by Oliver Stone
Chapter 11
THE REAGAN YEARS:
Death Squads for Democracy
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan threw down the gauntlet in Berlin: “General Secretary Gorbachev, 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!”
And on November 9, 1989, less than two and a half years after Ronald Reagan spoke those stirring words, the wall came down. The Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe soon crumbled. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed. The Cold War was over. Many credit Reagan with winning the Cold War. And some lionize him as one of the United States’ great presidents. But was Reagan really the heroic champion of freedom and democracy who brought closure to the most dangerous era in human history? Or was there a darker side to the man and his administration that made a mockery of his words? What really lay behind the smiling facade of this most unlikely of presidents?
Ronald Reagan, the folksy, homespun actor turned General Electric pitchman, had been California governor since 1967. He espoused strong family values but was estranged from his children and was the first president to divorce. A man of limited knowledge but deep religious beliefs and strong conservative convictions, he provided little guidance on policy and had no interest in or grasp of detail. His vice president, George H. W. Bush, confessed to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that he at first found Reagan’s views on international relations “almost unimaginable.” Bush, Dobrynin wrote, was “simply amazed to see to what extent Reagan was dominated by Hollywood clichés and the ideas of his wealthy but conservative and poorly educated friends from California.”1 National Security Council Soviet expert Richard Pipes admitted that at NSC meetings the president seemed “really lost, out of his depth, uncomfortable.” Very early in the new administration, counterterrorism coordinator Anthony Quainton was summoned to brief the president. In Quainton’s words, “I gave that briefing to the President, who was joined by the Vice President, the head of CIA, the head of the FBI, and a number of National Security Council members. After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off. That . . . was quite unnerving.”2
Jimmy Carter was deeply troubled by Reagan’s complete lack of curiosity when he tried to brief the incoming president on the challenges he would face, assessments of world leaders, and command and control of nuclear weapons. Carter aide Jody Powell recounted, “The boss really thought it was important for Reagan to know this stuff before he was sworn in and as he ran through it he couldn’t believe that Reagan wasn’t asking any questions. He thought maybe Reagan wasn’t taking any notes because he didn’t have a pad and pencil and finally offered him one, but Reagan said, no thanks; he could remember it. It was just the damnedest thing.”3
Many of Reagan’s close associates were struck by the depth of his ignorance. Upon returning from his late 1982 Latin American tour, Reagan told reporters, “Well, I learned a lot. . . . You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.”4 Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wondered, “What planet is that man living on?” when the president told him that “the Soviets [had brought] an American priest to Moscow in order to send him back to be a spokesman for Actors Equity.”5 Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was startled when Reagan, admiring O’Neill’s desk that had belonged to Grover Cleveland, told him that he had played Cleveland in the movie The Winning Season. O’Neill reminded him that the desk had belonged to President Cleveland, not Grover Cleveland Alexander, the pitcher. O’Neill, who served in the House for thirty-four years, said that Reagan “knows less than any President I’ve ever known.”6
Reagan’s simplistic worldview seemed to be a pastiche stitched together from Hallmark greeting cards, Currier and Ives lithographs, Benjamin Franklin aphorisms, Hollywood epics, and Chinese fortune cookies. He wrote, “I’d always felt that from our deeds it must be clear to anyone that Americans were a moral people who . . . had always used our power only as a force for good in the world.”7
He often displayed a striking inability to differentiate between reality and fantasy. In a late 1983 Oval Office meeting, he told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that as a photographer during the Second World War he had filmed the Allies liberating the Nazi death camps and had been so moved by the suffering he witnessed that he had decided to keep a copy of the film in case he ever encountered a Holocaust skeptic. Shamir was so impressed with Reagan’s story that he repeated it to his cabinet and it was printed in the Israeli paper Ma’ariv. Reagan later repeated a variant of the story to Simon Wiesenthal and Rabbi Marvin Hier, telling them he had been with the Signal Corps filming the camps and had shown the film to someone just a year after the war. Hearing the story, Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon noted that Reagan had never left the United States during or immediately after the war. The story was entirely fanciful.8
Ronald Reagan was one of the least intellectually curious men to ever occupy the White House. Counterterrorism coordinator Anthony Quainton recalled being summoned to the White House early in the new administration: “I gave that briefing to the President, who was joined by the Vice President, the head of CIA, the head of the FBI, and a number of National Security Council members. After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off. That . . . was quite unnerving.”
