Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  He gave Reagan a parting gift. For years the president had complained about Soviet shipments of weapons to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Gorbachev had countered by criticizing the United States for arming the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Gorbachev had already agreed in principle to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan, rendering moot the arms question in that country. Now he told Reagan he would cut off the Sandinistas.

  Reagan had hoped for greater progress on START. But he was willing to accept what he got. “I think the whole thing was the best summit we’d ever had with the Soviet Union,” he wrote that evening.

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  REAGAN USUALLY CELEBRATED St. Patrick’s Day. Being Irish was good fun and often good politics. But March 17 wasn’t fun in 1988. “First talk was about 23 indictments against Col. North, John Poindexter, General Secord and Hakim,” he wrote in his diary, referring to Richard Secord and Albert Hakim, intermediaries in the Iran-contra affair, as well as his former national security adviser, Poindexter, and Poindexter’s deputy, North. “Nothing much to say really.”

  Nor did he say much as the prosecution went forward. When questioned by reporters, he took refuge in the separation of powers: the courts must be allowed to do their duty. Politics constrained him no less than the law, for he couldn’t say anything without reminding his constituents of the most egregious blunder of his presidency.

  He had more to say on a related but differently embarrassing topic. Don Regan’s anger didn’t diminish upon leaving the administration; he exacted his revenge in a memoir published in the spring of 1988. He led with the story of Nancy’s astrologer, which naturally riveted the attention of the media and the public. Reagan dismissed it, even to himself. “The media are behaving like kids with a new toy,” he wrote. “Never mind that there is no truth in it.” The next day he recorded, “A short meeting—some talk about this astrology mess Don Regan’s book has kicked up. Some gal in L.A. claims she’s a visitor to the White House and that she gives us frequent readings. She even claims she advised me on choosing George B. We’ve never seen her in our lives and don’t know her at all.”

  Reagan was equally categorical in public, at first. During a business awards ceremony honoring ice-cream makers Ben Cohen and Jerry Green field, a reporter shouted a question: “Mr. President, will you continue to allow astrology to play a part in the makeup of your daily schedule, sir?”

  “I can’t,” Reagan replied, “because I never did.”

  White House staffers were more circumspect. They didn’t deny the essence of the story, but they said Nancy hadn’t consulted her astrologer for months. Joan Quigley thereupon told reporters she had been in contact with Nancy that very week. Marlin Fitzwater, Reagan’s new chief spokesman, stood up for the First Lady even while implicitly undercutting the president. “She certainly has every right to consult an astrologer,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with it. I object to the implication it is wrong and therefore has to be discontinued.”

  Nancy declared herself hurt by Don Regan’s revelation. “I was taken aback by the vengefulness of the attack,” she said in a written statement. “It’s come through to me that Don Regan really doesn’t like me.”

  Reagan defended Nancy. To journalists he characterized Regan’s account as “a bunch of falsehoods” and said, “I’ll be damned if I’ll just stand by and let them railroad my wife.”

  This hardly quelled the chatter. After fresh stories suggested that the signing date of the INF Treaty had been influenced by astrology, Reagan was asked whether this was true. He didn’t answer the question, instead asserting that Quigley had nothing to do with his midnight swearing in as California governor in 1967.

  The reporter brought him back to the question. “Are you denying that either you or Mrs. Reagan used astrology on any occasion during your time here at the White House to help set the schedule for trips or the signing of the INF treaty?” he asked. “I must say that this goes against what a lot of aides are telling us, sir.”

  “Well, no, I’m only going to tell you one thing,” Reagan said. “And that is that after I’d been shot, which was quite a traumatic experience for my wife—”

  “And you?” the reporter interrupted.

  “No, I was confident I was going to be all right.” Reporters laughed, easing the tension slightly. “But she was getting a great many calls from friends,” Reagan continued. “And a friend called and said that—or wished that he’d known what I was going to do that day and so forth because of—he mentioned someone, that all the signs were bad and everything else. And Nancy was—it was a trauma that didn’t go away easily. And when suddenly things of the same kind just for a short period there—when I was booked for something of the same kind where the accident occurred, why, she would ask, what does it look like now? And no changes were ever made on the basis of whether I did nor did not conduct this—”

  “But why something like the signing of an INF treaty?” the reporter pressed.

  “No, it wasn’t. Nothing of that kind was going on. This was all, once again, smoke and mirrors, and we made no decisions on it, and we’re not binding our lives to this. And I don’t mean to offend anyone who does believe in it or who engages in it seriously—”

  “Do you believe in it?” a reporter asked.

  “I don’t guide my life by it, but I won’t answer the question the other way because I don’t know enough about it to say is there something to it or not.”

  “Do you think the attempt on your life could have been prevented?”

  “No, this friend thought that had I been told that that was supposed to be a horrendous time for me, that I might have done something—well, we didn’t.”

