Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  The president acknowledged that strategic defense was important to him. But he thought it was important to humanity as well. “History teaches that a defense is found for every offensive weapon. We don’t know if strategic defensive weapons will be possible, but if they are, they should not be coupled with an offensive force. The latter must be reduced so it will not be a threat. And if strategic defenses prove possible, we would prefer to sit down and get rid of nuclear weapons and with them the threat of war.” Reagan reiterated that SDI was defensive. “SDI will never be used by the United States to improve its offensive capability or to launch a first strike,” he said. “SDI should not lead to an arms race. We can both decide to reduce and eliminate offensive weapons.”

  THE TIMING OF the lunch break might or might not have been fortuitous, but the afternoon break was definitely choreographed. The grounds of the mansion where they were meeting included a small house beside Lake Geneva; Reagan had directed that a fire be kept burning in a fireplace there. With the temperature inside the meeting room rising, the president suggested a walk in the fresh air. Gorbachev couldn’t refuse without appearing peevish. So off they went. The temperature had scarcely risen from the morning, and within minutes both men felt the chill. Reagan pointed to the house with its inviting fire, and they entered.

  Reagan presented a written outline of his thoughts on arms reduction, translated into Russian for Gorbachev to read. The general secretary examined the document carefully. To Reagan’s suggestion of reducing strategic arsenals by half, he said he could accept it but only if it was accompanied by a provision to prevent an arms race in space. He observed that the part of Reagan’s proposal on limits to intermediate forces in Europe failed to count British and French missiles on the American side of the ledger.

  Reagan stuck to his vision of strategic defense but repeated that the United States would share successful technologies with the Soviet Union. Gorbachev asked how the Soviet leadership could rely on such a commitment. Reagan answered that American laboratories would be open to Soviet scientists. Gorbachev judged this insufficient. He again insisted that space weapons be prohibited. Reagan complained that Gorbachev chronically mischaracterized strategic defense, which need not include space-based weapons at all.

  They talked for more than an hour but got nowhere. “He’s adamant and so am I,” Reagan recorded that evening. They returned to the mansion. But before they entered the door there, Reagan invited Gorbachev to visit the United States in 1986. Gorbachev accepted and in turn invited Reagan to the Soviet Union in 1987. Reagan agreed. “I scored one we’ve worried about—that the meetings should be on an ongoing basis,” the president wrote later. “That alone could make the meeting a success.”

  REAGAN AND GORBACHEV faced off again over dinner and during another series of meetings the following day. Reagan knew that conservatives in the United States—and some liberals too—expected him to speak out on human rights, and so, contradicting his earlier preference, he raised the issue. He said Congress would require satisfaction on human rights before it would approve any arms treaty. Gorbachev reacted with annoyance. He accused Reagan of hiding behind the pressure groups. The president could get what he wanted. Reagan answered that he wished it were so. “You sure are wrong about an American president’s power,” he said. Reagan repeated his argument that missile defense would not be destabilizing. Gorbachev grew angrier still. “Do you take us for idiots?” he said.

  “The stuff really hit the fan,” Reagan observed afterward. “He was really belligerent, and d--n it I stood firm.” But things calmed down when the formal sessions ended and the staff on both sides set to work crafting a communiqué. “He and I and the interpreters went into a small room and wound up telling stories,” Reagan said.

  To Reagan this was the most significant part of the summit. “As we flew home I felt good,” he recollected. “Gorbachev was tough and convinced communism was superior to capitalism, but after almost five years I’d finally met a Soviet leader I could talk to.”

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  GORBACHEV DEPARTED GENEVA less upbeat than Reagan. The Soviet leader later recalled the tension that had characterized the initial session. “As I reread the minutes, I am amazed at the extremely ideological stands taken by both partners,” he wrote. “In retrospect, they read more like the ‘No. 1 Communist’ and the ‘No. 1 Imperialist’ trying to out-argue each other, rather than a business-like talk between the leaders of the two superpowers.” That first meeting had made him skeptical that anything would come of the weekend. “We had lunch at our residence, and I shared my impressions of my tete-a-tete with Reagan with my colleagues. Reagan appeared to me not simply a conservative, but a political ‘dinosaur.’ ” Gorbachev’s impression of his American counterpart didn’t improve during the afternoon session. “Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative struck me as bizarre. Was it science fiction, a trick to make the Soviet Union more forthcoming, or merely a crude attempt to lull us in order to carry out the mad enterprise—the creation of a shield which would allow a first strike without fear of retaliation?”

  The adjournment to the small house with its blazing fire seemed promising at first. “The walk, the change of scene, the crackling of burning wood—all these helped to alleviate the tension,” Gorbachev said. But the better mood didn’t last. “As soon as we sat down, Reagan rushed back to his old tactics. Seemingly anxious that I might take up SDI again—this time one-on-one—he decided to anticipate my move by taking out a list of arms control proposals and handing them to me. As I understood it, the paper was not intended for discussion but, rather, for acceptance on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis.” Gorbachev naturally resented the pressure.

