Within minutes of the meeting ending, Reagan called Nixon. He probably suspected that the former president would be upset to see his old friend unceremoniously dismissed from the State Department. But Nixon understood Haig’s shortcomings as well as anyone. And he was pleased when Reagan told him that he would be offering the job to another Nixon friend, George Shultz. Nixon later spoke to Haig by phone. Still later, on June 28, Nixon told the press that “Secretary Shultz will carry on.” And then he took one of the complaints Haig had made and turned it into a virtue for Shultz. “If there has been any sniping or guerrilla warfare against the secretary of state, as Secretary Haig has indicated, let me tell you, you’re not going to see anything publicly about it from Secretary Shultz.” The reason? Shultz “will not tolerate it.”5
Nixon likely felt for Haig. But he understood politics well enough to know that Reagan deserved a secretary of state he could trust. And so the choice of Shultz seemed fine at the time. Nixon believed that Schultz was capable of doing the job and lacked Haig's obnoxiousness. Besides, Nixon had to keep his ties to the administration in order to have any influence. The former president could and would try to work with Shultz. His statement to the press was his way of giving Reagan some cover and signaling to Shultz that he wanted to be a resource for him.
Haig's departure could have been the end of Nixon’s foreign policy counsel to the White House. But he managed to navigate it carefully and his relationship with the president seemed just fine. “I criticize him privately and praise him publicly,” he told the press in describing his relationship with Reagan.
That fall, Reagan’s party took a beating at the polls. Midterm elections are always a challenge for the party that controls the White House, and November 1982 proved to be no exception. Still, the Republicans maintained a majority in the Senate. And that meant the president would still be able to govern effectively, especially on foreign policy. He had campaigned in 1980 promising to confront the Soviets. As 1983 began, Reagan was ready to make good on this promise. And Nixon’s advice and counsel would become even more important to him.
Chapter Thirteen
The Evil Empire
“The United States wants peace; the Soviet Union wants the world.”
In late 1982, a group of former Nixon staffers gathered at the Marriott Hotel in Washington. A banner greeted them that read, “Welcome Class of ’72.” The occasion was the tenth anniversary of Nixon’s forty-nine-state electoral landslide. The former president arrived wearing a dark suit and a bright smile. Nixon looked happy, and he was. He had a friend in the Oval Office, he was making public appearances again, and his books were selling. Nixon’s spirits soared as his made his way around the ballroom shaking hands with Pat Buchanan, John Mitchell, Chuck Colson, and others.
In his brief remarks to the group, Nixon quoted from his favorite Theodore Roosevelt passage: it was “the man in the arena” who counted and not the “cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” Nixon added with emphasis that none of his former staffers present at the occasion were “timid souls.”
Nor was the current occupant of the White House. On March 8, 1983, President Reagan arrived in Orlando, Florida, to deliver a keynote address to the National Association of Evangelicals. In a speech that touched on everything from domestic policy to NATO, Reagan spoke directly about the Soviet opposition. Using a phrase that would make news around the world, Reagan did not hold back: “Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”
And Reagan wasn’t finished rebuking the Soviets. He urged his Evangelical audience to “beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”
The national media were aghast. “When a politician claims that God favors his programs,” sneered Anthony Lewis in a column in the New York Times, “alarm bells should ring.” Lewis was especially appalled that Reagan urged the audience to avoid “the temptation of pride.” He castigated Reagan for aggressively blaming the Soviets. He faulted the president because he “applied a black-and-white standard to something that is much more complex.”1
According to Lewis, Reagan didn’t understand the history of the arms race: “One may regard the Soviet system as a vicious tyranny and still understand that it has not been solely responsible for the nuclear arms race. The terrible irony of that race is that the United States has led the way on virtually every major new development over the last 30 years, only to find itself met by the Soviet Union.”
Lewis’ comments were more critical than correct. As it turned out, Reagan did understand the terrible irony of the arms race. And he was appalled at where it had left the country. Reagan particularly took umbrage at the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). This was the theory in place for much of the Cold War that said the Soviets couldn’t launch a nuclear attack because the United States would reciprocate in kind. Thus, mutually assured destruction kept the world safe. Ironically, MAD essentially had become official U.S. policy with Richard Nixon’s signing of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that restricted defensive systems. But the idea had predated Nixon; the Johnson administration had first proposed the idea out of concern that the rush for a defensive system would lead to yet another arms race.
Reagan thought that MAD was indeed mad. And he had wondered for years if a different method of protecting the U.S. from a nuclear attack would work better. His speech to the Evangelicals was the first step in a two-pronged plan. First, Reagan would call out the “evil” that he saw in the Soviet Union and in the Soviets’ actions around the world. Second, he would propose a new approach.
