by Hugh Brogan
He himself can largely be blamed for what happened. Henry Kissinger (who was still occasionally called to the White House to give advice) noticed that Reagan did not seem much interested in diplomacy; he only paid keen attention when the subject of his own speeches came up (an actor and his lines); ‘It was as though long-term strategy was something other people were paid to worry about.’20 He was a lazy man; next to Roosevelt, his hero was Calvin Coolidge, and he hung his portrait in the White House; he joked, ‘It’s true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figured why take the chance?’ He rationalized his natural distaste for hard work by adopting the principle that it was his business to lay down the main lines of policy and then leave his subordinates to get on with carrying it out. Jimmy Carter had often let himself be swamped by detail, so this attitude had something to commend it; but Reagan carried it much too far. He was also far too casual about questions of legality and constitutionality, which encouraged similar attitudes in his subordinates, as we have already seen. Worst of all, his hands-off style meant that the administration was constantly at feud with itself. Nobody could say with any certainty what its policy was; it depended too much on who had last got the President’s attention.
So calamities occurred. In 1983, during an ill-judged intervention in the Lebanon, where a ferocious civil war was raging, 24 US marines were killed when their barracks was blown up. In 1986 Congress and the press discovered that elements in the Reagan administration, in defiance of public commitments to have no dealings with terrorist regimes, and of express Congressional decision, had entered upon an intrigue to sell arms to Iran via Israel; the money resulting from the sale was to be used to subsidize a rebellion in Nicaragua against a left-wing government which Washington right-wingers (including the President) regarded as a dangerous tool of the Soviet Union in Central America. They were as unreasonably obssessed with the Sandinistas of Nicaragua as the Kennedy brothers had been with Fidel Castro. Reagan at times talked as if he expected a red tide to come lapping at any moment at the borders of Texas. He propped up a particularly unpleasant regime of right-wing thugs in El Salvador, where there was also a civil war; he launched an armed intervention to overthrow a Marxist gang which seized power on the island of Grenada in 1983 (but that looked less like a principled exercise of American power than an attempt to make people forget about the recent disaster in the Lebanon). Public opinion did not share his anxieties; Americans were only anxious lest the President plunge them into another adventure like that in Vietnam. Public opinion was wise: left to himself, Reagan would no doubt have done so and, surreptitiously, that is just what his zealous but thick-headed assistant, Colonel Oliver North, tried to do. In his usual idle way Reagan let things get out of hand; he forgot that he had sworn to uphold and execute the laws. The Iran-Contra21 caper was as potentially damaging to the Constitution as Watergate itself; but Congress could not bear the thought of dragging itself and the country through the misery of another impeachment, this time of an immensely popular president.22 It was content to lay bare the truth through a series of reports and investigations, and to let Reagan exhibit himself as a shuffler, if not a liar, when he responded to investigators’ questions with such answers as ‘I just have no way of recalling anything specific as to what you are asking.’
But once more his luck saved Ronald Reagan from the consequences of his own inefficiency and bad judgement. In 1985 a new generation took command of the Soviet Union in the person of the new Secretary-General of the Communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev and his associates saw that the old Bolshevik system, which had steadily decayed since its last era of vigour under Khrushchev, could no longer postpone reform if it was not to collapse (they did not see, but in a few years would discover, that it was going to collapse anyway). The arms race in particular, which the Americans under Reagan seemed to want to push even further, technologically, ever more expensively, was a strain that the Soviet Union could no longer support (military expenditure now amounted to nearly a quarter of its total GNP). And Gorbachev, who harboured no aggressive designs himself – in 1987 he pulled the Red Army out of Afghanistan – no longer believed in the American threat, in spite of Reagan’s noisy rhetoric. He and his foreign minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, tried to open serious disarmament negotiations with Washington, and this time, most fortunately for the world, met with a positive response.
Reagan had changed, or rather a new side of his character had come to the fore. He was now in his second term, and wanted to be remembered as a statesman who had done something effective to prevent nuclear war, which filled him with genuine horror. (He seems to have been encouraged in this attitude by Nancy Reagan.) His Secretary of State, George Shultz, who was favourably impressed by Gorbachev, outmanoeuvred the hard men who had never believed that any good could come out of Moscow and did not believe it now. The result was a truly spectacular diplomatic process which culminated in a treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear forces, signed in Washington by Gorbachev and Reagan in December 1987, and ratified by the Senate in May, after which Reagan paid a wildly successful visit to Moscow. There was much negotiation still to be done by Reagan’s successor, George Bush; it would be many months more before the Berlin Wall came down and the Russians began their retreat from Eastern Europe; but these were consequences of the stunning fact that in 1987 the Cold War was abandoned.
