by Bret Baier
“Today, we utter no prayer more fervently than the ancient prayer for peace on Earth,” he said in his inaugural speech. “Yet history has shown that peace does not come, nor will our freedom be preserved, by good will alone.” Speaking of the SDI program, he said it would render nuclear weapons obsolete, describing the folly of mutually assured destruction, which was the dangerous status quo. And in a striking diplomatic appeal, he promised, “We will meet with the Soviets, hoping that we can agree on a way to rid the world of the threat of nuclear destruction.”
But he had a warning for the forces of oppression, which he laid out in his State of the Union address on February 6: “We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that’s not innocent; nor can we be passive when freedom is under siege. Without resources, diplomacy cannot succeed. Our security assistance programs help friendly governments defend themselves and give them confidence to work for peace. And I hope that you in the Congress will understand that, dollar for dollar, security assistance contributes as much to global security as our own defense budget.”
And, in what Charles Krauthammer called the “Reagan Doctrine,” he voiced support for “freedom fighters” in nations around the world, promising that the United States would be in their corner:
Harry Truman once said that, ultimately, our security and the world’s hopes for peace and human progress “lie not in measures of defense or in the control of weapons, but in the growth and expansion of freedom and self-government.” And tonight, we declare anew to our fellow citizens of the world: Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God’s children. Look to where peace and prosperity flourish today. It is in homes that freedom built. Victories against poverty are greatest and peace most secure where people live by laws that ensure free press, free speech, and freedom to worship, vote, and create wealth. Our mission is to nourish and defend freedom and democracy, and to communicate these ideals everywhere we can.
The growing list of “freedom fighters” who were receiving covert US support included the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet occupation, Angolans fighting communism in a bitter civil war, and the Contras in Nicaragua, fighting the socialist Sandinista government. But Reagan was also committed to supporting the movements for freedom in Poland, East Germany, and other Soviet bloc nations.
With the beginning of a new term, the White House team was undergoing a major shift. Within months, the old troika had dissolved—Baker switched jobs with Donald Regan and became secretary of the Treasury, with Regan as chief of staff; Ed Meese was confirmed by the Senate as attorney general; and Deaver was gone—the one year he’d originally promised to serve having lasted four.
As chief of staff, Regan was powerful but plagued by controversy and difficult relationships from day one, particularly with Nancy, which was ultimately his undoing. What bugged Nancy, and others, about Regan was that he seemed to think he was on an equal footing with the president. To him the chief of staff position was akin to being the CEO of a large corporation called America. He marched around, running the show, while relationships on the Hill and in the West Wing faltered. A frequent grumble was that Don Regan was so vain he thought “Hail to the Chief” was about him.
Returning as the assistant to the president for legislative affairs, after a three-year absence, it was Max Friedersdorf’s job to take Regan up to the Hill to meet the leadership. Friedersdorf reported that it was a disaster: “Regan spends an hour lecturing these guys. You do not lecture members of the United States Senate. I was aghast. It was so embarrassing. I mean, he’d sit there like he’s a CEO telling these guys how it’s going to be. You imagine telling Bob Dole how it’s going to be, or Howard Baker how it’s going to be.”
The White House was in for a bumpy ride, but when it came to the Soviets, Reagan never faltered.
“THEY KEEP DYING ON me,” Reagan complained. It seemed to be true. On March 10, he received word that Chernenko had passed away. Once again he declined to attend the funeral, sending Bush and Shultz in his stead. But after his conversation with Thatcher, he had reason to hope that the Soviet Union’s new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, was different, even as Gorbachev publicly cautioned the United States, “Do not rush to toss us on the ‘ash heap of history.’ The idea only makes Soviet people smile.”
