An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  There was to be no more sleep for us that night. I got on the phone with the Pentagon to make sure that everything possible was being done to protect the remaining marines in Beirut, then met with George Shultz and Bud for several hours in the same living room where we’d spent much of the night before. As dawn approached, the news from Beirut became grimmer and grimmer. At 6:30 A.M., we went to the airport, boarded Air Force One, and flew to Washington for what was to become a full day of National Security Council meetings in the White House Situation Room. We discussed the bombings and the preparations for the Grenada operation, which was scheduled to get started late that night with the infiltration of commando teams to gather intelligence paving the way for the landing the next day.

  On Monday, October 24, the news from Beirut became even more sickening: As rescue workers sifted through the rubble of the barracks and found more bodies, and as some of the critically injured marines died, the full magnitude of the catastrophe became apparent: In all, 241 marines had died as they slept, resting from the duties of trying to keep peace in Lebanon. Two miles away, and two minutes after the blast at the airport, fifty-eight French soldiers, also members of the multinational force, had been killed by a second car bomb.

  The evidence indicated that both suicide vehicles were driven by radical Shiite fundamentalists suicidally bent on the pursuit of martyrdom. They were members of the same group responsible for the barbarous bombing of our embassy in Beirut the previous April, a group whose religious leaders promised instant entry to Paradise for killing an enemy of Iran’s theocracy.

  Nancy and I were in a state of grief, made almost speechless by the magnitude of the loss. But I had to go on with my schedule for the day: an important meeting with our ambassador in Moscow, Arthur Hartman; a visit from the president of Togo; long-scheduled visits to the Oval Office by more than a dozen people arranged by various members of Congress—a Notre Dame coed who had won a science prize for devising an improved method for classifying and determining the age of fossil reptiles, a young blind man who had just walked across the country from Idaho to Maryland to prove handicapped people could do anything they set out to do, several newly appointed ambassadors, and others. I’ll never forget how difficult it was trying to pay attention to the things that were very important in the lives of these Americans, while trying to grasp the enormity of the tragedy in Beirut.

  At 2:00 P.M., the Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed me on the final details of the Grenada operation, which was scheduled to start at 9:00 P.M. Throughout the day, we continued to worry about leaks that could endanger the students. But this time (for a change) there were no leaks from the White House, the Pentagon, or Congress. It was one secret we managed to keep.

  That evening, after our troops were well on their way, I invited members of the congressional leadership—Tip O’Neill, Jim Wright, Robert Byrd, Howard Baker, and Bob Michel, along with Secretary of State George Shultz—to the family quarters in the White House, telling them in advance that the topic we were going to discuss was so secret that they should not even mention to their wives that they were going to the White House. The briefing began shortly after eight, with Cap Weinberger, Bud McFarlane, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, joining me in disclosing the secret appeal we’d received from Grenada’s neighbors, and going over plans for the rescue mission.

  Just before nine, I was called out of the briefing to take a call from Margaret Thatcher. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew she was very angry. She said she had just learned about the impending operation (probably from British officials on Grenada) and asked me in the strongest language to call off the operation. Grenada, she reminded me, was part of the British Commonwealth, and the United States had no business interfering in its affairs.

  I had intended to call her after the meeting, once the operation was actually under way, but she’d gotten word of it before I had the chance to do so. I told her about the request we’d received from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and said I had believed we had to act quickly and covertly because I feared any communication could result in a leak and spoil the advantage of surprise.

  She was very adamant and continued to insist that we cancel our landings on Grenada. I couldn’t tell her that it had already begun. This troubled me because of our close relationship.

  Early the next morning, after more than nineteen hundred army rangers and marines had landed at two points on Grenada, we announced the news of the Grenada rescue operation to the press. Our forces, despite greater-than-expected resistance, quickly gained control of the island’s two airports and secured the campus where the American students were. The Marxists and their Cuban puppeteers were defeated. After I received word that the students were safe and the Marxists neutralized, I wrote in my diary: “Success seems to shine on us and I thank the Lord for it. He has really held me in the hollow of His hand.”

  The price we had to pay to ensure the freedom of Grenada had been high—nineteen American lives and more than one hundred men injured. But the price would have been much higher if the Soviet Union had been allowed to perpetuate this penetration of our hemisphere. It would have only spread from there.

  Before the landings, we had been told there were about two hundred Cuban workers on the island assigned to the airport construction project; we suspected that they might have had weapons training as members of the Cuban military reserves. But our troops encountered resistance from more than seven hundred well-trained and well-armed Cuban warriors, the first evidence we got that the Communist influence on Grenada was even greater than we or its neighbors had suspected.

  Militarily, we can look back on the operation as a textbook success. When it was going on, though, there were many uncertainties and potential problems, especially regarding the safety of our students; I suspect that none of us who participated in planning the operation slept well the night before.

  The Marxists managed to play one dirty trick on us: Atop one hill on the island there was a mental hospital, and near it was a Grenadian army headquarters and barracks. The army installation was one of the legitimate targets for our airplanes. The Marxist thugs took down the flag over their building and raised it over the mental hospital, and as a result planes attacked the hospital until our forces on the ground alerted them to the ruse.

