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by Harvey Sicherman
Harvey Sicherman is president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He worked as special assistant to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. (1981-82) and consultant to Secretary of State George P. Shultz (1988), and served on Secretary of State James A. Baker’s Policy Planning Staff (1990-91).
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. By Edmund Morris. (New York: Random House, 1999. 894 pp. $35.00.)
On November 5, 1994, Ronald Reagan addressed his fellow Americans for the last time. He told them that he had Alzheimer’s disease, that he and Nancy hoped that acknowledging the affliction might inspire better understanding of it, and that he was aware of the heavy burden it would place on his family. Then he closed on an elegiac note: “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”
This letter, in Reagan’s readable hand, is reproduced by Edmund Morris in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (pp. 665-66). Direct, concise, yet touching the deepest human emotions, the message proclaims Reagan’s intellectual strength even as it announces the vanishing of it. And so, at least for Edmund Morris, Reagan rides off, enigmatic to the last, beyond his official biographer and all those who might wish to understand him.
The search for Reagan, however, is far from over. At 89, in thrall to the disease, he can no longer explain himself even if he were inclined to do so. Yet he remains at the center of two controversies, both of which speak to the future by referring to the past. The first is how to explain the most astonishing event of the twentieth century: the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union, a totalitarian superpower, after a violent career of seventy-four years. What part did Reagan’s policies, and Reagan himself, play in the event that immediately freed the world from fear of Armageddon? The second is whether Reagan’s foreign policy, in both the substance and the style of his leadership, offers any lessons to guide the United States through its current dilemmas, whether they be relations with China, the role of the military, or humanitarian intervention.
Dutch, fourteen years in gestation, should help to answer these questions. The author enjoyed unprecedented access to Reagan while he was president and thereafter to his presidential diaries and papers. The official imprimatur on Morris’s work assured that the president’s closest collaborators, beginning with his devoted wife, would talk to him. Moreover, enough time had elapsed to give perspective to the events of Reagan’s era, while the end of the Cold War itself and the revelations of the Soviet archives allowed a more dispassionate view. Finally, many of Reagan’s retired contemporaries were prepared to cooperate. But instead of being regarded as definitive, Dutch soon became a byword for the way a biography should not be done. It is worth a modest detour to find out why before examining the materials in the memoir that clarify Reagan and his record.
In 1979, Edmund Morris, although not trained as an historian, had become justly celebrated for a brilliant work, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Evidently, Michael Deaver (a close Reagan assistant) and Nancy Reagan thought this a good precedent for an official biography, and a few years later Morris consented. After all, the Rise of Ronald Reagan was itself a dramatic tale: the son of an alcoholic emerges as a self-disciplined athlete; the athlete turns into the sportscaster; the sportscaster into the movie star; the movie star into the labor negotiator; the negotiator into corporate booster; the booster into politician; the politician into governor; the governor into candidate; the candidate into president; the president into leader of the free world and putative victor in the Cold War. But the choice of Morris, in the expectation of a “TR redux,” fell flat.
The Roosevelt book presented a series of tableaux, each one illustrating a facet of TR’s multifaceted personality. Materials fell ready to hand because Roosevelt had long been a fascinating subject whose fame endures to this day. Morris’s gift was to “revive” his personality through the set pieces: a work of imagination sustained and coordinated by the facts.
Why could he not do the same for Reagan? Morris had been warned at the start that “what you see is what you get,” but he did not want to believe it. Like most of the chattering classes (this writer included) he gravitated easily to witty, talkative types, presuming that their discourse prized conversation as an encounter between two intellects. Reagan was a famous talker, but his talk was not Morris’s talk or, for that matter, a real conversation. Instead, it was a performance, the objective of which was to entertain and persuade, a one-way street measured, if at all, by Reagan’s inner applause meter. “Offstage,” as it were, there was no conversation beyond the ordinary. The author decides that the president was “an apparent airhead” (p. 579).
Even so, Morris would still not believe it. He set out to find the Holy Grail of Reagan’s Essence, only to conclude that he had both Presence and Absence at the same time. Much of the book thus becomes a futile attempt to fill the void of Reagan’s “relentless banality” (p. 579) with Morris himself, a fictional character who allows the author to explore the nonexistent Reagan personality through his own. This device falsifies the work and confuses the reader, thus defeating the major objectives of biography, namely, to clarify the subject and sort out the facts. For Morris, only the personality matters, but he is unable to find it, and the bare facts of Reagan’s inner life will not carry a book. Other space-wasting devices, such as the frequent, sometimes embarrassing descriptions of Reagan’s physique or the odd flights into the poetics of nature, only serve to persuade the reader that Morris would rather not be writing this book or that he was just the wrong man for the job.
The alternative, of course, would have been to write “The Life and Times of Ronald Reagan.” But Morris does not want to master those times, is clearly bored with many aspects of Reagan’s politics, and is almost as resolved as his subject to avoid learning the details. As a consequence, the narrative tends to disintegrate when the fictional character disappears and the hard work of understanding Reagan’s presidency comes into view. To compound the problems, those who hired Morris apparently thought that a biographer of Theodore Roosevelt must be a Republican, just the way Ronald Reagan believed that all military officers were Republicans. (Admiral William Crowe, his last chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not only testified against the Gulf War, but later endorsed Bill Clinton, who appointed him ambassador to the Court of St. James’s.) Instead, Morris offers the ludicrous fiction about draft dodging and Berkeley, and refers to Henry Kissinger as an “aging conspiracist.” It gets worse when Morris decides that, because Reagan does not discuss America’s faults but Gorbachev is willing to talk about Soviet problems, the American is more of an ideologue than the Russian. He concludes: “Perhaps that’s what we all privately fear: not godless communism, but practical Christianity, that blind belief in belief” (p. 548). “We all?” Could it be that Morris is (gasp!) a literary liberal, the very caricature that Reagan loved to lampoon in what Morris calls his “bromides”?
Reagan himself suspected something was wrong, because in 1992, after encountering Morris in Bush’s White House (Morris thinks Reagan has forgotten him), he remarked that Morris must be waiting for him to die before he publishes the book. The Gipper will never read this one. Mrs. Reagan said only that she was “disappointed.” Clearly, official biographies are not what they used to be. We are thus dealing with a book that arguably understands neither Reagan nor his times. But because we are also dealing with a great mass of assembled facts, all meticulously documented according to the author, we must see whether they shed any light on Reagan, his foreign policy, and how they shaped our world in the twilight of the Cold War.
