An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  I never considered sending U.S. troops to fight in Latin America. Realizing that neither our people nor those south of the border would want us to use American forces to repel Communist advances, I proposed to Mexico and other Latin countries that we establish joint programs to resist the subversion. They generally gave lip service to my suggestions, but I was never able to get them as aroused about the problem as I was, although I never stopped trying. Hovering over everything, I think, was that old fear of the Great Colossus of the North—the apprehension that we’d try to dictate and dominate Latin American affairs.

  After I got into office, I didn’t wait for Latin American leaders to make contact, nor was I going to seek them out with another plan for how we could be of help. Other administrations before mine had offered such help, I knew, but without many favorable results. I came into office determined to visit some of our neighbors, but not to propose a plan to resolve their problems. I intended to listen instead of lecture during a trip to Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Honduras in December 1982. In each country, I was greeted by the head of state, and in each instance that leader would ask me what plan I had in mind for Latin America. My answer to each was: I don’t have a plan. I’m here to learn what plan you have. Their surprise was so evident and their reaction so great that I felt a sense of success at each stop. I tried to emphasize that my goal was to help Latin Americans help themselves and that we weren’t going to send in the Marines. I must admit, though, that I used every chance I got to say some good things about democracy and free enterprise.

  In Säo Paulo, I told Brazilian leaders that America would rebound from its recession and get its economic house in order: “Somewhere along the way the leaders of the United States forgot how the American growth miracle was created. We substituted government spending for investment to spur productivity; a bulging bureaucracy for private innovation and job creation; transfers of wealth for the creation of wealth, rewards for risk-taking, and hard work; and government subsidies and overregulation for discipline and competition from the magic of the market place.” If we were to halt the spread of Marxist revolution in Latin America, I said, the first principle to be embraced was that “mankind will not be ruled, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, ‘by a favored few.’ The second is a pledge to every man, woman, and child: No matter what your background, no matter how low your station in life, there must be no limit on your ability to reach for the stars, to go as far as your God-given talents will take you. Trust the people; believe every human being is capable of greatness, capable of self-government . . . only when people are free to worship, create, and build, only when they are given a personal stake in deciding their destiny and benefiting from their own risks, only then do societies become dynamic, prosperous, progressive, and free.”

  During his welcoming toast in Bogotá, the president of Colombia made it clear that Colombians didn’t like being taken for granted. Privately, he told me that John F. Kennedy had come to his country and raised hopes with promises of economic development that were never fulfilled. This gave me a chance to say that I hadn’t come to his country with any promises or any answers, I’d come to ask questions: What were the problems we jointly faced, and how could we solve them? I told him my dream for the new alliance of the countries of the western hemisphere, saying we shared a common heritage of having come to this land from all over the world and that from pole to pole we worshiped the same God. He told me of his poor beginnings and I told him of mine. Then I pointed out that we were now the presidents of our countries, and I said I wanted the same kind of opportunity for everyone in all the Americas. By the time we had the farewell ceremonies at the Bogotá airport, I believe we were real friends. Still, I consistently found that most of the leaders in Latin American countries didn’t regard the Communist threat as seriously as I did. Neither, I was to learn, did many members of Congress.

  From the outset of our program of covert operations in Central America, my instructions were that everything we did must be done legally. At first, through the CIA, we helped Nicaraguans who had fought with the Sandinistas against Somoza interdict the flow of Russian arms into their country and El Salvador. Initially, this involved mostly the Nicaraguans’ use of homemade mines against ships bringing weapons into their country. In time, the CIA began organizing these freedom fighters into the Contras, a military fighting force that, with our aid and support, undertook the task of bringing democracy to Nicaragua in the same way that the freedom fighters who led the American Revolution brought democracy to our people.

  The program was directed by Bill Casey, and may have prevented a Communist takeover of El Salvador during the early and mid-1980s, although it didn’t take place without causing friction in the cabinet. George Shultz, who was as strongly committed as I was to halting Communism in Central America, and who wholeheartedly supported the Contras, thought Casey (whose efforts had the full support of others in the administration, such as Bill Clark and Ed Meese) was overly inclined to take risks and was, in effect, making foreign policy on his own without input from the State Department; more than once, Shultz threatened to resign because of Casey. I had to bring them together several times, and they worked out most of their differences and I convinced George not to resign.

  In late 1982, congressional opposition began to develop against our support of the Contras and the Salvadoran government. It was usually led by Tip O’Neill and his friend and fellow congressman from Massachusetts, Edward P. Boland, then chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. They began battling to limit virtually everything the administration was trying to do in Central America.