Reporters then had a field day revealing other Reagan whoppers. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, perhaps to dispel the notion that the president’s flights of fancy were a product of old age or related to his diminishing mental powers, wrote that he first became aware of Reagan’s habit of altering the truth in 1968 when, to highlight how lawless society was becoming, Reagan asserted that eight Chicago police officers had been killed in one recent month alone. Royko, curious, discovered that no cops had been killed in Chicago in months and only one or two in the entire year.9 Reagan often repeated his story about the Chicago “welfare queen” with eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards who had a tax-free income of over $150,000. The numbers would change—she sometimes had 127 names and received over one hundred different checks—but the point—an attack on greedy, dishonest blacks who stole from hardworking white Americans—remained the same.10
Compiling lists of Reaganisms became a national pastime. Reagan often made up apocryphal quotes from prominent individuals including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Winston Churchill. Perhaps it was fitting, therefore, that his press spokesman, Larry Speakes, admitted that he had made up quotes and attributed them to Reagan, anticipating what he would have wanted to say.11
For meetings with visitors and even with his own cabinet officials, Reagan read from three-by-five-inch file cards provided by staffers. Visitors would be mortified on those occasions when he unknowingly read from the wrong set of cards. He extrapolated from personal experience to form his views of the world. Facts could be ignored or contradicted when they didn’t support his preferred narrative. When William Clark, a former California Supreme Court justice, took over as national security advisor in 1982, he was shocked to discover how little Reagan actually knew about the world. He instructed the Pentagon and CIA to produce films explaining security issues and describing the world leaders Reagan would be meeting.12
Reagan’s disengaged style and lack of foreign policy experience left the door open to palace intrigue among his subordinates, who were eager to fill the void. Vice President Bush displayed firm, if nefarious, establishment credentials, with long-standing family ties to Rockefeller, Morgan, and Harriman interests. After graduating from Yale, he had moved to Texas, become an oilman, and run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970. Richard Nixon had engineered his appointment as Republican Party chairman.
Jeane Kirkpatrick would also play a prominent role in shaping foreign policy. A conservative Democrat and Georgetown political scientist who supported Reagan because of his staunch anticommunism, she was rewarded with an appointment as ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick supplied the
Reaganites with a justification for supporting right-wing dictatorships, calling them “authoritarian” regimes instead of “totalitarian” ones. Along with her colleague Ernest Lefever, who directed Georgetown’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, she contemptuously dismissed Jimmy Carter’s concern for human rights and reform programs. Lefever, a defender of repressive regimes from El Salvador to South Africa, became assistant secretary of state for human rights. The New York Times described him as “an ultraconservative who sneers at existing policy as sentimental nonsense and believes it is profound error to embarrass allies, however repressive, with talk about habeas corpus.” He dismissed concerns about torture in Argentina and Chile because it was “a residual practice of the Iberian tradition.” His center had recently been assailed for accepting a large contribution from Nestlé after conducting a study supportive of its campaign to convince mothers to replace breast-feeding with infant formula despite evidence that the switch had contributed to a tripling of infant malnutrition in underdeveloped nations.13 In June, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee rejected Lefever as unqualified for the position. Five of the committee’s nine Republicans joined with all eight Democrats in the vote. He was replaced by the equally objectionable Elliott Abrams.
Reagan meets with UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. A conservative Democrat and Georgetown political scientist who supported Reagan because of his staunch anticommunism, Kirkpatrick played a large role in supplying the Reaganites with a justification for supporting right-wing “authoritarian” dictatorships instead of left-wing “totalitarian” ones.
Not everyone welcomed the opportunity for freelancing that resulted from Reagan’s inattention. General Colin Powell, the deputy to National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci, recalled, “The President’s passive management style placed a tremendous burden on us. Until we got used to it, we felt uneasy implementing recommendations without a clear decision. . . . One morning . . . Frank moaned . . . , ‘My God, we didn’t sign on to run this country!’ ” James Baker, who served Reagan as campaign manager, White House chief of staff, and Treasury secretary, described the resulting foreign policy structure as “a witches’ brew of intrigue . . . and separate agendas.”14 Though often at one another’s throats over control of policy, Reagan’s top advisors shared an enthusiasm for covert operations. Together with Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Bush, they initiated operations in Central America and Africa through the National Security Planning Group, while supporting Soviet-bloc dissidents and expanding Carter’s programs in Afghanistan.
Global economic travails made their job easier. The rapid economic growth experienced by resource-rich third-world countries in the 1960s and early 1970s ground to a halt by the mid-1970s as the worldwide economic decline undercut income earned through raw-material exports. Third-world debt ballooned, crippling the prospects for continued development and devastating already impoverished populations. Revolutionary states that had overthrown colonialist regimes and experimented with socialism were among the hardest hit, leading many to question the viability of leftist development models. Reagan saw the resulting unrest as an opportunity to topple unfriendly governments and prove the superiority of capitalism.