As far back as his days as governor of California, Reagan had been intrigued by the possibility of creating a defensive system for the nuclear era. Even as Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were exploring ways of limiting nuclear defense, Reagan began thinking that expanding nuclear defense might be the answer. In 1967 he had met with a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory named Edward Teller who suggested that technology such as lasers could potentially be used to knock down a nuclear weapon in route to its target. Now as president, Reagan was toying with the idea again. Earlier in 1983, he had met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and expressed his dismay about the current policy of MAD. They agreed and told the president that new technologies such as kinetic energy could possibly help block a nuclear missile once it was launched. Reagan seized the idea.
Speaking from the Oval Office on the night of March 23, 1983, Reagan asked the nation, “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them? Are we not capable of demonstrating our peaceful intentions by applying all our abilities and our ingenuity to achieving a truly lasting stability?”
Then he made his major announcement: “Tonight, consistent with our obligations under the ABM Treaty and recognizing the need for closer consultation with our allies, I am taking an important first step. I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles.”
The plan to create a defensive shield protecting the U.S. from a nuclear attack would be called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It came under withering criticism almost immediately from Democrats like Senator Ted Kennedy, who mocked it as “Star Wars,” after the popular George Lucas science fiction films. But Reagan forged ahead despite the criticism. He believed that if technology could cr
eate offensive weapons it could also create defensive ones.
And he found an unlikely ally in Nixon. The former president was intrigued by the idea—not so much as a matter of defense policy, but as a matter of diplomacy.
Almost from the beginning of the SDI debate, Nixon doubted that technology would be able to produce the impenetrable shield Reagan hoped to create. “Too much of the debate has focused only on the possibility of developing a one hundred percent leak-proof population defense which even the strongest proponents agree could not be developed until the next century,” he wrote to his friend, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp. But Nixon worried that the U.S. “counter-force missile silos” could be vulnerable to a first strike from the Soviets, and thus believed that the U.S. had “no choice but to go forward with an SDI program” to at least protect these silos.2
In addition, Nixon, as always, was playing a long game. He viewed the new Reagan policy as a tool to be used in negotiations down the road with the Soviets. And Reagan, perhaps taken aback by the negative reviews of his plans, sought out Nixon’s advice even more. Not long after first unveiling the SDI program to the nation, the president wrote to his friend and thanked him for his part in “alerting our nation to the steady, relentless nature of Soviet military expansion, and the need to devote more of our resources to defense.”
Major White House policy announcements never happen in a vacuum. And Reagan taking the initiative with SDI was in part a response to growing pressure on the president to meet with the Soviets. Reagan was willing to meet with Soviet leaders, but, he later joked, “they kept dying on me.” Nixon’s old rival Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, followed by the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov and then of Konstantin Chernenko.
Still, as Nixon knew, the pressure on Reagan to meet with the Soviet leader would not relent. But Nixon did not think Reagan needed to rush into a summit meeting.
Nixon met privately with new National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane to discourage a “get acquainted” meeting. And he wrote directly to Reagan, warning, “Some well-intentioned advisors will urge you to agree to such a meeting because it will pull the teeth of the peace at any price groups and be reassuring to some of our jittery allies aboard.” That much was true, he conceded in his note to the president, “but only temporarily. Unless something substantive comes out, the effect of an atmospheric meeting wears off very quickly. . . .”3
Nixon believed that meeting for the sake of meeting made no sense. He continued this line of reasoning in his conversations with the national security advisor. He urged McFarlane to establish a meeting only once an agenda could be agreed upon. But one sticking point prevented that: SDI. The Soviets had reacted with outrage to Reagan’s proposal to expand the arms race into the skies. Reagan had expected this reaction. But he also wanted to meet with the Soviets. Paradoxically, Reagan wanted to build a defense shield, but he also strongly favored eliminating entire classes of nuclear weapons.
McFarlane was a perfect connection point for Nixon. The two men had been friends for years, and McFarlane welcomed advice from the elder statesman. Indeed, McFarlane often found himself frustrated by President Reagan, though he appreciated his many gifts. “Reagan,” he would famously say later, “knows so little but accomplishes so much.”
In Nixon, McFarlane found a sympathetic ear. The former president, too, had often been critical of Reagan but had always respected Reagan’s political gifts. And he sensed that Reagan might able to do something to help end the Cold War. In aid of that outcome, Nixon would continue to advise not only the president, but also his national security advisor.
