An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  When the Russians wouldn’t agree to remove the SS-20 missiles that they had aimed at European cities, we said we were going to proceed with NATO’s plans for us to deploy Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe in the fall of 1983 to counter the threat of the SS-20S.

  Although we had imposed economic sanctions on the Polish government and the Soviet Union following the cruel crackdown in Poland, our European allies, more greatly concerned about their trade relations in Eastern Europe, did not back us with the kind of support needed to make the sanctions as effective as I hoped, causing a temporary, if ultimately forgotten, strain in the Western alliance. Alone, we pressed ahead with the sanctions, although, as I wrote in my diary in early 1982, “The plain truth is: we can’t—alone—hurt the Soviets that much. The Soviets, however, will be disturbed at the evidence that their attempt to split us off from our allies have failed.” A few days after I wrote this, Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, and his wife came to the White House for dinner with other members of the Washington diplomatic corps. “Everything we’ve heard is true: They are a most likable couple,” I wrote. “In fact, so much so you wonder how they can stick with the Soviet system. Truth is, he and his wife are most likable and very much in love with each other after forty years of marriage.”

  Dobrynin was doubtlessly a dedicated Communist. But I couldn’t help liking him as a human being, and if that were possible, I wondered, wasn’t it possible the peoples of America and the Soviet Union had a chance to reduce the mistrust that had led us to the nuclear precipice?

  This dinner for the diplomatic corps occurred only one day after I had been given a briefing on the astonishing Soviet arms buildup, which left me amazed at its scale, cost, and breadth and the danger it posed to our country. The output of long-range missiles alone was staggering. Several days later, I had another briefing, this time on the Soviet economy. The latest figures provided additional evidence that it was a basket case, and even if I hadn’t majored in economics in college, it would have been plain to me that Communism was doomed as a failed economic system. The situation was so bad that if Western countries got together and cut off credits to it, we could bring it to its knees. How could the Soviets afford their huge arms buildup? Perhaps, I mused to myself in March 1982, America should “explore if the time hasn’t come to confront the Russians and tell them all the things we could do for them if they’d quit their bad acting and decide to join the civilized world. . . .”

  In the spring of 1982, in a speech at a Eureka College reunion marking the fiftieth anniversary of my graduating class, I renewed my invitation to the Soviets to initiate the START (the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks), which we’d put on hold after the Soviets imposed martial law in Poland. At the same time, in speeches at the United Nations and other places, I made it a point to speak with frankness on what I thought of Soviet expansionism. I wanted to remind Leonid Brezhnev that we knew what the Soviets were up to and that we weren’t going to stand by and do nothing while they sought world domination; I also tried to send out a signal that the United States intended to support people fighting for their freedom against Communism wherever they were—a policy some writers later described as the “Reagan Doctrine.” I felt it was time to speak the truth, not platitudes, even though a lot of liberals and some members of the State Department’s Striped Pants Set sometimes didn’t like my choice of words. Some congressmen and columnists claimed that I was determined to get us into a nuclear war with the Soviets.

  My critics in Congress began chipping away, then slashing away, at the money we needed to rebuild our military forces. Meanwhile, inspired by a similar movement in Europe with roots in Moscow, many well-meaning Americans (as well as some driven solely by sympathies for the other side) began taking to the streets to demand an immediate freeze on the development and deployment of nuclear weapons.

  Nuclear freeze had a nice-sounding emotional appeal, but the Russians had such a huge advantage over the United States in large land-based nuclear missiles with multiple warheads that if we agreed to one, we’d have had to meet them at the arms talks as second-class citizens—and if the unthinkable happened, it was possible their arsenal of giant missiles could overwhelm our older, unmodernized, and vulnerable retaliatory forces. Well-meaning or not, the nuclear freeze movement had an agenda that could have been written in Moscow.

  In May 1982, I sent a letter to Brezhnev suggesting a resumption of arms control talks at Geneva before the end of June. “As you know,” I wrote,

  it is my view that our previous efforts at limiting strategic offensive arms did not adequately meet the standards of reduction, equality and verification. The awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons imposes on our two countries both the practical necessity and the moral imperative to do everything within our power to reduce and even eliminate the possibility of their use in war. This has been the thrust of my country’s approach to nuclear arms control for over the past 35 years . . . we now stand at another historic juncture in the effort to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

  While Brezhnev’s response was not cordial, he agreed to new talks. “It is not our fault,” he wrote, “that the Strategic Arms Limitation process was interrupted for a long time. . . . The position with which the U.S., judging by your speech of May 9, is approaching the negotiations cannot but cause apprehension and even doubts as to the seriousness of the intentions of the U.S. side.”

