Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  Reagan took the cue. He told reporters he was directing members of the administration to commence discussions with Congress on reducing the deficit. A reporter immediately queried, “Are you willing to compromise on taxes, sir? Are you willing to compromise on taxes?”

  Reagan initially hedged. “I presented in my budget a program that provided for $22 billion in additional revenue, which was not necessarily taxes,” he said. But, perhaps recalling the worry in the voices of Greenspan and Baker, he added, “I am willing to look at whatever proposal they might have.”

  Reagan’s statement might have reassured the markets. Or it might have been regarded as political fluff. No one ever knew, for his offer wasn’t seriously tested. Greenspan and the Fed jawboned banks to keep lending and, most critically, flooded the financial system with new money. The markets stabilized, then began to recover the lost ground. As the memories of Black Monday faded, so did the president’s inclination to meet Tip O’Neill halfway on the budget.

  103

  IT WAS IN many ways a crisis for the country,” Reagan later wrote of the events of that October. “But I confess this was a period of time in which I was more concerned about the possibility of an even greater tragedy in my own life than I was about the stock market.” Nancy’s routine mammogram had revealed a troubling lump. John Hutton looked after Nancy’s health as well as Reagan’s; he had accompanied her to Bethesda, and he returned to the Oval Office to break the news to Reagan. It looked malignant, he said, but a biopsy would tell for certain. Reagan was stunned. “Afterward, John told Nancy I reacted to the news with an expression he would never forget,” Reagan recalled. “I think the president has always believed that nothing would ever happen to you,” Hutton said. Reagan added, “He was right.”

  The not knowing was the hardest part. “The next ten days may have been the longest ten days of our lives,” Reagan wrote. The night before her surgery, Reagan helicoptered with Nancy to Bethesda. He returned to the White House but couldn’t sleep. He got up early to fly back to the hospital, but fog grounded his aircraft and he had to take a car. He reached the hospital in time only to kiss Nancy as she went into the operating room.

  He and Nancy’s brother, Dick, who had driven in from Philadelphia, sat in the waiting room. “Dick and I buried ourselves with newspapers and some sessions with assembled doctors keeping us posted on progress of surgery,” Reagan wrote that evening. In due course they learned the results. “The biopsy turned out to be traces of what they called a non-invasive carcinoma—very tiny. Decision was to perform moderate mastectomy.” Reagan and Dick were able to see Nancy after lunch. “As can be expected she’s feeling bad about losing a breast,” Reagan wrote. “We did our best to let her know that was nothing compared to fact the cancer was gone. The doctors are delighted with the operation—it went so well and was so effective. There won’t be any chemotherapy or radiation treatment at all.”

  In his memoir Reagan recounted the incidents of that day more emotionally. “I looked up and saw John Hutton and Dr. Ollie Beahrs of the Mayo Clinic approach us,” he wrote. “Their faces telegraphed the news that they were about to give me: Nancy had a malignancy and she and her doctors decided on a mastectomy. I know how desperately Nancy had hoped this would not be the case and I couldn’t reply to them. I just dropped my head and cried. After they left, I remained at the table, motionless and unable to speak.” He told of visiting Nancy in the recovery room. “She was asleep when Dick and I got there. Suddenly, as we were standing by her bed, there was a little movement of her body. Her eyes didn’t open, but I heard a tiny voice say, ‘My breast is gone.’ Barely conscious because of her anesthesia, Nancy somehow had sensed we were there. She was devastated by the loss of her breast—not because she was worried about herself, but because she was worried about me and how I would feel about her as a woman. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ Then I leaned over and kissed her softly, and repeated that it made no difference to me. But seeing that sadness in her eyes, it was all I could do to avoid breaking up again.”

  Nancy suffered a second blow ten days later when her mother, Edith Davis, died. The president learned first. “I came home and told her the news,” he recounted in his diary. “It was heartbreaking.” The next day they flew to Phoenix. “Upon arrival we went direct to the mortuary,” Reagan wrote. “We saw Deede looking calm and peaceful in her red robe. This was too much for Nancy who broke down sobbing and telling her how much she loved her. I told her Deede knows that now and that she really wasn’t in that room with her body but would be closer to her when we get to her apartment where her long time friends were waiting for us.”

  The gathering with friends did help. “Nancy was in a better state of mind hearing all of us talk about Deede and our love for her,” Reagan wrote that evening. He flew back to Washington but returned to Phoenix for the funeral. Nancy asked him to deliver the eulogy. The service eased her pain a bit more. “Friends from all over the country were on hand,” Reagan recounted. “It was most heart warming.”

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  THE IRAN-CONTRA SCANDAL fairly paralyzed Reagan’s policies toward the Middle East and Central America. The administration’s violation of its own arms embargo against Iran shattered America’s credibility with much of the world, and its circumvention of Congress with regard to the contras lost it the support of even many Republicans on anything touching Nicaragua or its neighbors.

  Oddly, though, this was a blessing. By precluding new initiatives toward other regions, Iran-contra drove Reagan to focus on what he had always considered the central issue of foreign policy: relations with the Soviet Union. He had nothing to look forward to in domestic politics; the Democrats in Congress would simply wait him out. And with foreign policy narrowed to the Soviet Union, there was no one to dance with but Gorbachev.

