down here or we’ll have no alternative but to do so ourselves.’ ” Clark laid out the American invasion plan to Herrera Campins in Caracas. “He turned pale, and before I left his office, said, ‘Talk to Brazil, they’re closer. I don’t want anything to do with it right now, I’m in enough political trouble.’ ” Clark proceeded to Brasília, where he met not with the Brazilian president but with the general who chaired the country’s military chiefs of staff. “We parked at the end of the runway; it was after dark,” Clark recalled. Again he delineated what an American-backed invasion of Suriname would look like. “The chairman ran to the men’s room and threw up, he was so frightened,” Clark said.

  Perhaps Clark misunderstood the cause of the general’s distress. Or perhaps the general did not convey that distress to his civilian bosses. In any event, the Clark mission failed to achieve what Reagan wanted. “Venezuela couldn’t go along,” Reagan noted after debriefing Clark. “President of Brazil had an idea somewhat different than ours.” What that idea was, Reagan didn’t say. But he added cryptically, “So operation ‘Guiminish’ is born. We’ll know before the month is out whether it has succeeded.”

  WHATEVER THE NATURE of Operation Guiminish—named for a horse Reagan kept at his California ranch—it did not topple Bouterse, who remained in power for several years. Yet Suriname did not become a Soviet satellite or a base for Cuban operations in mainland Latin America. And so Reagan had to look elsewhere to make his statement of resolve against Latin leftism.

  He didn’t have to look far. Grenada was even more difficult for most Americans to find than Suriname, being a small island at the tag end of the Lesser Antilles. But unlike Suriname it actually touched the Caribbean, thus gaining in strategic value what it lacked in size. And it had a government, headed by Maurice Bishop, that was more obviously leftist than Bouterse’s merely brutal regime. Reagan had been watching Grenada since the beginning of his administration and had been warning Americans for months about the worrisome things happening there. “On the small island of Grenada, at the southern end of the Caribbean chain, the Cubans, with Soviet financing and backing, are in the process of building an airfield with a 10,000-foot runway,” the president declared in a March 1983 address on national security. “Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended for?” As the television cameras panned to an aerial photograph of the suspicious runway, Reagan elaborated on Grenada’s strategic importance and answered his own question: “The Caribbean is a very important passageway for our international commerce and military lines of communication. More than half of all American oil imports now pass through the Caribbean. The rapid buildup of Grenada’s military potential is unrelated to any conceivable threat to this island country of under 110,000 people and totally at odds with the pattern of other eastern Caribbean states, most of which are unarmed. The Soviet-Cuban militarization of Grenada, in short, can only be seen as power projection into the region.”

  Yet Grenada remained merely a talking point for the administration until October 1983—until the weekend of the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut. Maurice Bishop antagonized not only the American president but some of his own colleagues, who deposed, arrested, and executed him. The coup sent shudders through the eastern Caribbean, where the leaders of several small island states feared that the violence in Grenada might spread. They gathered hastily and sent a request to the American government for protection.

  The request reached Reagan in Augusta, Georgia, where he was spending a golf weekend with George Shultz and Don Regan. Reagan wasn’t much of a golfer, but he liked the getaway from Washington and the change of scenery from Camp David. Reagan and Nancy arrived on Friday afternoon; at four o’clock on Saturday morning he was awakened by a call from Robert McFarlane. McFarlane had just taken over as national security adviser from William Clark, after Clark alienated Nancy for being too visible as the orchestrator of administration foreign policy. “I had never really gotten along with him,” Nancy later said of Clark. “He struck me as a user—especially when he traveled around the country claiming he represented Ronnie, which usually wasn’t true. I spoke to Ronnie about him, but Ronnie liked him, so he stayed around longer than I would have liked.” McFarlane now said the president needed to hear the latest from the Caribbean. Reagan put on a robe and met McFarlane and Shultz in the living room of the Augusta club’s Eisenhower Cabin, where he and Nancy were staying. George Bush joined the group by phone from Washington.

  McFarlane relayed the request from the Caribbean leaders for American intervention. He and Reagan’s other advisers pointed out an American stake in Grenada apart from the island’s strategic role. Several hundred American students attended a medical school in St. George’s, the capital. Shultz had talked things over with Tony Motley, the American ambassador to Brazil and a military veteran. “We both had the searing memory of Tehran and the sixty-six Americans seized from our embassy on November 4, 1979, and held hostage for well over a year,” Shultz recalled. Shultz had no evidence that the new rulers of Grenada intended to seize any of the students, but with their Caribbean neighbors calling for American intervention, the Grenadians might have reasoned that taking hostages was a way to forestall such intervention.