  While I was reading the letter, I jotted down my reactions to his comments in the margin. Next to the sentences above, my comment was: “He has to be kidding.”

  To a remark by Brezhnev that “the ‘substantial’ reduction the U.S. side is talking about on the basis of the picture it has itself presented would naturally be substantial only for the Soviet side,” I wrote: “Because they have the most.”

  “Only one thing,” he wrote, “would be the result of such a one sided approach—an upsetting of the existing balance of forces and a break of that very stability which the U.S. side is allegedly so anxious to ensure.”

  (“He means ‘imbalance,’” I wrote.)

  “There should be no misunderstanding, Mr. President. This is not a realistic position, not the path toward agreement. Besides, as you know, we are not the only ones who hold such a view.” (This was apparently a reference to the disarmament movement in Europe.) Brezhnev proposed an immediate freeze on the number of nuclear weapons on both sides. “Such an agreement would, in our view, create favorable conditions for the negotiations and facilitate achieving the objectives therein. I would ask you, Mr. President, carefully to consider this proposal.” (My note in the margin: “I have and it is an apple for an orchard”) Brezhnev continued: “The Soviet people—and you can take my word for that—will resolutely support such an agreement,” to which I wrote in the margin: “How will they know? They haven’t been told the truth for years.” At the bottom of the letter, I wrote: “He’s a barrel of laughs.”

  Some of the frank things I was saying about the Soviet Union in the spring of 1982, I was told, caused concern among several of our European allies who had their hands full with the nuclear freeze movement, which was being fired up by demagogues depicting me as a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy aching to pull out my nuclear six-shooter and bring on doomsday.

  Partly because of these concerns, when I went in June 1982 to the economic summit in Versailles, I accepted invitations to address the parliaments of Great Britain and West Germany. I wanted to demonstrate that I wasn’t flirting with doomsday. I told the Europeans how I felt: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, but before we could persuade the Russians to take their finger off the trigger, we had to make them realize that there was a boundary beyond which the Free World would not accept criminal behavior by another state—and to do that we had to be able to negotiate with the Russians from a position of strength. “Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace,” I said to members of the British Parliament,

  but let it be clear
we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that’s now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets, but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. . . . If history teaches us anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly. We see around us today the marks of our terrible dilemma—predictions of doomsday, anti-nuclear demonstrations, an arms race in which the West must, for its own protection, be an unwilling participant. At the same time, we see totalitarian forces in the world who seek subversion and conflict around the globe to further their barbarous assault on the human spirit. What, then, is our course? Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?

  The answer, I said, was no.

  Time was on the side of the democracies: All over the world there were indications that democracy was on the rise and Communism was near collapse, dying from a terminal disease called tyranny. It could no longer bottle up the energy of the human spirit and man’s innate drive to be free, and its collapse was imminent. “The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us,” I said.

  Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies—West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam—it is the democratic countries that are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we’ve seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward, the Communist world.

  On this trip to Europe I wanted to accomplish something else besides convincing the Europeans I wasn’t determined to lead the Western alliance into a nuclear war. When I had entered office, I’d been struck by something that didn’t seem right: The democracies were up against an expansionist powerhouse that was trying all over the world to peddle its system, yet we who had the system of government that worked were doing nothing to sell our vision of freedom and the kind of system in which the people control government, not the other way around.

  So when I spoke before the European parliaments I made the point that while the world’s democracies might have differences among ourselves, we were united by the same system of beliefs: a belief in liberty and the rejection of the arbitrary power of the state, a refusal to subordinate the rights of the individual to the state, and the realization that collectivism stifles the best human impulses. The democracies, I suggested, like the Communists, should adopt a policy of expansionism: We should try to help the new countries of Africa and elsewhere embrace democracy and become evangelists worldwide for freedom, individual liberty, representative government, freedom of the press, self-expression, and the rule of law.

  Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings. . . . I believe the renewed strength of the democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom, will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace.

  If the democracies maintained their resolve against Communism and encouraged the expansion of democratic rule, I suggested, the rest was inevitable:

  Marxism-Leninism would be tossed on the ash heap of history, like all the other forms of tyranny that preceded it.