Like Reagan, Gorbachev could be an enigma—unpredictable and innovative, while remaining steadfastly loyal to the Party. He also shared the humble roots that had made his rise to power all the more remarkable. Born on March 2, 1931, in the rural farming village of Privolnoe, the first decade of Gorbachev’s life was one of extreme hardship and oppression. When Stalin launched his Great Terror in 1936, designed to weed out opposition, both of Gorbachev’s grandfathers were arrested; miraculously, they survived and were later released, but the incident was a trauma for the family. Privolnoe also endured a brief Nazi occupation during World War II, and Gorbachev’s father was drafted to fight in the war.
Poverty and near famine were constants, even after the war, but none of that got Gorbachev down. “We were poor, practically beggars,” he said of his childhood, “but in general I felt wonderful.” That comment echoes one that Reagan made about his own childhood. Thus, two men of humble roots and optimistic dispositions were fated to change the world.
Also like Reagan, Gorbachev came from a family that was not well educated, but he craved learning and achieved the seemingly impossible goal of acceptance to Moscow State University. There he joined the Communist Party but distinguished himself as something of an outsider and independent thinker. He was occasionally outspoken—dangerously so, given the times—but managed to couch his doubts about the rigidities of the Soviet system in more philosophical arguments. His agile mind could simply not accept all Stalinist dictates without challenge, but he was far from being a troublemaker. He strove to remain his own man internally in the midst of collective thinking, and he had a great love of the socialist promise, even as he saw its flaws. Those, he believed, could be fixed. He was loyal with a twist, a key to his ability to rise steadily through the ranks and reach the top.
Reagan often spoke from the heart about the crucial role Nancy played in his success, and we can see the truth of this sentiment in her undying devotion and the way she mastered politics and garnered support on his behalf. Gorbachev’s wife did the same for him. Raisa Titarenko was a year ahead of Gorbachev at Moscow State University, studying philosophy, and Gorbachev said it was love at first sight when they met at a dance. She was cooler about their prospects, but Gorbachev persisted. “She bewitched me,” he remembered. He set out to woo her, and when she finally agreed to marry him, he was ecstatic. Their long, happy marriage was built not only on love but on the highest form of mutual respect. Like Nancy, Raisa became her husband’s most trusted advisor. In a comment Nancy might have made, Raisa once said, “We have a division of labor. He’s working and I’m looking around. Then I tell him everything I see.”
How did Gorbachev view his mandate on taking office? That wasn’t so easy to determine at the time. But later, reflecting back on the challenges he had faced, he would cite the conditions in Russia before perestroika: “A dead-end political situation, economic stagnation, a build-up of unresolved social problems, violation of the rights and dignity of citizens.” He wrote those words in a 2011 book entitled The New Russia, which was very critical of Vladimir Putin. But clearly those were the problems he saw when he took office.
In particular, the collapsing economy, which Reagan frequently poked at, was a desperate reality for the fifty-four-year-old general secretary. He believed that nothing short of an economic transformation was necessary and that it would require a political one as well. In this aim he was bucking a rigid establishment that was resistant to progress and modernization. He had to convince it that change must happen if the Soviet Union were to survive. To accomplish that, he proposed a two-part program: perestroika, a reform of the political structure and a gradual shift from a centrally controlled
economy to one that was responsive to market forces; and glasnost, greater openness to diverse ideas and more media freedom. He anticipated resistance from the top, but in travels around the Soviet Union, from Leningrad to Ukraine and through Siberia, he found a welcoming response from citizens who felt crushed by economic problems and powerless against policies that made little sense to them. “Keep it up!” they cried in Leningrad. In a town in west Siberia, every resident came out to the street to greet him. “The people were happy that the ‘chief’ had finally come to visit them—the talk was direct and unsparing,” he wrote. “They asked, ‘How is it that we live in slums or old railway carriages? There is a shortage of everything. Here, beyond the Arctic Circle, we cannot get regular flights to the capital or other cities. The Soviet Union and Europe need gas, but it turns out that no one needs us.’ ”
Andrei Grachev, a close advisor of Gorbachev, in his personal and insightful book Gorbachev’s Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War, wrote, “One of the most crucial factors paving the way for future changes in Soviet foreign policy at the end of Brezhnev’s reign was a growing feeling within Soviet society that the civilization project initiated at the time of the 1917 October Revolution had reached a stage of general exhaustion, if not fiasco.” Ironically, one reason for that demise was the government’s homage to its own version of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned Americans of in 1961.
