Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

by Maddow, Rachel

  And still, the Gipper could not seem to get the necessary traction in that first race for the Republican nomination. The sitting (though unelected, as Reagan would point out) president, Gerald Ford, defeated the onetime governor in the first six primaries that year, including the one in Reagan’s birth state of Illinois by nearly twenty points. By early spring, Nancy Reagan was trying to gentle her husband out of the race; the campaign was so broke his managers weren’t sure they could afford the jet fuel to get his yellow Hughes Airwest DC-9 charter plane (the Big Banana, the press corps was calling it) to the next contest in North Carolina. But Reagan thought he still had one more card to play, maybe the trump card, against the president who knuckled under to Congress and bailed on the last war.

  For Reagan, it wasn’t just that Ford had “bugged out” of Vietnam, or that the president was playing footsie with Congress about cutting defense spending. It was the whole issue of national security—the politically potent, unbearably humiliating idea that the United States of America appeared weak in the eyes of the world. Just look at what was happening right under our noses, Reagan told audiences in North Carolina. They might not be aware of it, but President Ford was about to give in to the veiled threats of Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos. “What are the quiet, almost secret, negotiations we’re engaged in to give away the Panama Canal?” Reagan began to ask his audiences. “The Canal Zone is not a colonial possession. It is not a long-term lease. It is sovereign United States territory every bit the same as Alaska and all the states that were carved from the Louisiana Purchase. We should end those negotiations and tell the general: We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it!”

  Oh, that was the line his audiences responded to. Reagan’s wide-eyed pollster could see his numbers rising in North Carolina and egged him on. Voters might not know a damn thing about the tangled history of Panama and the canal, or of the agreements the United States already had in place there, or of the actual workings of the canal. But they sure liked a politician who stood up and said, They’re not gonna take it away from us. It struck the same nerve as that movie that was just out, Network, with its catchphrase “I’m mad as hell!… And I’m not going to take it anymore!”

  “Wrong-headed as it is,” noted Time magazine, “Reagan’s jingoism on the canal has apparently struck a nerve among parts of the electorate, arousing post-Vietnam sentiments that the U.S. should not be pushed around in its own hemisphere by, in Reagan’s words, ‘a tinhorn dictator.’ Insists Reagan, ‘The Latin American countries have a respect for macho. I think if the United States reacts with firmness and fairness, we might not earn their love, but we would earn their respect.’ ”

  Reagan won North Carolina going away.

  There was blowback. That old nuclear tree-pruning super-hawk Barry Goldwater called out Reagan for thoroughgoing dishonesty on the Canal issue. Plenty of journalists took Reagan to task for his absolute and complete fabrication about the Canal Zone being sovereign US territory. But Reagan did not back away. Like a good spokesman armed with a memorable Madison Avenue–like tagline, he just said it louder and more often. “We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it!” And by all appearances, he really believed it, with all his heart.

  The week after his North Carolina victory Reagan bought half an hour of prime-time television—nine thirty on a Wednesday night—and he used it to goose the pretend threat level: “There is one problem which must be solved or everything else is meaningless. I am speaking of the problem of our national security. Our nation is in danger, and the danger grows greater with each passing day.” The Ford administration was asleep at the wheel while Cuba’s Communist strongman Fidel Castro continued to “export revolution” to Puerto Rico and Angola and a score of places in between, Reagan said. We had sacrificed democratic Taiwan to Communist China. Then there was the Panama giveaway. And worst of all, the Soviets were cleaning our clocks in war-making capabilities: “The Soviet Army outnumbers ours more than two to one and in Reserves four to one. They outspend us on weapons by fifty percent. Their Navy outnumbers ours in surface ships and submarines two to one. We’re outgunned in artillery three to one and their tanks outnumber ours four to one. Their strategic nuclear missiles are larger, more powerful, and more numerous than ours.”

  None of these stark and terrifying “facts” about Soviet military superiority were true, but really, that was beside the point. “The evidence mounts that we are Number Two in a world where it’s dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best.” He believed in peace “as much as any man,” he said. “But peace does not come from weakness or from retreat. It comes from the restoration of American military superiority.”

  The turnaround after North Carolina was dramatic: After going 0 for 6 at the start of the primary season, Reagan won four of the next six primaries, swept up every delegate in Texas, Alabama, and Georgia, and extended the race all the way to the convention that summer. He did grudgingly concede to Gerald Ford at that convention, but Ronald Reagan never again took his eyes off the White House. He had made himself a big pin on the political map and he understood exactly how he’d done it. When something worked for Reagan, he stuck with it. So while the new Democratic president who defeated Ford, Jimmy Carter, picked up the Ford policy and negotiated a strategically beneficial treaty with Panama, while mainstream Democrats and Republicans in the Senate joined together to work toward the two-thirds vote necessary for ratification, while right-wing archbishop William F. Buckley and America’s beloved tough guy John Wayne (yes, that John Wayne) campaigned full-on for the ratification of Carter’s treaty, Reagan demagogued with a vengeance. “The loss of the Panama Canal,” Reagan said in one of his weekly radio addresses, “would contribute to the encirclement of the US by hostile naval forces, and thereby [threaten] our ability to survive.”