Dutch, of course, is not only about foreign policy, nor primarily about public policy, but rather, as noted, about the author’s vain search for a hidden Reagan. Still, the student of U.S. foreign relations will be interested in three areas of Morris’s narrative. The first traces Reagan’s strategy of moral and military rearmament, the ensuing tensions with the USSR, and the fourteen weeks in late 1983 and early 1984 that Morris calls “by far the most stressful” of Reagan’s presidency. Among other events: the “evil empire” speech, the Strategic Defense Initiative, defeat in Congress for his Central America policy, a crisis in his foreign-policy team, the Soviet shoot-down of a Korean passenger jet, disaster in Lebanon, the Grenada invasion, the first deployments of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, and the Soviet walkout from arms-control talks. It all ends with Reagan’s determined search for summitry, which was to bring the historic encounters with Gorbachev.
What were the wellsprings of Reagan’s policy? Morris spends some time on Reagan’s conversion to staunch anticommunism, rooted as it was in his experiences with party members in Hollywood. This reviewer was present in the spring of 1992 when, upon receiving an award in his California office for his Cold War leadership, the former president recounted the oft-told story of his awakening to the communist ideology, especially its rejection of fair play and democracy. But Reagan had gone well beyond simple anticommunism. He had latched on to a strategy for defeating the threat that was a version of the original containment idea. As George Kennan’s 1947 “X” article had explained, the Soviet Union was a state organized for conflict, if not war, and required tension abroad to justify repression at home. But if its expansion could be prevented or “contained,” then the system, given its absurd economic arrangements, would implode sooner or later. The logical foreign policy, therefore, was one that mobilized American resources to outarm the Soviets, pressured their weak points, and forced them to abandon their futile war with the West.
By 1981, at age seventy, Reagan’s views on this matter were well settled. The sophisticated maneuvers of dtente were for him a strategic blunder, for they had disarmed the West without fundamentally changing the Soviet Union. The essence of Reagan’s foreign policy was the reassertion of the older idea that the Cold War was there to be won and could be won if America rearmed morally and militarily. The moral component was fundamental: to explain the nature of the struggle and to convince Americans of the righteousness of the cause. The military component, which demanded an ocean of money despite a stagflated economy, was essential to convince Moscow that America had the will and would have the tools to change the “correlation of forces” in favor of the West.
Reagan’s application of these ideas also relied upon an analysis of the Soviets’ moral and material weaknesses. While the incoming administration was suitably alarmed about the U.S. position, it also possessed a good notion of Moscow’s own troubles. These included the endemic corruption of the system, a Poland on the edge of rebellion, and above all, economic stress. Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, arguably at the apex of its international power in 1981, was a military giant with atrophying feet. Its hard currency had to be spent on food imports; its industrial system relied on huge and hugely inefficient factories using the methods of the 1930s; cheap raw materials had been exhausted; and the influx of surplus labor to the cities, which depopulated the countryside, was over.
Moscow’s military strength had thus been expanded to the maximum, and beyond the maximum, of what its economy could sustain. The Soviet Union also faced hostile states on virtually every border. During the 1970s, Moscow had been forced to field a million-man army, backed up by nuclear weapons and a costly logistics system, against the Chinese. On top of this, a military revolution was in the offing that threatened to render obsolete the Soviets’ numerical advantages in soldiers and nuclear missiles. (Israel’s destruction of Syria’s Soviet-designed air defense system in June 1982 offered a foretaste of what precision-guided munitions could do.) Reagan himself, far better than Morris’s scattered references, summed up the situation:
You had to wonder how long the Soviets could keep their empire intact. If they didn’t make some changes, it seemed clear to me that in time Communism would collapse of its own weight, and I wondered how we as a nation could use these cracks in the Soviet system to accelerate the process of collapse.
Reagan’s policy of “acceleration” in the race with the USSR was bound to offend a Kremlin that habitually screamed aggression whenever its policies were contested. But neither Moscow nor many U.S. allies were prepared for Reagan’s combination of moral and military rearmament. In 1981-82, the president drew upon a widespread sense of alarm about the “hollowing” of U.S. defenses to put through budget increases unseen since the emergencies of 1940-41 or 1950-51. That he could do so despite recession and a Democratic Congress was a stunning demonstration of his political will and American industrial might.
Morris endorses the view that the military expansion turned the president’s program for economic recovery, which cut taxes without reducing the rapidly growing social entitlements, into an engine of massive budget deficits. This caused considerable heartburn in the administration, especially for David Stockman, the Republican “whiz kid” at the Bureau of the Budget. Morris clearly disapproves of Reagan’s sometimes cavalier treatment of the young Stockman as the president sides time and again with the voracious Pentagon. But the charge that Reagan uniquely saddled future generations with debt is overblown— every major U.S. military buildup was financed with borrowed money. The point is that Reagan saw himself in Franklin Roosevelt’s shoes: Americans were stricken by malaise, on the defensive abroad, and wondering about their values and future at home. And like FDR, he was going to gain the future by retrieving from the past, in his own person, America’s confident optimism. Morris acknowledges this point while leaving one with the feeling that things were not really that bad.
In 1981-82, Reagan had also managed to get his way with U.S. allies. He reaffirmed the decision to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range missiles in Europe unless the Soviets were willing to withdraw their already-deployed SS20s, which threatened to negate NATO’s strategy for rapid reinforcement in event of a conventional war in Europe— the key link at ground level between the European armies in place and the critical American reserves crossing the Atlantic. The European leaders, faced with growing public resistance to the missiles, took Reagan’s measure and found him, well, very American. After the first G-7 summit in July 1981, only four months after the president had come within an inch (literally) of assassination, he performed in his usual breezy way. Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Schmidt, and Franois Mitterand, all true conversationalists of the sort Morris loves, soon detected Reagan’s essentially different nature. Relying on the notes of Jacques Attali, Morris quotes Mitterand as telling Schmidt:
This is a man without ideas and without culture … but beneath the surface you find someone who isn’t stupid, who has great good sense and profoundly good intentions. What he does not perceive with his intelligence, he feels by nature (p. 443).
What Morris fails to note, however, is that Mitterand had reason to think well of Reagan’s good sense: he had already gotten the president’s reluctant agreement not to protest too loudly at the presence of Communists in his government. The great Florentine (as Mitterand was called in Paris) assured him that the Communist ministers would soon kill the party with the public. (So it was: the Communist vote in the next parliamentary elections plummeted, never to recover.)
This “good sense” also governed Reagan’s acceptance of Nixon’s great legacy, the unspoken alliance between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. After a period of dangerous uncertainty over the Taiwan issue, Reagan signed off on the August 1982 communiqu that promised a diminished military supply to the island if Beijing pursued peaceful reunification. Defenders of Reagan have claimed that he negated the communiqu in his own mind if not on paper. But Morris, who has but three references to China in the whole book, spends two pages explaining how Reagan came to accept Nixon’s deal back in 1972 (and even served as a special envoy to Taipei to explain America’s “realities”). Curiously, he misses the drama and significance that attended Reagan’s reluctant reencounter with this issue ten years later as president. The communiqué dashed the hopes of Moscow (and others) that his militant anticommunism would deprive the United States of the strategic benefit of the Sino-Soviet quarrel in the name of ideology.