  The only hopeful moment occurred on the walk back to the mansion. “We went outside again and I suddenly felt very cold—maybe in contrast to the warmth by the fire or to our heated discussion. At that point, the president unexpectedly invited me to visit the United States, and I reciprocated by inviting him to Moscow.”

  Yet that moment was a start. “As it seems to me now,” Gorbachev recounted, “something important happened to each of us on that day, in spite of everything. I think there had been two factors at work—responsibility and intuition. I did not have this impression after lunch, and in the evening we were still clinging to our antagonistic positions. But the ‘human factor’ had quietly come into action. We both sensed that we must maintain contact and try to avoid a break. Somewhere in the back of our minds a glimmer of hope emerged that we could still come to an agreement.”

  REAGAN HOPED TO build on what he took as the positive spirit of Geneva. He sent Gorbachev a handwritten letter expressing a desire to continue the conversation. “Our people look to us for leadership, and nobody can provide it if we don’t,” Reagan said.

  Gorbachev responded cordially but unforthcomingly. He said that Reagan’s attachment to SDI stood in the way of any meaningful agreement between their countries. If the president wasn’t willing to reconsider, talk was futile. Yet Gorbachev didn’t close the door entirely. “I would like to have you take my letter as another one of our ‘fireside talks,’ ” he said. “I would like to preserve not only the spirit of our Geneva meetings, but also to go further in developing our dialogue.”

  Reagan and Gorbachev weren’t the only ones responding to the spirit of Geneva. Important constituencies in both countries didn’t like the spirit at all. Caspar Weinberger rallied opponents of arms cuts to lobby Reagan to break the limits of the unratified SALT II treaty; Weinberger and the others similarly sought an interpretation of the 1972 ABM Treaty that would allow research and development of antimissile systems short of deployment.

  Reagan might have resisted the pressure had Gorbachev shown more flexibility on SDI. But when Gorbachev stood fast, Reagan suspected he was being played for a fool. A March 1986 National Security Planning Group meeting heard arguments from George Shultz for continuing to observe the SALT II restraints and from Caspar Weinberger for break ing them
. Reagan leaned toward the latter unless the Soviets agreed to a new arms agreement. “We can have a real reduction in weapons or an arms race,” he wrote later that day. “But we’re not going to sit by and watch them keep on fudging.” He heard additional arguments during the following weeks and in May came down on the side of the hawks. He issued a statement that detailed Soviet breaches of the SALT limits and concluded, “Given this situation, I have determined that in the future the United States must base decisions regarding its strategic force structure on the nature and magnitude of the threat posed by Soviet strategic forces and not on standards contained in the SALT structure.”

  Meanwhile, he rejected calls from Democrats and others to join Gorbachev in a moratorium on nuclear testing. The Soviets had just completed a round of nuclear tests, and so a moratorium would cost them nothing. Weinberger and the hawks convinced Reagan that a moratorium would cost the United States something substantial, namely the reliability of the weapons systems that were due to be tested. Reagan approved the testing.

  Yet he winced as he did so. Reagan wasn’t used to losing battles of public relations. He had mastered the art of public relations in American politics, but he realized he was losing the global public relations battle to Gorbachev. His refusal to forswear SDI, his decision to break out of the SALT limits, and his order to resume nuclear testing, however justified from the standpoint of American security, made Reagan seem a warmonger when Gorbachev was preaching peace and fewer weapons. In January the Soviet leader had offered proposals that would have resulted in the total elimination of nuclear weapons by the end of the century. Reagan liked the idea and wished he could have proposed it first. “It’s a hell of a propaganda move,” he wrote. “We’d be hard put to explain how we could turn it down.”

  But he did turn it down. The hawks in his administration and Congress were pushing him in just the opposite direction—the direction in which he himself had led them until recently. He now wanted to change course, but they didn’t. And he wasn’t willing to overrule them.

  Yet he hoped another summit or two might prepare the way for the kinds of cuts he and Gorbachev both envisioned. Gorbachev seemed willing to meet again. Soviet ambassador Dobrynin came for a visit and relayed Gorbachev’s interest in a sequel to Geneva. Reagan reciprocated. “My feeling is the summit will take place, if not in June or July, sometime after the election,” he recorded.

  COMPLICATIONS AROSE, HOWEVER. In late April a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Soviet Ukraine malfunctioned, leading to an explosion that spewed large amounts of radioactive debris into the atmosphere. The incident was a disaster in human and environmental terms, with dozens of people killed and many thousands exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. It was a debacle, as well, in the way the Soviet government handled it. Gorbachev seems to have wanted to tell the Soviet people as much as the government knew about the accident and its consequences for public health, but the ingrained secrecy of the Soviet bureaucracy prevented even him from finding out what was going on. The residents of the Chernobyl region, consequently, learned more from reports originating outside the Soviet Union, including those put out by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, than from their own government.

