by Bob Spitz
McFarlane and Poindexter bet that Reagan would get behind a defensive strategy. They gave him talking points and briefed him on their conversations with Jim Watkins, who would be prepared to back him and intercede with the joint chiefs. “And we think you should invite the chiefs to comment on the plausibility of beginning work on a very robust R&D program to move toward a defensive strategy.”
At the appropriate time near the end of a two-hour lunch, Ronald Reagan triggered the discussion, and Watkins rose to his cue. “Mr. President,” he said, “it is just immoral for us to believe we can somehow deter a conflict. We need to defend against an attack. We have an obligation. You have an obligation, as commander in chief, to protect the American people. As a moral proposition, wouldn’t it be better to defend people rather than to avenge them?”
The idea took the chiefs completely by surprise. There were plenty of head-shakes at the conference table, most vociferously from Jack Vessey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He leaned forward, looking down the row of his colleagues—Charles Gabriel from the Air Force, P. X. Kelley for the Marines—hoping that somebody would pipe up and call the bluff. No one, however, raised so much as a peep. “They were too polite—and shocked,” McFarlane says. “They knew they were on eggshells.”
“Well, Jim, I think you may be on to something here,” the president said.
Vessey wasn’t about to let this go unchallenged. “We’ve done this before, Mr. President, and we found that it wasn’t a plausible scenario,” he said.
“Well, I’m looking at what we’ve done the last two years, and it sure doesn’t seem like we’re getting anywhere,” Reagan countered. “So I really wish you would all put your hearts into this. I think it’s the right way to go.”
Bill Clark had also rehearsed a line, which he delivered with unequivocal precision. “So, Mr. President, you’d like the chiefs to study this and come back with a recommendation to you for whether this might be a sound way to restore deterrence?”
“Absolutely!” Reagan responded. “Let’s go!”
Not five minutes after Clark got back to his office, Jack Vessey rang him on the phone. “Bill, is he serious?”
“Yes, Jack,” Clark responded, “he sure is.”
“So you really want us to study converting to a defensive program from an offensive? You’re sure?”
“Yes! And the sooner the better, Jack. You may have six weeks, but you don’t have any longer than that.”
Actually, less. The president was so excited about the prospect of this reorientation that he wanted to clue in the American public as soon as possible, in a nationally televised address laying out the whole revolutionary scenario. He called it MX Plus and began formulating his remarks: “We are going to embark on a program of research to come up with a defensive weapon that could make nuclear weapons obsolete.” Well . . . that was getting a little ahead of things. “He kept talking about a global shield, which would prevent anything from coming through it,” recalls John Poindexter. “That was, frankly, over the top, and in that respect he was a dreamer.”
Still, Reagan persisted. The speech would be forthcoming. He sketched out an address on a yellow pad. “Let me share with you a vision of the future, which offers hope,” he began. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
No one was told about the contents of the speech. It was written and revised entirely in secret. Neither the State Department nor the Pentagon was consulted or forewarned. “We kept everyone, even the joint chiefs, in the dark,” recalls John Poindexter. The bureaucrats would stop it dead in its tracks. It was also essential to keep news of the speech from leaking to the press, where it was sure to ignite a firestorm of criticism before the president went on TV.
Cap Weinberger and Richard Perle were at a NATO conference in the Algarve in Portugal when they got wind of the defense speech. “It was the first we’d heard of it,” Perle recalls. “We were horrified. It would have been devastating for Cap in his relationships with all these defense ministers.” They wanted time to consult with the allies. Besides, the Defense Department had no faith in the strategy. Perle says, “We thought the whole idea was crazy.” They got on the phone immediately, pleading for a postponement of the speech, or at least a delay in the announcement.
George Shultz agreed. The day after the joint chiefs lunch, Nancy Reagan invited Shultz and his wife to an informal dinner at the White House residence. The Reagans had planned to spend a cozy weekend at the Camp David retreat, but the snowstorm had intensified overnight, closing roads in and out of Washington, making even helicopter transit impossible. Over cocktails, the president regaled Shultz with the vision: “How much better it would be, safer, more humane, if we could defend ourselves against nuclear weapons.” Shultz thought it could “present huge, perhaps insuperable, problems.” It was a nice thought, but basically a pipe dream. “We don’t have the technology to say this,” he insisted. “The initiative will not be seen as a peaceful gesture. It will be seen as destabilizing.” Subsequently, aides advised him that “a speech like this by the president will unilaterally destroy the foundation of the Western alliance.”
It was unusual for Shultz and Weinberger to be on the same side of the argument. In addition to their personal animosity, there was a natural institutional rivalry between State and Defense. In this case, however, they both urged the president to reconsider. But he wasn’t to be swayed. Besides, he argued, the television time had already been reserved. “Write the speech right here,” Reagan instructed Bud McFarlane. “And don’t bureaucratize it; otherwise it will be defeated before it ever gets out of the crib.” He wanted to make sure, as the New York Times reported, that “strategic experts within the administration were not given an opportunity to review the proposal before he made his speech.”