By 1983, Reagan had also had a foretaste of the trouble his strategy would breed. In the 1950s, Churchill defended the rearmament of the West with the slogan “We arm to parley.” This had always been a strong if risky element in fighting the Cold War; the very potential for decreased tensions tended to lower support for military spending, but in the absence of determined diplomacy the public became skittish over the purpose of the military buildup. Morris shows that at the very outset, Reagan wanted to “parley” with Leonid Brezhnev, but the Soviet leader was already decrepit, though he lingered for two years before his death allowed the KGB director, Yuri Andropov, himself ailing, to assume power.
Meanwhile, tensions rose, but Moscow’s policies were not changing. Reagan’s opponents at home and abroad mounted campaigns to “freeze” nuclear weapons at current levels or at least prevent the deployment of the Pershings. But the president was more cautious about using U.S. military power than his rhetoric implied.
Reagan had foresworn direct confrontation with Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because the Pentagon, full of militant rhetoric but extremely reluctant to use force, was unready for a test of strength. The alternative—CIA director William Casey’s covert action in support of the contra army—proved a contradiction in terms, hurting the administration in Congress and eventually badly damaging Reagan himself. In another region of potential U.S.-Soviet confrontation, the alliance with Israel’s Menachem Begin had nearly come asunder over the Lebanese invasion, leaving a U.S. Marine force in harm’s way. Meanwhile, Moscow had surmounted the dangerous Polish crisis late in 1981 by getting the Polish army to do the job of suppression, conceding to General Wojciech Jaruzelski some political autonomy in the process.
Reagan had no intention of changing his approach. If the Soviets were stubborn, then he would increase the pressure, thereby demonstrating that he marched to quite a different drummer than many of his administration’s officials. On March 8, 1983, he crossed a line in the moral campaign. Having described the communist ideology two years earlier as “another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written,” he now called the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Then on March 23, as part of a reiteration of his policy for dealing with the USSR, he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
This was an original Reagan variant intended to fix what he thought was a major flaw in the strategy of pressuring Moscow in the nuclear era. Again, Churchill caught its essence in 1955 when he described the “Balance of Terror” that paradoxically might keep the West and the Soviets from destroying each other. He had warned that until the West had a substitute deterrent, it would be fatal to dispense with the nuclear weapons that were the military heart of the balance.
The United States and the Soviet Union increasingly relied on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with hair-trigger alerts. Each side made elaborate calculations of how many of these weapons could survive a first strike by the other side, and how many were needed to destroy the aggressor in retaliation (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD to his critics). When Moscow and Washington began to experiment with—and even to deploy—defenses against such missiles in the late 1960s, both sides agreed on an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to restrict the competition to ICBMs. While Morris makes much of the imaginary aspects of Reagan’s SDI dream—a missile-proof bubble over North America—and his questionable scientific advice, Reagan was in fact tackling the matter on two levels. He funded the newest classes of U.S. land- and sea-based missiles and then proposed, through SDI, to render the Soviet missiles “impotent.” Reagan wanted to break up the balance of terror by negating the Soviet side of it and clear the way to a “nuclear-free world.”
After a triumphant spring, however, the administration went downhill fast. Congress had already passed the Boland Amendment prohibiting the CIA from trying to overthrow the Sandinistas. Despite a Reagan address to a joint session of Congress asking for $600 million in aid, the House Intelligence Committee voted on May 3 to ban all covert funding. Although temporarily restored by the Senate, this was a sharp slap at what would later be called the Reagan Doctrine aimed at pressuring Soviet clients by aiding their domestic opponents (“freedom fighters”). It set off the scramble that would eventually become the “contra” part of the Iran-contra scandal. Finally, by way of setbacks, Reagan faced in late July 1983 the possible resignation of his second secretary of state, George P. Shultz, after less than a year in the job.
This episode illustrated a notable feature of Reagan’s presidency—its chaotic national security operation. Every president has a unique operating style, born of his personal predilections and political pressures. Franklin D. Roosevelt was famous for the “left-hand/right-hand” maneuver whereby various officials left the Oval Office with conflicting signals, the better to preserve the president’s freedom of action. Eisenhower, to use Fred Greenstein’s phrase, practiced a “hidden hand” style of leadership, his avuncular smile and golf course outings disguising his very real manipulation of policy behind the scenes while cabinet officials took the flack. Reagan, it has been said, was the “no hands” president, hence the confusion was real, not a deliberate ruse, and his officials acted in their own cause, not necessarily his. This “no hands” approach derived from another of Reagan’s common-sense ideas that unfortunately could not work well in the Byzantine byways of Washington. “Citizen Reagan” knew he was not an expert in any field except politics and Hollywood, and lacked any interest at all in matters beyond his mantras of American goodness, communist badness, a strong defense, big government’s dangers, and the virtues of lower taxes for both freedom and growth. How, then, to run the government?
The answer was to recruit talented people, let them do what they thought should be done within the mantras, and let Reagan do what he did best, which was to decide on a few major goals and persuade the public to support them. This “give me the script, fellas” approach put a big premium of consensus within the Family of Reaganauts. But what if the “fellas” could not produce the script? Reagan hated discord in his presence and hated even more to decide in favor of one official over another unless the issue was of paramount importance. During his first term, he counted on the troika of Michael Deaver, Edwin Meese (both veteran California courtiers), and James A. Baker III (George Bush’s man, who knew how Washington worked) to develop the script, spare him from discord, and discharge the lesser decisions. In particular, Reagan wanted his national security adviser to avoid the notorious fighting between the White House and the State Department that, in his view, had disfigured the Carter and Ford presidencies.
It did not work out that way, especially in foreign policy. Secretaries of state must rely very heavily on their presidents as they navigate between the rocks and whirlpools of international issues that affect many bureaucratic fiefs and almost always cost the White House precious political capital. Thus did Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, soon fall afoul of the “no hands” system in spite of the president’s respect for his advice. Morris quotes Reagan’s diary on Haig: “It’s amazing how sound he can be on complex international matters, but how utterly paranoid with regard to the people he must work with” (p. 462). Haig, a veteran of orderly chains of command and the intellectual rigors of Kissinger and Nixon, was paranoid about others’ mixing up his signals. (Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, for example, at a delicate moment in the Lebanese War, said on national television that unless the president said it himself, it was not foreign policy.) The general’s way of doing things produced too much friction with the courtiers who for various reasons wanted him down or out, and the strife ultimately was too much for the president. But Morris catches only part of the story when he ties Haig’s departure too closely to the Lebanon fiasco, and his recounting of myriad rumors about Haig’s temper is seriously undermined by a grotesque inaccuracy. After relating the odd sequence in which Reagan read to Haig a note accepting a resignation letter Haig had not even sent (true), he writes, “Haig spent the next couple of hours tearfully drafting the requested letter” (p. 463). But the cited source, William P. Clark, was not in the secretary of state’s office that Friday afternoon, and, as an eyewitness who was in the room, I can state that this never happened.