  Reagan offered American assistance and refrained from trying to gain political ground at Gorbachev’s expense. But others on the American side made ample use of this opportunity to rail against Moscow for ineptitude and secrecy. Opponents of arms control contended that if the Soviets stonewalled their own people on a matter of such urgency, they would certainly try to frustrate any inspection regime established by an arms-control treaty.

  Gorbachev was embarrassed by the cover-up within his bureaucracy and angered by the Western reaction. Seizing on inaccuracies in some of the external reports, he accused the Western media of constructing a “mountain of lies.” He blamed the United States for an “unrestrained anti-Soviet campaign.” Years later he was still sore. “The tragedy of Chernobyl was exploited as an alleged proof that we had no intention of really ‘opening up,’ that we remained treacherous and not to be trusted.”

  Gorbachev took the reaction to Chernobyl, in the context of Reagan’s decision on SALT and his continued support of SDI, the MX, and the Pershings, as evidence of American bad faith. “The Americans continued to proclaim in public their readiness for serious arms control negotiations, but in reality they were again undermining the talks and adopting new weapons programs which sent the arms race spiraling upward,” he wrote. He was puzzled. “Try as I would, I simply could not understand this behavior.” He wondered what had happened to the spirit of Geneva. “Was President Reagan perhaps overruled by the powerful American military-industrial complex?” Did the president fear a political backlash? What ever the cause, the result was discouraging for future progress. “I finally arrived at the conviction that it was yet another attempt to provoke us and to make us deviate from the new course we had been pursuing since April 1985, returning to a policy of open confrontation. Right-wing circles in the West feared a renewed, dynamic and more democratic Soviet Union, offering peace and cooperation to other nations. Such an outcome did not conform with their strategies of the time.”

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  IN JANUARY 1986, Americans watched as the space shuttle Challenger lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since the dawn of the space age, NASA’s launches had drawn large audiences, with tens of thousands watching on the ground and millions on television. The crowds never tired of the spectacle of mighty rockets sending brave men and recently women into orbit, and with each launch American pride received a boost.

  On this day the flight proceeded well for the first minute. The launch vehicle rapidly gained speed and altitude; cameras strained to follow it as it rose into the distance. Viewers on the ground regained their hearing from the engines’ roar; watchers on television turned to their daily routines. But the attention of all was suddenly wrenched back when the mission experienced a catastrophic malfunction. A critical seal failed, allowing hot gases from one of the rocket engines to escape their normal exhaust route. This triggered a series of events that resulted in the breakup of the vehicle, which disintegrated amid several plumes of smoke and steam. All seven members of the crew were killed.

  Reagan had been in the Oval Office preparing to brief the television network news anchors on his State of the Union address, scheduled for delivery that evening. John Poindexter, the recently appointed national security adviser, and George Bush came in and told him what had happened. They went into the study and watched the replay on television. “It was just a very traumatic experience,” Reagan said later.

  He went ahead and met with the anchors. They talked not about the State of the Union but about the Challenger tragedy. “It’s a horrible thing,” Reagan said. “I can’t rid myself of the thought of the sacrifice of the families of the people on board. I’m sure all of America is more than saddened.”

  One of the reporters asked if the president took comfort in knowing that the American space program had suffered fewer deaths than the Soviet program.

  “We all have pride in that,” he responded. “But it doesn’t lessen our grief.”

  One of the crew was a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, who had been chosen and specially trained for the mission. Her presence had prompted NASA to provide special coverage of the launch to public schools. A reporter asked Reagan what he would say to the children who had been watching.

  “Pioneers have always given their lives on the frontier,” he reflected. “The problem is that it’s more of a shock to all as we see it happening, not just hear about something miles away. But we must make it clear”—to the children—“that life goes on.”

  Reagan thought of the McAuliffe family. “I can’t put out of my mind her husband and children,” he said. “The others knew they were in a hazardous occupation.” But she was different, and so was her family. “Your heart goes out to them.”

  HE DECIDED TO postpone the State of the Union address. I
nstead, he spoke to the American people about the terrible event the nation had witnessed and suffered. “Today is a day for mourning and remembering,” he said. “Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.” The country had lost another astronaut crew nineteen years earlier. “But we’ve never lost an astronaut in flight; we’ve never had a tragedy like this.”

  He read the honor roll of the deceased. He commiserated with their families. “We’re thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, ‘Give me a challenge, and I’ll meet it with joy.’ They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.”

  He spoke to the schoolchildren. “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen,” he said. To the children and their parents and the rest of his audience, he added, “It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”