Brezhnev had gone full steam ahead, his mind-set being that having more missiles than the United States would give the Soviets the winning hand in a war. But the military buildup was bleeding the economy. By Reagan’s second term, when the United States was spending around 5.8 percent of its GDP on the military (considered by many to be too high), the Soviets were spending 15 to 17 percent in an economy that was less than half the size of the United States’. So although some Soviets believed that the United States was losing the arms race, it hardly mattered. Furthermore, the USSR’s stampede around the globe aimed at spreading communism, such as the Afghanistan invasion (which Weinberger once referred to as “their Vietnam”), was bleeding the country’s coffers, as was the rise of insurgencies supported by the United States that had to be countered, an expensive prospect.
Insurgents around the world considered Reagan their hero. That was vividly clear in Poland with Reagan’s support of Solidarity, the independent labor movement begun in the shipyards of Gdańsk, led by Lech Wałęsa. A secret poll of six hundred Poles taken by Paris Match in 1983 found that they identified Poland’s last hope as being, in order, the pope, the Virgin Mary, and Ronald Reagan. Wałęsa came in fourth. To Reagan, the soldiers and insurgents struggling against communism on battlefields throughout the world were “freedom fighters,” a description he particularly applied to the Contras opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. “Those old verities, those truths of the heart—human freedom under God—are on the march everywhere in the world,” he said in a speech to the Irish Parliament. “All across the world today—in the shipyards of Gdansk, the hills of Nicaragua, the rice paddies of Kampuchea, the mountains of Afghanistan—the cry again is liberty.” More specifically, he declared that “We must stand by our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” He concluded, “Support for freedom fighters is self-defense.”
US support for insurgents around the globe was taking a heavy toll on the Soviet mission. Nations that could ill afford to be in the crosshairs of US might were reeling from the fight.
Many Soviet leaders and foreign policy advisors misunderstood Reagan. They were convinced that he was dedicated to the total destruction of the Soviet Union. But they weren’t listening. What Reagan was saying was that the Soviet system was orchestrating its own doom.
One of the most public faces of the old Soviet order was Andrei Gromyko, who had served as minister of foreign affairs since 1957. Whatever his intentions, he had not been able to ease the tensions with the West and was unprepared for a shift in focus by the US president. Before Gorbachev, any diplomatic advances had been strictly incremental and often subject to backtracking. According to Grachev, when Reagan gave his important speech in January 1984, calling on the Soviet Union to join the United States in a quest for peace, Gromyko never circulated the text of the speech to the Soviet leadership, including Andropov, who was ill. And it appears they had no other way of knowing about it. “However strange it may seem today, they did not read the Western press and had no source of information other than the news bulletins that had been carefully distilled and edited by TASS and Soviet Embassy cables,” he wrote. It’s notable that one of Gorbachev’s first acts in office was to reassign and replace Gromyko, in the process completely disregarding Gromyko’s recommendation for a successor in favor of Eduard Shevardnadze, a friend and loyalist who would not undercut him on the world stage. Shevardnadze lacked diplomatic experience, but he had the advantage of signaling a fresh start. US diplomats were initially surprised by his openness and even friendliness; they did not miss the cold, humorless face of Gromyko, whom they’d nicknamed “Grim Grom.”
Finally, in his fifth year in office, Reagan was ready to try something he had not done before: meet a Soviet leader face-to-face. He asked Bush to deliver a personal letter to Gorbachev at Chernenko’s funeral. In it he wrote, “You can be assured of my personal commitment to work with you and the rest of the Soviet leadership in serious negotiations. In that spirit, I would like to invite you to visit me in Washington at your earliest convenient opportunity.”