Morris thus lends himself to the idea that the problem was really Haig’s personality. But Shultz’s demands a year later indicate otherwise. Shultz was a placid, deliberately low-key man who kept his own counsel and could never be accused of grandstanding a meeting or having an overbearing personality. He, too, was beset by mixed signals from freelancing officials at the NSC and Defense Department, the main reason for his threat to resign that summer day. Who could advocate the president’s policy if the president never cleared up the signals?
The pressure to produce the script under these circumstances fell upon the national security advisers, and almost all of them cracked under it: Reagan went through six of them in eight years. In the summer of 1983, he was on his second, William Clark. A Californian known as “the judge” and often depicted as a kind of “son” to Reagan, he was noted for his careful demeanor, judicious proceeding, and total devotion to the president. He had served Haig initially as the secretary of state’s human link to Reagan but, after the veteran analyst Richard Allen failed to make the grade, Clark became national security adviser and played a key role in Haig’s final undoing.
Shultz’s anger that July day proved that Clark had not been doing an important part of his job, namely, to spare Reagan such confrontations. But it was worse than that. A new issue of Time magazine sported Clark on the cover and contained an article by Maureen Dowd depicting Clark as the man in charge of foreign policy. This time, Morris is rather good at describing the sequel. Nancy Reagan took upon herself, as she had done in the past, to protect “Ronnie” from those who would be famous at his expense. He quotes Nancy as telling Shultz that “Clark ought to be fired” (p. 490). By August 8, Shultz had won Reagan’s agreement to hold two regular weekly meetings in the absence of Clark. Thus, at the very moment of his apparent public triumph, Clark’s real influence ended.
What followed became a pattern whenever Reagan had to make a change in his crew: a flood of rumors, critical press stories, the official’s own sense that he had lost the president, and—inevitably—some remark by Reagan to the effect that the slipping official “could have his job as long as he wants it.” By that time, of course, who would want it? On October 13, Clark was made secretary of the interior in recognition of services past and his interests in western land use.
Morris then describes the brief but violent struggle to replace Clark. An attempted double-play by Baker and Deaver (Baker moving to the NSC and Deaver to chief of staff) met resistance from Weinberger, Casey, U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and others—inspired by Clark (p. 499). Reagan, who had already agreed to the switch, reversed himself under pressure, crushing Deaver and leaving Baker’s foreign policy ambition unrequited until 1989, when he became George Bush’s secretary of state. Instead, on October 17 the deputy, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, became Reagan’s third national security adviser. So Reagan, with his wife’s help, evaded the personal and political costs of losing another secretary of state while putting the NSC system in the hands of a technical rather than political appointee, an apparently small price to pay. But he did not, and never would, alter the basic terms of the “no hands” presidency. And McFarlane was only number three out of six.
Morris’s narrative suffers here from undue reliance on the Clark-Weinberger view of things. Those two are inevitably depicted as either principled or straightforward, and except when “Dutch” himself is critical of them, Morris never utters a discouraging word. This shows itself in his depiction of Shultz, who complains bitterly that he was able to see the SDI speech only when it was nearly complete. “Being by nature baggy of eye, suspicious of surprise, and thin of skin … on four days out of five Shultz was a delightful person… . Only on the odd day, when his vanity was bruised (often by some slight so minor as to be imperceptible) did the Secretary suddenly become a stone-faced sulk …” (p. 475). Here again Morris tries to explain the disorder in the national security system as the consequence of a personality problem. He either does not understand the way such a system should work or has swallowed somebody else’s line to the effect that Reagan, when faced by Shultz, caved in at the expense of a devoted public servant (i.e., Clark). And after stating the obvious—that Clark could no longer function—Morris still depicts him as choosing to resign (p. 499). Here, as noted earlier, Morris’s refusal or inability to master the ways of government makes him easy prey for a one-sided, even contradictory, version of events.
On July 4, 1983, Reagan received a letter from the new Soviet leader, Andropov, that gave the president the occasion to reiterate his desire to parley. Morris at last provides a real insight when he compares Reagan’s original draft response to the one eventually sent. The president wanted to reiterate his zero-option proposal on intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF), but his staff persuaded him that this might suggest an unwillingness to deploy at a critical moment when the Europeans, especially German chancellor Helmut Kohl, were making political headway on the subject. A bureaucratic draft went out instead.
Whatever business Reagan might have transacted with Andropov evaporated when, on August 31, 1983, the Soviet air force shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007, killing all 269 people aboard (including sixty-one Americans), after the plane veered off course over Sakhalin Island. On September 5, Reagan, in an Oval Office address, called it “an act of barbarism … born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights, the value of human life, and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations.” It was “the Soviet Union against the world.” After a month of dithering and a cover-up in which Moscow claimed the plane had been spying, Andropov accused Reagan of a “militant psychosis” and “extreme adventurism” (p. 498). Worse, U.S. intelligence revealed that the Soviet hair trigger in this case had been ordered by Andropov himself, and that the Kremlin actually feared an American first strike was imminent (p. 494).
Before all this settled in, however, the misbegotten adventure in Lebanon ended in disaster. On October 23 a suicide bomber with ties to the Syrians blew up the U.S. military barracks at the Beirut airport, killing 241 Marines. Morris quotes Reagan’s angry diary entries when, earlier in the year, a car bomb had killed dozens of Americans, including the top CIA man in the region, at the U.S. embassy. Perhaps suspecting that the diary might become public or perhaps out of an old-fashioned propriety, Reagan’s curses on the terrorists were never fully spelled out: h—l or d—n and never the Lord’s name in vain—a curious habit given the president’s inexhaustible pleasure in off-color jokes.
Simultaneously, Reagan had to decide what to do about a tragicomic Marxist coup on the small Caribbean island of Grenada, where an armed Cuban work battalion was constructing an airport capable of handling heavy military traffic. Over Margaret Thatcher’s objections to military action (the island belonged to the British Commonwealth, and its governor-general had appealed first to London), Reagan, on the night before the Beirut bombing, authorized the Grenada invasion partly to undo the Cubans and partly to rescue several hundred American medical students who might become hostage. Despite some military fumbling, the Grenada operation ended well, and Reagan’s faith in America was rewarded when the returning students kissed American soil. The Beirut operation was by comparison calamitous. As John F. Lehman Jr., then secretary of the navy, discovered, the Pentagon’s retaliatory bombing of Syrian positions employed antiquated tactics that resulted in the loss of two planes and the capture of a pilot, later released under the embarrassing auspices of Jesse Jackson.
