by Bob Spitz
She reiterated this opinion to Reagan over the 1984 Christmas holiday, during a private, off-the-record meeting at Laurel, his cabin at Camp David. Mrs. Thatcher was eager to see the president. She wanted to make her feelings known about his Star Wars strategy, which she had learned about only through the encounter with Gorbachev a few weeks earlier. Why hadn’t she been briefed on this? Why hadn’t Reagan confided in her? “He knew what she was coming for,” says Bud McFarlane, who joined them in front of the fireplace in the rustic living room, “so he was prepared.”
Thatcher wasn’t hesitant or circumspect. Moments after alighting from a helicopter, she launched into a full-on condemnation of SDI. “Look here, Ron.” She enunciated each word sharply, “I’m alarmed that you have apparently put at risk your commitment to the strategy that NATO has developed and relied on for forty years.” She was referring to Flexible Response, a program in place since the Kennedy administration that mandated a seamless transition from conventional to nuclear weapons in Europe to deter or prevail against Soviet aggression. “Point one: you seem to be separating the United States from Europe. Secondly, you’re making it appear that the United States may have in mind establishing the ability to launch a first strike—to be the aggressor, to not wait to ride out an attack because you have a bubble over the United States, or so you expect. Thirdly, it won’t work. It’s technologically beyond reach. And, lastly, you’re wasting money on this that would be better spent on improving the strength of the NATO forces.”
She had done her homework, some of which had come through the Soviets, but she was also speculating and overreaching to gain whatever information the president was willing to share on the subject. Despite her tenacity, he wasn’t about to give Thatcher anything that divulged where the technology stood. If Gorbachev and the Soviets were intimidated about SDI, then the strategy was already working, whether the mechanics ever would or not. All Reagan could do was attempt to reassure her while acknowledging the risk and exorbitant cost of the program—a five-year commitment of $26 billion for starters. “But with regard to separating us from Europe,” he pledged, “count on it, Margaret, we will never do that. And, similarly, under my leadership, we’ll never launch a first strike or undertake aggression as a moral proposition.”
He was gracious to a fault, laying on the charm. “She wasn’t buying it,” McFarlane recalls. “She wanted some earnest commitment.” Her dander was up. “What is this special relationship we’re supposed to have?” she huffed. “Come on, Ron! I’m embarrassed, and I want to see some evidence that you and I are joined at the hip on this.”
Thatcher wasn’t entirely satisfied by the president’s response and left in a state that McFarlane called “gruntled,” not at all pleased, but she was at least willing to paper over their differences, for now. However, Ronald Reagan was concerned with her unhappiness. To mollify her, he dispatched McFarlane to London close on her heels to do some fence-mending, basically repeating the same feeble pledges that were made at Camp David. As he was leaving Number 10 Downing Street, McFarlane delivered a parting gift. “Prime Minister, I’m authorized by the president to say that he believes there ought to be as much as $300 million a year in contracting to British firms on the SDI program.”
Later that spring, during the much-publicized appropriation cycle that involved funding for SDI, not a word of complaint emerged out of London. A few months later, at a reception in Bonn, Mrs. Thatcher drew McFarlane into a corner and said, “About that dustup we had—I’ve been thinking about it, and I can find a way, given the president’s assurances, that we can be supportive of this.”
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The president was committed to the Strategic Defense Initiative as the cornerstone of his goal for peace. He’d been rereading the Book of Revelation, especially the concept of Armageddon, and worried that at this point in history the state of weaponry might hold the potential for a catastrophic explosion sufficient to destroy humankind. “This could happen now,” he warned an aide. There was plenty of such inflammatory enlightenment in his old fallback reference Human Events, which he read religiously, annotated in the margins, and filed away for further reference. “When he read something in Human Events, he believed it,” Don Regan confirmed, even though the factual basis for the magazine’s positions was often threadbare at best. Human Events had helped to convince him that Social Security was an outright failure. It preached that the Sandinista government should be overthrown and that the Contras were great patriots, and it advocated for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which it believed would work and would guarantee America’s future.