It had lasted for forty years, and for thirty years before that relations between Soviet Russia and the West had been thoroughly abnormal. Its evaporation was a great gain not merely for human safety but also for common sense, and although many other individuals and factors helped to bring this victory about, Gorbachev and Reagan undoubtedly deserved the largest share of the credit. The collapse of the Soviet Union itself, signified by Gorbachev’s removal from office in December 1991, was perhaps an even more epochal event. The countries of Eastern Europe regained complete freedom of action; large fragments broke off from what had been the Russian empire of the tsars; Russia herself, though still huge, was a superpower no more; instead she had become an ordinary player on the world stage, beset with many appalling problems. For a moment America bestrode the world, apparently a colossus with all the answers to all the questions – political, social and economic.
It was an illusion. The United States still had many perplexities, some of which had been made worse by the Reagan years. The republic’s immense enduring strength meant that less than ever would any nation go voluntarily and formally to war with it, though it had so many enemies (in large part acquired by America’s blind support for the reckless state of Israel, and in part by its propensity to turn to force rather than diplomacy when difficulties arose) that it was going to be continuously exposed to terrorist attack of various kinds, and to other provocations. The disappearance of the Soviet rival meant that America was actually weaker, at least in the sense that she could no longer discipline her wayward friends or credibly threaten opponents, unless she first won the support of the world community (as happened in the Gulf War of 1991, when the US rescued Kuwait from annexation by Iraq) or was ready to pay the price for acting unilaterally. The twentieth-century world was in this respect too beginning to resemble that of the nineteenth century, with the United States in the central but not supreme role that had once been the British Empire’s.
The reversion to an older order was also evident institutionally. Never again would the presidency be as insignificant as it had been under Franklin Pierce or Chester A. Arthur, but now that foreign policy seemed to be less starkly urgent, Congress was much more inclined to interfere in its conception and execution, and the presidency was correspondingly diminished. It did not help that modern presidents seem compulsively determined to dig their own graves (Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton…) or that the decay of the old party structures, inside and outside Congress, left individual Senators and Congressmen much freer to speak and act as they pleased than they had been since the 1820s. As then, so now: they were more mindful of Buncombe County than ever,
23 and were less amenable to their chieftains – the Speaker, the committee chairmen, the majority and minority leaders as well as the President. From a philosophical point of view, perhaps this was beneficial: most free states today are too centralized for their own good, and the reviving importance of that bizarre, ill-organized, quarrelsome, voluble body called the Congress of the United States, coupled with the continuing vitality of American federalism, may also revive America’s claim to be the first of democracies – but only if Congress shows itself equal to its responsibilities, which it may or may not do. Meanwhile it certainly shows that it is as amenable as ever was the millionaires’ club to the representations of the great lobbies, for election expenses continue to rise insanely, and money has to be found somehow.
Beyond Washington, with its curious mixture of grand and parochial visions, the American people had to grapple, inconclusively as ever, with problems old or new or both. There was tension between sections, between states and the federal government, between cities and suburbs, country and town. If anxiety about race relations was a little reduced, anxiety about immigration was much increased; the problem of crime, the future of the family, the question of addictive drugs (including alcohol and nicotine), the uneven performance of the economy were among many other preoccupying problems. The women’s movement, environmentalism and religious fundamentalism still made themselves felt. There were far too many guns distributed among the population, and as a result there were far too many murders. In short, there were plenty of issues for the tried procedures of American democracy to resolve, and whenever one was more or less settled another would arise to take its place. The ship’s voyage was indeed endless; but in 1999, looking back, the American people could reasonably feel that they had survived its most dangerous passage; looking forward, they could expect to find themselves equal to whatever challenges a new century and a new millennium might throw at them.
A Note on Further Reading
A full-scale bibliography would be out of place in a history of this nature: it could do nothing that is not better done elsewhere, for instance in the Harvard Guide to American History (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, revised edn, 1974), available in paperback in Britain and an indispensable tool to anyone seriously interested in the subject. Two other books which ought to be in every school or college library where American history is studied are H. S. Commager, Documents of American History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 9th edn, 2 vols., 1974), and The Statistical History of the United States (New York, Basic Books, 1976). I have also found the Reader’s Companion to American History, edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1981) mostuseful. With these volumes at hand anyone can start the study of American history unaided, even by me.
