Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Helmut Kohl spoke with Reagan privately for nearly an hour. Reagan assured him he wasn’t upset by the furor in the media. Kohl was pleased. “He said I had won the heart of Germany by standing firm on this,” Reagan recorded. The German people confirmed Kohl’s assertion. “In all our motoring the streets are lined with people clapping, waving, cheering—all I’m sure to let me know they don’t agree with the continuing press sniping about the upcoming visit to Bitburg,” Reagan wrote.

  On the morning of May 5, Reagan visited the grave site of Konrad Adenauer, the founding father of West Germany, in the hills above the Rhine. Nancy Reagan and Mrs. Kohl laid flowers on the grave. The Reagans and the Kohls then boarded Air Force One for a flight to Hanover. A German helicopter carried them to Bergen-Belsen.

  Reagan wasn’t used to speaking to hostile audiences. As California governor he had occasionally encountered hecklers, but as president he was insulated from voiced dissent. On this day, however, the dissenters were fully in evidence. They came from Germany, the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and other countries. They were Christians and Jews, civilians and military veterans, the politically active and the heretofore silent. Guards, and reverence for the dead, kept them out of the camp itself, but they shouted in protest from the borders of the memorial. Obviously referring to Bitburg, they chanted, “You don’t belong there … We don’t want you to go in there.”

  Reagan saw and heard them. He affected unconcern. Asked what he thought of the protests, he shrugged. “It’s a free country,” he said. But he understood he had one chance to make the situation right, or at least better. A light rain fell from a gray sky as Reagan and Nancy walked beside the mounds of heather that marked the mass graves of those killed at the camp. He stood with bowed head before the obelisk commemorating the victims. He placed a wreath of green ferns at the base of the stone pillar; a ribbon on the wreath read, “The People of the United States of America.”

  He spoke in a low voice that suited the place and the mood. He talked of the evil that Hitler had wreaked on the world and on the souls buried in this place in particular. “For year after year, until that man and his evil were destroyed, hell yawned forth its awful contents,” Reagan said. “People were brought here for no other purpose but to suffer and die—to go unfed when hungry, uncared for when sick, tortured when the whim struck, and left to have misery consume them when all there was around them was misery.” Death had ruled at the camp, but death had not ruled forever—which was why he and Chancellor Kohl had come to the camp this day. “We’re here because humanity refuses to accept that freedom of the spirit of man can ever be extinguished. We’re here to commemorate that life triumphed over the tragedy and the death of the Holocaust—overcame the suffering, the sickness, the testing and, yes, the gassings. We’re here today to confirm that the horror cannot outlast hope, and that even from the worst of all things, the best may come forth.”

  Reagan quoted Anne Frank, who had perished at Bergen-Belsen: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever approaching thunder which will destroy us too; I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I looked up into the heavens I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.” He cited the Talmud: “It was only through suffering that the children of Israel obtained three priceless and coveted gifts: the Torah, the Land of Israel, and the World to Come.” In his own voice he added, “Yes, out of this sickness—as crushing and cruel as it was—there was hope for the world as well as for the world to come. Out of the ashes—hope, and from all the pain—promise.” The present generation bore witness to the pain as well as to the promise. “We’re all witnesses; we share the glistening hope that rests in every human soul. Hope leads us, if we’re prepared to trust it, toward what our President Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. And then, rising above all this cruelty, out of this tragic and nightmarish time, beyond the anguish, the pain and the suffering for all time, we can and must pledge: Never again.”

  No one applauded when Reagan finished. Applause was out of place. But his words took the edge off the protests. Even his critics had to appreciate his seriousness; whatever his other shortcomings, he clearly understood what had happened here and what it meant.

  The group proceeded to Bitburg. After all the uproar, Reagan took pains not to draw attention to himself. He neither spoke nor laid a wreath. He deferred to retired American general Matthew Ridgway, who had fought his way into Germany in 1945 with Eisenhower and the U.S. Army. Ridgway shook hands with an equally venerable German officer while a military band played the German equivalent of taps. Michael Deaver made partial amends for his public relations faux pas by narrowly restricting television coverage, ensuring that cameras could not pan from the president to the gravestones showing the SS insignia. Within minutes Reagan and Kohl and their wives had departed.

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  DONALD REGAN THOUGHT the visit had gone as well as it could have, under the circumstances. “Few presidents can have passed through a day of such unrelieved mourning in time of peace,” he wrote. “The symbols and memories of untimely death lay all around from morning till night. Reagan went through the ceremonies like a president, shoulders squared, features composed, every gesture correct. It was clear that he felt that he was carrying out a difficult and historic duty.” The somberness penetrated Reagan’s being. “As we walked to the car after the president’s speech at Bergen-Belsen I made small talk about the weather, hoping to divert his thoughts,” Regan recalled. “He shuddered. ‘It’s given me quite a chill,’ he said.”

  Reagan was quietly satisfied with the outcome. “It was the morally right thing to do,” he commented that evening. Kohl’s reaction confirmed this view. The chancellor and his wife wished Reagan and Nancy good-bye the next day. “They were quite emotional,” Reagan observed. “Helmut swore undying friendship.”