  We discovered over the next few days that Grenada was far from the balmy resort island it was depicted as in travel brochures. Even more than we had realized, it was already a Soviet-Cuban bastion in the Caribbean. Grenada’s neighbors had been right. We got there just in time. Grenada’s new airport, with its nine-thousand-foot runway, had been designed not for tourism as Maurice Bishop claimed, but for refueling and servicing Soviet and Cuban military aircraft. The barracks used by the Cuban “workers” on Grenada contained enough weapons and ammunition to equip thousands of terrorists. In the Cuban embassy, we found hollow walls stuffed with more weapons, plus documents linking Grenada’s Marxists to Havana and Moscow, including one letter sent six months before by a Soviet general to the commander of the Grenadian army that boasted Grenada could be proud of itself for becoming the third outpost of Communism in the New World—after Cuba and Nicaragua—and adding that soon there would be a fourth, El Salvador.

  Our troops brought back this letter and hundreds of other documents proving that the Soviet Union and Cuba had been bankrolling the Marxists on Grenada as part of a scheme to bring Communism to the entire region. The program was just beginning in Grenada; it was intended to go all the way through the Caribbean and Central America. We took this storehouse of documents to a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and invited the press to examine it. Reporters would have found evidence of everything we were saying. But very few did. Instead, for several days, most of the news commentators focused on claims that the landings on Grenada had been reckless. They said I was trying to turn the Caribbean into “another Vietnam”—until it began to sink in that the American people understood what was
happening on Grenada and agreed that the operation had been a necessary step to foil Communist penetration of our hemisphere.

  As for the eight hundred American students, I was among many in our country whose eyes got a little misty when I watched their arrival in the United States on television and saw some of them lean down and kiss American soil the moment that they stepped off the airplanes that brought them home. When some of the students later came to the White House and embraced the soldiers who had rescued them, it was quite a sight for a former governor who had once seen college students spit on anyone wearing a military uniform. In my diary entry for that day I remarked that we had had “the most wonderful South Lawn ceremony we’ve ever had. About 400 of the medical students we rescued on Grenada came here plus 40 military, all of whom had been on Grenada. Four branches of the service . . . it was heartwarming, indeed thrilling to see these young people clasp these men in uniforms to their hearts.”

  Some of the students told me tender stories, including several who said they had had to hide beneath their beds for more than twenty-four hours while bullets whistled past their windows. Then, they said, they heard a shout: “Okay, you can come on out.” They walked down the stairs, because, as one said, they’d just heard the greatest sound they had ever heard: the voice of an army sergeant, who, along with the other young soldiers, then bravely put their own bodies between the students and enemy fire while escorting them to rescue helicopters.

  One of the army helicopter pilots later sent me a letter pointing out that Grenada produced half the world’s nutmeg. If the Soviets had succeeded in their attempted takeover of the island, he said, they would have controlled much of the world’s nutmeg supply. “You can’t make an egg nog without nutmeg,” he pointed out, “and some people would say you can’t have Christmas without an egg nog. The Russians were trying to steal Christmas. We stopped them.”

  The people of Grenada greeted our soldiers much as the people of France and Italy welcomed our GIs after they liberated them from Nazism at the end of World War II. The Grenadians had been captives of a totalitarian state just as much as the people of Europe. Later, I went to Grenada and experienced a welcome that showed how deeply the Grenadian people felt about our efforts on their behalf. There were no YANKEE GO HOME signs on Grenada, just an outpouring of love and appreciation from tens of thousands of people—most of its population—and banners proclaiming GOD BLESS AMERICA.

  I probably never felt better during my presidency than I did that day. I think our decision to stand up to Castro and the brownshirts on Grenada not only stopped the Communists in their tracks in that part of the world but perhaps helped all Americans stand a little taller.

  But if that week produced one of the highest of the high points of my eight years in the presidency, the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut had produced the lowest of the low.

  61

  ON FRIDAY MORNING in early November 1983, Nancy and I flew to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for a service honoring the marines murdered in Lebanon and the American fighting men who lost their lives on Grenada. “It was a dreary day with constant rain which somehow seemed appropriate,” I wrote that night in my diary.

  All the ceremonies were outdoors, rain or no rain. It was a moving service and as hard as anything we’ve ever done. At the end, taps got to both of us. The only indoor part was a receiving line meeting the families of the deceased. They were so wonderful, sometimes widows or mothers would just put their arms around me, their head on my chest, and quietly cry. One little boy eight or nine politely handed me a manila folder saying it was something he’d written about his father. Later when I could read it, I found it was a poem entitled Loneliness. We helicoptered back to Cherry Point and there I addressed a crowd of Marines and families. Before leaving Lejeune I spoke briefly to the families I’d met in the line . . . the Lord was with me. The right words came. We flew back to Washington—a few meetings and then to Camp David where it was snowing.

