Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  “Ronald Reagan was just livid,” Bud McFarlane recalls. “He was normally an emotionally controlled man, but not this time. He was enraged.” The next morning, he assembled his top advisers in the Oval Office to discuss the American response. “Get Begin on the phone,” he demanded before anyone had a chance to weigh in. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he bristled, “I cannot condone, and I am outraged by, your use of force against these defenseless people.” Begin started to come back to him, but Reagan cut him off. “You’re not hearing me, Mr. Prime Minister.” The conversation went back and forth in the same manner, while Begin grew frustrated with the exchange. “Mr. President,” he said, “you are not hearing my argument.” “No, I am not—and I don’t intend to,” Reagan said. “And if you don’t stop right away, we’re going to review our whole relationship with you.” That took Begin’s defenses down a notch, inasmuch as it was code—a code he understood—to mean the severing of key U.S. support, including military assistance.

  The president strongly considered sending the Marines into Lebanon to guard against further hostilities. “If we show ourselves unable to respond to the situation, what can the Middle East parties expect of us in the Arab-Israeli peace process?” he argued. Shultz agreed. But Weinberger and the Pentagon were dubious. “Israel has gotten itself in a swamp, and we should leave it at that,” Weinberger concluded. Reagan listened to advice from both his secretaries and decided to “go for broke.” He intended to demand publicly that the Israelis and PLO withdraw from Beirut, at which point he would commit Americans to a multinational force (MNF) to protect the Lebanese and allow them to reassert their authority. To do less would dash any hopes for a peace initiative. While Shultz organized official support for the plan, Weinberger threw a monkey wrench into the process: the Defense Department, he said, would not commit American troops to an MNF until all foreign forces left Lebanon. That meant not only the Israelis and Palestinians but the Syrians and Iranians as well. It was an agreement Shultz knew was impossible to pull together. It didn’t matter. Over Weinberger’s objections, the president was determined that a U.S. Marine presence be part of any multinational force in Beirut, and he ordered a detachment to be deployed to Lebanon.

  It was a bold decision whose consequences would reverberate far beyond the Middle East.

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  A presidency that had begun on such a note of optimism was becoming mired in foreign policy in a time of global turmoil. The Middle East posed increasingly vexing challenges; the State Department endeavored to avert a war between Argentina and Great Britain over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands; officials monitored guerrilla warfare in El Salvador and Guatemala, while supporting their brutal governments and underwriting covert paramilitary activities dedicated to the forcible overthrow of the Nicaraguan government. Meanwhile, troubles at home proved difficult to navigate as well.

  By the summer of 1982, the American economy was in a free fall. More people were out of work than at any time since the Depression. “The nation,” as Tip O’Neill needlessly pointed out to Ronald Reagan, was “in a fiscal mess.” Unemployment had risen to an all-time high of 10.8 percent, businesses and factories were closing, and the deficit was ballooning. There was as yet no federal budget for 1983. More than a dozen budgets submitted by the administration had been introduced and rejected by the House, at an impasse over income tax cuts and defense spending. Finally, in August, Congress ignored the administration’s latest budget proposals and wrote one of its own. As a sop to the president, the bill preserved the 10 percent personal income tax cut in exchange for new and higher taxes on cigarettes, telephone calls, medical expenses, investment income, and sundry business gains. “I had to swallow hard to agree to any revenue increase,” Reagan admitted to a national television audience. Defense spending took a substantial hit, as did the food-stamp program and pensions for retired federal employees. On August 19, when Congress approved the budget, Reagan tried his best to put a good face on it, spinning the increases as tax reform. But no one was fooled. Human Events, Reagan’s conservative bible, reviled it as “the largest tax increase in history.”

  The president’s confidence rating dropped precipitously from 56 percent to 39 percent. Less than half the country approved of the job he was doing in the White House. More eye-opening perhaps was a private poll showing his “rapid decline of support among blue-collar families.” The honeymoon was over.

  On August 20, 1982, as Ronald Reagan ordered a battalion of eight hundred Marines to land in Beirut and then left on a sixteen-day vacation to his ranch, he was handed a memo prepared by the White House director of the Office of Planning and Evaluation. “The President’s image as a leader has declined considerably,” it said. “There is little reason to hope that economic conditions will improve significantly in the near future. . . . If the 1982 midterm elections were held on June 1 instead of November 2, Republicans would lose 44 House seats, 5 Senate seats, and 10 governorships.” The prognosis was bleak: “For these and many other reasons, it appears to many that the Reagan Administration may have commenced its demise.”

  A window closed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  WAR AND PEACE

  “In foreign relations, as in all other relations, a policy has been formed only when commitments and power have been brought into balance.”

  —WALTER LIPPMANN, 1943

  Mr. President . . .” Mike Deaver piped up during a daily briefing in the Cabinet Room in mid-January 1982. “The headlines are indicating you don’t have a foreign policy.” A mortified silence fell over the room. It was one thing to raise such an inquiry in private, and another to air it in a room packed with key administration officials and a gallery full of backbenchers. Especially considering the presence of the newly installed national security chief, Bill Clark, attending his first briefing along with his staff.