  In early 1983, I wrote in my diary: “NSPG meeting re El Salvador: We must step up aid or we’re going to lose this one . . .” A few days later, another: “Tomorrow we start trying to convince Congress we must have more money for El Salvador. We have an entire plan for bolstering the government forces. This is one we must win.” After a meeting with several Republican and Democratic congressmen who had gone to El Salvador to learn what was going on there, I wrote: “Not all had been on our side before they went—they are now. The stories they told all added up to the fact that El Salvador is only the current battlefield. What is going on is a general revolution aimed at all of Central America and, yes, Mexico.” After a meeting about Central America with Bill Casey and Bill Clark in June, I wrote, “We’re losing if we don’t do something soon. Those in Congress who are dribbling out about one quarter of what we ask for and need could be playing politics. They’d like to give enough money to keep us in the game [while] El Salvador bleeds to death. Then they call it my plan and it lost Central America. We have to take this to the people and make them all see what’s going on. If the Soviets win in Central America, we lose in Geneva and every place else.”

  The skirmishes I had with Congress in 1982 and 1983 were minor compared with those that would come later. My battles with Capitol Hill over Central America would continue through my entire presidency.

  I never understood the depth of the emotional resistance among some members of Congress to helping the government of El Salvador. Well-intentioned or not, they were in effect furthering Moscow’s agenda in Latin America. The United States had begun sending arms and ammunition to help El Salvador resist Marxist guerrillas when Jimmy Carter was president. I decided we should continue it. Yes, it is true there were extreme right-wing outlaw elements in that country, including members of the government security forces, who were guilty of flagrant and grave human-rights abuses, sometimes against innocent Salvadorans. But the brutal pro-Marxist rebels who were slaughtering innocent peasants, burning and pillaging their crops, destroying electrical power lines, and blowing up dams in their campaign to wrest control of the country were infinitely more barbaric. Unable to win the hearts of the people, they were depriving them of food, water, electricity, and the ability to earn a living and feed themselves. Under prodding from us, the Salvadoran government had begun traveling the road to a more democratic society. It had a
dopted a fairer criminal justice system and free elections. Throughout the early eighties, we applied pressure on the Salvadoran government to rid its military of right-wing extremists. With our backing, El Salvador eventually established the first democratic government in its history under President José Napoleon Duarte.

  To me, the seriousness of the problems in Central America was so obvious that we had no choice: Based simply on the difference between right and wrong, it was clear that we should help the people of the region fight the bloodthirsty guerrillas bent on robbing them of freedom.

  I rarely lose my temper, but I did experience a minor outburst in the Oval Office when Tip O’Neill was leading one of his crusades to block our program in Central America. I became angry and said: “The Sandinistas have openly proclaimed Communism in their country and their support of Marxist revolutions throughout Central America . . . they’re killing and torturing people! Now what the hell does Congress expect me to do about that?”

  During the eight years of my presidency, I repeatedly expressed my frustration (and sometimes my downright exasperation) over my difficulties in convincing the American people and Congress of the seriousness of the threat in Central America. The White House staff regularly received the results of polls that measured what Americans thought of administration policies. Time and again, I would speak on television, to a joint session of Congress, or to other audiences about the problems in Central America, and I would hope that the outcome would be an outpouring of support from Americans who would apply the same kind of heat on Congress that helped pass the economic recovery package.

  But the polls usually found that large numbers of Americans cared little or not at all about what happened in Central America—in fact, a surprisingly large proportion didn’t even know where Nicaragua and El Salvador were located—and, among those who did care, too few cared enough about a Communist penetration of the Americas to apply the kind of pressure I needed on Congress.

  Part of this reluctance, I’m sure, was a result of the post-Vietnam syndrome. There was a depth of isolationism in the country that I hadn’t seen since the Great Depression. But I think there was also another reason why I couldn’t get my message across: The Sandinistas and Salvadoran guerrillas were as effective manipulators of the press and public opinion as anyone I’d ever seen. Portraying themselves as a blend of Abe Lincoln and George Washington, they hired a public relations firm to mount a sophisticated program of propaganda that was the ultimate in hypocrisy. The unelected and despotic government of Nicaragua piously accused us of plotting to overthrow them at the same time that they were using guns and mortars in an attempt to overthrow elected governments in neighboring Central American countries.

  This campaign of disinformation succeeded, in my opinion, partly because many reporters simply refused to apply the same standards of journalistic skepticism that they applied to most of the topics they covered. Perhaps after Vietnam, when many reporters cast Uncle Sam in the role of villain, they didn’t want to put white hats on the Contra freedom fighters because the U.S. government was supporting them. Or perhaps they decided that it made a better story to report how the “little guys”—the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran rebels—were battling a Goliath from north of the border.