Morris’s account of these incidents is not very useful except that he reinforces what was known at the time. Weinberger and the joint chiefs wanted out of Lebanon; Shultz and McFarlane persuaded Reagan to use the rhetoric of “national interests.” Through insufficient force reluctantly applied, however, the United States could not carry the day. In recounting the Lebanese events, Morris again offers mostly the Weinberger-Clark perspective, resulting in a serious omission concerning the famous telephone call from Reagan to Begin when the Israelis, at General Sharon’s command, resumed bombardment of Beirut in early August. On the 12th, according to Reagan’s diary, after hearing a description of the carnage, the president called Begin: “I told him that it had to stop or our entire relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately [and] said the symbol of his [sic] was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off.” Morris notes that McFarlane was astonished by Reagan’s vehemence and “so, apparently, was Begin, who called back within minutes to say that the attack had been stopped” (p. 465).
Had Morris paid more attention to Shultz’s account, however, he would have known that the matter was more complicated. Begin had already ordered an immediate cease-fire during an earlier cabinet meeting, but Shultz had been told that the Israelis were still bombing, and he urged the president to speak directly to the prime minister. Since he had already given the order to stop, Begin was no doubt astonished at Reagan’s call. So after checking with the military, he called back to reassure Reagan that indeed the Israelis had ceased their fire. Deaver, however, planted in the media the image of Reagan on the telephone commanding Begin to halt. This no doubt encouraged Arab leaders to believe that Begin could be ordered around by Reagan, but he could not. On September 1, when Reagan, at Shultz’s initiative, put forward a peace plan that outraged Begin, the Arabs did not line up to support it. Amidst diplomatic confusion it came to nothing.
Eventually, Shultz, who had started out an antagonist to Israel over Lebanon, became a staunch friend. All of this, however, is way beyond Morris, who tries to settle the credit-taking over the Reagan phone call in a footnote. Faced with the prospect of a Syrian war, Reagan agreed to “redeploy” the surviving U.S. troops out of Beirut, Lebanon slipped into the Syrian grasp (where it remains today), and American prestige suffered a blow from which it did not recover until the Gulf War. Reagan does not seem to have understood, or was not bothered by, the Pentagon’s deliberate reluctance to support his policy in Lebanon. As Shultz put it archly: “Cap Weinberger and the Pentagon were extremely wary and reluctant to use the formidable capabilities in the Department of Defense.”
In the midst of these struggles, a truly momentous event occurred with the most far reaching consequences for U.S.-Soviet relations. Despite large public demonstrations, the West German Bundestag voted on November 22 to deploy the Pershings, and the missiles were fielded the very next day. The Soviets promptly walked out of the arms control negotiations at Geneva, and Washington was suffused with gloom. These events precipitated the “fourteen weeks” crisis, which Morris again attempts to explain in psychosomatic terms. He depicts Reagan from mid-September to the end of 1983 as a rapidly aging man with “steadily atrophying powers of concentration” (p. 495). The Soviet walkout, which in Morris’s view might have nudged the world toward a nuclear confrontation, was interpreted by Reagan himself as a sign that the Russians could not handle the American buildup (p. 498). But was Reagan wrong? Despite a highly sophisticated attempt by Moscow to intimidate the West on the deployment, the allies had held together. Reagan had bought Haig’s argument that the INF presented a true virility test and if NATO could pass it, then the stage would be set for real negotiation. After all, the only thing a decade of relentless military buildup had earned Moscow was that American missiles were now five minutes away instead of fifteen minutes away.
Morris interprets Reagan’s redoubled interest in a summit meeting in 1984 as the product of both election-year politics and a realization that his moral and military rearmament “had helped bring the world close to war in 1983. For what was Andropov’s increased alert along Soviet borders but a reaction to Ronald Reagan’s military build-up and deliberately provocative rhetoric?” (p. 495). Reagan himself subscribed to the view that he had overdone it, writing in his own memoir that the more experience he gained, “the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries, but as political aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike… . Well, if that was the case, I was even more anxious to get a top leader in a room alone and try to convince him we had no designs on the Soviet Union, and Russia had nothing to fear from us.”
Once more, Morris misunderstands the case, but this time he has plenty of company. Those among Reagan’s entourage who feared a negotiation with the USSR tended to portray their hero as somehow manipulated by the would-be appeasers around Shultz: how could you negotiate with an “evil empire”? Others, eager to condemn Reagan for an unnecessary buildup that endangered world peace, interpret his interest in negotiations as a sign that retroactively they were right. In fact, Reagan was just maddeningly consistent. He had always been “arming to parley,” and the INF deployment, SDI, and conventional buildup despite recession only proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that he meant to change the “correlation of forces.” To be sure, this was bound to anger Moscow, but now that the “correlations” were indeed changing, the Soviets had no choice but to take him seriously. And if there was a worrisome delay, it can be explained by the arcane rituals of Soviet succession politics. As Reagan said later of the Soviet leaders, “They kept dying on me.” And they did. Andropov succumbed in February 1984 to kidney disease, and the remainder of that year brought little change as his successor, the ailing Konstantin Chernenko, approached his own death. It was only on March 11, 1985, that an effective partner appeared in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev.
This brings us to the second major set piece of interest to foreign policy students: the Reykjavik summit. By this time, Morris himself was “in the loop” as much as he would ever be. Though unsalaried and not cleared for national security, he was nevertheless always “around,” much to the amusement or chagrin of various presidential aides. He accompanied the president to Geneva on November 19, 1985, but could only add impressions of the first exchanges between Reagan and Gorbachev, mostly riffs on body language and scenery. He also quotes Reagan’s diary entry describing his impression of Gorbachev as “highly effective,” but still holding basic Soviet goals, a man who wanted arms control because he wanted to reduce the burden on the Soviet economy. He would have us believe that he eavesdropped on the Geneva exchanges themselves only to be pushed away by a nervous Russian security guard (pp. 56263). What really fascinates him is Gorbachev’s violincello voice—Morris later gave a cassette of Rachmaninoff’s cello sonata to the Soviet leader “as a souvenir of how you sounded at Geneva”—but Gorbachev said he preferred Tchaikovsky (p. 822)!
When it comes to the main course, Morris does not deliver, pronouncing himself surprised and frustrated that Reagan would “blank out on events closed to me” and that he, Morris, did not have “access to high affairs of state” (p. 580). It would have been grossly irresponsible of Reagan to tell his appointed minstrel national security secrets. But this is still no excuse for Morris’s not mastering the essential issues, especially well after the administration was history and very little was secret anymore.
Following the Geneva summit, both sides agreed to meet regularly, but Gorbachev then floated the idea of a “base camp” before the next scheduled summit in Washington. Given the choice of London or Reykjavik, Reagan picked Iceland’s capital. After the considerable tensions of the Daniloff affair (the Soviets had seized an American journalist to swap for a Soviet spy), the Soviet leader was anxious for a discussion that need not be detailed, but would demonstrate political will.
