An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  On the international front, we had gone back to the bargaining table with the Russians to begin the process of reducing the threat of nuclear war while also beginning the first comprehensive modernization of our strategic and conventional forces in twenty years. By making a military career more attractive, we had begun to draw more of the best and brightest of our young people into the voluntary military forces.

  And I think the nation had begun the process of spiritual revival that was so badly needed. It was once again striving to live up to that special vision of America expressed more than three hundred years ago by John Winthrop on the deck of a tiny vessel off the coast of Massachusetts, when he told the pilgrims gathered with him on the edge of the New World that they had the opportunity to create a new civilization based on freedom unlike any other before it, a unique and special “shining city on a hill.”

  But for all our progress, there was much left to be done.

  We were plunging deeper into the nation’s worst recession since the 1930s, and the world was still a very dangerous place. Leonid Brezhnev had rebuffed my expressions of hope for a warmer relationship between our countries. In the Middle East, dangerous embers of malevolence and hatred smoldering since biblical times had erupted into savage warfare. In Afghanistan, the Soviets were attempting to subdue winds of freedom with a ruthlessness bordering on barbarity, and in Poland their puppet government was preparing to impose martial law to suppress a growing trade union movement. In a cynical rejection of basic human rights, Soviet leaders, some of them motivated by the same anti-Semitism seen in the murderous Russian pogroms of the past, held thousands of Jews captive, refusing to let them emigrate. And every day there was more evidence that Fidel Castro, the proxy of Moscow, was shipping more arms and Communist “advisors” into Central America, and that Nicaragua was becoming a base camp for Communizing all of Central America.

  Nicaragua’s Sandinista government had taken power in 1979, after the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza, with pledges to the Nicaraguan people and the Organization of American States that it would replace Somoza’s dictatorship with democracy. It promised free elections, a free press, free enterprise, and an independent judiciary. But within weeks of Somoza’s overthrow, the Sandinistas had begun replacing one dictatorship with another: They seized television and radio stations and began censoring newspapers and crushing whatever democratic sentiment they encountered as violently and ruthlessly as Somoza had ever done. Meanwhile they allied themselves with Castro, Moscow, and the Eastern bloc.

  Once they were in power, the Sandinistas began trying to export their Marxist revolution to neighboring El Salvador and other countries in Central America. They proved themselves masters at propaganda, peddling an image of themselves in Europe and America as kindly men whose democratic reforms were being thwarted by the Great Colossus of the North—us.

  Early in my first year in the White House, we launched an initiative aimed at helping Caribbean and Central American countries reverse the great economic and social inequities that made many of them ripe for subversion and revolution. But it was soon apparent it was going to take more than that to stop the Marxist guerrillas financed by Castro and Brezhnev. And while our friends in Mexico and Venezuela had indicated that they would join us in a collaborative effort to resist the advance of Marxism in Latin America, it was becoming apparent that they weren’t ready to make the kind of commitment necessary to do the job. The United States would have to meet the challenge largely alone—but without sending our troops across the border. That was an option I never entertained.

  Bill Casey and others at the CIA drafted a plan to meet the Communist threat in Central America through a covert program that, over the next few months, would provide for the support of anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans who would try to halt the flow of Soviet-made arms from Cuba to Nicaragua and El Salvador. These men, just a few in the beginning, were the nucleus of Nicaragua’s Contra freedom fighters.

  A month later, after we went over the program in more detail, I formally approved the plan, hoping that it would halt the advance of Communism seven hundred miles from our border. Only time would tell.

  • • •

  As all this was going on, we were witnessing the first fraying of the Iron Curtain, a disenchantment with Soviet Communism in Poland, not realizing then that it was a harbinger of great and historic events to come in Eastern Europe. Brave men and women in Poland had demanded one of the most basic human liberties, the right to organize a trade union in defiance of a government that forbade any instrument of power or influence beyond itself.

  When this heroic and spontaneous ground swell on behalf of freedom refused to recede, Poland’s Communist leaders had been forced to grant Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union an inch of freedom, recognizing it as a bona fide representative of the workers, and under more pressure even spoke of introducing a modicum of democratic reform to the Polish Communist Party.

  Moscow responded to these acts of insubordination by sending its troops on maneuvers along the Polish border during the spring of 1981. It installed a military regime in Warsaw with orders to halt the liberalization. It also cut off loan credits, thus leaving the Polish economy, already unable to feed its people and nearly in ruin because of the failure of Communism, teetering near the brink of collapse.

  As seen from the Oval Office, the events in Poland were thrilling. One of man’s most fundamental and implacable yearnings, the desire for freedom, was stirring to life behind the Iron Curtain, the first break in the totalitarian dike of Communism.

  I wanted to be sure we did nothing to impede this process and everything we could to spur it along. This was what we had been waiting for since World War II. What was happening in Poland might spread like a contagion throughout Eastern Europe.