“I often called him to talk about my frustrations,” McFarlane later remembered, “which could center on my relationships in the White House or most usually by difficulties in overcoming President Reagan’s inability to understand foreign policy.” Though he didn’t always share McFarlane’s harsh assessment of Reagan as a statesman, Nixon offered his friend much more than words of encouragement. “He would say, ‘Put it to him this way,’ or ‘Put it to him that way,’ ” McFarlane recalled. And when the national security advisor used Nixon’s phrasing with the president, “it often worked.”4
That fall brought events that changed the equation in favor of Reagan’s position with the Soviets. On September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 left Anchorage, Alaska, on its way to Seoul, South Korea. The commercial flight had deviated slightly from its flight path and accidentally entered Soviet airspace. Soviet fighter planes soon tracked the plane and fired warning shots, which the Korean Air Lines pilots most likely never noticed. The Soviet pilots then destroyed the plane with air-to-air missiles. All 269 passengers and crew members were killed.
Initially, the Soviets denied any responsibility for the attack. But the evidence was overwhelming. Then the Kremlin claimed that the plane was on a spying missing. But the rest of the world was having none of it, and neither was the American president. Speaking from the Oval Office on the night of September 5, 1983, Reagan spoke bluntly of the tragedy: “Let me state as plainly as I can: There was absolutely no justification, either legal or moral, for what the Soviets did.” He contrasted the Soviets’ actions with those of other countries: “Is this a practice of other countries in the world? The answer is no. Commercial aircraft from the Soviet Union and Cuba on a number of occasions have flown over sensitive United States military facilities. They weren’t shot down. We and other civilized countries believe in the tradition of offering help to mariners and pilots who are lost or in distress on the sea or in the air. We believe in following procedures to prevent a tragedy, not to provoke one.”
In that speech, Reagan never used the phrase “evil empire.” But he didn’t need to. The Soviets had proven Reagan’s point with their actions. No one could doubt that they could not be trusted. And that was the very reason Reagan was pushing for a defensive system.
Other consequences flowed from this incident. Eventually the Reagan administration pushed for the commercialization of Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology so that other planes would not drift off course. But perhaps the most prominent side effect of the KAL 007 tragedy was that it strengthened Reagan’s hand going into an election year. The economy had already begun to respond to his tax cut package and was growing again. Now the American public could also see that a strong hand was needed in the White House to deal with foreign events.
But they also saw a soft hand from Reagan at times. In the fall of 1983, the president signed legislation establishing a national holiday for civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., thus defying many in his own party. Pat Buchanan, one of Nixon’s former aides, used his syndicated column to attack the president’s decision. He wrote that “by the day he died on that Memphis balcony, Dr. King had become as polarizing, as divisive, as negative a force as there was in national politics.”
On September 24, Nixon wrote to Buchanan to disagree politely. While acknowledging that King’s personal life had been scandalous, he pointed to his role as a public figure. “On balance, what we have to recognize is that Americans need heroes,” Nixon wrote, “and that the only perfect man died on the cross. And black Americans, because of their special background, need them most of all.”5
As 1983 neared its end, Democrats were lining up to run against Reagan. The fate of American foreign policy would depend on the outcome of the 1984 election. Reagan privately told aides he wasn’t sure he should run. But his friend in Saddle River, New Jersey, was quite sure. America, Nixon believed, needed Reagan. And he was prepared, once again, to do his part to help Reagan win at the polls.
Chapter Fourteen
The 1984 Election
“I urge you to bite the bullet and do what is necessary. . . .”
As 1983 neared its close, Richard Nixon kept his eye on his place in history. He continued to make public appearances and work on books. But he was also looking for ways to reach even more people. No medium had done more for his rehabilitation than television did with the Frost interviews.
What if he could appear on television again to talk about his presidency, only without an antagonistic interviewer like David Frost? A deal was negotiated with CBS to show a ninety-minute interview conducted by his former aide, Frank Gannon.
Gannon interviewed Nixon for more than thirty-six hours over the course of nine different days. Nixon proved more relaxed taking questions from his former aide. Before the interview was shown on 60 Minutes, the stately figure of Morley Safer appeared to introduce the segment and downplay any concerns critics had about CBS purchasing the interview.
“When we looked at the videotapes we saw a Richard Nixon talking with astonishing candor,” Safer told his audience on the night of April 8, 1984. “We never heard a president speak that way on the record. So we purchased the broadcast rights to an hour and a half of those 38 hours. Mr. Nixon was paid a fee by the company which produced the tapes and, in addition, has a profit participation in the worldwide sale of the memoirs.”1
In the interview, Nixon—dressed in his usual dark suit and blue tie—spoke about Watergate and even used the phrase “smoking gun” when talking about the tapes. It was the “final blow, the final nail in the coffin. Although you didn’t need another nail if you were already in the coffin, which we were.” This was another attempt by Nixon to accept moral responsibility without acknowledging any legal responsibility. But now, more than five years after he first tried it on television with Frost, Nixon knew the public was more accepting of his explanation. Time heals most wounds.
After the Fall Page 15