Reagan, who read this as a sign that Gorbachev was taking him seriously, agreed to the Reykjavik summit of October 1112, 1986, which many regard as the great set-piece encounter of the Cold War. To Reagan enthusiasts it was his finest hour as he escaped Gorbachev’s “ambush” on SDI. To Reagan’s critics it was a huge opportunity squandered by an ignorant man. Gorbachev, too, has depicted it as a decisive point when the Cold War was turned down the road to its end.
Morris makes much of the dramatic and bleak scenery around Reykjavik, trying to pump the thunder of a Norse saga into the matter and adding much pop philosophy about “land plates” grinding, Christians vs. pagans, human rights vs. tribal values, and other silliness (p. 593). But he was not there—he had been bumped for lack of space by Chief of Staff Don Regan—so he had to stimulate his imagination especially hard. A better case can be made that the scene was fit for a comic opera. The weather was bleak and depressing; the view was one of oil refineries and dirty glaciers. Höfdi House, site of the summit, was widely believed to be haunted. Her Majesty’s government had given up its lease on the mansion in 1952 because heavy objects had a habit of falling from ceilings and walls with no apparent cause.
Reagan himself later regarded the summit as an elaborate trap laid by Gorbachev to force him to give up SDI, which he resolutely refused to do. But Gorbachev’s objectives actually ran well beyond SDI, and he almost achieved them. The new Soviet position laid down before a surprised American delegation on Saturday, October 11, emphasized the president’s favorite theme—abolishing nuclear weapons, beginning with the Americans’ zero option for the theater weapons recently deployed in Europe. All classes of nuclear weapons should be reduced by 50 percent, short-range missiles frozen, and nuclear tests banned.
What appealed to Reagan above all was the abolition of nuclear weapons. This was a side of the president that his advisers ignored, but he was deadly serious about lifting the threat of Armageddon from the American people. He would argue with Gorbachev that he wanted to return to the safety of his youth, when death did not come from the sky. Earlier in the year, Reagan’s imagination had been excited by the infamous Chernobyl accident, which the Soviets handled initially with the usual lies and bluster. Morris makes the astonishing claim that Chernobyl precipitated breakaway movements in the Ukraine and Belarus, “the first meltdown of Soviet Communism,” as if these regions (Ukraine in particular) had cheerfully embraced Soviet rule before the accident. But for Reagan, the fact that Chernobyl meant “wormwood” in Ukrainian triggered his memory of Revelation 8: 1011, the burning star that poisons the waters.
A non-nuclear world, however, was not a goal unique to Reagan or Gorbachev. It had been a staple of Stalinist propaganda for a simple reason: if the West were stripped of nuclear weapons, then the Red Army would become the most powerful military force on the European continent. The non-nuclear talk therefore had always made the NATO partners nervous.
Conventional superiority was an unspoken aim of Gorbachev’s reductionist talk. The spoken aim, however, was to get Reagan to give up SDI—confine it for a decade to the “laboratory”—until the reduction programs were carried out. Reagan, who until this topic came up had seemed totally passive, rose to the challenge. Morris quotes Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister: “Suddenly he [sic] flare up, crisp, engaged. When you touch raw nerve, Reagan’s flare will fill the room” (p. 596).
Reagan later repeated his argument to Morris, with “a look of goofy benevolence.” If both sides agreed to reduce weapons toward zero, than SDI would be a kind of post-reduction guarantee against cheating or a rogue power. The United States, promised Reagan, would even share ballistic defense technology with the Soviets. Gorbachev refused to believe it, insisting instead that SDI would just take the arms race into space, whereupon the meeting adjourned. On October 12, Gorbachev upped the ante to make specific the abolition of all weapons, not just missiles, to let the Europeans keep their own arsenals, and to reduce conventional forces, but held firm on no SDI testing outside the lab. “It’s laboratory or nothing,” said Gorbachev. Said Reagan after consulting with Shultz: “The meeting is over.”
As they parted, Reagan accused Gorbachev of laying a trap, and the latter responded with a grandiloquent error: “Mr. President, you have missed the unique chance of going down in history as a great president who paved the way for nuclear disarmament.” Reagan rejoined: “That applies to both of us… . You could have said yes.” Later, Gorbachev had another thought for the Icelandic prime minister: “But there will be more coming out of this meeting than anyone realizes. For the first time in forty years, both great powers tried to eliminate all nuclear weapons. This is the beginning of the end of the Cold War” (p. 599).
What should one make of Reykjavik? Reagan and Gorbachev both thought they had failed, and yet both succeeded. Reagan remained faithful to his pledge that he would ease the danger of nuclear war through SDI and an improved deterrent, working eventually toward the “zero nuclear world” of his dream. Gorbachev, through the zero option in Europe, sought to reduce the Western nuclear forces that offered an increased threat to the USSR. And, indeed as was always the case in the Cold War, Germany proved to be the theater of the most significant transaction.
Gorbachev’s statement should be taken with a heavy grain of salt. The idea that the Cold War was really about the nuclear threat had long been central to Soviet propaganda. Reagan himself reminded Gorbachev that the two sides armed because they mistrusted each other’s objectives, not the reverse, and that was indeed the key to understanding the Soviet position. Gorbachev sought to trade yesterday’s weapons (the abundant Soviet missiles) against tomorrow’s (the new American bombers, Minutemen, and potentially SDI). He had apparently concluded that the Soviet economy was too weak to support an even more intense arms race plus his reforms, so the Americans had to be diverted from developing another generation of technology.
The Soviets were therefore vitally interested in seeing that this phase of dtente would “speed up” their economy through an infusion of Western credits and so-called structural reform and simultaneously ease the strain of military competition. Again, this was reasonable, not radical, and could very well give the Soviets a strategic advantage. That is why Mrs. Thatcher, horrified at the thought of a non-nuclear world or even of the zero option in Europe, hastened to Washington after the summit to lecture Reagan on Churchill’s old proposition that it would be folly to discard nuclear deterrence unless something equally effective could be put in its place. Unlike Dutch, Maggie (and her European colleagues) knew first-hand the horrors of “merely” conventional war.
But as McFarlane told this reviewer, he had spent hours reminding the president of the crucial link between nuclear and conventional forces for NATO, only to realize that this mattered less for Reagan than the idea of lifting the nuclear shadow once and for all. NATO was thus spared a serious, perhaps terminal, crisis thanks to Gorbachev’s determination to deprive Reagan of the hypothetical SDI! In the aftermath, Shultz decided that on the next go-round the United States should argue for a reduction to minimal deterrents, not the elimination of all nuclear weapons. Thus, in the end, the serious business flowing from Reykjavik impacted Germany most of all. It was no accident, as they used to say in Moscow, that the major outcome of the summit was the eventual removal of both U.S. and Soviet theater nuclear forces from Europe.
