Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  Reagan’s goal was victory over Communism. This is not to say he would not have agreed with parts of Kennedy’s “peace speech.” He, too, believed that the American and Russian people should communicate, and if only the Russian people could see how the West lived and how, by comparison, their own system was failing them, then they would throw off the yoke of Communism. A few months before his first summit with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan said, “I only wish that I could get in a helicopter with Gorbachev and fly over the United States. I would ask him to point to people’s homes and we would stop at some of them. Then he would see how Americans live, in clean and lovely homes, with a second car or a boat in the driveway. If I can just get through to him about the difference between our two systems, I really think we could see big changes in the Soviet Union.” He even imagined how well an American couple named Jim and Sally might get along with a Russian couple named Ivan and Anya as they sat to compare notes on their hopes and fears. Those who heard Reagan express these sentiments reported that they were embarrassed by his supposed naïveté.

  Reagan’s fundamentally optimistic faith was belied by a history of anti-Communist rhetoric so uncompromising that when he assumed office the Soviet leadership “presumed” Reagan intended a nuclear first strike against their country. While still head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov was convinced Reagan was planning a surprise attack on the USSR. “Reagan is unpredictable,” he said. “You should expect anything from him.”

  Though Reagan had begun publicly discussing his desire to reduce or even abolish nuclear weapons in early 1982, the Soviets doubted his sincerity. News reports stated that a secret national security directive authorized by Reagan now declared that changing internal Soviet policies was a primary goal of U.S. foreign policy, and this included the intent of the United States to escalate the arms race in order to place significant economic pressure on a presumably faltering Soviet economy.

  Reagan continued to speak out against the Soviet Union in ways that were bellicose and threatening. In his famous speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, Reagan declared the USSR “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Two weeks later, Reagan unveiled his proposal for a missile defense shield. While acknowledging such a technologically complex enterprise could take decades to develop, Reagan asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than avenge them?” Andropov, now promoted to general secretary, charged that Reagan’s proposal was an attempt to “disarm the Soviet Union” as a preamble to attacking or blackmailing the Soviets. SDI threw the Soviets into a near-panic. They believed that America had the technological know-how to construct such a system. Convinced that war was truly imminent, the Soviets went on high intelligence alert—for two years.

  Even Reagan’s jokes unnerved the Soviets. In August 1983, as he did a sound check while preparing to deliver his weekly Saturday radio broadcast, Reagan said, “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw the Soviet Union forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Reagan was unaware the microphone had been prematurely activated, so his remarks were broadcast live. He laughed off the incident, but the Kremlin instructed its KGB agents in Washington to be especially alert for signs of America preparing for war, such as the stockpiling of food or blood.

  The Soviets genuinely believed there were signs the United States was preparing for war. In the spring of 1983, the U.S. Pacific Fleet engaged in its largest maneuvers in the North Pacific since World War II. Admiral James D. Watkins, chief of naval operations, acknowledged later that the maneuvers had been intended to be “aggressive” in order to gain the Soviets’ “attention.” Naval warplanes violated Soviet air space and flew over Soviet military installations on the Kurile Islands, north of Japan, and the carrier Midway went silent so that it could not be tracked by the Soviets, suddenly reappearing near Soviet waters. These exercises were later followed by joint military exercises in Latin America that included mock bombing runs and naval quarantine maneuvers. All these activities further unnerved the Soviets.

  On August 31, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 departed JFK International Airport in New York City for Seoul with 269 people on board, including Georgia congressman Larry P. McDonald, a Democrat who was also the current chair of the John Birch Society. McDonald was traveling to Korea to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the U.S.–South Korean mutual defense treaty. After a short refueling stop in Anchorage, Alaska, Flight 007 continued on to Seoul but, for reasons unknown, quickly strayed off course. Ninety minutes after takeoff from Anchorage, Flight 007 was more than 200 miles off course and headed for Kamchatka Peninsula, a heavily defended Soviet military installation off-limits to all civilian aviation. There was no sense that the flight crew knew anything was wrong; they continued to make routine position and weather reports.

  The Soviets scrambled fighter planes to intercept and identify the aircraft, which was now close to Sakhalin Island, another heavily fortified Soviet installation. The Soviet planes tracked Flight 007 for twenty minutes, yet somehow the KAL crew was oblivious and the Soviet pilots were unable to confirm the airliner’s civilian status. As Flight 007 neared the extensive Soviet military complex at Vladivostok, the pilot of the Soviet SU-15 was ordered to fire. Two missiles struck the airliner, and the Soviet pilot reported back to ground control, “The target is destroyed.”

  Among the passengers on board Flight 007 were sixty-three Americans. There were also twenty-three children under the age of twelve on board. While shrapnel from the missile strike likely killed some passengers, the rest endured a terrifying twelve-minute descent as the plane spiraled down into the chilly Pacific, the suddenly depressurized cabin without oxygen and frightfully cold.

