Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  REAGAN REMAINED CALM. He had received bad reviews in Hollywood and survived them; he would survive these too. Polls still showed him ahead of Mondale, if by less than before. He listened to Jim Baker, who waved aside the age question as recycled irrelevance. “It was the same old stuff,” Baker remarked afterward. Reagan studied harder, even as he indulged Nancy in her efforts to relax and rest him. “Let Ronnie be Ronnie,” she told all who would listen. She arranged for Maureen and Ron and their spouses to join her and Reagan in Kansas City ahead of the second debate. Whether or not the children provided him the moral support she ascribed to them, they made her feel better.

  Reagan later claimed that the line that silenced his critics was an ad-lib. The topic of the second debate was national security; Henry Trewhitt, diplomatic correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, was one of the panelists. Half an hour into the debate Trewhitt said, “Mr. President, I want to raise an issue that I think has been lurking out there for two or three weeks and cast it specifically in national security terms. You already are the oldest president in history. And some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?”

  Reagan knew the question was coming. His facial expression and body language indicated he was ready for it. His answer wasn’t exactly respondent, but it served his purpose. “Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” Reagan said. “And I want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The audience laughed, many with relief. Even Mondale was forced to laugh. Reagan took a sip of water to let the effect register. Then he almost spoiled it with a sentence that eliminated any pretense of spontaneity in his answer: “If I still have time, I might add, Mr. Trewhitt, I might add that it was Seneca or it was Cicero, I don’t know which, that said, ‘If it was not for the elders correcting the mistakes of the young, there would be no state.’ ”

  Reagan’s one-liner accomplished all he required. It didn’t remove questions about his age, for he was still seventy-three. But it neutralized them. If Reagan could joke about his age—if he could get a laugh out of his audience and even out of his opponent—how serious could it be? His substantive performance in the second debate was just marginally better than in the first debate, but the only thing people remembered was the joke.

  Reagan’s campaign rolled forward. The television commercial that set the campaign’s theme portrayed an America reawakening under the president’s able and inspiring leadership. “It’s morning again in America,” a reassuring voice declared over images of Americans happily engaged in wholesome activities. “Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly two thousand families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon sixty-five hundred young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”

  American voters quite evidently did not want to return to those bad old days. When they went to the polls in November, they handed Reagan a thunderous victory. The president carried forty-nine of the fifty states, losing only Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and that by fewer than four thousand votes. His eighteen-point margin in the popular vote—59 percent to Mondale’s 41 percent—showed how dramatically Americans had shifted their political preferences since Reagan had burst on the national scene in 1964. In that year the liberal candidate, Lyndon Johnson, had defeated the conservative, Barry Goldwater, by more than 20 percent of the popular vote. In 1984, Reagan, the conservative, crushed Mondale, the liberal, by a comparable margin.

  Reagan remembered that after Goldwater’s defeat many pundits had declared conservatism dead. Even within the Republican Party the movement struggled to avoid being read the last rites. But Reagan had never faltered. He refused to change his message. On the campaign trail in 1980 and again in 1984 he used the same images and even some of the same phrases he had employed in his 1964 speech. Through the wilderness years of American conservatism, during the 1960s and 1970s, Reagan’s optimism that the country would see the wisdom in conservatism had frequently appeared naive, if not delusional. But as the magnitude of his reelection victory became evident, what had been dismissed as delusion won new appreciation as vision, and his naïveté was recognized as the clearest-sighted realism.

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  REAGAN REASONABLY ASSUMED his landslide victory would increase his credibility in negotiations at home and abroad. He thought the press was still biased against him—“The press is now trying to prove it wasn’t a landslide, or should I say a mandate?” he grumbled after a postelection news conference—but he was pleased that the Democratic leadership paid attention to the election results. “Tip O’Neill told me privately he was very conscious of the fact that I had received 59 percent of the vote.”

  The Soviets were paying attention too. The Kremlin’s envoys had broken off arms talks in Geneva to protest Reagan’s insistence on deploying the Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, but after the election they signaled a willingness to return to the table. Reagan thought this a good sign, one he intended to exploit. He called a meeting of the National Security Planning Group in late November. Douglas George of the CIA outlined Soviet capabilities and likely negotiating strategies. “The Soviets are afraid that U.S. gains will erode the advantages which they have achieved,” he said. The Kremlin hoped Congress would derail the MX system and the Europeans would reject the Pershings and cruise missiles. But SDI was what really kept Soviet leaders awake nights, George said. “The Soviet Union recognizes that no amount of capital that it can invest would permit them to compete successfully with the United States in terms of SDI.”

  Caspar Weinberger asserted that this made SDI all the more important. “It is strategic defense that gives the United States its leverage on the Soviet Union,” the defense secretary said.

  General John Vessey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, didn’t argue with Weinberger about SDI but stressed the role of the MX. “The Soviet Union gets a great amount of military leverage from its ICBM force, and it is important that we develop a counter to that,” he said.

  Reagan returned to Douglas George’s point and broadened the conversation. He asked whether the Soviet Union feared America’s economic capability.

