Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  NOW AND THEN, however, Reagan spoke openly about religion. He had done so briefly at the Republican convention in 1980, and he did so at greater length in March 1983, when he traveled to Florida to address the annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals. Conservative Christians had become a pillar of Republican politics about the time southern Democrats became Sunbelt Republicans; a Republican fund-raiser featuring the president and including many of those in the audience was scheduled for the same hotel right after his address. Consequently, Reagan wasn’t surprised at the warm welcome he received. The ovation that greeted him went on and on; when it finally ended, he thanked the members of the audience not only for their applause on this afternoon but for the more potent support they offered on other occasions. “Thank you for your prayers,” he said. “Nancy and I have felt their presence many times in many ways. And believe me, for us they’ve made all the difference. The other day in the East Room of the White House at a meeting there, someone asked me whether I was aware of all the people out there who were praying for the President. And I had to say, ‘Yes, I am. I’ve felt it. I believe in intercessionary prayer.’ ” He practiced what he believed, he said. “I couldn’t help but say to that questioner after he’d asked the question that if sometimes when he was praying he got a busy signal, it was just me in there ahead of him.” Reagan’s audience laughed appreciatively.

  He had another joke. “An evangelical minister and a politician arrived at heaven’s gate one day together. And St. Peter, after doing all the necessary formalities, took them in hand to show them where their quarters would be. And he took them to a small, single room with a bed, a chair, and a table and said this was for the clergyman. And the politician was a little worried about what might be in store for him. And he couldn’t believe it then when St. Peter stopped in front of a beautiful mansion with lovely grounds and many servants and told him that these would be his quarters. And he couldn’t help but ask, ‘But wait, there’s something wrong. How do I get this mansion while that good and holy man only gets a single room?’ And St. Peter said, ‘You have to understand how things are up here. We’ve got thousands and thousands of clergy. You’re the first politician who ever made it.’ ” Reagan’s listeners roared laughter and shouted approval.

  Yet Reagan didn’t want the evangelicals to feel they and their religion had no place in politics. On the contrary, he asserted historic roots for the Christian religion in American politics and public life. He quoted William Penn: “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.” And Thomas Jefferson: “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” And George Washington: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” And finally Alexis de Tocqueville, the French conservative who had searched far and wide for the secret of American democracy: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” More applause, serious this time, and many nods of approval.

  Reagan thanked his audience for keeping America great by keeping it good. He explained that his administration supported their efforts to preserve the role of religion and faith in American life. It was no easy task. “I don’t have to tell you that this puts us in opposition to, or at least out of step with, a prevailing attitude of many who have turned to a modern-day secularism, discarding the tried and time-tested values upon which our very civilization is based.” Reagan didn’t dispute the worthy intentions of the secularists, but he held that the results of their actions were pernicious. They arrogated to government what rightly belonged to individuals, and they substituted their godless values for the tested truths of religion.

  He gave an example. “An organization of citizens, sincerely motivated and deeply concerned about the increase in illegitimate births and abortions involving girls well below the age of consent, sometime ago established a nationwide network of clinics to offer help to these girls and, hopefully, alleviate this situation.” Reagan reiterated that he didn’t fault the intentions of those involved. But their efforts undermined morality. “These clinics have decided to provide advice and birth control drugs and devices to underage girls without the knowledge of their parents.” Reagan said he had ordered clinics receiving federal funds to notify the parents. And the secularists had cried foul. “One of the nation’s leading newspapers has created the term ‘squeal rule’ in editorializing against us for doing this, and we’re being criticized for violating the privacy of young people. A judge has recently granted an injunction against an enforcement of our rule.” Reagan wondered aloud what the country was coming to. “I’ve watched TV panel shows discuss this issue, seen columnists pontificating on our error, but no one seems to mention morality as playing a part in the subject of sex. Is all of Judeo-Christian tradition wrong? Are we to believe that something so sacred can be looked upon as a purely physical thing with no potential for emotional and psychological harm? And isn’t it the parents’ right to give counsel and advice to keep their children from making mistakes that may affect their entire lives?” The evangelicals leaped to their feet for another ovation.