Neither was it an accident that Reagan’s own preferred set piece was not the derring-do amid the ghosts of Hfdi House, but his dramatic demand in Berlin on June 12, 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Morris, misreading as usual, considered this occasion “too staged, the crowd too small and well-primed, to make for genuine drama… . What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost’s poem on the subject” (p. 624). In this case, as in others, the old actor had a surer sense of the significance of the scene than his would-be biographer. Not thirty months later, Mr. Gorbachev displaced the Stalinist regime in East Germany, opened the Wall, propelled German reunification, and marked the beginning of the end of the state Lenin founded.
That brings us to the third and least happy aspect of the Reagan foreign policy record. Even as Reagan was enjoying his post-Reykjavik popularity, he and the NSC inadvertently set another stage for a play in multiple acts, which was to last until 1992 and encounter an increasingly hostile audience. This was the Iran-contra scandal that at bottom involved sending American weapons to the Islamic Republic of Iran in exchange for the release of several hostages held by Iranian-controlled terrorists in Lebanon. The Iranians also paid $20–;30 million, some of which was diverted secretly to the contras in Central America.
Morris offers a signal service by toting up the transactions, which began in September 1985 and ended in October 1987. Three hostages had been released and $31 million in military hardware sent (especially the wire-guided anti-tank TOW weapons), but six new hostages had been taken and one killed. The damage to Reagan’s “moral reputation” was “incalculable” (p. 621).
The affair itself seemed an unlikely event. Jimmy Carter’s bungling over a previous set of hostages in the American embassy had turned Iran into the third rail of American foreign policy. There were laws against commercial or military trades with terrorist states, which could be set aside only through written authorization by the president. Reagan himself subscribed to the notion that negotiating for hostage release was a slippery slope. Better to hit the bastards hard before the hostages were taken, as he had done in Grenada.
There was another important reason not to bother with hostages in Lebanon. Ever since the civil war there had descended into an orgy of massacre and reprisal, Americans had been warned away from the country. Those who remained did so of their own volition, including clergy, academics, a few businessmen, and the occasional spy. Only the last had a good claim on Washington’s aid.
What could conceivably have overridden such a monumental pile of obstacles? How could Reagan and his “stand tall” administration break his promise never to bargain with terrorists? On November 18, 1986, a day before the press conference when Reagan’s honesty collapsed all the half-fibs he had been urged to tell, Morris questioned the president on his motives and rationale. He found his man angry at the press, but Morris bore into the point: “What made you tip over the brink?” After a wandering conflation of various elements, Reagan finally puts it in unmistakable language:
[W]hat if you found a fella over there that came to us with a plan of rescue and said, “I can rescue the hostages, I can get them out, but there’s going to be a cost associated that’s more than I can do… .” Now, are you paying ransom? Or are you hiring someone to get your hostages out for you? And I think of this thing that we did was kind of in that framework (p. 611).
Reagan, as Morris points out accurately, would never alter this view of events, even if the Tower Investigation Commission reduced him to incoherence. Morris had seen him this way before, over the ill-considered visit to the Bitburg cemetery in 1985, when the president convinced himself that the SS veterans buried there were victims of Nazism, too. On that occasion, Reagan had faced paralysis when he could not reconcile the political rationale for going (support for Chancellor Kohl) with his innate sense of justice. He had resolved it in his own mind by interpreting the pressure on him not to go as an attack on presidential authority. In the Iran-contra case, especially after the details leaked of the diversion of funds, he could not regain his balance, and his attempt at humble charm (“when I make a mistake, it’s a beaut”) fell flat.
The truth is that Reagan had a stubborn, passionate desire to redeem the hostages and just overlooked, or looked beyond, the obstacles. The Iranians were hired to do the job. The rest of the details mattered little. His diary is unenlightened and his memory unreliable. “What did the President forget, and when did he forget it?” became the joke (p. 620), although Judge Lawrence Walsh, set loose for five years and with $50 million by the special prosecutor’s law, was never convinced of Reagan’s imprecision.
If the president was possessed of a bad idea, why did the NSC, cabinet, and chief of staff not warn him off? McFarlane, the national security adviser who boosted the scheme, possessed the courage and skill to evaluate the business and end it if necessary. Never happy with State’s tilt toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, he saw in the initiative a possible opening to those in Tehran who wanted a better relationship with the West. But by the time he detected the Iranian fraud, he was out of office for other reasons, caught in the usual vise between State and Defense. Later, at the president’s behest he took the awful chance of flying into Tehran. This had its comic moments, including the Israeli cake with a key and the assortment of middle men, con men, and mendacious mullahs at the airport. The affair turned tragic, however, when in February 1987 McFarlane convinced himself that he had neglected his duty in not stopping the thing, and attempted suicide.
As for John Poindexter and Oliver North, they epitomized what the columnist Joe Alsop once called the union of the “phony-tough and the crazy-brave.” Casey’s CIA (“independent as a hog on ice,” Shultz said of it) played a murky role, and Casey took its secrets to his grave, while the otherwise efficient chief of staff, Don Regan, proved uncomprehending and evasive. Finally, Shultz and Weinberger (“fighting like old Rottweilers, out of sheer habit”), though livid in their rare joint opposition to the Iran initiative, did not threaten to resign. Soon Morris is gleefully cataloging “a landscape littered with moribund Reaganites” (p. 619) and quoting the Tower Report: “The NSC system will not work unless the President makes it work” (p. 621).
By this time, Morris has tired of his narrative and substitutes page after page of contemporary notes, some illuminating, some just overheated. An example of the latter stems from the transition between the hapless Regan and the new chief of staff, former senator Howard Baker. James Cannon, Baker’s helper, hears “such horror stories about the President’s recent performance” that he suggests Reagan be observed at the cabinet meeting of March 2, 1987, “with a view of invoking Twenty-Fifth Amendment, Sec. 4 (Presidential Disability) if he proved to be disoriented” (p. 622). But “the depressed, somnolent … president, moving with his usual fluid grace,” gives off “waves of benign power. Even before they sit down they realize that the Gipper is back… . The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is shelved” (p. 623).
So Morris, weary of all the policy business, returns to his real quest for the inner Reagan, or rather the decay of the outer Reagan, which he evidently hopes will allow the inner man to surface. It never happens. Soon we are back to hearing of Reagan’s gaffes at the signing of the INF Treaty in Washington, of “cozy chats” about Armageddon, and at length of Reagan’s paean to freedom, delivered to students at Moscow State University before a huge, stony bust of Lenin. “They know he is talking nonsense,” opines Morris, “but they forgive him because they know that his heart is good” (p. 636, emphasis in original).