  General Vessey responded, “The Soviet Union has a greater military and industrial base, but we have the lead in high technology.”

  Weinberger added, “The key is SDI.” But America needed to move quickly. “We don’t have the time to mobilize an industrial base the way we did in World War II.”

  Reagan had a more technical question. He asked whether deterrence would be enhanced if the administration publicly adopted a launch-on-warning policy. Everyone at this meeting understood that the point of the MX program was to allow the United States to absorb a Soviet first strike and still retaliate devastatingly. But because the MX didn’t yet exist, Reagan was asking if the United States should launch as soon as it detected a Soviet launch. By one line of thinking, such an American hair trigger would banish Soviet thoughts of a first strike. But by another, it would make the Soviets nervous and prone to miscalculation. Moreover, it required reliable detection measures by the United States. Reagan followed up by asking whether such measures existed.

  Weinberger acknowledged that there were gaps in America’s radar coverage. But Vessey said that those applied only to Soviet missiles launched from submarines.

  Robert McFarlane thought Weinberger and Vess
ey understated the problem with a launch-on-warning policy. “We do not have the kind of attack assessment capability that we would need to rely on such a policy,” he said. American radar could see the missiles coming in, but it couldn’t tell whether they were aimed at American missiles or American cities.

  Vessey agreed that the detection was unreliable and therefore that launch on warning was infeasible.

  Paul Nitze, who headed the administration’s delegation to the intermediate-force talks in Geneva, rejected the president’s suggestion on political grounds. He called it a “policy of weakness.”

  But William Casey thought launch on warning might be useful in prodding Congress to fund strategic defense. Launch on warning, he said, “would make SDI look very good indeed.”

  Weinberger stated simply, “SDI is the best response to the Soviet threat.”

  REAGAN AGREED. THROUGH the end of 1984 and into 1985 he conducted a two-pronged offensive: pushing the Kremlin to engage in meaningful arms talks and pressing Congress to fund the new weapons systems, the MX and SDI, that would make the talks meaningful. He thought he could pull it off. “We and the Soviet Union may be coming together more than many people realize,” he told the National Security Planning Group. The president reiterated his discovery that the Soviets honestly feared American capabilities and intentions. “We could build on the Soviet preoccupation with defending the homeland by making clear that we have no intention of starting a nuclear war,” he said. The Kremlin’s concern for defense could afford an opening for SDI. “We have no objections to their having defenses, but we have to look at defenses for ourselves.” He conceded that this would be a tough sell. “They are afraid of SDI.” The administration’s job was to demonstrate that they needn’t be. “We must show them how defenses are not threatening. We must make it clear that we are not seeking advantage, only defense.”

  American analysts had reported that the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in antisatellite technology, or ASAT. The Soviets were likening ASAT to SDI, perhaps as a basis for a trade. Reagan rejected the comparison. “We are willing to negotiate the end of ASATs because they are offensive weapons,” he said. But he wasn’t going to bargain away strategic defense. And the fact that the Soviets were nervous about it was all the more reason to keep it. “SDI gives us a great deal of leverage,” he said.

  Robert McFarlane suggested that the Kremlin was hoping for help from the administration’s critics in Congress and the media. “The Russians may bet that the United States cannot sell its SDI program. We need to get support for strategic defense.”

  Reagan joked, “We can start by canceling our subscriptions to the Washington Post.” Yet the president took seriously the political opposition to the administration’s weapons program. The complaints from liberals like those at the Post didn’t surprise him, but conservative resistance caused him dismay. Barry Goldwater singled out the MX as a boondoggle. The Arizona senator thought the Pentagon was spending too much already; the MX was more of the wasteful same. Reagan feared that Goldwater’s opposition would be contagious. “He could well be the kiss of death,” the president wrote.

  Reagan invited senators and representatives of both parties to the White House. He pitched the MX and SDI as necessary precursors to arms reductions. “I hope we’re making them realize we can’t unilaterally disarm and hope to persuade the Soviets,” he wrote afterward. A few weeks later he brought David Boren and Sam Nunn, two leading Democrats in the Senate, to the White House for cocktails and discussion of the MX. “I believe we’ll have their support,” Reagan noted. “In fact they talked of how wrong it was for Congress to interfere with a president in foreign affairs and how both parties must come together at the water’s edge.”

  Tip O’Neill was unsupportive but not obstructionist. “Tip surprised me,” Reagan recorded after a lunch with the House speaker. “He won’t make an issue of MX but will not personally vote for it. He says it’s a matter of conscience; having the MX, he says, will provoke a Russian nuclear attack.” Reagan gave O’Neill modest credit for integrity on this crucial issue but none for intelligence. “He can’t respond when asked how we can remain defenseless and let the Soviets have thousands of missiles aimed at us.”

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  ON MARCH 11, 1985, Reagan made an entry in his diary that marked the beginning of the end of an epoch in modern history, although he didn’t realize it at the time. “Awakened at 4 A.M. to be told Chernenko is dead,” he wrote. “Word has been received that Gorbachev has been named head man.”