  Reagan vowed to fight for parents’ rights against the secular onslaught. He would fight on other fronts as well. He had sent Congress a constitutional amendment to put prayer back in the classroom. “There’s growing bipartisan support for the amendment,” he was pleased to report. “And I am calling on the Congress to act speedily to pass it and to let our children pray.” His administration supported legislation guaranteeing student religious groups the same rights to use school facilities after hours as nonreligious groups.

  He turned to an issue about which most of his audience cared passionately. “More than a decade ago, a Supreme Court decision literally wiped off the books of fifty states statutes protecting the rights of unborn children,” he said, referring to the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade. “Abortion on demand now takes the lives of up to one and a half million unborn children a year. Human life legislation ending this tragedy will some day pass the Congress, and you and I must never rest until it does. Unless and until it can be proven that the unborn child is not a living entity, then its right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must be protected.” Enthusiastic applause.

  Reagan knew his audience felt embattled; more than a few liked feeling embattled. Yet he reminded them of the signs of progress on matters dear to their hearts. “There’s a great spiritual awakening in America, a renewal of the traditional values that have been the bedrock of America’s goodness and greatness,” he said. He cited survey results showing that Americans were far more religious than people elsewhere. Nineteen of twenty Americans believed in God, and a very large majority took the Ten Commandments quite seriously. “Another study has found that an overwhelming majority of Americans disapprove of adultery, teenage sex, pornography, abortion, and hard drugs. And this same study showed a deep reverence for the importance of family ties and religious belief.” America was far from perfect. “There is sin and evil in the world,” Reagan said. “Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal.” But America had dealt with evil, and it would continue to do so. “The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back. There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country.” Reagan enjoined his listeners to speak out against those who would take the country back to those old ways. “I know that you’ve been horrified, as have I, by the resurgence of some hate groups preaching bigotry and prejudice. Use the mighty voice of your pulpits and the powerful standing of your churches to denounce and isolate these hate groups in our midst. The commandment give
n us is clear and simple: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ”

  AMERICA REMAINED THE best hope of mankind, the torchbearer of human freedom, Reagan said. This brought him to his closing point, touching on the nation’s struggle for right in the world. “During my first press conference as president, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that, as good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution. I think I should point out I was only quoting Lenin, their guiding spirit, who said in 1920 that they repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas—that’s their name for religion—or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. And everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old, exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.”

  The communists’ subordination of morality to the needs of the state put them in fundamental conflict with Americans and others who placed morality first. And it complicated negotiations with them. “This doesn’t mean we should isolate ourselves and refuse to seek an understanding with them,” Reagan said. “I intend to do everything I can to persuade them of our peaceful intent, to remind them that it was the West that refused to use its nuclear monopoly in the ’40s and ’50s for territorial gain.”

  But it did mean that Americans must be clear about the kinds of people and regimes they were dealing with. “Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”

  A widespread refusal to acknowledge this fact was vexing his efforts to counter Soviet power and curtail the arms race, Reagan said. The refusal lately took the form of calls for a “nuclear freeze”—a halt to new weapons systems. Reagan explained that a freeze would reward the past Soviet buildup, prevent the United States from rectifying the resulting imbalance, and thereby actually hinder arms control, which the freeze advocates claimed to favor. The president granted that discussions of nuclear policy could get arcane, tempting nonspecialists to wash their hands of it. He cautioned his listeners against such a mistake. “I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”

  No one was above the struggle. “While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.”

  62

  AS REAGAN’S AUDIENCE leaped to its feet to applaud his conclusion, reporters scanned their notes for the hook that would lead the coverage that evening and the next day. “Evil empire” was the phrase that caught on, with “focus of evil in the modern world” elaborating where space allowed. Most of Reagan’s conservative supporters joined the evangelicals in applauding the president’s forthrightness in calling the communists evil. His liberal critics groaned at his moralizing and contended that name-calling would yield nothing good.

  Many on both sides missed Reagan’s point. Communism was evil, the president believed, but that didn’t absolve Americans from having to deal with it. In this respect Reagan wasn’t very different from Richard Nixon, the architect of détente. Nixon never declared himself an agnostic between democracy and communism; he simply contended that American security required normalizing relations with the communists lest the two sides eventually destroy the world. Reagan came to the same conclusion, which was why he cautioned the evangelicals against thinking they were above the politics of superpower relations.