As Reagan’s presidency ended, Morris made one last cast for his fish. On January 9, 1989, he asked Dutch to summarize the “seminal events”: Reagan cited the tax-reduction program and “evil empire—I meant it!” He then expounded briefly on his relationship with Gorbachev: “I told him, right out, one thing: an arms race you can’t win.” Was the Soviet Union still an evil empire? “It was evil, until he—until this one man [Gorbachev] made all the difference.” And what frightened him the most? Nothing, really. “The most difficult thing to do in this position … is to order young Americans into action, knowing the risks” (p. 643). Inevitably, the Morrisesque question followed. He had been at the Canadian embassy where the departing ambassador, Allan Gottlieb, told Morris that Reagan was “the most enigmatic character of modern times” and applied Samuel Johnson’s comment, “the more you explain it, the less you will understand it.” Told this, Reagan was genuinely surprised: “That’s me? I think I’m an open book!” (p. 644).
At this point, we must close the Morris book using what he has provided in order to find the “rest of Reagan,” the role his foreign policy played in the demise of the USSR, and what his legacy offers the future. To repeat the questions raised at the outset, did the Reagan policy matter much to the downfall of the USSR, or was it rather, as Strobe Talbott and others have argued, dangerous and unnecessary?
In deciding these issues, we ought to apply the facts not only as known now, but as known then, discarding the cruel tendency to charge statesmen with ignorance when they could hardly have known otherwise. No one, for example, could have concluded based on information in 1980 that the Soviet Union was foreordained to dissolve a decade later, just as no one in 1960 could have said that the United States would be mired in an Asian war with a stagflated economy in 1970. What we do know is the following course of events. In 1980, the Soviet Union was an aggressive, expanding power with important military advantages over its numerous enemies. Five years later, a reform-oriented leadership took power, emphasizing economic and ideological change while simultaneously seeking a breather from military competition with the West. And five years after that the Soviet Union dissolved from within.
Was all of this a purely domestic act, the inevitable shriveling of a fatally stricken organism? The most reasonable answer is that the Soviet weaknesses manifest in 1980 and after were aggravated by pressure from the West. Morris’s book reinforces the view that Reagan sought to compel strategic choices in Moscow. Reagan would prove, through American moral and military armament, that the Soviets could not enjoy a favorable correlation of forces much longer. And when he launched an emergency arms buildup (despite recession) and deployed Pershings in Europe (despite domestic opposition), he found the Soviets unable to match the former and unwilling to go to war over the latter.
As for Gorbachev, he intended neither to forfeit a leading Soviet role nor to dissolve the empire itself. He had, as Gromyko described him, “a nice smile with iron teeth.” His objective was to rejuvenate the USSR, and he needed time and money, not arms or adventure. If that meant jettisoning ideology or trading yesterday’s weapons to prevent tomorrow’s from being built, then so be it.
The Soviets had made this kind of choice before (during earlier periods it had been known as the New Economic Policy, the Khrushchev thaw, and dtente), but this time the oscillation proved fatal. “Glasnost,” “perestroika,” and nostalgia for the young Lenin did not produce a workable political philosophy or an effective economic policy. The peoples under Soviet rule sensed gradually that the regime had lost its nerve to kill. In this sense, Reagan’s approach, not original with him, turned out to be the right one: deprive the regime of its capacity to intimidate abroad and it would lose its capacity to intimidate at home, as people awakened to the idiotic deprivations of the system. In sum, Reagan forced the Soviets to choose a course less dangerous to the West. But the Reagan policies did not guarantee the demise of the USSR. Gorbachev, the Communist Party, the bungled coup-makers, and Boris Yeltsin, among others, deserve the credit for that. And so does George Bush, for helping to ensure that the final act—including the “tearing down of the wall”—would be peaceful.
As for Reagan himself, he did not know much, but he knew enough. He did not do all of the policy, but it could not have been done without him. More than most presidents, he had an extraordinary will to attain those things that mattered to him, and, fortunately for the American people, they were things that mattered most to the national interest. Possessed of a religious certainty that people could do good and that the United States was destined to do better, he knew that the nation’s incomparable resources could only be effective if the national will could be invoked. Moral and military rearmament marched hand in hand.
Morris, of course, offers many instances where Reagan did not know much. The other side of the president’s iron will when it came to the things that mattered was a shocking lack of will or even interest concerning things that should have mattered. But then Reagan was an open book, less like Teddy Roosevelt than General Ulysses S. Grant, in whom General John Schofield spied an “extreme simplicity—so extreme that many have overlooked it … unmindful that simplicity is one of the most prominent attributes of greatness.” Through the complicated swirl of events, Reagan shone through as an amiable American playing himself, full of optimism and fair play, possessed of essential truths, and determined above all to serve the people and protect their interests. Translated into foreign policy, this meant “arm to parley” and tell the truth about democracy and tyranny.
Finally, what can be learned from Reagan for our times and our problems? The struggle over foreign policy in the Republican Party today reproduces some of the strains in his own administration and doubtless reflects broad fissures in the American body politic. Some want U.S. power to remake the world in a crusade for democracy, and the Gipper’s rhetorical flights offer the prooftexts of the faith. Others see the caution of the man in practice, his reluctance to use military force and his negotiations with the “evil empire” as the guideposts for a much more restrained enterprise. Then there are those who invoke a “Reagan Foreign Policy” to launch a new cold war, but they lack an opponent of Soviet stature. The Chinese are just not up to the part, at least not yet. In short, these arguments tell us much more about our times than Reagan’s legacy.
Still, Reagan does have important things to tell us, a kind of cautionary tale. American foreign policy needs both military and moral power, and a president who summons only the one or the other runs the risk of coming up short on both. Leaders lead, and they do not seek in complexity a cause for inaction. They must offer direction even if the supporting footnotes fail to pass muster with the chattering classes, and give guidance to capable officials whose footnotes do pass muster. Above all, foreign policy must express what is dear to our hearts and our heads, but rest always on the knowledge that action, especially military action, must be prudent. These aphorisms express the rest of Reagan, who spoke his own epitaph in his farewell address: “We set out to change a nation, and we changed the world.”
New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1979.
Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 237-38.
Although dubbed a doctrine by the columnist Charles Krauthammer (Time, Apr. 1, 1985, pp. 54-55), it was never called that inside the administration, and Lou Cannon argues persuasively that it was a tactic rather than a new strategy in and of itself. See Reagan: Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). For a good discussion of how such actions fit the overall strategy of “pressuring” Moscow, see Joseph Shattan, Architects of Victory (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 1999).
George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 84.
Reagan, An American Life, pp. 588-89.
Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows (New York: Touchstone, 1996), pp. 270-73, discusses the CIA’s information on Soviet apprehensions as presented to Reagan in December 1983.
James B. McPherson, “The Riddle of the Victor,” The New Republic, Feb. 21, 2000, pp. 43-44.
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