It “horrified” the president’s top men that he embraced such pabulum. More than one White House official asked Don Regan, “How the fuck can you get that magazine away from him?” Although he tried, Regan wasn’t able to stop the subscription. “The damn thing came to the family quarters,” he said. Stu Spencer ordered Mike Deaver to hide it, but to little good. The magazine was Ronald Reagan’s bedrock reading, more than a guilty pleasure, often isolating him from a broader, more informed perspective on key issues. The president was guided by instinct, Regan noted, developing his gut feelings about issues culled from articles he read and letters ordinary people sent him in the mail, and “once they were ingrained in the brain of Ronald Reagan, they stayed there and hell wouldn’t eradicate these things when he had the basic belief.”
When it came to SDI, he was convinced beyond doubt it would work. In his mind, he envisioned a space shield against these missiles and, by God, he was going to provide the American people with that shield, despite considerable misgivings from scientists and engineers. This is what the President of the United States does for his people, he thought. He intended to make it happen. Nothing would crown his second term more than if he gave the country such a new sweeping sense of security.
Whether this instinctual decision-making was managed or contained well enough by his advisers remains open to question. But they had learned that the path of least resistance to maintaining the president’s overwhelming popularity was to “let Reagan be Reagan.” The rallying cry of the 1984 presidential campaign had carried into his second administration.
Let Reagan be Reagan. Occasionally, it would have been better if advisers had intervened. There were times they were frustrated when he stood for what he thought, against prevailing political and public sentiment, in favor of what he regarded as just and right, whether people agreed with him or not, heedless of the potential fallout. Advisers as influential as the secretary of state deemed Reagan’s “stubborn determination and willingness to do what he considered to be right” both an advantage and a disadvantage in setting policy.
He dug in even deeper when he’d given his word. In a calamitous example of Ronald Reagan’s resolve, he accepted an invitation from Chancellor Helmut Kohl to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of V-E Day, which would include visiting a military cemetery in Germany where “a handclasp over the graves of the fallen” would be a testament to the two countries’ reconciliation and friendship. Implicit in the details: the visit was payback. Kohl was facing tough regional elections, and the president agreed to help his cause in return for the chancellor’s support in 1983 for situating new U.S. Pershing II missile installations in Europe. The visit dovetailed with the upcoming G7 economic summit in Bonn.
In January, Der Spiegel reported that Reagan’s agenda might include a visit to Dachau, the site of the former Nazi concentration camp in Bavaria. The White House quickly scratched Dachau. “You know, he’s a cheerful politician,” an aide told a reporter. “He does not like to grovel in a grisly scene like Dachau.” But the suggestion that he go there was enough to prick old wounds. For many Americans—those who lost loved ones and those who had fought—the horrors of World War II were still too fresh and painful. The visit to Germany alone was controversial enough.
In late February 1985, Mike Deaver led an advance team to Germany in
order to survey alternative sites for the president’s trip. The state visit in May would effectively serve as Deaver’s swan song. He was fed up with the punishing government grind, and his alcoholism had spun out of control. “I had to get out of there,” he admitted. “I was a sick guy.” He had informed the Reagans that he would be leaving the White House for good in June, and overseeing a glamorous European swing that included stops in Spain, France, and Portugal would usher him out the door in style. But Deaver’s due diligence fell woefully short and planted a lamentably wrong step in his stride across the threshold.
Among the prospective sites under consideration was Kolmeshöhe cemetery, in the quaint town of Bitburg near the Luxembourg border. A U.S. airbase was located on the outskirts of the town, and every year since 1959 American and French officials had joined German locals in a wreath-laying ceremony at the cemetery. It was a lovely tradition, Deaver thought, that would dignify the solemnity of the occasion. “It was very picturesque,” he recalled. “A beautiful little spot.” He didn’t spend much time at the site. There was a fresh blanket of snow on the ground, and the gravestones were mostly covered. But he was assured by German authorities that there was nothing there that would embarrass the president.