  But there were observers watching from the sides of the room. In the spring of 1987 Reagan traveled to Europe for the annual meeting of the G7, in Italy. Some of America’s allies had been upset by Reykjavík, worried that the president was moving too quickly on arms control. “Margaret Thatcher came down like a ton of bricks,” Jack Matlock recalled. The British prime minister chided Reagan for even thinking of removing the nuclear deterrent that for decades had kept the peace in Europe. She reminded him that American nuclear weapons had the purpose of offsetting Soviet advantages in conventional forces. An arms treaty for Europe that didn’t address conventional weapons could leave the Soviets dangerously dominant. “There was a real point at issue on arms control, on which I wanted to make my position clear,” Thatcher wrote later. “I was not prepared to see British forces in Germany left without their protection and said so forcefully.”

  Reagan reassured her that he wouldn’t weaken deterrence. He thought she was mollified. “As usual we were on the same wave length,” he remarked in his diary.

  He traveled from Italy to Berlin. The mayor of West Berlin had asked him to speak on the occasion of the 750th anniversary of the city. Reagan’s advisers wanted to hear something ceremonial and innocuous; with Congress still investigating the Iran-contra scandal, they thought the president should maintain a low profile.

  Reagan took the opposite view. He insisted on reminding the world of the moral difference between the United States and the Soviet Union. Howard Baker read a draft speech that included a challenge to Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Supposing the phrase to be the work of an overzealous speechwriter, Baker sought to strike it out. The State Department seconded his caution. “But Reagan was tough on it,” Baker recalled. The language was the president’s, he learned. “Those were Reagan’s words.” And Reagan didn’t want them tampered with. “He said leave it in.”

  The words stayed in. “General Secretary Gorbachev,” Reagan declared in front of the Brandenburg Gate, “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”


  GORBACHEV GROANED, NOT because he opposed what Reagan was demanding, but because he supported it. Gorbachev had moved cautiously after Reykjavík. His dual reforms, glasnost and perestroika, inspired hope among Russian liberals even as they sowed fear in the old guard. Americans, including Reagan, had often assumed Soviet leaders ruled by diktat, and some, most notably Stalin, did. But Gorbachev lacked the stature of Stalin or even Brezhnev, and he had to feel his way forward. In certain respects he was weaker than Reagan, who at least had the popular mandate conferred by two election victories. Definitely no more than Reagan could he be seen as compromising national security in his relations with the United States.

  Reagan and the Americans weren’t helping. “In the best tradition of its Wild West, America was again flexing its muscles and accusing the Soviet Union of all sins,” Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs. “The Americans (and not only they) employed the mass media to manipulate public opinion, to recapture the initiative in international affairs and to force us to accept their rules. I often discussed the issue with my colleagues. All of us felt that we must not surrender the initiative.”

  But they did surrender something more valuable than the initiative. Gorbachev decided to unbundle the package deal he had offered at Reykjavík. He announced that the Soviet government was willing to negotiate a treaty on intermediate nuclear forces, or INF, separately from a strategic forces treaty. By delinking INF from what was being hopefully called a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, he delinked INF from SDI as well. He had hoped to use Reagan’s desire for an INF treaty to persuade him to drop SDI or confine it to the laboratory, but his strategy had fallen short. Moving on, he judged an INF treaty beneficial to the Soviet Union on its own merits. He privately assailed the decision by his predecessors to install the SS-20 missiles that had triggered the whole intermediate forces controversy. “Whatever the arguments advanced at the time to justify the deployment of such missiles, the Soviet leadership failed to take into account the probable reaction of the Western countries,” he wrote. “I would even go so far as to characterize it as an unforgivable adventure, embarked on by the previous Soviet leadership under pressure from the military-industrial complex.” The SS-20s threatened merely America’s allies, but the Pershings the Americans and NATO responded with threatened the Soviet Union itself. In fact they threatened the Soviet Union more gravely than any other American system, as they could reach their targets in as little as five minutes. “Hence I deemed it my duty to avert the deadly danger to our country and to correct the fatal error made by the Soviet leadership in the mid-1970s.”

  Gorbachev told George Shultz of his decision when the secretary of state visited Moscow. Gorbachev had previously seen Shultz as Reagan’s mostly silent partner, but in Moscow he learned to appreciate him as a diplomat of the highest order. “I realized, maybe for the first time, that I was dealing with a serious man of sound political judgment,” Gorbachev recalled. They discussed an INF deal and sketched the outlines of an agreement. They shared the hope that a treaty could be signed by year’s end.

  REAGAN HOPED SO too. But he hoped for more. An INF pact would be very important; it would be more than any president had ever achieved on arms control. But it wasn’t enough. Reagan still wanted to lift the nuclear cloud from humanity’s future. This had been his goal from the beginning. He had come close at Reykjavík. And with his time in the White House dwindling, he felt a greater need than ever to tackle the big missiles, the ones that threatened Armageddon. “Now we must finish the task,” he told the National Security Planning Group. “I don’t accept the suggestions of some that it is too late for us to get a START agreement before I leave office.” Reagan knew he faced skeptics, even within his administration, and he made clear he wouldn’t cut a deal for the sake of a deal. “I want a START agreement,” he said, “but only if it is a good one, one we can verify and which enhances our security.”