  As much time as Reagan devoted to policy toward other areas of the world—Central America, the Caribbean, Poland, the Middle East—he never lost sight of the Soviet Union. The Soviet nuclear arsenal threatened the United States in a way none of the other challenges to American interests even approached. From the beginning of his presidency, Reagan pondered and calculated how to reduce the threat from Soviet arms, for the benefit of the United States and of the world. Reagan’s “evil empire” characterization of the Soviet Union fairly captured his judgment of communism as a guiding philosophy, but it didn’t prevent him from pursu ing policy toward the communists that was pragmatic and surprisingly nonjudgmental. As in other areas of policy, Reagan showed himself quite capable of saying one thing and doing something else.

  BUT FIRST HE had to give the Soviets an incentive to negotiate arms reductions. And that required persuading Congress to fund critical parts of his defense buildup. Congressional Democrats as a group had never liked Reagan’s defense plan, and with each round of budget negotiations they chipped away at programs they considered extravagant or expendable. The MX missile fit both criteria in the minds of its critics. The MX (for “missile experimental”) was a proposed solution to the twin problems facing America’s existing arsenal of land-based intercontinental missiles: their increasing age and the growing accuracy of Soviet missiles. Improvements in miniaturization and guidance made it possible for American arms builders to pack multiple, independently targetable warheads onto a single rocket, giving one launcher many times the destructive power of existing missiles. This offset the improved accuracy of the Soviet missiles, in that if even a small portion of the MXs survived a Soviet first strike, they could still obliterate most of the important targets in the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders, doing the apocalyptic arithmetic, would presumably be deterred from attacking.

  On the other hand, given the paradoxes implicit in nuclear strategy, the Soviets might draw the opposite conclusion. Because the MXs packed so much punch, taking out even a few of them would be very tempting. One Soviet missile could save as many as ten Soviet cities. Reckoned this way, the MXs might undermine deterrence.

  They might, that is, unless their vulnerability could be reduced. The missiles could be placed in hardened—reinforced—silos designed to withstand anything but a direct hit by a Soviet missile. Or they could be made stealthily mobile. Stealth and mobility were central to the potency of another leg of America’s nuclear triad, submarine-launched missiles, which were hidden beneath the waves and constantly on the move. (The third leg of the triad, bombs and cruise missiles launched from aircraft, were mobile but at this time less stealthy.) Both versions of vulnerability reduction—hardening and mobility—were pursued by the Pentagon’s weapon designers as they developed the MX.

  But both were costly and so elicited resistance from Democrats and others who continued to complain that Reagan gorged the Pentagon while starving social programs. Some of the critics asked why the United States needed a nuclear triad; would two legs or even one not suffice? Others took up the argument that the MX was destabilizing. Many cited Eisenhower’s lament about the military-industrial complex having imperatives separate from national security.

  Yet Reagan considered the MX indispensable. “Back to Washington and what I’ve been told may be the most momentous decision any president has had to make,” he wrote in his diary after a day trip to New Orleans midway through his first year in office. “It was to OK the strategic missile and bomber buildup for our future defense needs.” Reagan approved funding for a hundred MX missiles to get the program started.

  Putting the new weapons in the budget was one thing, though; keeping them there was another. During the budget battles within the administration in 1982, the MX posed a tempting target for David Stockman and the other deficit hawks. They didn’t try
to kill the program, merely to delay it. Reagan and his MX allies, most notably Caspar Weinberger, had to fight to keep it front and center. In May 1982 the president approved a National Security Decision Directive stressing the importance to American security of moving forward on the MX. “It is absolutely essential that we maintain the momentum of the MX program and that we achieve Initial Operational Capability in 1986,” the directive declared. Getting specific, the directive added, “Development of MX will be completed and sufficient units produced to support 100 operational missiles.”

  The Democrats in Congress still objected. They campaigned against the MX and other examples of what they considered Pentagon excess, and though their victories in the 1982 congressional elections—the Democrats gained twenty-six seats in the House while holding their ground in the Senate—owed more to the recession, they interpreted their success as a mandate to block the MX. “We’re going to have trouble,” Reagan predicted. “The Dems will try to cancel out the whole system. It will take a full court press to get it. If we don’t I shudder to think what it will do to our arms reduction negotiations in Geneva.”