Once more, we had reason to be hopeful about the future of the Middle East. Then Syria, apparently emboldened by its new late-model Russian arms and thousands of new Soviet “advisors,” began sending signals that it would not leave Lebanon. This meant that the hard-won agreement between Lebanon and Israel couldn’t be implemented, either.
Once again, we called on Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which had good reason to be worried about the growing Soviet presence in Syria as a serious threat to their oilfields, to apply pressure on Syria to leave. I reassured a nervous President Gemayel that we would keep our marines in Lebanon and not abandon his country while we tried to work out a settlement.
George Shultz went back to Lebanon to see if he could accelerate the departure of Syria, but, disappointingly, he found that the Arab world was badly fractured and either unable or unwilling to exert the necessary leverage to get Syria out of Lebanon. He and Robert C. (Bud) McFarlane of the National Security Council, who had taken over Habib’s responsibilities as special envoy to the Middle East, tried hard through the summer and early fall of 1983 to persuade Syria to agree to leave, but the situation deteriorated steadily. The Syrian and Israeli forces remained entrenched, while old feuds between Lebanese Christians and Muslims began to erupt in an increasingly bitter civil war.
Meanwhile, new problems surfaced in the Middle East. Apparently deciding to move while much of the world was distracted by events in Lebanon, the region’s foremost terrorist, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi—like Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, a client of Moscow—began making new moves on two of his neighbors in North Africa, Sudan and Chad. France, the former colonial ruler of Chad, sent in troops to fight against the Libyan-backed rebels, and at France’s request we sent several AWACS planes and fighter escorts to help keep tabs on Libyan aircraft.
At summer’s end, the fighting in Lebanon between rival Christian, Muslim, and Druse militias grew heavier, putting Lebanon’s fragile truce and everything we’d been working for there in jeopardy. The civil war spread rapidly, threatening the stability of the Gemayel government and making it uncertain how Israel and Syria would react. Soon, what had been chaos in Beirut became anarchy and then more tragedy. Syrian forces, Iranian Shiite Muslims, and radical members of the PLO began taking sides in the civil war, and fighting expanded; Druse and Muslim snipers started attacking the members of the multinational force as they patrolled Beirut, then began attacking the Beirut airport compound where our marines were housed, killing several of them.
Here are portions of several entries pertaining to the worsening crisis in Lebanon from my diary of September 1983:
Sept. 6
We lost two more Marines last night in Beirut. The civil war is running wild and could result in the collapse of the Gemayel govt. and then stuff would hit the fan. I called the parents of the two Marines—not easy.
Sept. 7
More on Lebanon. We have to show the flag for those Marines. I can’t get the idea out of my head that some F-14’s off the Eisenhower coming in at about 200 feet over the Marines and blowing hell out of a couple of artillery emplacements would be a tonic for the Marines and at the same time would deliver a message to these gun happy Middle East terrorists.
Sept. 8
Our Marine artillery and one ship off shore at Beirut returned fire of Druse artillery in the hills and silenced it. F-14’s from the Eisenhower had flown a reconnaissance mission. I called the colonel in command. He said morale was high.
Sept. 10
Met with George Shultz. . . . Our main meeting was on Lebanon. The situation is worsening. We may be facing a choice of getting out or enlarging our mission. Chiefs of Staff want to send the New Jersey. I’m concerned as to whether that won’t have a bad morale effect on our friends in Central America. We’re going to move her through the canal and offshore to the Atlantic before seeing whether she should head for Lebanon.
Sept. 11
N.S.C. is meeting . . . on Lebanon re a new cable from Bud McFarlane. Troops obviously P.L.O. and Syrian have launched a new attack against the Lebanese Army. Our problem is do we expand our mission to aid the Lebanese army with artillery and air support? This could be seen as putting us in the war.