McFarlane knew he needed more substance and support for the president than inspirational rhetoric. “We’ve got to get some science guys, credible folk, in the audience at the White House,” he directed his staff. “Have them sitting there, watching the TV when the president speaks so they can react and respond to the predictable criticism.” As instructed, they rounded up the usual suspects, including Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, who’d been hustling Ronald Reagan about his own defensive program—Excalibur—whose satellites, he claimed, would revolve around the Earth and direct X-rays and laser beams toward any missile coming from the Soviet Union. This had been part of an ongoing discussion since 1967, when Governor Ronald Reagan attended a briefing on Teller’s research for nuclear explosives at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Teller’s scheme was purely theoretical—there wasn’t any support for it from the scientific community—but he wanted $300 million to build a prototype, and the president was all ears. To some, it sounded all too reminiscent of the Inertia Projector, a gizmo that shot rockets out of the air employed by Secret Agent Brass Bancroft, one of Reagan’s favorite movie roles, in the 1940 movie Murder in the Air.
The president’s televised speech, delivered as planned on March 23, 1983, drew parallels to a different movie. Ted Kennedy immediately ridiculed it as “a reckless ‘Star Wars’ scheme.” Star Wars! The allusion was irresistible to critics, who persisted in using it, implying that the idea of a missile shield was nothing more than science-fiction fantasy. Reagan hated the Star Wars nickname, preferring Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, but it stuck. Tip O’Neill, barely able to contain his mockery, reached back even further in the science-fiction pantheon, deriding the president’s “Buck Rogers style.”
No one was more critical of President Reagan’s speech than the Soviet Union, which denounced it as a clear violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed by Richard Nixon in 1972. Article V, S
ection 1 of that document was specific: “Each party undertakes not to develop, test, or deploy ABM systems.” The Russians saw it as “cosmic war technology that can give the other side a first-strike capability.” The Kremlin’s anxious response was indicative of the shifting sands of the Soviet economy. In the past, the logic of the arms-control establishment’s opposition to ballistic missile defense was: We build a defense, the Soviets will simply build a greater offense. But the Soviets did not have that capacity anymore. Their economy was falling apart, and they were staggering under a military budget that was possibly as much as 40 percent of their GDP. And General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, an intractable militarist, had died in November 1982, replaced by Yuri Andropov, the former chairman of the KGB, who liked western music and drank whiskey, not vodka. The Soviet Union worried that its internal problems, along with Reagan’s missile defense program, were destabilizing the balance of power.
It was logical, not only to the Russians but also to many pundits, that the shift in U.S. strategy could be interpreted as a hostile act—the development of new, sophisticated weaponry meant to escalate the arms race and achieve strategic superiority. This was expressed to the president during an Oval Office interview with a pool of White House correspondents on March 29, 1983, when missile defense dominated the conversation. Ronald Reagan answered their queries with a stunning revelation. The president, he said, “could offer to give that same defensive weapon to [the Soviets] to prove that there was no longer any need for keeping their missiles.” He would give the Soviets the missile defense system. Had they heard him correctly? They had, he assured them. And if the two sides had the same system, he might conceivably tell the Russians, “I am willing to do away with all my missiles. You do away with all of yours.”
It was a loopy-sounding plan to anyone who had followed three decades of the Cold War. A missile shield . . . sharing it with the Soviet Union . . . No less an authority than George Shultz feared the president had fallen prey to a serious weakness: his tendency to accept “uncritically—even wishfully—advice that was sometimes amateurish and even irresponsible.” Other foreign policy priorities were more grounded in reality, for better or for worse.
The peacekeeping detachment of twelve hundred U.S. Marines in Southern Lebanon was welcomed by no one—neither the thirty thousand Israeli soldiers nor the fifteen thousand Syrian troops in the country, and certainly not the Palestinian fighters who refused to withdraw from the country.
Ronald Reagan grew frustrated at the lack of progress. He’d accepted Al Haig’s view that the United States could cultivate a “strategic consensus” in war-torn Lebanon through diplomatic efforts with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. But that tactic proved futile, and the Syrians had further complicated matters thanks to a supply of surface-to-air missiles from the Soviet Union, and to their arming of their Shiite proxy force, Hezbollah. Syria agreed to leave Lebanon only after Israel withdrew, and Israel wasn’t budging until the Syrians were gone. It was a classic standoff. Reagan had insisted that the United States was committed to “a Lebanese government of national unity, security for Israel’s northern border and expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon,” but as the months wore on, those goals seemed increasingly remote.