  Reagan remembered the Iran hostages even better than Shultz did, having won election partly because of them. He wasn’t about to risk incurring a similar hostage problem of his own. “I asked McFarlane how long the Pentagon thought it would need to prepare a rescue mission,” the president recalled, referring to a preemptive extraction of the students. McFarlane replied that the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the operation could begin within forty-eight hours.

  “Do it,” Reagan ordered.

  The president later admitted to a larger agenda than either the American students or Grenada. He feared that the United States was becoming paralyzed by the memories of Vietnam. “I understood what Vietnam had meant for the country,” he wrote in his post-presidential memoir, “but I believed the United States couldn’t remain spooked forever by this experience.” Reagan recognized that Grenada wasn’t quite a dagger at America’s heart, yet it was a place where he could make a statement that would keep other daggers away.

  His statement-making purpose was bolstered just hours later by news of the Beirut bombing. The complexities of the Middle East prevented him from responding in Lebanon as forcefully as he wished he could, but these constraints simply rendered more necessary a demonstration of American power elsewhere.

  PREPARATIONS FOR THE Grenada strike took place in secret. Reagan didn’t want to alert the regime in Grenada, which might seize the students for self-defense, and he didn’t wish to clue Congress, lest certain members blow the cover for political purposes. “I suspected that if we told the leaders of Congress about the operation, even under terms of strictest confidentiality, there would be some who would leak
it to the press together with the prediction that Grenada was going to become ‘another Vietnam,’ ” he said later.

  Reagan kept the secret from Margaret Thatcher as well. Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth, and the prime minister had let Reagan know she thought the United States had no business meddling there. Reagan didn’t agree, yet he didn’t want to argue with her. “I believe Maggie Thatcher was the only person who could intimidate Ronald Reagan,” Howard Baker asserted afterward. Baker spoke from personal knowledge of the two leaders and as one who overheard a Reagan-Thatcher conversation at a critical moment of the Grenada affair. The preparations for the invasion had proceeded smoothly, and the president had just given the order to launch. At this point he lifted the veil slightly, bringing Baker, his Democratic counterpart Robert Byrd, and House leaders Tip O’Neill and Jim Wright to the presidential living quarters for a confidential briefing. The briefing had hardly begun when the White House butler came in. “Mr. President, the Prime Minister is on the phone,” he said. Reagan got up to take the call. “He went next door from the oval sitting room and closed the door,” Baker recounted. “But as is typical of many people who don’t hear very well, he spoke in a loud voice. I could hear him plain as day. He said, ‘Margaret’—long pause. ‘But Margaret’—and he went through that about three times, and he came back sort of sheepish and said, ‘Mrs. Thatcher has strong reservations about this.’ ”

  Yet Reagan refused to change his mind. The invasion went forward, as the president explained several hours later. “Early this morning, forces from six Caribbean democracies and the United States began a landing on the island of Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean,” he said from the White House. The Caribbean forces were tokens, as the administration tacitly acknowledged. “We have taken this decisive action for three reasons,” he continued. “First, and of overriding importance, to protect innocent lives, including up to a thousand Americans, whose personal safety is, of course, my paramount concern. Second, to forestall further chaos. And third, to assist in the restoration of conditions of law and order and of governmental institutions to the island of Grenada, where a brutal group of leftist thugs violently seized power.”

  Reagan’s third point made clear that he wasn’t content merely to extract the students. He would topple Grenada’s government and replace it with one more to his liking. This suited the Caribbean countries that had requested the intervention. Eugenia Charles was prime minister of Dominica and chair of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States; she joined Reagan for the White House announcement. “We were all very horrified at the events which took place recently in Grenada,” she said. “We, as part of the Organization of East Caribbean States, realizing that we are, of course, one region—we belong to each other, are kith and kin; we all have members of our state living in Grenada—we’re very concerned that this event should take place again.” Charles said that the coup in Grenada had reversed that country’s halting progress toward democracy. “It means that Grenadians have never been given the chance to choose for themselves the country that they want. And, therefore, it is necessary for us to see to it that they have the opportunity to do so.”

  A reporter asked Reagan if the Americans in Grenada were safe. He replied that they were, as far as he knew. Another reporter asked how long the American troops would remain in Grenada. “We don’t know how long that will be,” Reagan responded. “We want to be out as quickly as possible, because our purpose in being there is only for them to take over their own affairs.”

  A questioner raised the sovereignty issue. “Mr. President, do you think the United States has the right to invade another country to change its government?”

  Eugenia Charles jumped in. “But I don’t think it’s an invasion,” she said.

  “What is it?” the reporter said.

  “This is a question of our asking for support,” Charles said. “We are one region. Grenada is part and parcel of us—”

  “But you’re sovereign nations, are you not?” the reporter interrupted.

  “—and we don’t have the capacity, ourselves, to see to it that Grenadians get the freedom that they are required to have to choose their own government.”