George Shultz, Bill Casey and Jim Baker have just left me at 2 p.m. to get more info on what is happening and where our partners in the M.N.F. [multinational force] stand. Contingent on what they learn I’ve ordered use of naval gun fire. My reasoning is that this can be explained as protection of our Marines hoping it might signal the Syrians to pull back. I don’t think they want a war with us. If it doesn’t work then we’ll have to decide between pulling out or going to the Congress and making a case for greater involvement. N.S.C. will meet again at 6 p.m.
The meeting [was held and] didn’t change anything so I’ve called for use of Navy fire power and air strikes if needed.
Sept. 12
N.S.C. on Lebanon. Things a little more quiet. A meeting there in Beirut as Gemayel attempts to get a cease fire. The Druse actually allowed the long delayed Red Cross column into the village where 40,000 Christian refugees have been besieged. . . .
Sept. 14
N.S.C: Saudi Arabia may exert more pressure on Syria. Things are a little suspended in Lebanon . . .
Sept. 19
N.S.C: Our Navy guns turned loose in support of the Lebanese army fighting to hold a position on a hill overlooking our Marines at the Beirut airport. This still comes under the head of defense. To allow those who have been shelling our marines to take that position would have made the Marine base untenable.
We met later—George Shultz, Cap W, etc., on a compromise we hope Congress will agree to regarding the War Powers Act and Congressional approval of the Marines being in Lebanon. Sen. Baker thinks he can get it through the Senate. Among other things it would settle their presence in Lebanon for 18 months.
Sept. 30
[Latest opinion polls] show I’m up on job rating, the economy. But on foreign policy—Lebanon—I’m way down. The people just don’t know why we’re there. There is deeply buried isolationist sentiment in our land.
After each marine was killed that September, I telephoned his parents and tried to console them. They were difficult, terrible calls to make. One father asked me: “Are we in Lebanon for any reason worth my son’s life?”
I gulped and said, yes, there was. “No words I can say can ever make up for the loss of your son, but perhaps you might find a little comfort in knowing that your son died while he was living up to the finest traditions of his country and the Marine Corps . . . America is a country whose people have always believed we had a special responsibility to try to bring peace and democracy to others in the world. And brave men and women have always been willing to give up their lives in the defense of freedom—and that’s what our marines are doing in the Middle East.”
Some men, I told another parent, go through life and never find themselves in a position where they are called upon to do one of the tough jobs that have to be done. Some face that moment and fail. But most Americans accept and do the tough jobs because they know there is no one else to do them, and they know in their hearts that they must be done.
Perhaps no words could convince a grieving father that his son had died for a just purpose; yet I firmly believed in what we were doing in Lebanon. And our efforts had seemed to be working, giving time to the Lebanese, the Syrians, and the Israelis to work out a solution to their problems.
Although some Americans, like that father, had doubts about our purpose in Lebanon, I tried to convince them that America had a duty to be there. “The Middle East,” I’d say, “is pretty much everybody’s business, it’s important to all of us.” But to have to explain this to those families—and, as I was to learn shortly, this task had only just begun—was very difficult and very, very painful.
While I tried to persuade Congress and grieving parents that the United States had to maintain its peacekeeping role in Lebanon, the civil war went on unrelentingly, with more a
nd more attacks on the airport and the positions of French troops who were assigned to the multinational force. At this time, Bill Clark, who’d been my national security advisor for almost two years, asked to be relieved of his post, and agreed to take on the slower-paced job of secretary of the interior; he was fatigued and wanted a change.
When Jim Baker heard about it, he told me he was getting a little tired of the routine as White House chief of staff and asked me to give him the NSC job. He proposed that Mike Deaver, whom I knew well from our California days, take over his job.
I agreed to this. But then Ed Meese, Bill Clark, Bill Casey, and Cap Weinberger got together and tried to convince me it was a bad idea. Some were not enthusiastic about having Mike, whose job involved overseeing White House political and public relations, become chief of staff. There was also resistance to Jim as national security advisor. I decided to reverse myself and scrap the change. Otherwise, I thought, the result would be friction among the cabinet and the White House staff.