  But our options were limited and presented us with several dilemmas:

  Although we wanted to let the Polish people who were struggling for liberty know that we were behind them, we couldn’t send out a false signal (as some say the United States did before the doomed 1956 uprisings in Hungary), leading them to expect us to intervene militarily on their side during a revolution. As much as we might want to help, there were limits on the actions our people would support in Poland, especially if, as was likely, there was a charade in which the Polish government appeared to request intervention by Russian troops.

  We wanted to help the hungry of Poland fill their stomachs, yet we didn’t want to do anything that would prop up the ailing government and prolong the survival of Communism. We didn’t want to keep the Communist government afloat by shoring up its economy, yet if the economy collapsed, the result might be violent popular uprisings that would bring in Soviet tanks and doom the embryonic democratic movement. That summer we supported efforts by U.S. and European banks to negotiate an extension of Poland’s international debt payments to avert a collapse of the economy, and agreed to send millions of dollars’ worth of food to feed the people of Poland. We were striking a delicate balance.

  Almost as soon as I moved into the White House, we began informing Moscow that military intervention by the Soviets in Poland would be resisted by us through every diplomatic means at our disposal. In late spring, after intelligence reports indicated that the Soviets were contemplating an invasion of Poland, I wrote to Brezhnev that the United States and the rest of the Western world would look very unfavorably on such an attack; I said the Soviets could forget any new nuclear arms agreements or better trade relations with us and expect the harshest possible economic sanctions from the United States if they launched an invasion. Brezhnev replied that what was going on in Poland was an internal matter for Poland’s puppet government alone to deal with, and the Soviet Union had no interest in the United States attitude about Poland.

  After our initial correspondence following my release from the hospital in April, Brezhnev and I had exchanged several other chilly letters in which we expressed an interest in continuing a dialogue between the two of us. But he always
refused to abandon the Brezhnev Doctrine (although he didn’t call it that), and I kept telling him there was no hope of improving our relations until the Soviet Union stopped pushing its policy of expansionism and trying to subvert democratic governments. As I concluded one letter, “In sum, the United States is more interested in actions which further the cause of world peace than in words.”

  Poland’s brave shipyard workers continued their fight for freedom throughout the fall of 1981, triggering persistent rumors and intelligence reports that the Soviets were considering an invasion, along with continued expressions of our opposition to this possibility. On Sunday, December 13, Poland—and Moscow—finallyacted. Without warning, the Polish military government closed the country’s borders, shut off communications with the rest of the world, arrested the leaders of Solidarity, and imposed martial law.

  The crackdown fell short of the military intervention we had warned against, but our intelligence experts established that the entire exercise had been ordered from and orchestrated by Moscow.

  A day or two after the crackdown, Al Haig brought me confidential information that the Polish ambassador in Washington, Romuald Spasowski, wanted to defect immediately. Our people managed to spirit him away before the KGB got to him; the ambassador and his wife, daughter, and son-in-law were taken to a safe place.

  Two days later, I wrote in the diary,

  [At today’s N.S.C. meeting] I took a stand that this may be the last chance in our lifetime to see a change in the Soviet Empire’s colonial policy re Eastern Europe. We should take a stand and tell them unless and until martial law is lifted in Poland, the prisoners were released and negotiations resumed between Walesa and the Polish government, we would quarantine the Soviets and Poland with no trade or communications across their borders. Also tell our NATO allies and others to join us in such sanctions or risk an estrangement from us. A TV speech is in the works.

  On December 22, Ambassador Spasowski and his wife came to see me in the Oval Office; both had looks of desperation that were mixed with relief. Their faces brightened when I told them I welcomed them to America as genuine Polish patriots. Spasowski said he and his family had been thinking about defecting for several years and had been moving closer and closer to it, then decided to act after the imposition of martial law and crackdown on Solidarity.

  It was an emotional meeting for all of us and left me with more disgust than ever for the evil men in the Kremlin who believed they had the right to hold an entire nation in captivity.

  Subsequently, I learned Ambassador Spasowski had been condemned to death by the generals who ruled Poland.

  Later that day, I finished writing my speech to the nation; although it was supposed to have been a Christmas message, I decided to deliver a strong message to the Soviets condemning their action in Poland. “We can’t let this revolution against Communism fail without our offering a hand,” I wrote in the diary afterward. “We may never have an opportunity like this in our lifetime.” Then I wrote a message to Leonid Brezhnev condemning the Soviet role in the crackdown in even harsher language; it was sent over the Washington-Moscow cable “hot line,” known in the White House as the “Molink.” I said:

  The recent events in Poland clearly are not an “internal matter” and in writing to you, as the head of the Soviet government, I am not misaddressing my communication. Your country has repeatedly intervened in Polish affairs during the months preceding the recent tragic events. . . . Our two countries have had moments of accord and moments of disagreement. But since [the invasion of] Afghanistan nothing has so outraged our public opinion as the pressures and threats which your government has exerted on Poland to stifle the stirrings of freedom. Attempts to suppress the Polish people—either by the Polish army or police acting under Soviet pressure, or through even more direct use of Soviet military force—certainly will not bring about long term stability in Poland and could unleash a process which neither you nor we could fully control.

