An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  Another prayer was answered later the same day during a telephone conversation with Howard Baker. “Howard was in Florida visiting his grandchildren. When he called back I asked him to take the job. Paul was right. He accepted immediately and is coming to Washington tomorrow . . .”

  This diary entry concluded: “Now I’ll go on reading the Tower report till I fall asleep . . .”

  During our meeting the week before, Don Regan had said he would remain on the job until I found a replacement for him; then I would announce his resignation and the name of his successor and the date of the change. Unfortunately, there was a news leak, and it became public that I intended to replace Don with Howard Baker. The leak was not intentional, and I had not wanted to embarrass Don.

  The next thing I knew, Kathy Osborne sent an envelope to me at the residence (it was almost 6:00 P.M.) that contained a single sheet of paper. It said:

  I resign as Chief of Staff to the President of the United States.

  Donald T. Regan.

  Chief of Staff to the

  President of the United States

  I wrote out the following reply by hand for Kathy to type:

  Dear Don:

  In accepting your resignation I want you to know how deeply grateful I am for all that you have done for the administration and for the country. As Secretary of the Treasury you planted the seeds for the most far reaching tax reform in our history. As Chief of Staff you worked tirelessly and effectively for the policies and programs we proposed to the Congress.

  I know that you stayed on beyond the time you had set for your return to private life and did so because you felt you could be of help in a time of trouble. You were of help and I thank you. Whether on the deck of your beloved boat or on the fairway; in the spirit of our forefathers, may the sun shine warm upon your face, the wind be always at your back and may God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

  Sincerely,

  Ronald Reagan

  After this matter was settled, I began writing a speech to deliver to the nation in conjunction with the public release of the Tower Board’s report. While I was working on it, my son Ron flew to Washington from California and, in the privacy of the family quarters, we had a man-to-man talk of a kind we’d never had before. I’ll always remember and feel proud and blessed by the sentiment that motivated Ron to make that trip across the country. As I wrote late that night in my diary, “Ron came from the coast to plead with me—out of his love for me—to take forceful action and change the situation [that had caused so much anguish for me and the administration]. I was deeply touched.” What a lucky father I am, I thought.

  In my speech to the nation on March 4, 1987, I accepted full responsibility for the Iran-Contra affair and then added: “What should happen when you make a mistake is this: You take your knocks, you learn your lessons, and then you move on.”

  Howard Baker went on to become an outstanding chief of staff, a perfect man for the job—smart, fair, personable, savvy about Washington, a decent man. And Frank Carlucci and Colin Powell went on to revitalize and restore honor to the NSC.

  The cloud that descended over my credibility during the Iran-Contra affair undoubtedly affected the fate of some of my legislative goals during my last two years in office. With the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, it’s hard to say how much more we might have accomplished if the crisis hadn’t occurred, but clearly it had some impact. Still, we were able to move on once the Tower Board had removed the cloud from over the White House and agreed, as did the congressional investigating committees, with what I had been saying from the beginning: that I had had no knowledge of any diversion of monies to the Contras.

  To this day I still believe that the Iran initiative was not an effort to swap arms for hostages. But I know it may not look that way to some people.

  I still believe that the policy that led us to attempt to open up a channel to moderate Iranians wasn’t wrong. Nevertheless, as I said in my speech when the Tower report was made public, mistakes were made in the implementation of this policy. Because I was so concerned with getting the hostages home, I may not have asked enough questions about how the Iranian initiative was being conducted. I trusted our people to obey the law. Unfortunately, an initiative meant to develop a relationship with moderate Iranians and get our hostages home took on a new shape I never expected and was never told about.

  Mistakes were made and I tried to rectify them, first by appointing the Tower Board to investigate the events, then by reorganizing the National Security Council to ensure that no one there could ever again take it upon themselves to set foreign policy. In time, my ranking in the public opinion polls rose. But that never made me feel as happy as some people might think it would: It was as if Americans were forgiving me for something I hadn’t done.

  When it first began to appear that North and Poindexter had done things they hadn’t advised me of, my initial reaction was, well, perhaps they thought they were doing the right thing and trying to protect me, and I felt compassion for both of them. I did not know, during those first days following the discovery of the “smoking gun” memo, that North and others at the NSC had spent hours shredding documents. Nor did I have any idea of the full magnitude of how I had been misled.

  Before learning these things, I called North, after he had been relieved of his duties at the NSC. During this conversation I referred to him as a national hero; I was thinking about his service in Vietnam. As I’ve mentioned, I subsequently learned that North had allegedly claimed that he met with me often in the Oval Office and at Camp David, and that we spoke on the phone frequently and there was a private pipeline between the two of us. Well, none of those things were true. The truth is—as he testified before Congress—that I hardly knew him.