“Jim took it well but Mike was pretty upset,” I noted in my diary. “It was an unhappy day all around. An NSPG [National Security Planning Group] meeting on Lebanon. No decisions, just a listing of the problems. Not a pleasant evening what with all the hassle over the N.S.C. spot.”
After that, Bill Casey and some of my more conservative supporters began pushing me to give the NSC job to Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was either tired or bored after more than two years at the UN. She had her heart set on the job and told me so. I admired Jeane, but I had noticed there was some bad chemistry between her and George Shultz, so I decided to give the spot to Bud McFarlane.
My decision not to appoint Jim Baker as national security advisor, I suppose, was a turning point for my administration, although I had no idea at the time how significant it would prove to be.
60
ON FRIDAY, October 21, 1983, four days after Bud McFarlane took over his new post at the NSC, Nancy and I flew to Georgia for a golfing weekend at the Augusta National Golf Course with George Shultz, Don Regan, former U.S. Senator Nicholas Brady, and their wives. After the dispute over the NSC job, a series of frustrating meetings over Lebanon, and more battles with the Democrats over the budget, I was looking forward to a couple of days of relaxation, although I hadn’t played golf in quite a while and didn’t have high hopes for my performance on the links.
Shortly after four o’clock Saturday morning, Nancy and I were awakened by a telephone call from Bud, who was in Augusta as part of the traveling White House support team. He said it was urgent that I meet with him and George Shultz immediately in the living room of the Eisenhower Cottage, where we were staying. This was the cottage Ike always used whenever he was on a golfing vacation at Augusta. In robe and pajamas, I listened to them explain that the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States had asked us to intervene militarily on the island of Grenada, one of their neighbors in the Caribbean located ninety miles north of Venezuela. Via a secure telephone link with Washington, George Bush, serving in his role as head of the White House crisis management team, also participated in this middle-of-the-night conference.
We’d been watching events on Grenada very closely for several days. In a bloody coup the previous week, Grenada’s prime minister, Maurice Bishop, a Marxist protégé of Fidel Castro who had invited Cuban workers to Grenada to build a suspiciously huge new airport on the island, had been executed by leftists who were even more radically committed to Marxism than he was. The leaders of Grenada’s island neighbors—Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent’s, St. Lucia, Dominica, and Antigua—told us that under Bishop they had been worried by what appeared to be a large Cuban-sponsored military buildup on Grenada vastly disproportionate to its needs; now, they said, these even more radical Marxists in control of Grenada had launched a murderous reign of terror against their enemies. Unless they were stopped, the Caribbean neighbors said, it was just a matter of time before the Grenadians and Castro moved on their countries. They said that they wanted to join together in ousting the Cubans from Grenada before it was too late, but lacked the military wherewithal to do so, and asked us to join with them in dislodging the radicals.
There was one other thing we had to consider: Eight hundred Americans who attended medical school on Grenada, all of them potential hostages.
Under these circumstances, there was only one answer I could give to McFarlane and Shultz and those six countries who asked for our help.
Several days earlier, after the coup and Bishop’s execution, I had ordered a flotilla of navy ships that had just left for Lebanon as part of a routine rotation of marines there to make a detour toward Grenada, in case it was needed to evacuate the students. I asked McFarlane how long the Pentagon thought it would need to prepare a rescue mission on Grenada.
He said the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed it could be done in forty-eight hours.
I said, “Do it.”
We agreed that the operation would have to be mounted under conditions of the strictest secrecy, so that the Grenadian forces and Cubans on Grenada would not have time to bring in reinforcements or to make a run for the American students at St. George’s University Medical School. Cuba was near enough that with forewarning it could send troops to the island in a hurry. If there were any leaks, the result could be war between us and Cuba, which we didn’t want, and the taking of hundreds of Americans as hostage.