  Ronald Reagan had enlisted “the Judge,” his old Sacramento sidekick, to take up the position following the departure of Dick Allen. The appointment had not gotten off to an auspicious start. Other than serving as Al Haig’s principal deputy, Clark had little foreign policy experience. This was exposed during his confirmation hearings, when he had been unable to define either “détente” or “Third World,” nor could he name the prime ministers of Zimbabwe or South Africa. Clark drew harsh critiques from veteran diplomats. Haig echoed some interrogators in the Senate when he said of Clark, “He doesn’t know his ass from third base.”

  What Clark knew, however, was how to serve Ronald Reagan’s best interests. He was familiar with the president’s shortcomings and quite adept at playing to his strengths. From experience, Clark was an expert when it came to distilling pages of bureaucratese to the few essential paragraphs that allowed the president to grasp a dense policy. And nowhere was this more useful than with national security.

  It pained Clark and his staff to hear Deaver challenge his boss’s record. The president, especially, was taken aback. He stood there, tight-lipped, unsure how to respond. Deaver had overstepped. It wasn’t appropriate to put the President of the United States on the spot. Bud McFarlane, who had joined Clark’s office from a chain of distinguished posts in international affairs, couldn’t contain himself. Breaking the uncomfortable silence, he said, “Mr. President, of course you have a foreign policy.” All heads swiveled to get a better look at the newcomer, and a backbencher at that, who had the nerve to speak out. “It is founded upon sufficient strength to deter any attack on our country and the means to prevail if we get into a war. Secondly, the renewal of allied strength and collective security that really gives meaning to Article 5 of the NATO treaty.* Thirdly, a commitment to advancing the cause of peace in the Middle East. Fourthly, a policy that encourages private investment and can stimulate growth in Third World countries to advance a more stable world. And, lastly, a defense against terrorism, which is on the rise.”

  An interval elapsed when everyone held their collect
ive breath. “I’ll be damned,” Deaver finally chimed in, “I think we just got a foreign policy.”

  It wasn’t as simple as that, and it wasn’t conducted in a way that compartmentalized initiatives as cleanly as McFarlane had described them. But following a relatively sleepy 1982 in which fewer than a dozen National Security Decision Directives were published, 1983 would demand a fully articulated foreign policy ready to kick into gear as crises across the globe tested Ronald Reagan’s ability to meet them.

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  The midterm election loss hadn’t been as bad as the Office of Planning and Evaluation predicted. Still, the Republican Party took a drubbing, losing twenty-six seats in the House of Representatives, while eking out a 54 to 46 margin in the Senate. Also of concern, as the New York Times reported, was that “Republicans sought to disassociate themselves from President Reagan’s record, especially on budget reductions in social programs.”

  Reaganomics was certainly on the ropes, and that dilemma was infecting the administration at the outset of the third year. “What we are witnessing this January, is not the midpoint in the Reagan presidency, but its phase-out,” David Broder observed in his January 12 Washington Post column. “‘Reaganism,’ it is becoming increasingly clear, was a one-year phenomenon, lasting from his nomination in the summer of 1980 to the passage of his first budget and tax bills in the summer of 1981. What has been occurring ever since is an accelerating retreat from Reaganism, a process in which he is more spectator than leader.” Three days earlier, the New York Times published an editorial over the title “The Failing Presidency,” declaring “Mr. Reagan’s loss of authority only halfway through his term should alarm all Americans.”

  Not all. He still had a grip on his fundamentalist Christian base and sought to tighten it in light of an overall 35 percent approval rating. Heading to Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 1983, he decided to make his case in an address to the National Association of Evangelicals. Most of his remarks were directed at the evangelicals’ core issues: the evils of abortion, the transgressions of those who provide birth control information to teenage girls without parental permission, and the redemptive power of prayer. But buried in the fiery text was an appeal for the salvation of the Soviet Union couched in terms the audience embraced. “There is sin and evil in the world,” he began, his voice rising in preacherly indignation. “And we are enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” Some reporters covering the speech wondered where the president was going. “Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all those who live in totalitarian darkness—pray that they will discover the job of knowing God.” He was clearly referring to the Soviet Union, which he called “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Reagan then made a bid for the audience to scrutinize nuclear freeze proposals, considering the rejection of them as “the temptation of pride,” while insisting that the arms race was anything but “a giant misunderstanding.” It was “the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” The crowd jumped to its feet, cheering the president, as a band fanned passions by playing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It was a startling spectacle that harkened to the fiery Chautauquas delivered by William Jennings Bryan that had electrified the young Ronald Reagan in Dixon. The Washington Post echoed a preponderance of major media by saying, “No other presidential speech has ever so flagrantly allied the government with religion.”