  One time, we got information that a Soviet ship that had gone through the Panama Canal and was headed up the west coast of Central America was loaded with arms bound for Nicaragua. I went public with the information because the Sandinistas had always denied that they were getting any Soviet weapons. After I did, the Sandinistas swore up and down that I was wrong, that the ship was carrying only farm equipment; then they announced that they were going to invite the international press corps to the dock when the ship unloaded to prove that I had slandered them. That scared me a bit, and I wondered: Are they going to stop someplace en route and unload the weapons?

  Well, the ship pulled into the harbor and the press was invited—the Cuban press. Its representatives dutifully reported that the ship was carrying farm equipment, and some of the American papers picked up this story as evidence that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  The ship’s cargo was helicopter gunships.

  There was lots of other evidence available to the press that Nicaragua, like Cuba, had become a headquarters for exporting revolution throughout Latin America. In April 1983, Libya dispatched a plane to Nicaragua supposedly carrying medical supplies; our intelligence learned the plane was carrying a different sort of cargo, and brought this to the attention of authorities in Brazil. When the plane stopped there for refueling, it was searched. Its cargo: tons of arms and explosives bound for the Sandinistas, whose leaders were being quoted almost daily in the press saying that they weren’t getting arms from anyone. The Brazilians made sure that the plane didn’t continue on to Nicaragua.

  Once, Daniel Ortega, comandante of the Sandinistas, had come to New York for a UN meeting, and he and his wife had gone home with $3,500 worth of designer sunglasses. Yet he still managed to portray himself, especially in Europe, as a humble peasant who was being harassed and overwhelmed by the American colossus.

  On two occasions, clergymen from Central America, former prisoners of the Sandinistas who were unknown to each other, came to Washington and I presented them to the White House press corps. In both cases, their ears had been cut off with bayonets by the Sandinistas, and the throat of one had been slashed; he had barely escaped death. I told their story in front of the television cameras, but it never received the attention I thought it deserved.

  When some well-intentioned congressmen began traveling to Nicaragua to learn for themselves what was going on, the Sandinistas began staging guided tours to show off their supposed reforms, showing visitors only what they wanted them to see. Some congressmen, however, including quite a few Democrats, went privately to Nicaragua, did their homework and independent digging, talked to the people, and discovered the truth: that what was being offered to the congressmen on the government’s guided tours was a trip past a Potemkin village—a false-fronted democracy, all illusion and no substance—and these congressmen would vote with us on Contra aid.

  Others, along with several American clergymen who made the trip, came back bamboozled by the Potemkin villages and the Sandinistas’ disinformation machine and described the Sandinistas as heroes. They insisted that the people of Nicaragua were enthusiastic supporters of the Sandinistas. I knew otherwise, but I never could talk some of them out of it.

  After Nicaragua’s most recent elections, I’d enjoy talking to them now.

  63

  MY BATTLES WITH CONGRESS over Central America went on for almost the entire eight years I was in the White House, and made good grist for the journalistic mill. Understandably, reporters enjoy a good political scrap. But I believe the issues involved in our tug-of-war transcended those of many Washington political battles.

  As I have noted before, the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives for most of the past six decades. In recent years, I think they managed to perpetuate their control of the House less through the popularity of their political beliefs or their voting records than through the enormous powers of congressional incumbency. Because of their opportunities for bestowing political favors, generating publicity, and raising enormous sums of money for reelection campaigns from special interest groups that want favors from them, it is almost impossible, short of a major scandal, for a member of Congress to lose his or her seat involuntarily.

  More than ninety-five percent of congressional incumbents who seek reelection every two years are reelected. The dice are loaded in their favor. I don’t think this is good for the democratic—with a small d—process, nor is it good for America.

  Because it’s so easy for incumbents to get reelected, and for the majority party to guarantee itself “safe” districts during the reapportionment of electoral districts each decade, the Democrats have managed to keep a lock on the House and usually the Senate. Yet public opinion polls and recent pre
sidential elections show that Americans have increasingly been embracing Republican principles as many at the top of the Democratic Party have been distancing themselves from the values of mainstream Americans, whom they claim to represent.

  With public support for their political point of view declining, giving them less hope of capturing the White House, the Democrats are trying to impose their point of view through the legislative process—principally via the exploitation of their control of Congress and their power over the federal purse strings. In doing so, they have been trespassing increasingly across the invisible boundary established by the separation-of-powers principles inherent in our Constitution.

  Unlike members of Congress, the president is elected by all the people. He is the chief executive, and his principal responsibility is the security of the nation and its people. I don’t claim that he (or someday, she) should be able to do anything he wants to do. But every four years, the American people elect a president following a long campaign that gives them an opportunity to observe him in action, learn his views, test his judgment. The voters then make a choice. They’ve heard what he (or she) stands for. Then, they bestow their trust upon the winner.

  You can’t have 535 members of the House and Senate administer foreign policy. If the president doesn’t do what the people want him to do, they will let him know it.