by Conrad Black
SALT II was in trouble with congressional and public opinion when the whole Carter policy of almost militant altruism hit land mines under each foot in the last days of 1979. In November, Khomeini’s regime stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, an outrageous violation of international law, and seized 52 hostages with diplomatic passports within. Carter made his natural appeals to international opinion, courts, and organizations, and was generally supported everywhere. But a popular late-night network news program began, entitled America Held Hostage, and continued to telecast every weeknight for the life of the crisis. Carter made occasional purposeful statements such as “The honor of America is more important than the lives of any individuals.” But he appeared impotent, to a degree completely unprecedented in the history of his country and his office. At least Lyndon Johnson was making war on North Vietnam, however ill-advisedly in tactical terms, and poor James Madison finally went to war with Britain, as did Wilson with Germany. Carter made pious statements and earnest entreaties, but Khomeini ignored him as if the president of the United States had no more deterrent or moral authority than the president of Albania or Paraguay. Carter continued the Democratic policy followed to some extent by all their presidents since Jefferson, except Roosevelt and Truman, of not seeming to wield an adequately large or versatile stick to defend the entire national interest.
And on December 26, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Leonid Brezhnev had enunciated the Brezhnev Doctrine (even Soviet leaders were resistless against the temptation to have a doctrine named after them, however portentous the phrase might be in the circumstances). This held that any country that became “socialist,” i.e., communist, would be retained in that condition, if necessary by the application of Soviet military force. This outrageous concept was invoked in the aftermath of the oppression of Czech liberalism in August 1968. Now Brezhnev was pushing it further, in implicit disregard for the deterrent strength of the United States, by invading a neighboring country that it claimed had adopted socialism and was being threatened by internal and external reactionary forces.
This was by a wide margin a more unwise, not to say morally reprehensible, action than the American commitment of large-scale forces to the defense of South Vietnam. It was not only the first naked aggression the Soviet Union had committed against a neighbor since Stalin seized a chunk of Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia under the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and then for good measure invaded Finland a few months later, in 1939 and 1940. It was also, in Talleyrand’s famous formulation, immoral, and also an error. It is almost inconceivable that the Soviet leadership could have undertaken such a mad enterprise. The secret of Afghan independence was that it was so lacking in geopolitical interest as a landlocked country with almost no natural resources, was so rugged and mountainous, and its population was so resistant to outsiders, it was never worth the huge commitment of forces that would be necessary to suppress it. The British had come to this conclusion 75 years before.
Now the Soviets not only antagonized the Muslim world and provoked the Western Alliance, and blundered into a geopolitically useless and indigestible place (“a porcupine,” as Hitler said of Switzerland), it did so with completely inadequate forces. The Kremlin replicated, on a smaller scale but even more egregiously, Johnson’s error of entering ambiguously into foreign war. There was no rationale, no serious measurement of the risk-reward ratio, an inadequate commitment of forces, no exit strategy, and no possible justification even if the Afghans had not risen in revolt, as they instantly and almost universally did.
An unlikely informal coalition, including the United States, Britain, China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and Israel began assisting the Afghan rebels, mainly Islamists even more primitive in their social outlook than Khomeini. The Soviet occupation force of 100,000 was pinned down to the major centers and could soon move between them only in armored columns. The United States distributed so many over-the-shoulder ground-to-air missiles that the Soviet helicopter forces took terrible losses. It was, almost from the earliest days, a disaster for the Russians, but it again made Jimmy Carter look weak to his countrymen as an election year dawned.
Carter had two other problems—indecisiveness and a faltering economy. There was a pattern that made the country and its allies uneasy, of Carter taking an initiative and then reversing it. For some time the administration publicly alleged that the Soviet Union was developing a nuclear submarine base at Cienfuegos, Cuba, something Nixon and Kissinger had looked at closely but finally decided wasn’t really happening and should not become the cause of a superpower dispute. Carter eventually came to the same conclusion. For several days he was publicly dispatching a carrier group to the Indian Ocean, led by the USS America, but then ordered it, also publicly, without explanation, to make a 180-degree turn.
Much more worrisome and disruptive of the Western Alliance was that Carter pressed hard for the attachment of neutron warheads to NATO’s short-range missiles in Europe; warheads that killed people by radiation but did comparatively minimal damage to inanimate structures such as buildings. The Soviet propaganda apparatus and its docile believers in the West took up the hue and cry that this was inhuman. Western leaders such as West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt went to great lengths and political inconvenience to hold the line, and then Carter abruptly decided that it should not be done, essentially for the reasons the Russians and their allies and dupes had been alleging.
The Tehran hostage crisis took a further nasty turn in April 1980, when Carter ordered a helicopter rescue effort and it was a complete fiasco due to poor intelligence, though without loss of life. Secretary of State Vance resigned, revealing this only after the mission, because he believed that if the hostages were freed, Khomeini would just seize 50 other Americans in Iran, randomly. He was succeeded by the 1968 vice presidential candidate, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, a man of no particular foreign policy credentials. This mishandling of a severe affront to the United States was not an acceptable quality of strategic leadership, for the United States or the Western Alliance. The American public, even if they could rarely be precise about it, sensed this.