  American intelligence concluded rather quickly that the Soviets had mistaken Flight 007 for an American intelligence-gathering plane that had been in roughly the same vicinity. United States intelligence had no “specific evidence showing that the Soviets had knowingly shot down an airliner.” The Soviets, however, refused to acknowledge they had made a terrible error, and so it appeared the murder of the 269 KAL passengers had been deliberate—a shaky premise that some in the Reagan administration were quick to exploit. Secretary of State George Schultz gave the first official administration response, “We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.”

  A war scare quickly developed, one that French President François Mitterrand warned “was comparable in seriousness to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.” There were conservatives within the White House that demanded “action—military action.” At the least, Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger thought disarmament talks should be broken off and all equipment sales to the Soviet Union canceled. CIA Director William Casey suggested massive aid to the Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet occupation of their country. Worried that Reagan’s reputation for being trigger-happy might be true, congressional leaders contacted the White House, urging restraint.

  Reagan, however, had no intention of escalating the crisis into war. Because of the approaching Labor Day holiday, Reagan was at his ranch in California, and he was inclined to stay there. He did not, as Kennedy had done during the Cuban missile crisis, convene a team of advisors for lengthy deliberations. Instinctively, he believed the United States would gain the maximum advantage by casting the tragedy not as an issue between the United States and the Soviet Union, but between the Soviet Union and the world.

  When Reagan was convinced to return to Washington and address the nation and the world on September 5, he drafted his remarks himself and said, “From every corner of the globe the word is defiance in the face of this unspeakable act and defiance of the system which excuses it and tries to cover it up.” Later, he explained to aides, “It is the Soviet Union against the world, and we intend to keep it that way.” The most immediate world response to the shooting down of Flight 007 was a global boycott by commercial airlines of flights in
to the Soviet Union, which lasted two weeks.

  Conservatives who thought Reagan would produce military victory over the Soviets were dumbfounded. This was it? The sum total of the American response while being led by one of the most renowned anti-Communists would be words? Conservative activist Richard Viguerie accused Reagan of being “Teddy Roosevelt in reverse”—speaking loudly and carrying a very small stick. One dismayed member of the National Security Council, John Lenczowski, said that Reagan’s refusal to respond militarily was America’s worst foreign policy failure since 1933, when Roosevelt formally recognized the USSR. And Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, would later lament, “Ronald Reagan resembles Jimmy Carter more than anyone conceived possible.”

  Much as during the earlier Berlin and Cuba crises of Kennedy’s administration, American opinion initially seemed to favor a strong military response. But Reagan was unmoved. He knew, given his long record of opposition to Communism, that he did not need to prove he could be tough on the Russians. Where Kennedy had been worried the Soviets were testing his supposed inexperience, Reagan understood the Soviets in this instance were responding in fear.

  After NATO military exercises in the fall had particularly distressed the Soviets, Reagan had decided to ratchet down his rhetoric, saying he would no longer refer to the Soviets as “the focus of evil.” And just prior to the shoot down of KAL 007, he had already begun to initiate low-level contacts with the Soviet government and approve new contracts to sell the Soviets equipment to construct oil and gas pipelines. Those efforts continued. His vision was never to defeat the Soviets in a war, but to put continuous pressure on the Soviet system and be patient until that system collapsed in on itself.

  Reagan may have felt it instinctively, but he could not have known that the Soviet Union was already taking steps to disengage from the Cold War. Already bogged down in a war in Afghanistan that was sapping Soviet morale as surely as the Vietnam War had in the United States, the Soviets made a far-reaching decision in 1981 not to intervene in Poland to put down the dissent being fomented by Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade union and also by the first Polish Roman Catholic pope, John Paul II. Andropov (the de facto Soviet leader given Brezhnev’s poor health at the time) had concluded that with Soviet troops already in Afghanistan, sending troops to Poland would have left the USSR vulnerable to attack by the West. This was the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine—the USSR would no longer use force to protect its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis said, “Had these conclusions become known at the time, the unraveling of Soviet authority that took place in 1989 might well have occurred eight years earlier.”

  Reagan, meanwhile, was waiting for a suitable negotiating partner to take and maintain leadership of the Soviet Union. Brezhnev died in November 1982, Andropov died in February 1984, and Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, died in March 1985. “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians if they keep dying on me?” Reagan said. And then came Mikhail Gorbachev as the new Soviet general secretary.

  At fifty-four, Gorbachev was the youngest Soviet leader since Stalin and the first university-educated Soviet leader since Lenin. Unlike his predecessors, he had traveled widely outside the Soviet Union and was aware that people in the West “were better off than in our country.” He told his wife, Raisa, “We can’t go on living like this.” Reagan quickly realized that Gorbachev was unlike any other Soviet leader. Gorbachev, Reagan said, had “warmth in his face and style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most other senior Soviet leaders I’d met until then.”

  Reagan and Gorbachev held four summits. The first in Geneva in 1985 was primarily a chance for the two leaders to get to know each other. Just as Gorbachev had impressed Reagan as a different type of Soviet leader, Reagan disarmed Gorbachev with his sincerity and charm. Gorbachev concluded that Andropov had been wrong; Reagan had no intention of a secret strike against the Soviet Union. Shortly after the Geneva summit, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster occurred, which further convinced Gorbachev of the need for the Soviet Union to address “the sickness of our system.”

