Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Reagan realized the historic opportunity was slipping away. For a rare moment in his life he experienced self-doubt. He scribbled a note and passed it to Shultz. “Am I wrong?” the note asked.

  Shultz whispered, “No, you are right.”

  Reagan then gathered his papers. “It’s too bad we have to part this way,” he told Gorbachev. “We were so close to an agreement.” His voice grew angry and disappointed. “I think you didn’t want to achieve an agreement anyway. I’m very sorry.”

  “I am also very sorry it’s happened this way,” Gorbachev said. “I wanted an agreement and did everything I could, if not more.”

  “I don’t know when we’ll ever have another chance like this and whether we will meet soon,” Reagan said.

  “I don’t either,” Gorbachev replied.

  93

  REPORTERS HAD BEEN barred from the talks and had received no word of how the discussions were going. But most assumed, because Reagan and Gorbachev delayed their departures, that something was afoot. They crowded the front of Höfði House to assess the demeanor of the principals as they emerged.

  Reagan was their bellwether. He was better known to the media than Gorbachev, and he was famous for his smile, his wave, and the spring in his step. The public self-possession acquired in decades before crowds and cameras sometimes made him a cipher, but it caused reporters to scrutinize him all the more closely for hints of how he really felt.

  On this day, at this late hour, no scrutiny was required. His face told everything. He suddenly looked all of his seventy-five years. His features sagged; his shoulders slumped; his mouth formed a thin, tight line. Larry Speakes had never seen his boss so. “I was worried about his health,” Speakes wrote later. Reagan’s trademark optimism had vanished. “Reagan was somber,” Don Regan recalled, “and for the first time since I had known him I felt that I was in the presence of a truly disappointed man.”

  Reporters asked if there would be a joint statement. “There is going to be no statement!” Reagan said curtly.

  The president accompanied Gorbachev to the Russian’s limousine. Gorbachev said, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

  “It could have worked out if you had wanted it to,” Reagan said, anger inflecting his disappointment.

  “I hope to see you in the United States,” Gorbachev said.

  “I don’t know that there is going to be a meeting in the United States,” Reagan replied.

  Don Regan talked to Reagan in the car on the way to the air field. “Buck up, Mr. President,” he said. “I don’t know what went on in there, but you’re going to have to meet with the staff in a few minutes. It won’t look well for you to be seen so grim and angry.”

  Reagan hardly heard what Regan said. “Don, we came so close,” he said. “It’s just such a shame.” He held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. “We were that close to an agreement.”

  “His frustration was palpable,” Regan continued. “ ‘Laboratory, laboratory, laboratory,’ the president said, repeating the word over and over again. Then he went on: ‘It even got to a personal level, Don. I said to Gorbachev: “I think we’ve developed a good relationship. I’m asking you personally to give me this. You’ve got your ten years; I understand why you need it. But I promised the American people that I wouldn’t trade away their future security, which is SDI.” But Gorbachev wouldn’t give in even to my personal plea.’ ”

  AS HE HAD for many months, Gorbachev bested Reagan in the battle for public opinion. While Reagan drove to the airport for the flight home, lamenting to Don Regan the opportunity lost, Gorbachev held a news conference. A reporter for the New York Times found him characteristically impressive. “Mr. Gorbachev, leaning forward in his seat and slashing the air with his right hand at times for emphasis, spoke without notes for an hour before responding to questions,” the reporter recounted. “His presentation was polished and at times impassioned.”

  Gorbachev explained that he had offered far-reaching proposals that would have averted the threat of nuclear war. But President Reagan had rejected them by insisting that he, Gorbachev, agree to an SDI policy “only a madman would accept.” In the end the American president had even rejected an agreement on intermediate nuclear forces that he himself had proposed five years earlier. “I said, ‘I don’t understand how you can abandon your own child,’ ” Gorbachev recounted.