  There was cause for concern. For the first time in history, the President of the United States was tailoring his initiatives to the interests of a specific religious audience. But there was also a personal moral belief that Ronald Reagan was grappling with. He was haunted by the concept of a nuclear apocalypse brought on by human error and determined to find an antidote to the madness. He had touched on this concern a month earlier, on February 11, 1983, during a lunch with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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  That day, a powerful snowstorm had shut down Washington, forcing the chiefs to be transported over from the Pentagon in a tracked vehicle like sardines in a can. Most of the agenda concerned the defense budget and the MX missile program, which had suffered a stinging defeat in Congress. The U.S. weapons system was in disarray, and the chiefs were consumed with updating the military foundation of U.S. deterrence. As Bud McFarlane, the lunch meeting’s chairman, recalls, “It was pretty clear that the Soviets had not only gone past us where land-based ICBMs were concerned, but that our side of things had become vulnerable. Our missiles were stationary targets, and the Soviet Union had introduced mobile missiles.” America desperately needed the same, which is why the Pentagon had proposed a program called Big Bird—the mobile flying-around of ICBMs—but Congress wasn’t buying the idea. The joint chiefs needed an alternative plan.

  McFarlane and his colleague John Poindexter, the military assistant to Bill Clark, had been exploring another option. Rather than continuing to press the offensive program, they’d put a small group together to examine the state of research and technology available for a potential defensive program.

  A defensive program. It was unheard-of—a radical approach. McFarlane had primed the pump by calling friends in the aerospace industry at TRW, Hughes, Lockheed, and Boeing, and asking them a number of hypothetical questions: “What if we were to build a bubble over the United States, a shield that couldn’t be penetrated—an antiballistic missile system—deployed either in space or on the ground? Perhaps a series of missile systems that would shoot down an incoming missile. Is any of this feasible? Is the state of the art good enough?” They’d actually entertained this discussion before, in the 1960s, when Robert McNamara was the secretary of defense. At the time, a couple of ideas called Sentinel and Safeguard were floated, and limited deployment was made. But the consensus of the aerospace community was that it wouldn’t work. However, in the interim the technology had changed—and so had their minds.

  John Foster, who had been the undersecretary of defense for research, development, and engineering during the Johnson and Nixon administrations and was currently a physicist at TRW, told McFarlane that in the 1960s, when the subject came up, available technology could not support such a concept. “Our computers weren’t good enough to calculate whether a ground-based intercept force could be launched in time to hit six thousand incoming Soviet warheads,” Foster explained. “Also the propellants in our defending missiles weren’t good enough, and our guidance systems weren’t good enough. In the meantime, however, we’ve made enormous gains in all those areas, so while I’m not telling you we can build it today, investments will enable you to do it soon.”

  McFarlane knew that “investments” and “soon” were valuable assets. A certain amount of psychology was involved in nuclear strategy; it was part science and part politics. If the United States, with its superior technology, committed to such a defensive program, it would have a psychological effect on the Soviet Union. And if the Soviet military saw the Pentagon investing $26 billion in defensive systems, the enemy might conclude that eventually American physicists were going to figure something out. American rhetoric could claim to have the technology ready to launch, even though it was ten to fifteen years off, if it worked. But the point was to let the Soviet minister of defense know his country was being exposed as backward. “It was Samuelson economics 101,” McFarlane says. “Competitive advantage. You stress what you do best.” John Foster advised him to play that for all it was worth. “If you do,” he said, “the Soviets are going to want to stop us, and they’ll come our way on arms control.”

  Still, a defensive strategy was a 180-degree change. McFarlane knew it would be a hard sell where the joint chiefs were concerned. “They didn’t like all the money that went into it,” says Richard Perle. “The Air Force saw it as meaning fewer fighter planes. To the Navy, it meant fewer ships, to the Army fewer tanks.” But John Poindexter had laid important groundwork. His ace in the hole was James D. Watkins, the chief of naval operat
ions. “I knew Jim was a devout Roman Catholic,” Poindexter says, “and had moral objections to mutual assured destruction.” To him, that strategy was irrational. Utter madness! One day, a poor silo guard in Siberia might drop a wrench down a pipe and accidentally launch a missile attack. Watkins came to the February 11 lunch fully on board and willing to rally his fellow chiefs.

  McFarlane and Poindexter had primed the president. “He was all over it,” McFarlane recalls. “I knew that Reagan was scripturally grounded and tended to orient himself in Revelations and the possibility of Armageddon.” He was already on record warning a California legislator, “Everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.” And, as late as 1980, in a television interview, he said, “We may be the generation that sees Armageddon.” As president, Armageddon appeared to him as a catastrophic nuclear explosion sufficient enough to destroy humankind.

  As a primer, Reagan had met with an organization called High Frontier, underwritten by the Heritage Foundation and headed by General Daniel Graham, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Its purpose was to promote research for a space-based missile defense, but a working platform hadn’t yet been developed. Several core members of the Kitchen Cabinet supported the strategy and urged the president to give it high priority. A White House working group made up of Ed Meese, Bill Clark, and Marty Anderson also met regularly to discuss the prospect of missile defense. Reagan was intrigued but cautious. So far there was nothing to support the scheme other than moral goodwill and wishful thinking. He was not convinced it was either technically feasible or affordable. Even so, General Graham’s five-page article about High Frontier in the January 1983 edition of Human Events had rekindled the president’s interest.