The sharp renewed increase in oil prices provoked galloping inflation while economic activity slowed and the U.S. economy was afflicted by stagflation, almost double-digit inflation and unemployment, and the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, determined on a policy of high interest rates to reduce economic activity, collapse inflationary pressures, and essentially ignore the short-term impact on unemployment.
7. THE RISE OF RONALD REAGAN
Ronald Reagan swept almost all the primaries in 1980 and was easily nominated for president by the Republicans in Detroit. Former Texas congressman, CIA director, representative to China, ambassador to the United Nations, and Republican Party chairman George H.W. Bush ran a respectable but distant second. There was a movement to ask President Ford to stand for vice president, but Reagan refused to shed any of the constitutional authority of the office he sought, and Ford was not lusting after a lower office than he had already held, and Reagan chose Bush for vice president. Carter faced a strenuous but strangely disorganized and poorly explained challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy and lost a few of the big primaries, but won renomination, with Mondale, without serious difficulty.
Conventional liberal national opinion was that Reagan was a shallow if attractive and eloquent superannuated film actor; it disdained his landslide victories as governor of California and assumed that Carter, as a substantial chief executive and incumbent president, would be elected, as all incumbents had been since Hoover. Congressman John Anderson of Illinois, a liberal Republican of the Rockefeller stripe, but not a well-known figure, ran as a third-party independent. Reagan conducted an extremely professional campaign. The themes were that Carter was an ineffectual, gullible weakling, so out of his depth that he was endangering world peace by creating irresistible temptations for the Russians. The hostage crisis and the Afghan invasion were endlessly cited as
evidence of his unsuitability to be president. The economic problems were dumped entirely at his door because of his inability to influence oil prices, his betrayal of America’s ally the Shah, who always pierced any anti-Western oil cartel, his enfeeblement of the armed forces, and his supposed appeasement of the Soviets. The Democrats portrayed Reagan as a simplistic, right-wing extremist who would make an ass of himself and endanger world peace. Carter was referred to informally as a peanut farmer by one side, and Reagan, with equal disdain by the other, as an actor. (One of his more vocal and articulate critics, the writer Gore Vidal, said that it was “an injustice to call Reagan a ‘Grade B actor.’ He is one of the greatest actors in world history, who played in a lot of Grade B movies.” Vidal particularly harped on Reagan’s performance in Bedtime for Bonzo.)
The Democrats ridiculed Reagan’s campaign promises of higher defense spending and reduced income taxes, which he said would accelerate economic growth rates sufficiently to avoid an unacceptable deficit (more or less what happened). Unable to catch Reagan in the polls, Carter gambled everything on a debate, late in the campaign, believing that his detailed knowledge of issues and Reagan’s perceived breeziness and imprecision would reveal the challenger as light for the office both were seeking. Reagan proved to be well-versed in the issues, and had some debating techniques that were damaging to Carter (“There you go again”). Reagan concluded by asking that the voters consider, as they exercised the “sacred privilege of the ballot,” if they and their families and the country were “better off than you were four years ago.” Reagan added a little to his lead and closed the campaign with some overpoweringly eloquent addresses and a saturation advertising blitz hammering the theme “The time is now for strong leadership. If not us, who? If not now, when?”
On election day, Reagan won decisively, 43.9 million votes (51 percent), to 35.5 million votes (41 percent) for Carter and 5.7 million votes (6.6 percent) for Anderson. Reagan won 489 electoral votes and 44 states to 49 electoral votes, six states, and the District of Columbia for the president. The Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time in 28 years, since Eisenhower, in his first campaign, drew the Senate, leaving (vice president) Nixon with the deciding vote. Reagan chose as secretary of state Kissinger’s former deputy at the National Security Council, and Nixon’s chief of staff, vice chief of staff of the army, and Ford’s Supreme Allied Commander (NATO) in Europe, General Alexander M. Haig. He was a tough Vietnam combat veteran and an apparently splendidly qualified choice; he had performed well in all his previous positions.
Carter and Muskie did manage to negotiate the release of the Tehran hostages, although they were only freed a few minutes after Reagan was inaugurated, on January 20, 1981, and Reagan graciously invited Carter to welcome the hostages back to the West in Germany on behalf of the nation. The country had cured itself of the nostrum of an almost overly trusting foreign policy.