  Yet for all his puzzlement and disappointment, the general secretary professed optimism. “This is not the end of contact with the United States,” he said. “It is not the end of international relations.” The Soviet Union stood by the offers it had presented. “Let America think. We are waiting. We are not withdrawing our proposals.”

  THE TROUPER IN Reagan reemerged at the airport. Donald Regan claimed credit. “For much of the way he talked about his disappointment, going over the details of his discussions with Gorbachev,” Regan wrote. “His spirits were so low that I finally tried to cheer him up by telling a joke. The only one I could think of was about horses.” This finally started to draw Reagan out of his funk, as he couldn’t resist horses or horse stories.

  Meanwhile, Reagan’s speechwriters, in another car, were busy crafting his first public statement after the summit. On reaching the airport, they gathered with the president. “Despite the cheering conversation in the car, Reagan was still subdued and pensive,” Regan said. “He shuffled the speech cards, changing the order of his remarks, then shuffled them again; his mind was elsewhere.”

  But gradually the reality of having to face an audience sank in. “The discipline of a lifetime returned, and he began to study his lines,” Regan recalled. He had mere minutes to learn them. He was still studying when the band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Reagan heard the cue. “The president looked around the table at each of us in turn, squared his shoulders and literally marched the twenty steps to the platform that had been set up on the airport tarmac,” Regan said. A small crowd of Americans had gathered to see the president; they applauded and waved American flags. Reagan responded as he always did to a friendly crowd. “Color returned to his face,” Regan observed. “His smile came back and he read his speech in a strong, confident voice. It was a flawless performance.”

  “Thank you all,” the president said. “It’s good to feel so at home. And I want to apologize for being so late. As you know, General Secretary Gorbachev and I were to have concluded our talks at noon, after more than seven and a half hours of meetings over the last two days. But when the hour for departure arrived, we both felt that further discussions would be valuable. So, I called Nancy and told her I wouldn’t be home for dinner.” The crowd laughed appreciatively. “She said she understood,” Reagan continued. “In about six and a half hours, I’ll find out.” The crowd laughed again.

  The president addressed the issue that was on everyone’s mind. Reagan’s staff and speechwriters had understandably decided to emphasize the positive elements in the meetings with Gorbachev. Reagan responded to their suggestions and carried it off. “The talks we’ve just concluded were hard and tough, and yet I have to say extremely useful,” he said. “Mr. Gorbachev and I were frank about our disagreements. We had to be. In several critical areas, we made more progress than we anticipated when we came to Iceland. We moved toward agreement on drastically reduced numbers of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in both Europe and Asia. We approached agreement on sharply reduced strategic arsenals for both our countries.”

  Yet they hadn’t quite reached the finish line. “There remained, at the end of our talks, one area of disagreement,” Reagan said. “While both sides seek reduction in the number of nuclear missiles and warheads threatening the world, the Soviet Union insisted that we sign an agreement that would deny to me and to future presidents for ten years the right to develop, test and deploy a defense against nuclear missiles for the people of the free world. This we could not and will not do.”

  REAGAN’S EXPLANATION BECAME the administration’s line: that the president had
pressed for sweeping reductions in nuclear arsenals but had refused to compromise American defense, represented by SDI, to achieve them. The White House interpretation had numerous advantages. It blunted assertions by antinuclear activists that Reagan was an irredeemable warmonger. To be sure, he hadn’t achieved the deep cuts he proposed, but in merely putting them on the table, he had gone further than any president before him. It appeased the hawks, who had criticized the quick summit and feared that Reagan would be gulled by the wily Gorbachev. On this point the hawks had to credit Gorbachev as much as Reagan, for by making the laboratory restriction on SDI his price for the cuts, the general secretary had outfoxed himself and inadvertently rescued America. Robert Gates of the CIA was less hawkish than many in America, but he subscribed to this view. “Gorbachev took a very high-stakes, high-risk gamble to set up Ronald Reagan, ambush him, and kill SDI,” Gates wrote. But the ambush had failed, and SDI and the American arsenal survived.