The Soviet economy also hit the skids in the late 1970s, beginning a sustained period of stagnation and decline that only worsened when oil prices collapsed in 1982. Military expenditures, which absorbed almost a quarter of the gross domestic product (GDP), were further weakening the economy. Reagan was determined to exploit the situation. At his first press conference, on January 29, 1981, he unleashed an anti-Communist diatribe that reversed almost two decades of progress in easing Cold War tensions:
Well, so far détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims . . . the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use . . . they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards.15
The CIA, which had largely been kept in check by Carter, played a major role in Reagan’s new anti-Communist crusade. CIA analysts had long prided themselves on professionalism and distance from the operations side of the Agency. That would not fly with the Reagan team. The assault that began via Bush’s Team B reached fruition under Casey. Administration hard-liners wanted intelligence that supported their view of a dangerous, hostile, and expansion-minded Soviet Union regardless of how far such a perception departed from reality. Casey, a multimillionaire Wall Street lawyer and devout Irish Catholic, had come to the CIA, according to his deputy Robert Gates, “to wage war against the Soviet Union.” According to Gates, “the Reaganites saw their arrival as a hostile takeover.”16 Casey had read Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network and was convinced that the Soviet Union was the fount of all international terrorism. According to Melvin Goodman, head of the CIA’s office for Soviet analysis, “Several of us met with Casey to try to tell the director that much of Sterling’s so-called evidence was in fact CIA ‘black propaganda,’ anticommunist allegations planted in the European press.” But, he added, “Casey contemptuously noted . . . that he ‘learned more from Sterling than from’ ” all of them. Others who touted the Sterling line included Haig, Wolfowitz, State Department consultant Michael Ledeen, and State Department official Robert “Bud” McFarlane.17 CIA experts, however, knew that the Soviets, for all their faults, actually discouraged terrorism.
Reagan with CIA Director William Casey, a multimillionaire Wall Street lawyer and devout Irish Catholic, who had come to the CIA, according to his deputy Robert Gates, “to wage war against the Soviet Union.” Under Casey, the CIA painted a picture of a hostile, expansionist USSR, an image that didn’t accord with the facts.
Casey and Gates began a purge of analysts who refused to knuckle under. If their reports failed to support the administration line, Casey just wrote his own conclusions. Goodman, who served as a senior CIA Soviet analyst from 1966 to 1986, observed, “The CIA caricature of a Soviet military octopus whose tentacles reached the world over supported the administration’s view of the ‘Evil Empire.’ ” Goodman blamed “the fact that the CIA missed the most important historical development in its history—the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself”—largely on “the culture and process that Gates established in his directorate.”18
While CIA intelligence was being dismantled, operations were running amok. Colonel John Waghelstein, who headed the U.S. military advisory team in El Salvador, stated, “Real counterinsurgency techniques are a step toward the primitive.” That description could be applied to the efforts of U.S.-backed and trained government forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and to the U.S.-run insurgency in Nicaragua. These “freedom fighters,” as Reagan called them, routinely raped, tortured, castrated, mutilated, decapitated, and dismembered their victims.19 To harden Guatemalan soldiers to the point where they were able to kill some 100,000 Mayan peasants between 1981 and 1983, army recruits were beaten, degraded, even submerged in sewage, and forced to remain covered in shit for extended periods of time. Broken and dehumanized, they carried out brutal acts. In December 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, the army slaughtered over 160 people, swinging the 65 child victims by their feet and smashing their heads against the rocks. Just the day before, Ronald Reagan had visited Guatemala as part of a tour of Latin America and complained that its president, General Efraín Ríos Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian who had recently seized power in a military coup, had received “a bum rap,” assuring reporters that the dictator was “totally committed to democracy.” Reagan called him “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.”20 In fact, he said that in light of Guatemala’s improved human rights record, he was considering restoring military aid, which Carter had cut off in 1977 because of the governm
ent’s deplorable human rights record. Reagan was apparently comfortable with Ríos Montt’s explanation that “we have no scorched-earth policy. We have a policy of scorched communists.”21 U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin announced, “The killings have stopped. . . . The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light.”22
Reagan also met that day with Honduran President Roberto Suazo Córdova, who was waging his own U.S.-backed counterinsurgency war. According to the Los Angeles Times, the meeting occurred in a “drab building” at “a heavily guarded military airport in eastern Honduras. Soldiers manned anti-aircraft guns in the sugar cane fields bordering the runway, and military helicopters patrolled overhead. . . . The weather was hot and humid, and the pinstripe suits worn by White House officials looked conspicuously out of place.” Secretary of State George Shultz whispered to one reporter, “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