  Even after John Wayne sent Reagan a private and personal note offering to show him “point by goddamn point in the treaty where you are misinforming people,” and offering fair warning that it was time for the Gipper to shut his piehole (“If you continue to make these erroneous remarks, someone will publicize your letter to prove that you are not as thorough in your reviewing of this treaty as you say or are damned obtuse when it comes to reading the English language”), Ronald Reagan doubled down. He cited a former “defense intelligence” expert, Gen. Daniel O. Graham (and put a pin in that name), who said rumors of Castro’s Communist minions at work in the fields of Panama were based on “pretty solid evidence.” He also cited a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs who “expressed the gravest concern about surrendering the canal to a leftist oriented government allied with Cuba, citing the danger of giving this advantage to a man who might permit Soviet power and influence to prevail by proxy over the canal. He said the ‘economic lifeline of the entire Western hemisphere would be jeopardized.’ ”

  In private correspondence with his good friend Bill Buckley, leading up to their nationally televised 1978 Firing Line debate on the Panama issue, Reagan professed a much more accommodating view, one that involved maybe internationalizing the operation of the Canal. But on TV he stuck to his crowd-pleasing hard line. “We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it!” was not a slogan that invited waffling. “We would become a laughingstock by surrendering to unreasonable demands, and by doing so, I think we cloak weakness in the suit of virtue” was how Reagan closed the Firing Line debate. “I think that the world would see it as, once again, Uncle Sam putting his tail between his legs and creeping away rather than face trouble.”

  Buckley was on the right side of history in his argument for the treaty. Panama’s subsequent control of the Canal did not create a threat to “the economic lifeline of the entire western hemisphere,” or any other kind of threat to the United States. It’s been a technocratic nonissue for the most part. But the intellectual father of the modern conservative movement still marveled at the rewarding political vein Reagan had tapped. “I think that Governor Re
agan put his finger on it when he said the reason this treaty is unpopular is because we’re tired of being pushed around.”

  By the time the Canal treaty made it to the Senate floor for ratification, Reagan’s histrionics had almost torpedoed the thing, aided by millions of desperate, pants-on-fire direct-mail appeals from the Conservative Caucus, and by the American Conservative Union’s “documentary” with the self-parodying title “There Is No Panama Canal … There Is an American Canal in Panama.” “This may be the most important TV program you’ve ever watched,” an ACU spokesman blared on the eve of the broadcast. What should have been a slam-dunk ratification became an act of political courage in the Senate. Reagan and his growing right-wing “truth” machine had stirred public opinion to such a frothy head that Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker was warned that a vote for the treaty would cost him any chance at the GOP presidential nomination in 1980. On the way to the Senate floor to cast his aye vote, a popular centrist Democrat from New Hampshire asked his wife to “come on and watch me lose my seat.”

  The treaty squeaked through by a single vote, but it gave Reagan and the right wing of the Republican Party an issue that kept on giving. The next two election cycles were bloodbaths for the Senate Democrats. That New Hampshire senator lost his seat; so did the treaty’s floor manager, four-term senator Frank Church, who could not overcome a last-minute conservative ad blitz funded by the National Conservative Political Action Committee: “Now that all the shouting is over, remember the Panama Canal, built with American blood and treasure. Frank Church voted to give it away.” Birch Bayh of Indiana lost to a callow, lightweight Republican named Dan Quayle, and the 1972 presidential nominee George McGovern lost his South Dakota seat in an embarrassing 58–39 landslide.

  But the Reagan assault didn’t stop at the party line. A slew of moderate Republicans who had supported the treaty were swept aside for being weak-kneed, such as Kansan James B. Pearson, who retired amid catcalls that he was not “Republican enough,” and old lions like Clifford Case and Jacob Javits, who lost ignominiously in the primary to a county supervisor from Long Island named Alfonse D’Amato. In November 1980, when Republicans gained control of the Senate for the first time since the end of 1954, this was not your father’s Republican Party. The Senate newbies were amped up, doctrinaire, undistracted by facts on the ground, and primed for a fight in which America could prove itself mighty once again. And at the head of the parade was the new president-elect, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

  • • •

  Just a few months before Ronald Reagan became America’s fortieth president, a former director of the White House Military Office wrote a book revealing the contents held within the world’s most terrifying valise, America’s “nuclear football.” They included an eight-to-ten-page list of secure and comfortable accommodations available to the president in the event of nuclear war; a black book full of cartoonish illustrations, with a constantly updated menu of retaliation possibilities (“Rare,” “Medium,” and “Well-Done”) thoughtfully highlighted in red; and a simple three-by-five-inch recipe card with the authentication codes the president needed to unleash our nation’s full lethal fury.