  The administration’s interpretation of what happened at Reykjavík had a final, absolutely critical advantage: it reflected what Reagan actually believed. At every opportunity the president repeated, with perfect sincerity, that SDI was vital to American security, that field-testing was crucial to its development, and that no reductions in offensive weapons warranted giving it up.

  Yet not everyone, even in the administration, shared this view. “I felt crushed,” Jack Matlock recalled of the moment he learned what had caused Reagan to balk. “Ten years in laboratories would not have killed SDI; it could have preserved the concept since there was at least that much research needed to determine what technologies were most promising.” Matlock declined to blame Reagan, who was no expert on the science and engineering of SDI. Instead, he blamed George Shultz, who did know the state of technology and had been at Reagan’s side at the critical moments. “How could Shultz have let this happen?” Matlock asked himself. “Ten years in labs for SDI and elimination of strategic nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles would have been an agreement totally in the U.S. interest. If Shultz had told Reagan that, Reagan might have accepted it. Why had Shultz been so obtuse?”

  Matlock wasn’t alone in doubting that restricting SDI to labs for ten years would kill the program. “Given the present state of our technology, I think we could abide by these restrictions for ten years,” Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist and supporter of SDI, said. Norris Smith, speaking for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was doing SDI research, said that no current projects would be hampered by confining research to the laboratory and that follow-on projects wouldn’t be ready for field-testing for two to ten years, depending on the success of the lab tests.

  George Shultz thought the critics missed the point of SDI. The secretary of state thought Reagan missed the point of SDI, too, though he was tactful enough not to say so. Reagan denied SDI was a bargaining chip; Shultz thought a bargaining chip was precisely what it was, except that it was a chip that must never be bargained away. Shultz was agnostic on whether SDI would ever work as Reagan hoped it would in shielding America from enemy missiles. But he judged that it had worked brilliantly in bringing Gorbachev to the negotiating table and wringing concessions out of him. “History will show, I believe, that the Reykjavik meetings were a turning point in the modern history of arms control,” he told an associate as soon as he got back to the office. And SDI would continue to work only if America held it over the head of Gorbachev and his successors. “Without SDI as an ongoing propellant, these concessions could wither away over the next ten years,” Shultz remarked later. As it was, SDI had shown how far Gorbachev was willing to go in arms reductions. “I knew that the genie was out of the bottle: the concessions Gorbachev made at Reykjavik could never, in reality, be taken back. We had seen the Soviets’ bottom line.”

  GORBACHEV CONTENDED THAT it was Reagan who had revealed his bottom line. The general secretary remained upbeat as he reported the outcome of Reykjavík to the Politburo in Moscow. He blamed the failure to reach agreement partly on Reagan. “We had to wage a struggle in Reykjavik not only with the class enemy but also with such a representative of our class enemy, who exhibited extreme primitivism, a caveman outlook and intellectual impotence,” Gorbachev said. But the larger cause was a fundamental American misconception of the Soviet system. “It is the belief that the U.S. might exhaust us economically via an arms race, create obstacles for me and for the entire Soviet leadership, undermine its plans for resolving economic and social problems and thereby provoke popular discontent.” Reagan had thought this would compel the Soviet side to accept his interpretation of the ABM Treaty; he was shown to be mistaken. In the process, though, he had tipped his hand, revealing how far he was willing to go on arms control.

  Public opinion was siding with the Soviet Union after Iceland, Gorbachev said. “The world lays responsibility for the failure to reach agreements at Reykjavik on the United States.” Even many Americans thought Reagan was being unreasonable in clinging so tightly to SDI. The situation would only get better. “We did the right thing when we came forth with the initiative of holding this meeting and when we put forth our new proposals,” Gorbachev told the Politburo. “Our line fully lived up to expectations. Reagan and his administration found themselves in a quandary. Let them flounder.”