Violence began to pick up, sporadically at first. Five Marines were wounded on March 16, 1983, when a grenade was tossed at them from a second-story window. Then, on April 18, a delivery van commandeered by the Islamic Jihad Organization and packed with two thousand pounds of TNT drove up to the front door of the American embassy in the Beirut suburbs and detonated in a suicide attack that took the lives of sixty-three members of the diplomatic staff, seventeen of them Americans. Caspar Weinberger argued for a withdrawal of the Marines, or at least their removal to ships offshore, but George Shultz won the argument for maintaining their presence. “It was intended as a show of moral support, but nothing more,” says Bud McFarlane. All efforts went toward keeping the peace and overseeing a program called Fire and Maneuver, essentially the training of a Lebanese Armed Forces unit. For the time being, the Marines were bivouacked at the Beirut airport, right out in the open. They needed a more clearly defined mission, and they needed cover.
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At the same time, Central America was an area of rising concern. Since becoming president, Ronald Reagan had his eye on the region, and on El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in particular, which were threatening to become a footprint for the Soviet Union in the Western Hemisphere. Al Haig argued that such subversion by a foreign power violated the essence of the Monroe Doctrine—which guaranteed the freedom and territorial integrity of any Western Hemisphere state—and threatened the ultimate security of the United States. In any case, Reagan, recognizing a chance to push back the spread of communism, was willing to entertain an aggressive policy in Central America.
Bill Casey, the CIA director, agreed. Allowing the Soviets to establish a base so close to the United States was not in the country’s strategic interest. He considered this “the most important foreign policy problem confronting the nation.” Casey was almost obsessive in his focus on Latin America. “Mr. President, we have an historic opportunity,” he said. “We can do some serious damage to them.”
At the outset, the president approached the situation with caution, but developments in Nicaragua captured his foreign policy team’s attention. Nicaragua, as they saw it, was a country in play. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front had ousted the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Jimmy Carter had supported the new government, the Sandinistas, to the tune of $99 million in aid, and for a while it seemed as though Nicaragua was in the budding stages of a rebirth. Its leaders nationalized property owned by the Somozas, enhanced working conditions, instituted free unionization for all workers, mandated equality for women, abolished the death penalty, and improved public services, including housing and education. But they also abolished the country’s constitution, its presidency, and all its courts, and cracked down brutally on dissent. A junta had consolidated power in Managua and began moving the country decidedly to the left; all signs were that its goal was to turn Nicaragua into a state much like Cuba.
During a meeting of the National Security Council in November 1981, Reagan became intrigued by the exploits of a ragtag Nicaraguan rebel group known as the Contras, shorthand for counterrevolutionaries. The Contras were ostensibly a 500-man unit engaged in an operation to undermine the Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega Saavedra, the junta leader, and to stanch the flow of weapons into the hands of Marxist guerrillas amassing just across the border in El Salvador. Ronald Reagan romanticized the Contras as “freedom fighters,” describing them as “the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance.” They were also poorly trained, poorly equipped, and lacking a territorial foothold, relying on safe harbor in neighboring Honduras for conducting raids in and out of Nicaragua.
Reagan allocated $19 million to retrain the Contras in Honduras and launch covert guerrilla actions in Nicaragua in conjunction with the CIA and the U.S. military. Despite good intentions, he was walking a fine line between legitimate aid and outright misconduct. Congress had barred the administration by law from taking any actions “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.” Several senators were already up in arms over what they saw as another Vietnam-type imbroglio. Battle lines were also drawn between administration officials divided over the policy: Baker, Deaver, Shultz, and Weinberger opposed expanding covert action, while the conservatives—Meese, Casey, Kirkpatrick, and Clark—were gung ho. Not that it mattered: the president was hooked. He considered the Sandinistas agents of a communist threat “at our doorstep,” and, as proof, persisted in repeating a quote he attributed to Vladimir Lenin (although Lenin never said it): “First we will take Eastern Europe, then we will organize the hordes of Asia . . . then we will move on to Latin America; once we have Latin America we won’t have to take the Unite
d States, the last bastion of capitalism, because it will fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit.”
To reinforce the president’s thinking, Human Events was hitting the situation hard, portraying Nicaragua as a rat’s nest of communist infiltration and an incubator of revolution in other Latin American nations. “The Sandinista Government Should Be Overthrown,” a front-page editorial espoused in March 1982. “Nicaragua is not yet Cuba . . . [but] if we fail to oust the present rulers fairly quickly, it is bound to become another strong, Soviet-controlled base, complete with a Russian combat brigade.”
Reagan clipped the article and added it to a folder he kept in a personal file—a thick sheaf of moralistic stories from Human Events and Reader’s Digest—that he referred to for inspiration and even outright guidance. The magazine’s commentary on Nicaragua helped to shape his attitude about events in Latin America, although he drew the line at its suggestion that the United States should act “alone, if necessary” to overthrow the Sandinistas. Nevertheless, he believed, “If the Soviet Union can aid and abet subversion in our hemisphere, then the United States has a legal right and a moral duty to help resist it.” He cited for his rationale the Truman Doctrine, which called for fighting the spread of communism through U.S. support to countries “resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” But the situation in Nicaragua was different. Reagan wasn’t asking Congress to support a government resisting attempted subjugation; he wanted support for the armed minorities who sought to overthrow a government that was officially recognized around the world, even by the United States.