Ronald Reagan was one of the most astonishing characters ever to occupy the presidency of the United States. The son of an unsuccessful shoe salesman in downstate Illinois, he graduated from an obscure local college, Eureka, and held only six jobs in his career: lifeguard in Tampico, Illinois; baseball announcer in Des Moines, Iowa (California-bound in the Great Depression); film actor (including six terms as head of the Screen Actors’ Guild); vice president for public and personnel relations of General Electric Corporation; governor of California; and president of the United States. He was less than a month short of his seventieth birthday on his inauguration, the oldest of any newly inaugurated president in the history of the country. He had been an ardent Democrat, who was driven into the Republican Party by the antics of the left in Hollywood after World War II, as the Cold War broke out, and further propelled along that path by the experience of 90 percent marginal income tax rates (most people in that bracket could find methods of reduction or exoneration). Reagan became one of the spokesmen for the new conservatives, was more flexible and much more articulate than Goldwater, and had been backed by a group of wealthy California Republicans for governor in 1966. He was an effective and popular governor. When radical students occupied the main campus square at Berkeley, he had the National Guard clear it with fixed bayonets, and there were no injuries. When he went to places where there were large demonstrations being restrained by state policemen with locked arms, he made a point of shaking hands with each one of the policemen and ignoring the demonstrators just two feet away.
Reagan was a very affable man and was universally charming, but he was, in the words of media proprietor Rupert Murdoch to the author, “a cunning old peasant.” In a benign reenactment of a familiar plot, his financial backers probably expected to retain more influence on him than they did. He smiled amiably, but would steer his own course, and had the confidence and the intuition to follow his own instincts. Ronald Reagan did not change his views to lure voters; the nation, between 1965 and 1980, came steadily, almost imperceptibly, to him. In a sense, the office had sought the man, and he assumed the office with a clear and comprehensive program to (once again) let America be America. “The only welfare system we ever had that worked was a job,” he declared, and when asked his plan for the Cold War, he replied, “We win and they lose.” He soon made it clear that there was a new mood in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. There would be no return to détente, and the United States immediately began a massive arms buildup of all forces, and a plan to assist anti-communist guerrillas and shatter the Brezhnev Doctrine of the permanence of communist rule once established with the (inevitable) Reagan Doctrine, almost indistinguishable from those of Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon; and he began with increased arms shipments to the Afghan guerrillas and to the Nicaraguan Contras, who opposed the leftist Sandinistas, who had replaced the Somoza government in Nicaragua and aided leftist guerrillas in El Salvador.
Reagan thought that the Kennedy and Johnson Democrats and Nixon and Kissinger, and certainly Carter, had been too deferential to the Russians, and that the Soviet Union was not really a plausible rival to the U.S.—that its economic system was, as he put it, “Mickey Mouse,” the political system was oppressive, and the whole country was a cauldron of barely suppressed ethnic and economic conflicts and too stagnant to keep pace if the U.S. would shake Vietnam and Watergate out of its psychology and act boldly but not impetuously. Where Nixon and Kissinger were chess grandmasters, Reagan was a poker player, but also of surpassing skill.
8. PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN
Reagan began his term with the advancement of two simple concepts, a sharp acceleration of America’s military capacity and a sizeable reduction of income taxes, on the theory that this course was vindicated by the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts and that revenue would actually grow from increased economic activity and produce less fervent efforts at tax avoidance and evasion. The defense buildup included building 100 new warships and recommissioning the Iowa class battleships as both naval artillery and cruise missile launching platforms; building the B-1 bomber as a successor to the B-52 (a program Carter had canceled); and completing the M-X missile, which Reagan christened the Peacekeeper, a maximum-range intercontinental missile with 10 independently targeted warheads (i.e., the equivalent of 10 missiles and the cornerstone of Nixon’s wonderful euphemism of “nuclear sufficiency”—sufficient, that is, to frighten the Soviets).
The Reagan administration continued to negotiate with the European NATO allies the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in those countries to reply to the Soviet SS-20s, whose launch sites were already being set up in significant numbers in Eastern Europe. Personal income taxes were broadly cut by 25 percent. He sent a powerful message when 13,000 air traffic controllers (whose union, PATCO, had supported Reagan in the 1980 election) struck illegally; he gave them, as government employees, 48 hours to return to work, and then fired the 90 percent of them that did not obey the order, on August 5, 1981. Flights were reduced in number and military air controllers were substituted, and there were no mishaps. T
his dramatic step indicated with great clarity that a new hand was on the government, replacing the uncertain grip of his predecessor.
The progress of Reagan’s program was assisted by his great aplomb in coping with an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, in Washington. As he left a hotel after a midday speech, he was wounded in the chest by a bullet from an assailant who also shot the president’s press secretary, a member of his security unit, and a municipal policeman. The president, though he had a collapsed lung and a bullet only about an inch from his heart, walked into the hospital, where he was driven at speed, though he had to be assisted into the operating room. He removed his oxygen mask to say to the gathered group of doctors and emergency nurses: “I hope you’re all Republicans.” The presiding doctor (a Democrat) responded with equal gallantry that at that moment, all Americans were Republicans. The president recovered quickly and addressed the Congress four weeks later to prolonged and thunderous applause, and in the face of his enhanced popularity, his congressional opponents were resistless against his taxing and spending cuts and increases in defense outlays.