  NANCY REAGAN TOOK a very different view of the Bitburg affair. “I was furious at Helmut Kohl for not getting us out of it,” she recalled of the cemetery visit. She had wanted her husband to reconsider. “I urged Ronnie to cancel the visit.” She was distressed when he refused, as she was distressed by anything that showed him in an unfavorable light. “And yet I was also proud of Ronnie for following his conscience,” she allowed.

  She blamed Don Regan for putting her husband in such an embarrassing position, and she mildly blamed her husband for permitting Regan to be where he could do such harm. “If, by some miracle, I could take back one decision in Ronnie’s presidency, it would be his agreement in January 1985 that Jim Baker and Donald Regan should swap jobs,” she wrote. Speaking for herself, who could have vetoed the swap before Mike Deaver took it to the president, she reflected, “It seemed like a good idea at the time—a little unusual, perhaps, but reasonable.” Baker was exhausted as chief of staff, and Regan was eager to step in. “When Baker and Regan suggested the switch, there was no reason to expect that this new arrangement would lead to a political disaster.”

  DON REGAN WAS experiencing his own doubts about his new position and all it entailed. “I enjoy this job a little more than Treasury because of the excitement and being ‘at the point,’ ” he confided to a friend. “However, it doesn’t give me as much time for thinking as Treasury did, and certainly I can’t spend nearly the time I want in analyzing as I was able to do at Merrill Lynch.” Regan sought to remedy the analytical deficit by devising a second-term strategy for the president. He and his staff produced a document laying out priorities in domestic and foreign policy. These included tax reform and the ongoing budget battle at home, as well as a variety of initiatives abroad: arms-control talks with the Soviets, trade negotiations with America’s trading partners, the fight against leftism in Central America and the Caribbean, efforts toward peace in the Middle East.

  Regan drew from his experience in the corporate world, where a chief executive’s staff would hammer out an action plan and present it to the boss, who w
ould approve some parts of the plan and reject others. Regan deemed the document he handed Reagan a work in progress, with further work to follow the president’s reactions. Regan knew Reagan well enough not to expect a line-by-line critique, but he thought the president would take the exercise seriously, read the document carefully, and offer substantive comments. “Instead, Ronald Reagan read the paper while he was at the ranch and handed it back to me on his return without spoken or written comment,” Regan recalled.

  “What did you think of it?” Regan asked.

  “It’s good, Don,” Reagan said. “It’s really good, Don.”

  Regan expected the president to elaborate. But he didn’t. “He had no questions to ask, no objections to raise, no instructions to issue,” Regan wrote. “I realized that the policy that would determine the course of the world’s most powerful nation for the next two years and deeply influence the fate of the Republican Party in the 1986 midterm elections had been adopted without amendment.”

  Regan couldn’t believe he had anticipated Reagan’s desires perfectly. “I was uneasy,” he remembered. “Did the president really want us to do all these things with no more discussion than this?” He was tempted to press Reagan to be sure. Did he want his staff to move forward on each of these fronts just as the paper specified? But respect for the president’s office bound his tongue. “It is one thing brashly to speak your mind to an ordinary mortal and another to say, ‘Wait a minute!’ to the president of the United States. The mystery of the office is a potent inhibitor. The president, you feel, has his reasons.”

  Regan realized that Reagan’s leadership style was unique. “Another president would almost certainly have had his own ideas on the mechanics of policy, but Reagan did not trouble himself with such minutiae,” Regan wrote. “His preoccupation was with what might be called ‘the outer presidency.’ He was content to let others cope with the inner details of running the administration.” Regan knew that Kennedy had often jumped the chain of command to question mid-level officeholders about details of policy. Nixon immersed himself in the detailed formulation of policy toward China and the Soviet Union. Carter was notorious for micromanagement. “But Reagan chose his aides and then followed their advice almost without question.”

  The system worked well most of the time, but even when it didn’t, Reagan remained unflappable and removed. “Never—absolutely never in my experience—did President Reagan really lose his temper or utter a rude or unkind word,” Regan wrote. “Never did he issue a direct order, although I, at least, sometimes devoutly wished that he would. He listened, acquiesced, played his role and waited for the next act to be written.” Regan, coming from the private sector, found this behavior baffling. But he couldn’t fault the president’s results. “Reagan’s method had worked well enough to make him president of the United States, and well enough for the nation under his leadership to transform its mood from pessimism to optimism, its economy from stagnation to steady growth and its position in the world from weakness to strength. Common sense suggested that the president knew something that the rest of us did not know. It was my clear duty to do things his way.”

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  REAGAN’S WAY WASN’T always easy to discern. A month after Bitburg the president confronted a problem he had been preparing for since his campaign against Jimmy Carter. Reagan had excoriated Carter for failing to secure the release of the fifty-two American hostages in Iran, and he took pride that their captors had freed the hostages before having to deal with him as president. The hostage problem receded from the headlines, but it didn’t disappear. Its center of gravity shifted to Lebanon, where that country’s civil war allowed militia groups to operate with impunity. Hezbollah was the most active; supported by Iran, it waged irregular war against the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and against countries that supported Israel. The United States topped the list of Israel’s supporters; on this account Americans became targets of Hezbollah operations, including kidnappings. By the middle of 1985 the group held seven Americans it had seized in Lebanon.