  I received a lot of pressure from my supporters, starting from the first days after the Iran-Contra story broke and continuing to my last week in the White House, to grant clemency to Oliver North and John Poindexter. I never gave it serious consideration: I felt that if I pardoned them before a trial, there would be a shadow of guilt over them for the rest of their lives and the suspicion of cover-up. I felt that once the legal process had begun, the law had to take its course.

  • • •

  As exhaustive as its investigation was, the Tower Board did not answer all the questions about the Iran-Contra affair. It told us that Oliver North appeared to have diverted millions of dollars in “residual” income from the weapons sales to keep the Contras equipped and alive. I’ve seen speculation that the diversion amounted to as much as $8 million or $12 million. Bud McFarlane testified that North had told him the Contras were benefiting from the sale of arms to the Iranians. But, to this day, after all the trials and ten months of congressional investigations, there are still many details we do not know about the transfer of those weapons and the exchange of money for them—exactly how much money was involved and where it went, for example.

  Although the Tower Board said that there was “considerable evidence before it of a diversion of funds to support the Contras,” it found “no hard proof” of that. The congressional investigations filled in some of the gaps, but a lot remains unclear.

  Bill Casey, John Poindexter, Oliver North, and Bud McFarlane knew that I believed that the survival of the Contras as a democratic resistance force was essential in Nicaragua. I made no secret of that. They also knew that I stood firmly behind the initiative proposed by Israel aimed at freeing the hostages and opening up talks with the future leaders of Iran. But until Ed Meese uncovered North’s memorandum, I had not heard a whisper about funds being channeled from the Iranian arms shipments to the Contras—and I would not have approved it if anyone had suggested it to me.

  Yes, I believed in helping the Contras; but no one, including presidents, is above the law. The Iranian initiative was secret, but I was assured that everything about it was legal. And one thing about the Iranian initiative will never change: we did bring home three hostages.

  But lo
oking back now, with the benefit of hindsight and the Tower Board’s report, it appears that, despite Israel’s repeated assurances that we were dealing with responsible moderates in Iran, some of those “moderates” may have had links to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s government and were trying to obtain weapons under false pretenses. And despite Israel’s endorsement of them, we now know that some of the middlemen we were dealing with during the Iran initiative (and who helped us win the freedom of three hostages) behaved at times like bait-and-switch con men: They would make promises, then renege on them, lying to McFarlane, North, Poindexter, and others with the sole intention of profiteering. During this process, apparently, Oliver North and others at the NSC agreed to certain things—such as promising secret U.S. intelligence data to the Iranians for use in their war with Iraq—that I was never told about.

  Because of his illness and subsequent death, I never had a chance to learn from Bill Casey what he knew about Iran-Contra. Probably only John Poindexter and Oliver North know all the answers. In this regard, I’ve often wondered if we didn’t move too fast after Ed Meese uncovered the memorandum that disclosed the diversion of funds to the Contras. Ed said that Poindexter and North shouldn’t remain in their jobs another day, and Don Regan agreed; he said it would be important to show that we took decisive action as soon as the diversion of funds was discovered.

  As a result, on the day that John Poindexter came to the Oval Office to resign, I didn’t ask him the questions I now wish I had. If we hadn’t acted so quickly, maybe he and North would have told me some of the things that are still a mystery to me after all this time.

  If I could do it over again, I would bring both of them into the Oval Office and say, “Okay, John and Ollie, level with me. Tell me what really happened and what it is that you have been hiding from me. Tell me everything.”

  If I had done that, at least I wouldn’t be sitting here, writing this book, still ignorant of some of the things that went on during the Iran-Contra affair.

  PART SIX

  Arms Control: From Geneva to Reykjavik, Washington to Moscow

  70

  A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF MYTHOLOGY grew up around the Strategic Defense Initiative, the program I announced in 1983 to develop a defensive shield against nuclear missiles. It wasn’t conceived by scientists, although they came on board and contributed greatly to its success.

  I came into office with a decided prejudice against our tacit agreement with the Soviet Union regarding nuclear missiles. I’m talking about the MAD policy—“mutual assured destruction”—the idea of deterrence providing safety so long as each of us had the power to destroy the other with nuclear missiles if one of us launched a first strike. Somehow this didn’t seem to me to be something that would send you to bed feeling safe. It was like having two westerners standing in a saloon aiming their guns at each other’s head—permanently. There had to be a better way.

  Early in my first term, I called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—our military leaders—and said to them: Every offensive weapon ever invented by man has resulted in the creation of a defense against it; isn’t it possible in this age of technology that we could invent a defensive weapon that could intercept nuclear weapons and destroy them as they emerged from their silos?

  They looked at each other, then asked if they could huddle for a few moments. Very shortly, they came out of their huddle and said, “Yes, it’s an idea worth exploring.” My answer was, “Let’s do it.”

  So the SDI was born, and very shortly some in Congress and the press named it “Star Wars.”