  Protocol regarding the nuclear football was well established by the time Reagan entered the White House. The military aide carrying the Zero Halliburton briefcase for the day was tasked to stick close to the president. The first reason was operational. Our commander in chief had to have that case at the ready at all hours, with the authentication codes easy to find, just in case. At a moment’s notice, the president could dial up anything from “firing a tactical nuclear weapon, one of them,” remembered a later nuclear-football-toting aide, “to full-bore Armageddon.” The second reason for full-time proximity was more in the realm of public relations. Photojournalists were always snapping pictures of the president, so the Soviets were certain to get constant pictorial reminders that our nuclear button was never beyond reach. Consequently, White House military aides saw a lot of the president, which perhaps bred a certain amount of familiarity, which could be why one aide, John Kline, wondered aloud if maybe Ronald Reagan was doing something out of line. Kline noticed that his boss was saluting members of the armed forces. Soldiers were supposed to salute their president; the president was not supposed to salute the soldiers. No modern president, not even old General Eisenhower, had saluted military personnel. It might even be, well, sort of, improper. Reagan seemed disappointed at this news. Kline suggested he talk to the commandant of the United States Marine Corps and get his advice, and the commandant’s advice ran something like this: You’re the goddamn president. You can salute whoever you goddamn well please. So Ronald Reagan continued saluting his soldiers, and he encouraged his own vice president and successor, George H. W. Bush, to do the same. And every president since has followed.

  Ronald Reagan loved the military; even long after he left the presidency he was still extolling the virtues of martial efficiency as compared to the federal government’s bloated, bureaucrat-driven civil service system. When he saluted the military, Reagan really meant it. He’d been a soldier himself, he’d sometimes remind people, a captain in fact, with a pretty high security clearance. Way back in 1937, Reagan had done the patriotic thing and signed up as a reserve officer in the US Army Cavalry. Because of the actor’s debilitating nearsightedness, the Reserves had deemed Reagan capable of only “limited duty.” But then, after Pearl Harbor, and just as his movie career seemed finally to be taking off, the cavalry unceremoniously plucked him out of his $5,000-a-week job as a contract player at Warner Bros. and sent him to a San Francisco supply depot loading ships bound for Australia. Lt. Reagan never complained. His country was at war and this was what he’d signed on for.

  The Army physical didn’t do much for Reagan’s self-esteem, as he described it in one of his autobiographies: “One of the doctors who was administering the test told me after checking my eyes that if they sent me overseas, I’d shoot a general. The other doctor said, ‘Yes, and you’d miss him.’ My report read: ‘Confined to the continental limits, eligible for corps area service command or War Department overhead only.’ ” He’d be good for pushing paper, in other words, and that was about it.

  As luck would have it, Reagan’s old studio boss, Jack Warner, had just been sworn into the Army as a lieutenant colonel, though unlike Lt. Reagan, Warner got to keep drawing his civilian salary. Warner’s orders were to stand up a movie-making team within the Army Air Corps. The First Motion Picture Unit, Fum-Poo in Army acronym speak, would be responsible for the Air Corps’ total celluloid output, from combat photography of bombing runs to full-blown rah-rah morale-building motion pictures to training films for pilots and their crews such as Aircraft Wood Repair: Parts 1 thru 4; Uncrating and Assembly of the Thunderbolt Airplane; Oil Fires, Their Prevention and Extinguishment; and Land and Live in the Jungle and its sequels Land and Live in the Desert and How to Survive in the Arctic.

  Warner needed men familiar with movie production. So two months into his tour at the port in San Francisco, Reagan received orders to report to the old Hal Roach Studios in Culver City for his new job as Fum-Poo’s personnel officer, where he could also moonlight as needed as an actor and narrator for the unit films. His commander in San Francisco, a career officer from Virginia Military Institute, was flabbergasted by Reagan’s new assignment. The Army had a long history of mismatching men and jobs, but Reagan’s assignment to the Army’s in-house movie studio was a move of exquisite logic and thoroughgoing good sense. “In thirty-four years, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the Army make sense,” said the colonel. “This is putting a square peg in a square hole.” Reagan might not have had great potential as a soldier, but few men were better equipped to perform the role of a soul-stirring make-believe soldier.

  Reagan could be amused by the goings-on at Fort Roach—“a completely unofficial title, and one, I think, that was not intended to be complimentary,” he wrote in his autobiography. He always got a chuckle out of seeing some vis
iting regular Army colonel saluting an actor-private who was costumed as a general. But the mission of Fum-Poo was no joke to Reagan. Even the simplest training films required mastery of both the craft of filmmaking and the technical know-how of flying and maintaining America’s expensive new weapons—an array of advanced high-altitude bombers and aerobatic fighter planes with the latest electronic control systems.

  But the real Hollywood magic was reserved, in the dark days after Pearl Harbor, for the Big Sell. At the beginning of the war, Army Air Corps chief Hap Arnold figured he needed fifty thousand pilots and maybe triple that number of crewmen. The general needed a recruiting tool, and wanted movies with heart-thumping scenes of the “full inspirational splendor of roaring engines,” he said, “of tight bomber formations gliding through the clouds,” to be distributed in target-rich environments like high schools and colleges. Pilots signed up by the droves. Reagan’s future vice president enlisted right out of high school, against his own father’s advice. But when the Air Corps fell short of the enlistment quota for its most notoriously dangerous assignment, rear gunner, Arnold turned to Jack Warner and Fum-Poo to help him invest that job with “some romantic appeal.”