  Reagan supplied his own answer. “Once these nations, which were once British colonies, were freed, they, themselves, had a treaty. And their treaty was one of mutual support. And Grenada is one of the countries, signatories to that treaty.” Grenada’s government had been constitutional and democratic at the time the country ratified the treaty, which therefore had greater legitimacy than the dictates of the current unconstitutional regime. “So, this action that is being taken is being taken under the umbrella of an existing treaty.”

  The operation proceeded swiftly and smoothly. “I can’t say enough in praise of our military—Army rangers and paratroopers, Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel—those who planned a brilliant campaign and those who carried it out,” Reagan told Americans two days later. The troops had captured Grenada’s two airports and secured the campus where the students lived. They arrived without a moment to spare, Reagan said. American intelligence had assumed that some Cubans who worked at the main airport were military reservists. “Well, as it turned out, the number was much larger, and they were a military force. Six hundred of them have been taken prisoner, and we have discovered a complete base with weapons and communications equipment, which makes it clear a Cuban occupation of the island had been planned.” Reagan described a warehouse that had been seized. “This warehouse contained weapons and ammunition stacked almost to the ceiling, enough to supply thousands of terrorists. Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn’t. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.”

  The invasion sparked international condemnation of the United States for trampling the sovereignty of Grenada. The UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to censure the American government. After-battle reports suggested that the American students had never been in danger and that the administration exaggerated the Cuban influence.

  Reagan retreated not an inch. Reporter Helen Thomas inquired whether he was bothered by the heavy vote in the General Assembly. “It didn’t upset my breakfast at all,” Reagan answered. Another reporter asked him to explain how the American invasion of Grenada differed from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Reagan replied. “This was a rescue mission. It was a successful rescue mission, and the people that have been rescued, and the Grenadians that have been liberated, are down there delighted with and giving every evidence of appreciation and gratitude to our men down there.” Another reporter wanted to know whether the success of the Grenada operation inclined the president to use military force elsewhere. Reagan dodged the question, saying any other situation would be different. A third reporter said the Nicaraguan regime was asserting that Reagan was preparing to order the invasion of their country; was this true?

  Reagan smiled, as if considering the matter. He had certainly intended that the Sandinistas take notice of what American power could accomplish. If they were worried, all the better. He didn’t quite deny their assertion. “I haven’t believed anything they’ve been saying since they got in charge,” he said. “And you shouldn’t either.”

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  DURING REAGAN’S SECOND year in office, his father-in-law, Loyal Davis, became seriously ill. “Nancy is very depressed about her father’s health and understandably so,” Reagan wrote in his diary. Davis and Nancy’s mother had retired to Scottsdale, Arizona, and his illness prompted repeated flights by Nancy across the country from Washington. Reagan liked and respected his father-in-law and was naturally concerned for his health. But he worried more about his spiritual health. “He’s always been an Agnostic,” Reagan wrote. “Now I think he knows fear for probably the first time in his life.” Reagan couldn’t take the time Nancy did to visit Davis, but he wished he could. “I wan
t so much to speak to him about faith,” he said. “I believe this is a moment when he should turn to God and I want so much to help him do that.” Yet Reagan never found the time, and Davis died a few months later with Reagan’s words unspoken.

  This diffidence on religion was the rule with Reagan rather than the exception. Casual observers and even people close to him might sometimes have wondered whether he had any religion at all. Edwin Meese later asserted, “He got a lot of sustenance from his faith,” but neither Nancy nor his children thought enough of Reagan’s religious beliefs to remark more than passingly upon them in their memoirs. Ron Reagan recalled that his father subscribed to a sort of modern Manifest Destiny. “ ‘I can’t help feeling that the Lord put America here between two oceans for a purpose,’ he used to say with a kind of unblinking innocence,” the younger Reagan wrote. And Ron recorded that the family attended Sunday services at the Bel Air Presbyterian Church when he was growing up. But beyond that, his father kept his religious beliefs largely to himself. “He was not a real Bible thumper,” Ron said.

  As president, Reagan sprinkled his speeches with religious references, making the closing tag “God bless America” mandatory for every president after him. In his diary and private letters he occasionally included a line about religion. Yet his faith was far less conspicuous than Jimmy Carter’s, for example. On Sundays he preferred Camp David to church. He explained that his attendance disrupted the services, which was true enough. But his faith was internal rather than institutional, and he professed to perceive the divine as much in nature as in any building. “It bothers me not to be in church on Sunday but don’t see how I can with the security problem,” he wrote on a Camp David Sunday during his first year in office. “I’m a hazard to others. I hope God realizes how much I feel that I am in a temple when I’m out in his beautiful forest and countryside as we were this morning.”