  As the myths grew, one of them was that I had proposed the idea to produce a bargaining chip for use in getting the Soviets to reduce their weaponry. I’ve had to tell the Soviet leaders a hundred times that the SDI was not a bargaining chip. I’ve told them I’d share it with others willing to give up their nuclear missiles. We all know how to make the missiles. One day a madman could come along and make the missiles and blackmail all of us—but not if we have a defense against them. My closing line was, “We all got together in 1925 and banned the use of poison gas. But we all kept our gas masks.”

  Some people may take a different view, but if I had to choose the single most important reason, on the United States’ side, for the historic breakthroughs that were to occur during the next five years in the quest for peace and a better relationship with the Soviet Union, I would say it was the Strategic Defense Initiative, along with the overall modernization of our military forces.

  But looking back now on the entirety of those eight years I was in Washington, I have to say that the improvements in U.S.-Soviet relations didn’t come quickly and they didn’t come easily.

  As I have mentioned before, the Soviet Union we faced during my first winter in office was guided by a policy of immoral and unbridled expansionism. During that first year, we embarked on a broad program of military renewal to upgrade our land, sea, and air forces and adopted a foreign policy aimed at making it clear to the Soviets that we now viewed them through a prism of reality: We knew what they were up to, we were not going to accept subversion of democratic governments, and we would never accept second place in the arms race.

  At the same time, recognizing the futility of the arms race and the hair-trigger risk of annihilation it posed to the world, I tried to send signals to Moscow indicating we were prepared to negotiate a winding down of the arms race if the Soviets were also sincere about it—and proved it with deeds.

  These policies were linked: Because we now viewed the Soviets through the prism of reality, we knew we would never get anywhere with them at the arms control table if we went there in a position of military inferiority; if we were going to get them to sue for peace, we had to do it from a position of strength.

  And, because we viewed them realistically, it was clear that if we did negotiate an arms control agreement with the Soviets, it had to be absolutely verifiable. Agreements couldn’t be based on trust alone.

  I didn’t want the United States ever to have to do what it sometimes had been forced to do in the past: go to the arms control table with the Russians holding better cards and having to beg them to negotiate seriously with an appeal to their better nature. That’s why “Peace through Strength” became one of the mottoes of our administration.

  And I decided that if we were to participate with the Russians in arms control talks, our goal should be to reduce nuclear weapons, not just limit their rate of increase, which is what past nuclear arms control agreements had done.

  There is a myth that arms control agreements automatically produce arms reduction. Well, between 1969, when the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) began, and the mid-eighties, the Soviets increased their number of strategic nuclear weapons by thousands, and under the limits set by the SALT I and SALT II agreements the number could have reached thousands more.

  That might be arms limitation, but it sure wasn’t arms reduction.

  Looking back at the recent history of the world, I find it amazing how far civilization has retrogressed so quickly. As recently as World War I—granted the rules were violated at times—we had a set of rules of warfare in which armies didn’t make war against civilians: Soldiers fought soldiers. Then came World War II and Hitler’s philosophy of total war, which meant the bombing not only of soldiers but of factories that produced their rifles, and, if surrounding communities were also hit, that was to be accepted; then, as the war progressed, it became common for the combatants simply to attack civilians as part of military strategy.

  By the time the 1980s rolled around, we were placing our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population.

  A nuclear war is aimed at people, no matter how often military men like to say, “No, we only aim to hit other missiles.”

  One of the first statistics I saw as president was one of the most sobering and startling I’d ever heard. I’ll never forget it:

  The Pentagon said at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a
nuclear war with the Soviet Union—even if we “won.”

  For Americans who survived such a war, I couldn’t imagine what life would be like. The planet would be so poisoned the “survivors” would have no place to live.

  Even if a nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it.

  No one could “win” a nuclear war. Yet as long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used, and once the first nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end?

  My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons.

  Some of my advisors, including a number at the Pentagon, did not share this dream. They couldn’t conceive of it. They said a nuclear-free world was unattainable and it would be dangerous for us even if it were possible; some even claimed nuclear war was “inevitable” and we had to prepare for this reality. They tossed around macabre jargon about “throw weights” and “kill ratios” as if they were talking about baseball scores. But for the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.

  Since I knew it would be a long and difficult task to rid the world of nuclear weapons, I had this second dream: the creation of a defense against nuclear missiles, so we could change from a policy of assured destruction to one of assured survival.

  My deepest hope was that someday our children and our grandchildren could live in a world free of the constant threat of nuclear war.

  During my first year in Washington, we reopened arms negotiations with the Russians in Geneva but made virtually no progress, blocked by the refusal of the Soviets to end their subversion of democratic governments, their continuing aggression in Afghanistan and brutal crackdown in Poland, and their resistance to the zero-zero plan I proposed in November 1981 to eliminate intermediate-range missiles from Europe. I viewed the zero-zero proposal as the first step toward the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons from the earth; the Soviets saw it as an attempt by us to reduce the immense Soviet imbalance of nuclear missile power in Europe—which it was.