  I later corresponded with and spoke again with some of the families who lost loved ones during the barbarous suicide attack in Beirut. Many, God bless them, reached out and tried to help me deal with my grief. I’ll share one of the letters I received:

  Dear President Reagan:

  I am the mother of L/Cpl David Cosner, killed recently in Lebanon.

  I want to thank you for your kind letter sharing our grief. I know this was hard for you to do since you think everyone is blaming you for this tragedy. I was very angry at everyone, including you. I was not ready to give David up and I felt it was not our country he was keeping peace for.

  As the 23rd of Oct. dragged on, I was constantly reminded that I had asked God to watch over him. I knew if he was safe, God was giving him strength to help his fallen buddies, but, if he was dead, I also know he would be at peace in God’s arms. This turmoil continued until 9 P.M. The blessed peace and comfort came, telling me he was in his Heavenly Home.

  I really believe it was simply David’s destiny to have been there.

  He was an excellent Marine and therefore had the choice of any base in the world. He chose to stay at Camp Lejeune knowing he was going to Lebanon.

  He was not sent nor did he have to go. This is why I am telling you this so you will know that David did indeed give his most precious gift to America, very unselfishly, and some good must come of this tragedy.

  He left us a beautiful 2½ year old granddaughter, Leanna, and wonderful memories from the 22 years we shared.

  I am so proud to be David’s mother and I know in time I will get the hugs from him that are denied me now.

  I have asked our wonderful town to stand behind you, our chosen leader, so our enemies will know we are strong. One Nation, Under God.

  I pray that God will give you the strength to make the right decisions and keep you safe in His protective arms.

  Sincerely,

  Marva Cosner

  After the service at Camp Lejeune, the Secret Service began randomly altering the route of Marine I because of intelligence reports that Islamic terrorists were plotting to fire rockets at the White House helicopter. An informant in Lebanon also reported that Shiite terrorists were planning to kill my daughter Maureen, which led to a strengthening of her Secret Service protection.

  In the profound sadness that fell over the whole country in the aftermath of the Beirut bombing, I had to decide what to do next in Lebanon. Not surprisingly, there was new pressure in Congress to leave that country. Although I did my best to explain to the American people why our troops were there, I knew many still didn’t understand it.

  I believed in—and still believe in—the policy and decisions that originally sent the marines to Lebanon. The purpose of having our troops and those of the other three nations in Beirut was to help keep the peace and to free the Lebanese army to go after the various militias and warlords who were terrorizing the country. We never had the intention of getting involved in Lebanon’s civil war.

  For a while, our policy seemed to be working. There was genuine peace on the streets of Beirut. One woman wrote to me that for the first time in eight years she was able to send her children to school in Beirut; a young American woman whose fiancé was employed in Lebanon wrote that he said that if it hadn’t been for the multinational force, there would have been several massacres of Christians in Lebanon.

  Still, as we were learning, the situation in Beirut was much more difficult and complex than we initially believed. The central government of Lebanon that we were trying to help had all but wasted away, weakened by the virtual collapse of the 1943 agreement under which Lebanon gained its independence from France, and which provided the basis for the sharing of power between Christians and Muslims. With Muslim and Christian believers splintered into many competing sects, Lebanon’s political landscape had become a clutter of disorder, violence, and mayhem. Our policy was based on the expectation that the Lebanese army would subdue the militias of these rival groups and reestablish the central government’s control o
ver the country while the multinational force helped maintain order. But the Lebanese army simply wasn’t strong enough to bottle up the centuries of seething sectarian hatred in Lebanon; nor did we realize until it was too late that many members of the Lebanese army had sympathies for one warlord or another and didn’t have the will to fight their countrymen, especially those with similar religious beliefs. We also had not recognized that, when our marines took over the responsibility to keep open Beirut’s civilian airport, they were placed in possibly the most vulnerable spot in the city, a wide-open space where they were vulnerable to snipers in the surrounding hills. At first, the marines had camped outdoors in tents, but when the sniping and shooting got heavy, their officers decided they would be safer if they slept in a steel-and-concrete building at the airport. These officers hadn’t counted on the depravity of a suicide bomber.

  The price we had to pay in Beirut was so great, the tragedy at the barracks was so enormous, and the virulent problems of Lebanon were so intractable, that it wasn’t possible to continue with the policy that had put our marines in Lebanon without taking a second look at it. Our choices were limited and none of them easy. In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believed the last thing we should do was turn tail and leave. If we did that, it would say to the terrorists of the world that all it took to change American foreign policy was to murder some Americans.

  If we walked away, we’d also be giving up on the moral commitment to Israel that had originally sent our marines to Lebanon. We’d be abandoning all the progress made during almost two years of trying to mediate a settlement in the Middle East. We’d be saying that the sacrifice of those marines had been for nothing. We’d be inviting the Russians to supplant the United States as the most influential superpower in the Middle East. After more than a year of fighting and mounting chaos in Beirut, the biggest winner would be Syria, a Soviet client. Yet, the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy there.