Yet it is only decent for me to list some of the books which I have found especially valuable in preparing this history, particularly those which are lively in thought or style, or both, and which are thus likely to be of special appeal to beginners. It is always as well to start with entertaining works when launching a programme of historical study: before it is over you are certain to have to plough through many boring ones, and it takes time to find out how nevertheless to enjoy them. As Samuel Butler said, always eat a bunch of grapes from the top. Experts will be amazed at my omissions and eccentric emphases, but the list is not meant for them. It is not even meant primarily for examination candidates, but for those capable of enjoying the subject of American history for its own sake.
I have arranged these titles in rough chronological order of subject. Several of them belong to multi-volume works. Readers must not be put off. The art of dipping into such books is well worth acquiring: the most random sampling is likely to bring up pearls. I have given the full details of publisher, place of publication and date, in all cases except that of works so famous that they exist in a multiplicity of acceptable editions; only occasionally has it seemed worthwhile to indicate a preferred version,
ALVIN M. JOSEPHY (ed.) and WILLIAM BRANDON, The American Heritage Book of Indians (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961).
D. B. QUINN, England and the Discovery of America 1481–1620 (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1974).
WALLACE NOTESTEIN, The English People on the Eve of Colonisation (New York, Harper & Row, 1954).1
CHARLES M. ANDREWS, The Colonial Period of American History (New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 4 vols., paperback edn, 1964).
JOHN SMLTH, The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles.
ROBIN BLACKBURN, The Making of New World Slavery (London, Verso, 1997).
WILLIAM BRADFORD, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, Alfred Knopf, 1966).
PERRY MILLER, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1956).
DANIEL BOORSTIN, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, Random House, 1958).
JOSEPH E. ILLICK, Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, Scribner’s, 1976).
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, ed. R. A. Billington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1961).
R. A. BILLINGTON, Westward Expansion (New York, Macmillan, 1949).
WINTHROP JORDAN, White over Black (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1968).
L. H. GIPSON, The British Empire Before the American Revolution (New York, Knopf, 15 vols., 1939–70).
C. M. ANDREWS, The Colonial Background to the American Revolution (New Haven, Conn.; London, Yale University Press, revised edn, 1931).
R. R. PALMER, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (London, Oxford University Press, 2 vols., 1959–64).
H. S. COMMAGER, The Empire of Reason (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978).
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Autobiography.
DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN, George Washington: A Biography (New York, Scribner’s, 7 vols., 1948–57).
MERRILL D. PETERSON, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York, Oxford University Press, 1970).
BERNARD BAILYN, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967).
BERNHARD KNOLLENBERG, The Origins of the American Revolution (New York and London, Macmillan, 1960).
E. S. AND H. M. MORGAN, The Stamp Act Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
IAN CHRISTIE, Crisis Of Empire (London, Edward Arnold, 1966).
JOHN SHY, Toward Lexington (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1965).
BENJAMIN WOODS LABAREE, The Boston Tea Party (New York, Oxford University Press, 1964).
PIERS MACKESY, The War for America (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965).
THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on Virginia.
JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York, Knopf, 5th edn, 1980).
MAX FARRAND (ed.), The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, paperback edn, 4 vols., 1966).
ALEXANDER HAMILTON, JAMES MADISON, and JOHN JAY, The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1961).2
CARL VAN DOREN, The Great Rehearsal (New York, Viking Press, 1948).
RICHARD HOFSTADTER, The American Political Tradition (New York, Knopf, 1948).
DANIEL BOORSTIN, The Americans: The National Experience (New York, Random House, 1965).
DOUGLASS C. NORTH, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1961).
THOMAS C. COCHRAN and WILLIAM MILLER, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York, Harper & Row, revised edn, 1961).
GEORGE R. TAYLOR, The Transportation Revolution 1815–1860 (New York and London, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1951).
MARCUS CUNLIFFE, The Nation Takes Shape, 1789–1837 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959).
ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR, The Age of J
ackson (Boston, Little, Brown, 1945).
ROBERT V. REMINI, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia and New York, J. B. Lippincott, 1963).
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York, Knopf, 2 vols., 1945).
STANLEY P. HIRSHSON, The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young (New York, Knopf, 1969).
BERNARD DE VOTO, The Course of Empire (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1952). Across the Wide Missouri (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1947). 1846: The Year of Decision (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1943).
W. W. FREEHLING, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Crisis in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York, Harper & Row, 1966).
KENNETH M. STAMPP, The Peculiar Institution (New York, Random House, 1956).