  Reagan and Nancy hoped the to-do would blow itself out. Yet they took little comfort from a prediction by the astrologer herself that it would do the president no lasting harm. Joan Quigley told a reporter that Reagan shared a fundamental strength with Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln: “They’re all Aquarians. They all have great vision.” She added, “Reagan has a lot of Capricorn in his chart, because he’s very practical. Also he has three planets in their exaltation, which is a very good quality. It means his life is a very important one.”

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  A MID THE TIZZY, Reagan met with some foreign television correspondents, who found the astrology story bizarrely riveting. “Your former chief of staff has said that astrology played a part in your scheduling, indeed, in summit planning,” one of them recounted for viewers in his home country. “How do you think that may change the way Mr. Gorbachev views the president and the administration he’s dealing with?”

  Reagan wasn’t surprised by the question. “I hope Mr. Gorbachev has heard some of the things that I have been saying about those charges,” he replied, “because no decision was ever made by me on the basis of astrology.”

  Gorbachev’s reaction mattered to Reagan, because by this time the Soviet leader was one of the few people paying attention to the president. Reagan’s power was rapidly dwindling; with the election campaigns to replace him already at full steam, his ability to get even the attention of the American people was diminishing. Domestic initiatives were out of the question; foreign policy was the sole realm in which he still exercised influence.

  But his foreign policy goals were shifting. When he entered the White House, his primary objective in foreign policy had been the defeat of communism. The Kremlin had been the enemy, and all efforts were bent toward frustrating its designs. Now the head man in the Kremlin was his partner. Reagan recognized that his goals and Gorbachev’s weren’t identical, but he had concluded that neither were they antithetical. He had called the Soviet empire evil, but he didn’t think of Gorbachev as evil at all. In fact he had come to think of Gorbachev as not very different from himself. He credited Gorbachev with good faith in seeking an end to the arms race and even the nuclear era; he acknowledged that Gorbachev had constituencies that had to be placated, just as he himself did.

  Reagan’s constituen
cies were on his mind when he visited Gorbachev in Moscow for their final summit. He understood that a START deal at this late date was unlikely, but he hoped to maintain the momentum he and Gorbachev had built on arms control. He also understood that conservatives in the United States still suspected Gorbachev’s motives and that some doubted his own motives or wisdom in getting so close to Gorbachev. Many conservatives seemed to long for the ideological clarity of the days when the American president called the Soviet Union an evil empire.

  Not long after the handshake at the start of the Moscow summit, Reagan raised what he called a sensitive topic. It was so sensitive, he said, that if word he had mentioned it leaked to the press, he would deny it. It had to do with religious freedom. Saying he was speaking as a friend, he asked Gorbachev, “What if you ruled that religious freedom was part of the people’s rights, that people of any religion—whether Islam with its mosque, the Jewish faith, Protestants or the Ukrainian church—could go to the church of their choice?” Religious freedom, besides being valuable on its merits, would make agreements with the United States much easier. If Gorbachev would guarantee religious tolerance, Reagan said, attitudes in America toward the Soviet Union would change dramatically. “You will be a hero, and much of the feeling against your country will disappear like water in hot sun.” Reagan reiterated that he himself would never try to take credit for pushing Gorbachev to make the change. “If anyone in the room would say I had given such advice, I would say that person was lying.”

  Gorbachev initially waved aside the suggestion. The problem of religion in the Soviet Union was not serious, he said. He himself had been baptized but was not now a believer; this represented an evolution of Soviet society. In the Soviet Union, people were allowed to believe or not, according to their own lights. “This is a person’s freedom,” he said. The United States was in no position to cast stones, for America was less free than the president suggested. “Why do nonbelievers sometimes feel suppressed?” he asked.

  Reagan rejoined that they were not suppressed. He said his own son Ron was an atheist—“though he calls himself an agnostic.” He said that in the United States, church and state were so fully separated that prayers could not be said in public schools.

  Gorbachev granted that after the Russian Revolution, opposition to religion had gone too far. But those times were long past. “Today the trend is precisely in the direction you mentioned. There have been some conflicts between the authorities and religious activists, but only when they were anti-Soviet. There have been fewer such conflicts recently, and these surely will disappear.”

  Reagan urged Gorbachev to make that prediction a promise.

  Gorbachev again resisted, but less vigorously than before. The conversation ended on a touchingly personal note. Reagan remarked that there was one thing he had always wanted to do for his atheist son. He wanted to serve Ron a gourmet dinner and have him enjoy it. At the dinner’s end he would ask Ron if he believed there was a cook. Reagan said he wondered what Ron would answer.

  Gorbachev replied that one answer alone was possible: yes.

  THEY TALKED ABOUT a START agreement but made little progress. They repeated earlier arguments about SDI but soon realized they weren’t getting anywhere. Both realized, though neither said, that Reagan’s lame-duck status made it impossible for him to deliver any major agreement on strategic arms, and therefore made it imprudent for Gorbachev to offer any concessions toward such agreement.

  The focus of the summit shifted to events outside the formal talks. Reagan spoke with Soviet dissidents, with prominent writers and artists, with Russian Orthodox clerics, and with students and faculty at Moscow State University. His theme was freedom, which he hailed as the key to progress in all realms of human development. “Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things,” he declared at Moscow State. “It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream—to follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters.”