We decided not to inform anyone in advance about the rescue mission in order to reduce the possibilities of a leak. Grenada had been a British colony for almost two hundred years before it won its independence in 1974, and was still a member of the British Commonwealth. We did not even inform the Britsh beforehand, because I thought it would increase the possibility of a leak at our end and elevate the risk to our students.
Frankly, there was another reason I wanted secrecy. It was what I call the “post-Vietnam syndrome,” the resistance of many in Congress to the use of military force abroad for any reason, because of our nation’s experience in Vietnam. No rational person ever wants to unleash military force, but I believe there are situations when it is necessary for the United States to do so—especially when the defense of freedom and democracy is involved or the lives and liberty of our citizens are at stake. I understood what Vietnam had meant for the country, but I believed the United States couldn’t remain spooked forever by this experience to the point where it refused to stand up and defend its legitimate national security interests. I suspected that, if we told the leaders of Congress about the operation, even under terms of strictest confidentiality, there would be some who would leak it to the press together with the prediction that Grenada was going to become “another Vietnam.” We were already running into this phenomenon in our efforts to halt the spread of Communism in Central America, and some congressmen were raising the issue of “another Vietnam” in Lebanon while fighting to restrict the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief.
We couldn’t say no to those six small countries who had asked us for help. We’d have no credibility or standing in the Americas if we did. If it ever became known, which I knew it would, that we had turned them down, few of our friends around the world would trust us completely as an ally again.
I knew that if word of the rescue mission leaked out in advance, we’d hear this from some in Congress: “Sure, it’s starting small, but once you make that first commitment, Grenada’s going to become another Vietnam.” Well, that wasn’t true. And that’s one reason why the rescue operation on Grenada was conducted in total secrecy. We didn’t ask anybody, we just did it.
After giving my approval to the operation, I went back to sleep. After an hour or so, I got up to play golf. As I’d expected, my golf game needed some work. I hadn’t played more than four times in the previous three years, and it showed.
When we reached the sixteenth hole, a group of Secret Service agents suddenly surrounded our group, stopped the golf game, and herded us into White House limousines. The situation was this: An armed man ha
d smashed a pickup truck through a nearby gate at the course and taken seven hostages, including two White House assistants, to the pro shop. There he was threatening to kill them unless I agreed to meet with him.
Normally, I wouldn’t have made any response to demands by a terrorist. That only encourages more terrorism. But I was told that the gunman was very unbalanced and the lives of the hostages were in imminent danger. I got on the car phone and called the pro shop, and when the phone was answered, I said: “Hello, this is Ronald Reagan . . .”
There was a silence, then the man hung up without saying a word and the phone went dead. We dialed the pro shop again—in fact, four more times—but every time, he hung up on me. He was insisting on speaking to me face to face, which the Secret Service agents wouldn’t permit.
While the agents searched the golf course and the woods around it to discover whether the man had any accomplices, they urged me to return immediately to Washington. I vetoed the idea. I was safe and didn’t think we should make any sudden moves that would suggest an air of crisis; this might encourage the press to start digging and learn about the Grenada operation. We went back to the Eisenhower Cottage. After a few hours, the gunman released the hostages unharmed and was arrested.
(The second of our two White House aides wasn’t actually released. He said to the gunman, “Gee, it’s hot in here, don’t you think a six-pack of beer would be good?” When the gunman agreed with that proposal, our man walked out of the pro shop on an errand to get the beer, never to return.)
That night, our group had a pleasant dinner together. Nancy and I went to bed a little earlier than usual because we were tired after the early morning interruption the night before. At about 2:30 A.M., however, our phone rang again. Again it was Bud McFarlane: He said a suicide bomber had just driven a truckload of dynamite past our sentries and smashed into the marine barracks at the Beirut Airport. According to the first reports, at least one hundred marines had been killed.
An American Life Page 47