  I said that in our correspondence both of us had expressed a desire for better Soviet-American relations, but that it was being jeopardized by “political terror, mass arrests and bloodshed in Poland . . . the Soviet Union must decide whether we can move ahead with this agenda [of trying to improve relations] or whether we will travel a different path.”

  On Christmas morning, after we’d opened our gifts around the family tree in the White House, I was handed a reply to my message to Brezhnev, a terse note sent via the Molink claiming it was the United States, not his country, that was interfering in Polish affairs.

  “If a frank exchange of opinion between Communist parties and the expressions by them of their opinions to each other is not pleasing to someone in the United States,” Brezhnev said, “then, in reply, we must firmly say: That is the business of the parties themselves and only them. And the Polish people do not sit in judgment of others who would force their values on them.” Apparently referring to several recent speeches I had made, Brezhnev accused me of “defaming our social and state system, our internal order,” a charge to which I pleaded guilty.

  Attempts to dictate your will to other states are in gross contradiction to the elementary norms of international law. I would like to say further: they are thoroughly amoral. And no sort of game with words regarding the rights of man can hide this fact. The Soviet Union repudiates the claims of anyone to interfere in the events occurring in Poland. You, Mr. President, hint that if further events in Poland should develop in a manner unsatisfactory to the United States damage will be inflicted along the entire range of Soviet-American relations. But if we are to speak frankly, it is your Administration that has already done enough to disrupt or at the very least undermine everything positive which was achieved at the cost of great effort by previous American administrations in the relations between our countries. Today, unfortunately, little remains of the reciprocal positive political gains which were achieved earlier. . . . One cannot help but notice that the general tone of your letter is not the way in which leaders of such powers as the Soviet Union and the United States should talk with each other, especially considering their power and position in the world and their responsibility for the state of international affairs. That is our opinion.

  What a good Christmas present, I thought: I’d made my point to Brezhnev.

  In a Christmas Day reply to him, I told Brezhnev we would not intervene in Poland if the Russians did not, and proposed that the Polish people only be given the right of self-determination that had been promised to them by Joseph Stalin himself at the Yalta Conference. At Yalta, I reminded him, Stalin had promised Poland and all the countries of Eastern Europe the right of self-determination, but the Soviets had never granted it to any of them.

  Shortly before New Year’s Day, we backed up our words with action: I announced that we were imposing sanctions against Poland and the Soviet Union in an expression of our displeasure over the crushing of human rights in Poland. We suspended negotiations on a new long-term grain-sale agreement; banned flights to the United States by the Soviet airline, Aeroflot; canceled several exchange programs; and imposed an embargo on shipment to the Soviet Union of critical American-made products, including pipe-laying equipment that was to be used in the construction of a trans-Siberian gas pipeline. When I sought the support of our European allies for this policy, I was disappointed. They agreed we should send a signal of disapproval to the Russians, but not if it involved halting work on the pipeline; the reaction of some of our allies suggested that money spoke louder to them than principle. They said they wanted freedom for the Polish people but also wanted to expand trade with the Eastern bloc, and they refused to join our efforts to block work on the new pipeline that was to bring natural gas from Siberia to Western Europe.

  As I thought back on that letter I’d sent to Brezhnev after the shooting, I realized I hadn’t made much progress with the Russians in reducing Cold War tensions during my first year in office. Although Brezhnev’s Christmas message had made it clear that th
ey knew there was a new team in Washington, the Soviets were acting more like international brigands than ever.

  Unfortunately, as my first year came to an end, it also appeared we weren’t making much progress in curing our economic problems. Like a runaway train that keeps hurtling along the tracks long after its locomotive has lost power, the economy was racing deeper into a recession that was the product of years of mismanagement in Washington, and was depriving millions of Americans of their livelihood. Although the prime interest rate was no longer 21.5 percent as it was in January, it was 15 percent, still too high for an economy badly in need of a jump start. The country had added more than 250,000 new jobs during the year, but the national unemployment rate was 8.4 percent, the highest in six years, and still climbing. In industrial states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, the rate was even higher, and hundreds of factories were being forced to close their gates. New home sales and new car sales were in a tailspin. In all, more than nine million Americans were out of work.

  Tip O’Neill used every opportunity he got to lambaste me as a “rich man’s president” who cared nothing about the little man, the unemployed, or the poor, and said my economic program was a “cruel hoax.” The press wrote that my program had failed, my honeymoon with Congress was over, and I’d have to give up everything I’d fought for during that first year. Public opinion polls showed that a lot of Americans agreed with that; they blamed us, not the Carter administration, for the recession.