  Reagan referenced American history in his praise of freedom, but his theme applied as well to perestroika, as his audience understood. They applauded him for siding with Gorbachev and reform. Jack Matlock, by this time ambassador to the Soviet Union, heard the president’s speech at Moscow State and marveled at the response. “It was almost electric, the way the speech touched the students there,” Matlock said. “He made a tremendous impression that went through the media like lightning.” Matlock recalled receiving an ecstatic hug from a Russian intellectual he knew. “This is one of the greatest days in Russian history,” the friend said. Matlock gently suggested he might be exaggerating. “No,” he replied. “If Reagan thinks we’re on the right track, we have a chance.”

  The crucial moment for Gorbachev came almost casually. “Mr. Reagan and I went on a walk around the Kremlin,” Gorbachev recalled. “The American president was greeted by groups of tourists. He answered their greetings good-humoredly, occasionally stopping for a chat.” One Muscovite asked the president, “Do you still see the Soviet Union as the evil empire?”

  Reagan answered simply: “No.”

  Gorbachev recalled, “I was standing next to him and thought to myself: ‘Right.’ ”

  Gorbachev made sure to describe the exchange and repeat the president’s response in a news conference the next day, prompting reporters to ask Reagan what had caused the shift in his views.

  Reagan replied, “I think there is quite a difference today in the leadership and in the relationship between our two countries.” He added, “I think that a great deal of it is due to the general secretary, who I have found to be different than previous Soviet leaders.”

  En route home Reagan refined his assessment of the changes taking place in the Soviet Union and the world. “Quite possibly, we’re beginning to take down the barriers of the postwar era,” he told Margaret Thatcher and an audience of British dignitaries at London’s Guildhall. “Quite possibly, we are entering a new era in history, a time of lasting change in the Soviet Union.” He couldn’t be sure. “We will have to see.” But his tone and demeanor indicated he had hopes.

  His private response to the summit was equally optimistic and more heartfelt. “What can I say except ‘Thank the Lord,’ ” he wrote in his diary.

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  GEORGE BUSH GREETED Reagan at Andrews Air Force Base. “You made us proud,” the vice president declared. “This week an American president strode the hard ground of Red Square and reminded the world through the sureness of his step and the lilt of his words what a bracing thing freedom is—what a moving and bracing thing.”

  More than good feeling toward the president inspired Bush’s words. In a season of Republican primaries that served as a referendum on the Reagan presidency, Bush had garnered sufficient delegates to secure the nomination to succeed the president. Reagan had adopted a public posture of impartiality between Bush and Bob Dole, the vice president’s principal challenger, but like everyone else he considered a vote for Bush to be an endorsement of himself. On learning that Bush had won the New Hampshire primary, Reagan noted, “That made my day even if I do have to be neutral publicly.”

  It wasn’t inevitable that the Republican convention would be a celebration of the Reagan years. The shadow of Iran-contra still hung over the president, and the enormous addition to the federal debt during Reagan’s tenure continued to give traditional conservatives nightmares. But the organizers of the convention decided the Reagan charisma was good for one more victory, and they placed the president front and center. A series of loyalists paid tribute to his masterful leadership. A documentary recounted his life and touted his accomplishments.

  Then Reagan himself spoke. He had never been in finer form. He recounted the dire condition of the country when he had been elected, and he recalled what he and the party had promised to do to remedy things. “It was our dream that together we could rescue America and mak
e a new beginning, to create anew that shining city on a hill. The dream we shared was to reclaim our government, to transform it from one that was consuming our prosperity into one that would get out of the way of those who created prosperity. It was a dream of again making our nation strong enough to preserve world peace and freedom and to recapture our national destiny.” The challenge had been great, but Americans were used to rising to challenges. And so they had risen during the last eight years.

  The delegates thrilled to the old Reagan message and incomparable delivery. They wouldn’t let him continue. “Reagan! Reagan! Reagan!” they chanted.

  He deflected the enthusiasm toward the party’s new nominee. “And George was there,” he said.

  The audience wasn’t buying. They wanted their hero. “Four more years! Four more years!” they shouted.

  “No, you haven’t heard it all yet,” he insisted. He described his administration’s efforts to reduce red tape, and declared, “George Bush headed up the task force that eliminated those regulations.”

  From a man who had recently completed his fourth superpower summit, this was almost damning with faint praise. But the delegates eventually took their cue. Some began chanting, “Bush in ’88.”

  Reagan nodded approvingly. Yet he made no more than a passing effort to promote Bush as a leader in his own right. And he undercut even that effort when he told Bush, “Go out there and win one for the Gipper.”

  He concluded with more of the imagery the Republicans had learned to love. “We lit a prairie fire a few years back. Those flames were fed by passionate ideas and convictions, and we were determined to make them burn all across America.” And so they had burned. “But we can never let the fire go out or quit the fight, because the battle is never over. Our freedom must be defended over and over again—and then again.”