Gorbachev responded with a lengthy letter that was just short of warmly accommodating, with some subtle jabs. He did not directly confront Reagan about his “Evil Empire” rhetoric, but he did write of his desire that a mutual trust be established between them. “It is not an easy task,” he wrote, “and I would say, a delicate one. For trust is an especially sensitive thing, keenly receptive to both deeds and words. It will not be enhanced if, for example, one were to talk as if in two languages: one—for private contacts, and the other, as they say—for the audience.” In other words, he expected Reagan to tone down his public rhetoric if he wanted to make progress on a relationship. Reagan surely understood that. He was quite willing to shift gears if he were dealing with a more honest broker. Perhaps Gorbachev would be that person. Certainly, his predecessors had not been.
Gorbachev wrote that he would be pleased to plan for a personal meeting between the two of them, though he asked that they revisit the question of its location. Such a meeting, he said, should not be about signing some major agreements but a “search for mutual understanding on the basis of equality.”
No one really expected Gorbachev to come to Washington for his first summit with Reagan; it would have made him look like a supplicant. Nor did Reagan have any intention of going to Moscow. They finally compromised on a neutral site, Geneva, Switzerland, and agreed to meet for the first time in November. There was an interesting historical precedent for a Geneva summit. It was in Geneva in 1955 that Eisenhower first met Khrushchev and formed an initial connection with him. Khrushchev was not yet in power, Nikolai Bulganin was, but he so dominated the summit that everyone had seen the handwriting on the wall. It was in Geneva that Eisenhower first proposed his “Open Skies” concept—a system of mutual accountability that would reduce the threat of nuclear war. After the summit, Bulganin spoke positively about the “spirit of Geneva,” but then the complexities of rapprochement settled in. Now the two countries’ leaders were heading to Geneva once again, thirty years later.
REAGAN DIDN’T ALWAYS IMMERSE himself in the nitty-gritty details of government—“That’s why I have staff,” he’d say. He was a big-picture president who was motivated by a broad vision of expanding freedom and justice. When those principles were at stake, he could be daring when others were cautious. It could get him into hot water on occasi
on, but he rarely backed down. He had confidence in his own sense of right and wrong. “His strongest suit was in knowing what he believed and why he believed it and standing there,” Shultz once observed. “The thing that got him in trouble was his intense concern about Americans being held hostage abroad and his desire to do something about it. You have to be happy that a president feels that way, but it turned out it got him into trouble because he didn’t get a handle on it. He could let the wish be the father to the thought on some occasions.”
Iran-Contra, as it was known, grew out of this sense of calling, which filtered down to his staff. When seven US diplomats and private contractors were taken hostage in Lebanon by the Islamic paramilitary group Hezbollah, the Reagan administration struggled to find a solution. Given the United States’ firm policy that it would never negotiate with terrorists, there seemed little to be done. But when an opening appeared to negotiate with moderate Iranians to work out a deal that would secure the release of hostages without directly giving aid to the terrorists, it seemed like a roundabout solution.
Reagan, who felt emotionally devastated by his meetings with the families of the hostages, thought it was up to him to find a way out for them. The idea of selling arms to Tehran in exchange for their influence over the hostage takers seemed promising—in spite of the reservations of his advisors. “I was strongly opposed to the idea of giving arms to the Iranians, or to anybody over there, because we’d spent a lot of time and expended a huge amount of effort to persuade other countries not to sell them anything,” Caspar Weinberger said.
The proposal was that we’d sell them arms ourselves in return for their helping to get our hostages back. It was said, “We have to deal with these moderate elements in Iran.” I said, “There aren’t any moderate elements. All the moderates were killed long ago, and what you’re dealing with are a bunch of unreliable and thoroughly dishonest and corrupt arms dealers.” But the President’s idea of trying to get the hostages back overweighed almost everything—including, as he said later, all his own lifetime teachings and doctrines. But he was so unhappy about the idea of Americans being held against their will and our being unable to pull them out that he was willing to try even this, which, he said later, was a great mistake.