  The two men met next in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1987, and it was here that it became apparent that the Cold War was in its final phase. Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s offer to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe—the missiles’ presence had been a key driver of the “Nuclear Freeze” movement that led millions to protest the arms race in Europe and America—and also suggested an additional 50 percent reduction in all American and Soviet strategic weapons if the United States would abandon research and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as “Star Wars.” Reagan had always seen SDI not merely as a weapon in the Cold War but as security against any rogue state or terrorists who might think to launch a nuclear missile. He did not want to give it up. He offered instead to share SDI research with the Soviets and suggested both sides eliminate all intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  Gorbachev refused to budge on his opposition to SDI, and both men left Reykjavik angry, though they each understood the significance of what they had discussed. Both leaders shared an interest in eliminating nuclear weapons. Reagan and Gorbachev never reached a formal agreement to abolish nuclear weapons, nor did SDI ever come close to being deployed as Reagan imagined it, but at their third summit in Washington, DC, in 1987, they did sign a treaty dismantling all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

  The knowledge that he had nothing to fear militarily from the United States allowed Gorbachev to pursue the reforms he labeled perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“openness”). In June 1987, nearly twenty-four years to the day after Kennedy had stood in the same spot and declared “Ich bin ein Berliner,” Reagan traveled to Berlin and stood near the Berlin Wall to declare, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The reaction from Moscow was muted. The wall came down two years later—torn down by German citizens, not the Soviets.

  In the meantime, Gorbachev had in 1988 essentially dissolved the Warsaw Pact and freed Eastern Europe from Soviet domination when he announced the USSR would unilaterally cut its ground forces by half. In a speech to the UN General Assembly, Gorbachev said, “force and the threat of force cannot be and should not be an instrument of foreign policy. . . . Freedom of choice is . . . a universal principle, and it should know no exceptions.” In 1991, Gorbachev, with help from Russian president Boris Yeltsin, thwarted a coup by Communist hard-liners who hoped to undo his many reforms and return to the old Cold War status quo. Instead, by the end of that year, Gorbachev had resigned from power and the twelve former Soviet republics became independent post-Soviet states.

  It all has led to the irresolvable debate over just how much credit Reagan deserves for having “won” the Cold War. Had it been, as John Lewis Gaddis noted, that Reagan had always been “pushing against an open door,” and the Soviet Union would have collapsed sooner or later? Former president Gerald Ford bristled at the suggestion that bringing down Soviet Communism had been a one-man job. “I feel very strongly that our country’s policies, starting with Harry Truman and those who followed him—Democratic and Republican presidents and Democratic and Republican Congresses—brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.” There were many other key players as well—Lech Walesa, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, the Afghan rebels, and no one more so than Gorbachev himself. Indeed, it cannot be emphasized enough that Kennedy and Reagan were each fortunate that their Soviet counterparts, Khrushchev and Gorbachev, were rational men who also feared the consequences of nuclear war.

  However, as biographer Richard Reeves noted, Reagan should get his due. Few people could have envisioned a peaceful end to the Cold War and an end to Communism, but Reagan “knew that it was going to happen. No small thing.” Gaddis noted that had Reagan died during the 1981 assassination attempt, not only would the Reagan pres
idency have been “a historical footnote,” but it is unlikely his successor, George H. W. Bush, would have mounted “an American challenge to the Cold War status quo. Bush, like most foreign policy experts of his generation, saw that conflict as a permanent feature of the international landscape. Reagan . . . definitely did not.” Upon Reagan’s death in 2004, The Economist opined that admirers should not claim that Reagan caused the collapse of Communism, because “sooner or later” the Soviet Union was destined to fail, but Reagan’s actions hastened the fall with a result of “maybe 20 years less of Marxist-Leninist ideological arrogance, and of the cold war’s dangers.”

  But which of Reagan’s actions were the ones responsible for accelerating the collapse of the Soviet Union? Defense analyst John Arquilla of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School has persuasively argued that Reagan’s great contribution was not bankrupting the Soviet Union through his massive defense buildup, but rather it was his success in personal diplomacy. The Soviet economy was in less dire straits than Reagan might have believed, Arquilla said, but the trusting relationship formed between Reagan and Gorbachev allowed Gorbachev to pursue the reforms that resulted in a new world order. “Indeed,” Arquilla wrote, “absent the ‘Reagan touch,’ the cold war would surely have dragged on.”

  That the Cold War continued as long as it did was, in some ways, a victory for humanity. As Gaddis has noted, another name for the Cold War might be “the long peace”—except that deaths from conflicts at least peripherally associated with the Cold War exceeded five million. But the casualties could have been much worse, particularly in October 1962 or September 1983, when Kennedy and Reagan each faced a moment when a wrong decision by either man might have meant the deaths of hundreds of millions of people and a world unimaginably changed for the worse. They had multiple options. They chose peace. Whatever else they accomplished, they had no greater legacy.