  American analysts had been watching Mikhail Gorbachev for some time. “We knew a lot about him,” Robert Gates recalled, speaking for the CIA, which had picked Gorbachev as a comer since the Andropov interlude. In fact the CIA had been rooting for Gorbachev, for a number of reasons. First, the gravity of the problems facing the Soviet Union required someone willing and able to grasp the nettle of reform. “The twin dangers of chaos and a possible desperate military lunge for an economic lifeline or diversion from problems at home were a concern,” Gates said. “Accession at last of a leader who was prepared to make tough decisions to address that crisis was to be welcomed by the United States.” Second, the CIA analysts believed that the crisis in the Soviet Union couldn’t be remedied without significant cuts in Soviet military spending. “Many were persuaded that Gorbachev would eventually face up to this reality.” Third, they hoped Gorbachev would help calm relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. “CIA professionals were no more immune than other Americans to the feeling that the U.S.-Soviet confrontation had gotten a bit too hot in recent years.” Fourth, Gorbachev was simply more fun to study than his predecessors. “After long years of watching every move of a group of aging, colorless, uninteresting Soviet leaders, here was one of flesh and blood, of energy and action, of emotion, a man seemingly determined to change things.”

  Gates and the CIA had reported to Reagan that Gorbachev was the likely successor to Chernenko. “If Gorbachev is chosen, it could lead to the emergence of a more articulate, self-confident brand of Soviet leadership,” Gates and the agency predicted. “He might push for more innovative solutions to Soviet economic problems and greater flexibility and initiative in dealing with opportunities and challenges abroad.”

  Reagan gave greater thought to attending Chernenko’s funeral than he had given to going to Brezhnev’s or Andropov’s. But again he decided not to risk appearing too eager. He again sent George Bush, accompanied by George Shultz, in his place.

  Bush was used to the routine by now. “I think it was Jim Baker who came up with the slogan for me, ‘You die, I’ll fly,’ ” Bush recounted later. He and Shultz attended Chernenko’s funeral and then a state reception at which Gorbachev greeted them. Shultz was impressed at once. “Gorbachev started with a grace note, thanking us for ‘paying our respects to General Secretary Chernenko,’ and then launched into the most far-ranging statement on foreign policy that I had heard from a Soviet leader,” Shultz recalled. “ ‘It is natural,’ he began, ‘to wonder what might change with the departure of one general secretary and the appointment of a new one. The United States should proceed from the premise that there will be continuity in both the domestic and foreign policy of the U.S.S.R.’ Then he noted the chimes of an antique clock in the room and said, with a smile, that the clock was old and was not intended to serve as any kind of signal.”

  Gorbachev had come to the meeting prepared. A thick sheaf of papers apparently outlined what he intended to say. But he put it aside. “He was articulate and spontaneous,” Shultz said. “He seemed to be thinking out loud. Perhaps he was.” Bush outranked Shultz, and the vice president did the initial talking for the American side, leaving Shultz to take mental notes. “I could listen intently and watch Gorbachev, trying to size up what kind of a person he was,” Shultz recalled. “Gorbachev later told me he had noticed me watching him in this first meeting and wondered what I was thinking.”

  The general secretary toured the horizon of i
nternational affairs. He cited the emergence of scores of newly independent countries since the 1950s, each having its own interests and agenda. “No one, not even the U.S.S.R. and the United States, can fail to take this into account,” he said. “We have to learn to base our relations on these realities.” Gorbachev mentioned statements by persons he called “very highly placed U.S. officials” that seemed to ascribe all the problems of the emerging world to Soviet mischief. “Moscow would seem to be almighty,” he said ironically. He continued seriously, “The U.S.S.R. has no expansionist ambitions. It has all the resources it will need for centuries, be it in terms of manpower, natural resources, or territory.” He added, with a lighter touch, “We have no territorial claims against the United States, not even with respect to Alaska or Russian Hill in San Francisco.” He pointed to past cooperation, particularly during World War II—“a bright page in the history of Soviet-U.S. relations”—and again during the era of détente.

  He looked directly at Bush to make a statement he obviously considered very important. “The U.S.S.R. has never intended to fight the United States and does not have such intentions now,” he said. “There have never been such madmen within the Soviet leadership, and there are none now. The Soviets respect your right to run your country the way you see fit. In the same way, it is up to the Soviet people to make such decisions on behalf of the U.S.S.R. And the U.S.S.R. will never permit anyone to teach it how to govern itself.” He paused. “As to the question of which is the better system, this is something for history to judge.”

  He turned to the arms race and arms control. “The two countries have now reached a point in their arms buildup when any new breakthroughs resulting from the scientific and technological revolution—not to mention shifting the arms race to space—could set in motion irreversible and uncontrollable processes.” He questioned the seriousness of the American side, asking why people in the Reagan administration often sounded so skeptical about arms talks. “These negotiations are being depicted as requiring years and years. Is the U.S. side really interested in these negotiations? Is it interested in achieving results? Or does the United States find these negotiations necessary in order to pursue its programs for continuing the arms race, for developing ever new types of arms?”