  Reagan tried not to publicize the hostages’ predicament lest the publicity encourage other kidnappings. He felt deeply for the hostages and their families, but he discovered what Carter had learned: that the instruments for freeing the hostages were frustratingly ineffectual or self-defeatingly expensive. American intelligence agencies couldn’t figure out where the hostages were being held, and their captors seemed to be moving them frequently. Any military rescue operation risked killing the very people it was supposed to save. “Our options were few, and I spent many, many hours late at night wondering how we could rescue the hostages, trying to sleep while images of those lonely Americans rolled past in my mind,” Reagan recalled. “Almost every morning at my national security briefings, I began by asking the same question: ‘Any progress on getting the hostages out of Lebanon?’ ”

  As of the summer of 1985 the answer was no. And that June the hostage problem grew dramatically worse. Two hijackers associated with Hezbollah seized control of TWA flight 847 from Athens bound for Rome. The 153 passengers and crew were mostly Americans. The hijackers forced the plane to reroute to Beirut, where they released some women and children, refueled, and headed for Algiers, where more women and children were released. The hijackers then ordered the plane back to Beirut, where they dumped the body of a U.S. Navy diver, Robert Stethem, whom they had killed, apparently to demonstrate their determination. Several gunmen in sympathy with the hijackers boarded the plane, which returned to Algiers. Some additional passengers were released. The plane flew once more to Beirut.

  Reagan had been alerted as soon as American intelligence learned of the hijacking. He followed the crisis as it unfolded. And he learned that the hijackers were demanding that Israel release more than seven hundred Shia prisoners Israel’s army had taken in Lebanon, as their condition for freeing the Americans they still held. Israel had indicated confidentially to the American government that it had planned to free the Atlit prisoners, as they were called for their place of detention in Israel, but it was disinclined to do so under duress from the terrorists. Yet it was willing to help the United States if so requested. “The U.S. at the highest level must ask them to do it,” Reagan explained in his diary. “This of course means that we, not they, would be violating our policy of not negotiating with terrorists. To do so, of course—negotiate with terrorists—is to encourage more terrorism.”

  Reagan nonetheless thought there might be a way to shape the discussion in order to satisfy the hijackers and preserve the appearance of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. A Lebanese Shia, Nabih Berri, had emerged as a spokesman for the hijackers; Reagan reasoned that the American government could talk to Berri without breaking its rule against negotiating with terrorists. “I suggested that if Israel said to Berri—we were going to release these detainees anyway, we’ll expedite it if you let the Americans go—no one would be giving in to terrorists,” Reagan wrote after meeting with his national security team.

  George Shultz didn’t like the sound of it. Whether through a middleman or not, the United States would be negotiating with terrorists. “You can’t square that circle, Mr. President,” Shultz said.

  In public the president stuck to stated policy. Reporters shouted questions as he stepped off his helicopter returning from a weekend at Camp David. “Sir, can this be negotiated?” one asked. Another said, “Would you like to see Israel return some of those Shiite prisoners?”

  “This is a decision for them to make,” Reagan responded. “And the decision isn’t so simple as just trading prisoners. The decision is at what point can you pay off the terrorists without endangering people from here on out once they find out that their tactics succeed.”

  “Are you still opposed, then? Are you still opposed to negotiating with terrorists?”

  “This has always been a position of ours, yes,” Reagan said.

  “So how might this be worked out, then?”

  “I can’t comment. I think that we’
re going to continue doing the things that we’re doing and just hope that they themselves will see that, for their own safety, they’d better turn these people loose.”

  In a formal news conference two days later Reagan spoke more vigorously. “America will never make concessions to terrorists,” he said. “To do so would only invite more terrorism. Nor will we ask nor pressure any other government to do so. Once we head down that path there would be no end to it, no end to the suffering of innocent people, no end to the bloody ransom all civilized nations must pay.”

  Yet Israel insisted on blurring the line between negotiating with terrorists and not doing so. “The Israelis are not being helpful,” Reagan complained confidentially. “They have gone public with the statement that they would release their prisoners if we asked them to. Well, we can’t do that because then we would be rewarding the terrorists and encouraging more terrorism.” The next day Reagan grumbled that Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli defense minister, had “loused things up by establishing a linkage we insist does not exist.”

  Eventually, the administration and the Israeli government coordinated their stories. The Israelis convinced Reagan that they had indeed intended to release the Shia prisoners and would have done so if the hijacking had not taken place. Reagan took this as sufficient ground for encouraging Hafez al-Assad, the leader of Syria and a new prospective go-between, to pass along a message. “It has been the position of the U.S. throughout this event that the hijacking and hostage-taking is preventing the planned release by Israel of Atlit prisoners,” George Shultz cabled the American embassy in Damascus. “Therefore you may inform the Syrians that the President believes that Syria may be confident in expecting the release of the Lebanese prisoners after the freeing of the passengers of TWA 847, without any linkage between the two subjects.”