For the most part, the trip’s schedule would fall into place around various political events and meetings, including an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The president’s main concern at the time was jump-starting the arms-control negotiations with the Soviets, slated to begin in Geneva on March 12, 1985.
Early that morning in the hours before dawn, Reagan was awakened by a call from Bud McFarlane, which never augured well. McFarlane bore news that Konstantin Chernenko was dead, the third Soviet premier to die since the president had taken office. It was disruptive, but not obviously consequential. The Soviet hard line hadn’t budged an inch in the past twenty years. The Americans knew, more or less, what to expect no matter who sat in the Kremlin. Chernenko’s successor was announced within hours. Shultz had predicted correctly—it was Mikhail Gorbachev.
The president had no intention of attending Chernenko’s funeral. He sent Vice President Bush instead, along with a letter to Gorbachev extending an invitation. “You can be assured of my personal commitment to working with you and the rest of the Soviet leadership in serious negotiations,” it said. “In that spirit I would like you to visit me in Washington at your earliest convenient opportunity.”
It was a coincidence that Gorbachev took office on the day that Soviet and U.S. negotiators resumed arms-control talks. Both sides continued the time-honored pas de deux. But a breakthrough, of sorts, arrived in a Gorbachev response. On March 24, he wrote the president that he had “a positive attitude to the idea you expressed about holding a personal meeting between us.”
That was a game-changer.
If Margaret Thatcher could do business with this man, perhaps Ronald Reagan could as well. But on that same day, Major Arthur Nicholson Jr., an American Army officer stationed in Germany, was shot by a Soviet sentry in East Germany, reminding the president just how fragile the Cold War relationship was. If he needed further proof, it came in an intelligence report that revealed that the Soviets prevented the administering of first aid to the wounded soldier, resulting in his bleeding to death. Was Gorbachev the kind of man who condoned such barbarous acts of cruelty? Thatcher might have cozied to his ingratiating smile, but clearer heads accepted Andrei Gromyko’s warning that Gorbachev’s nice smile “has iron teeth.”
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With the Soviet Union in uncertain transition, the president doubled down on American security interests. Throughout the early spring of 1985, he pressed for a new $1.5 billion appropriation to build twenty-one MX missiles, those ferocious long-range mastodons. A similar bill had been defeated in 1982, but a renewed lobbying effort gave the administration hope. This time, as a result of the full-court press, Congress bestowed its blessing, upping the ante in the ongoing arms-control negotiations in Geneva. MX missiles could carry up to ten warheads, and in theory represented a major leap forward in missile performance. The reality never quite squared with the theory, but they worried the Soviets greatly, so they were good bargaining chips and gave the negotiators leverage.
With the appropriations bill in the win column, the president decided to push his luck to persuade Congress to resume funding for the Contras in Nicaragua, which the legislature had cut off in 1984. “The Contra funding is like the MX spending,” Reagan rationalized during a National Security Planning Group meeting on Central America. “It is what will keep the pressure on Nicaragua.” The request he made was for $14 million window-dressed as humanitarian aid, but those operating behind the scenes knew it was earmarked to arm the rebels in their fight against the Sandinistas. In fact, third-party contributions to the Contras had amounted to more than $24.5 million since appropriated funds had stopped, but more—much more—was needed to keep the operation intact. At the rate things were going, the well would soon run dry. Oliver North, who was coordinating the operation with National Security director Bud McFarlane, recommended an additional $15 million to $20 million to maintain the Contras’ momentum.