  Caspar Weinberger remained distrustful of any agreement. He deemed Reykjavík a disaster narrowly averted. He didn’t like the idea of an INF accord, though he judged he could no longer oppose it frontally. He definitely didn’t want a START deal. He warned Reagan and the planning group against any concessions to the Soviets. Better no START agreement at all than one that required concessions, he said.

  George Shultz supported both an INF pact and a START treaty, and he opposed Weinberger. He suspected that Weinberger was opposing START as a way of sabotaging INF. Shultz declared that START was essential to INF. “It is very easy for the Soviets to deploy more missiles, and it is hard for us,” he said. An INF treaty would be worthless if not followed by START, he said, for the Soviets could simply deploy new strategic missiles to replace the intermediate missiles eliminated.

  Weinberger denied wanting to scuttle either START or INF. “I agree with you on the need for START,” he said. “But that is no reason for us to give in to the Soviet demands. We’ve got a good agreement in INF because we hung tough and we can do the same in START.”

  Reagan elevated the discussion to the realm of first principles. “You’ve got to remember that the whole thing was born of the idea that the world needs to get rid of nuclear weapons,” he said. “We’ve got to remember that we can’t win a nuclear war and we can’t fight one. The Soviets don’t want to win by war but by threat of war. They want to issue ultimatums to which we have to give in. If we could just talk about the basic steps we need to break the log jam and avoid the possibility of war—I mean, think about it: Where would the survivors of the war live? Major areas of the world would be uninhabitable. We need to keep it in mind that that’s what we’re about. We are about bringing together steps to bring us closer to the recognition that we need to do away with nuclear weapons.”

  Weinberger played to Reagan’s desire to eliminate nuclear weapons. “We have to be very careful in this area, Mr. President, because what we want to do is get rid of nuclear weapons, and if we handle this badly, we will not be able to get rid of them,” he said. “We can’t live with nuclear weapons if they are used. We can’t get rid of them because there are no defenses against them. We must do nothing to inhibit our ability to defend against nuclear weapons. We need to defend early; we need to defend our continent, not just a few sites.”

  Weinberger was among those who had sighed relief that Reagan at Reykjavík had refused to constrain SDI. He worried that Reagan’s evident desire for START might cause him to wobble in a future meeting with Gorbachev. He now declared that SDI must not be limited in any way. There could be no restrictions on America’s ability to test or deploy.

  Frank Carlucci pointed out that at Reykjavík the president and Gorbachev had agreed in principle not to withdraw from the ABM Treaty before 1996.

  “Yes, but we’re walking back from that, and we’re really making progress,” Weinberger said.

  Reagan interjected, “Why can’t we agree now that if we get to a point where we want to deploy we will simply make all the information available about each other’s systems so that we can both have defenses? So that if either side is ready to deploy, both agree to make available to the other all the results of their research.”

  “I don’t believe that we could ever do that,” Weinberger said. The secretary of defense had never so flatly contradicted this fundamental facet of Reagan’s conception of strategic defense. But the president said nothing.

  Weinberger’s allies joined in. General Robert Herres, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “Mr. President, there is great risk in exchanging technical data. Much of our technology is easily convertible into other purposes and into an offensive area.”

  Ken Adelman took a similar view. “Mr. President, that would be the most massive technical transfer that the western world has ever known,” the arms control director said. And it would defeat the purpose of strategic defense. “If they understood our system that well, it would be easy for them to move to countermeasures.”

  Now Reagan objected. “Once we deploy something, won�
�t they know about the system? So won’t they try to counter it anyway? So what differ ence does it make if they get the information and counter it or if we simply provide it to them?”

  Weinberger ignored the president’s questions. “The key here is the price that they are asking is too high. We ought to just hold tough.”

  Technical discussion ensued. The president listened distractedly. Finally he said, “There has to be an answer to all these questions, because some day people are going to ask why we didn’t do something now about getting rid of nuclear weapons. You know, I’ve been reading my Bible and the description of Armageddon talks about destruction, I believe, of many cities, and we absolutely need to avoid that. We have to do something now.”

  “We certainly need to avoid Armageddon,” Carlucci agreed.

  “The answer is SDI,” Weinberger said.

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  GORBACHEV WAS PLEASED that George Shultz was the one to greet him when he landed in Washington in early December. America’s Geneva negotiators had reached agreement on INF with their Soviet counterparts, producing a signature-ready treaty. Gorbachev belatedly accepted Reagan’s Reykjavík invitation for a Washington summit and winged west.

  The secretary of state thought the general secretary had never looked better. “He was upbeat, positive, animated and eager,” Shultz recalled. “He talked about the changes taking place in his country and his desire to close out the Cold War with the United States.” Gorbachev inquired as to American opponents of the INF Treaty. “What about critics in the U.S.?” he asked Shultz.