  94

  REAGAN WAS STILL unwinding from Reykjavík when, on November 4, 1986, he received a pair of jolts. The first was the loss of the Senate to the Democrats in the midterm elections. The eight-seat swing wasn’t wholly unexpected; presidents’ parties typically lose ground at the halfway points of second terms. But the Democratic takeover of the north end of the Capitol meant that the opposition would control both houses of Congress for the rest of Reagan’s presidency. He had never been able to charm Tip O’Neill; he wondered if Robert Byrd, the leader of the new Senate majority, would be any easier to deal with.

  The second jolt took the president entirely by surprise, although it shouldn’t have. American papers picked up a story that had been published in an Arabic-language magazine in Lebanon asserting that the United States had been furnishing military equipment to Iran. Robert McFarlane, the story went on to say, had secretly traveled to Tehran in connection with the arms shipments.

  The government of Iran shortly confirmed part of the story. It said McFarlane had been in Tehran. It added that McFarlane and four Americans who accompanied him had been detained before being expelled from the country. Additional news accounts linked the arms deliveries to the recent release of David Jacobsen, an American who had been kidnapped in Lebanon more than a year before.

  The White House initially gave the story the back of its hand. “As long as Iran advocates the use of terrorism, the U.S. arms embargo will continue,” Larry Speakes told reporters. In response to a direct question as to whether the arms embargo remained in effect, Speakes said, “Yes.”

  Reagan refused to dignify the story with a public comment of his own. In his diary he blamed the media for more misreporting. “Usual meetings,” he wrote. “Discussion of how to handle press who are off on a wild story built on unfounded story originating in Beirut that we’ve bought hostage Jacobsen’s freedom with weapons to Iran.” Reagan intended to continue his silence. “Our message will be ‘we can’t and won’t answer any Q’s on this subject because to do so will endanger the lives of those we are trying to help.’ ”

  Reagan brought Jacobsen and his family to the White House. The president couldn’t resist the opportunity to express his satisfaction at Jacobsen’s freedom and his concern for the Americans still in captivity. But the event gave reporters license to question him on his policy toward the hostages and their kidnappers. “Mr. President,” one reporter asked, “the Iranians are saying that if you’ll release some of those weapons, they’ll intercede to free the rest of the hostages. Will you?”

  Reagan stuck to his script. “There’s no way we can answer questions having anything to do with this without endangering the people we’re trying to rescue,
” he said.

  Reporters had uncovered the rift between the State Department and the NSC staff regarding the hostages and relations with Iran. A reporter wanted Reagan to confirm or deny the division: “Could you just tell us whether Secretary of State Shultz agrees with your policy or disagrees and has protested, as has been reported?”

  Reagan refused to reveal what advice he had been given. “We have all been working together,” he said.

  “And Secretary Shultz supports the policy, and so does Cap Weinberger?”

  “Yes,” Reagan said.

  A reporter wanted more detail on how Jacobsen had been freed. “Why not dispel the speculation by telling us exactly what happened, sir?”

  “Because it has to happen again and again and again until we have them all back,” Reagan said. He returned to the script. “And anything that we tell about all the things that have been going on in trying to effect his rescue endangers the possibility of further rescue.”

  The reporters continued to push. “Your own party’s majority leader”—Robert Dole—“says you’re rewarding terrorists,” one said.

  David Jacobsen stood beside Reagan through all this. His frustration grew with each probing question. Finally he burst out angrily, “In the name of God, would you please just be responsible and back off?”

  Reagan nodded agreement with Jacobsen, and the two turned to go inside the Oval Office. A shouted question followed them: “How are we to know what is responsible and what is not?”

  Moments later, away from the reporters, Jacobsen said to Reagan, “My God, Mr. President, these people are savages. Don’t they realize what they are doing?”

  Reagan again nodded, gratified that Jacobsen had said what he himself was thinking. “It was an emotional and heartwarming meeting,” he recorded in his diary. He was pleased with his own response to a flap he hoped would blow over. “Now we are off to Camp D,” he concluded the day’s entry.