The president agreed to do what he could. On April 15, 1985, he addressed a fund-raiser to benefit the Nicaraguan Refugee Fund. He was in his element as the after-dinner speaker, trading barbs with his old sidekick Bob Hope. After the usual jokey exchange, Reagan came right to the point. “We cannot have the United States walk away from one of the greatest moral challenges in postwar history. . . . We will fight on. . . . We will win this struggle for peace. Viva Nicaragua Libra!”
Viva Nicaragua Libra!
News broke the same week that the president’s trip to Germany included his laying a wreath at the cemetery in Bitburg. “Who’s buried in Bitburg?” the White House correspondent for Newsday asked Larry Speakes. The press officer threw up his hands; he had no relevant information. But others did. Elie Wiesel, the esteemed Holocaust survivor and human rights advocate, was aghast at the news, and the American Legion announced it was “terribly disappointed.”
Two days later, word leaked out that forty-nine members of the Waffen SS, the elite Nazi military unit responsible for brutal war crimes, were among the soldiers buried in Bitburg. The goodwill excursion devolved into a crisis. Would the president really agree to visit graves containing soldiers involved in atrocities against Americans? Most had belonged to the Second SS Panzer Division—Hitler’s elite regiment known as Das Reich—which had massacred civilian families in France. One of them, Otto Beugel, had been awarded the Cross of Gold for having killed ten Americans in combat. The Waffen SS crimes detailed at the Nuremberg trials were all too fresh in the public’s mind.
The visit created a public-relations nightmare. Once the press got wind of it, there was no letup. “Get off this—don’t go,” Don Regan advised the president. But Reagan remained adamant. “I’ve promised,” he replied, his eyes doleful. He’d given Helmut Kohl his word. “We were hoping that Kohl would reconsider,” says Jim Kuhn, Reagan’s second-term executive assistant, “but the chancellor was intractable.” Kohl sent Reagan a “Dear Ron” letter that said canceling the visit would have a serious psychological effect on the way Germans viewed Americans. He laid it on thick, going so far as to claim that Soviet propaganda was driving this agenda. Canceling the trip would be a political catastrophe for him.
Reagan was between a rock and a hard place. “He sure as hell wanted this to go away,” Kuhn recalls, “but backing down was never an option. In fact, the outcry may have strengthened his resolve to go.”
Mike Deaver flew to Germany in an attempt to salvage what he could of the visit. Efforts were made to find an alternative site to the Bitburg cemetery, but Kohl wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, Deaver, trying to soften the edge, decided to add a concentration camp visit to the schedule, either at Dachau or Bergen-Belsen. This only drew more rebukes from congressional leaders
, veterans, Jews, and especially Elie Wiesel. On April 19, in a nationally televised ceremony broadcast from the Roosevelt Room of the White House organized to award Wiesel the Congressional Gold Medal, the fragile honoree stopped the proceedings cold when he chastened Reagan directly. “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
The outcry was taking its toll. As Bud McFarlane described it to his counterpart in Germany, “The drumbeat of criticism gathers momentum with every hour here.” Pressure was coming from all quarters to do something different, something decisive, about the Bitburg visit. George Shultz told the president, “Bitburg is a disaster . . . hitting the most sensitive people at the most sensitive time.” The Senate voted 82–0 against the president’s going; the House followed suit, 390–26. The Israelis were strongly opposed. Margaret Thatcher condemned the event as “deeply offensive and insulting to the memory of the victims.” In an ABC News poll, 52 percent of respondents urged Ronald Reagan to cancel the trip. But Richard Nixon advised him to stay the course, arguing that the visit would only strengthen U.S.-German relations. Henry Kissinger chipped in with his endorsement. Every day brought a new, conflicting opinion. The press was reporting it like a soap opera. They were “really sucking blood,” Reagan fumed in a diary entry, “and finding every person of Jewish faith they can who will denounce me.” It only reinforced his determination. “Well, d—n their hides. I think it is morally right to go & I’m going.” His back was up. He resolved not to cancel the trip “no matter how much the bastards”—the Holocaust survivors and war veterans—“scream.”