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  ALTHOUGH I THINK I convinced many people on that trip to Europe that I wasn’t a trigger-happy cowboy, the nuclear freeze movement marched along unfazed through the summer and fall of 1982, while the Democratic majority in Congress tried to kill many of the most important elements of our military modernization program, including the MX missile and B-l bomber, and our efforts to improve the quality of our all-volunteer army. Attempts to slash the military budget continued even after we began seeing tangible evidence of success. After a briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff one day that summer, I wrote of the meeting: “It was inspiring. We’ve really turned the military around. Morale-wise and every other way.” A much greater proportion of military personnel were high school graduates, use of marijuana among the troops was down from fifty percent to sixteen percent, reenlistment rates were soaring, and there was a renewed sense of honor among our military men and women that made them proud to wear a uniform again.

  Congressional budget battles and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon preoccupied us much of that summer. Meanwhile, the continuing Soviet crackdown on Poland, tensions caused by Brezhnev’s effort to hold us responsible for Israel’s actions in Lebanon, his refusal to concede that the Soviets were meddling in Third World countries, and other problems prevented any improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urged me to consider imposing a blockade around Nicaragua to send a stronger signal to Moscow that we didn’t like what the Soviets were doing in Central America, but a blockade would have been an official act of war. I didn’t want a state of war existing between us and Nicaragua—and no one could tell where efforts to blockade Soviet ships bound for Central America might lead.

  One afternoon, George Shultz and I invited Ambassador Dobrynin over to the White House. We met in our living quarters and engaged in a discussion about mutual problems. He brought up a Soviet desire to resume negotiations on a long-term grain agreement. I tried to explain to him a problem that we had with the American people and the importance of public opinion in our system:

  Americans have a deep feeling for the countries of their ancestry; when people in other nations are persecuted, we can’t make concessions to countries that mistreat them. But, I told the ambassador, some act on the part of the Soviets might make it easier for us to resume negotiations, but not as a trade or bargain. I reminded him that a Pentecostalist family had been living for four years in the basement of our embassy in Moscow. If they attempted to set foot off the embassy grounds, they would be arrested. Their crime: belief in their religion and belief in God. I said that in mentioning the Pentecostalists I wasn’t trying to negotiate or strike a bargain—just pointing out that a kindness to those people would make it easier for us to do something for his government, and we’d never mention it as an exchange or concession. It wasn’t long before the Pentecostalists were in America. A short time later we agreed to resume negotiations on the grain agreement.

  Throughout most of 1982, I tried to persuade our European allies to restrict credit to the Soviets and join us in imposing other sanctions aimed at halting construction of the trans-Siberian natural-gas pipeline. I eventually had a little success. I was unable, however, to persuade them to apply as much economic pressure on the Soviet Union as I thought we should to accelerate the demise of Communism; many of our European allies cared more about their economic relationships in Eastern Europe than tightening a knot around the Soviets.

  During the late summer and fall of that year, while the streets of U.S. and European cities were filled more and more often with nuclear freeze proponents, Soviet negotiators at Geneva sought to exploit this public sentiment and dug in their heels against the zero-zero proposal, and, simply put, U.S.-Soviet relations remained in a deep freeze.

  In September, Secretary of State Shultz met with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, who hinted that Brezhnev might be interested in a summit meeting with me. I told George to advise Gromyko that we agreed in principle with the idea but wanted some good deeds from Moscow first. I wasn’t surprised when George got nowhere with Gromyko. Nevertheless, I wondered: How long can the Russians keep on being so belligerent and spending so much on arms when they can’t even feed their own people?

  At 3:30 A.M. on November 11, Nancy and I were awakened by a telephone call from my national security advisor, who told me Brezhnev had just died. I asked George Bush and George Shultz to attend the funeral along with our ambassador in Moscow, Arthur Hartman.

  Before Brezhnev’s death, I had decided I was going to announce in the middle of November a lifting of the sanctions on cons
truction of the trans-Siberian pipeline; our major trading partners (those represented at the economic summit) had agreed to impose limited trade and credit restrictions on the Soviets, which meant none of us would subsidize the Soviet economy or the Soviet military expansion by offering preferential trading terms or easy credits, and to restrict the flow of products and technology that would increase Soviet military capabilities.

  A portion of my diary entry for November 13, 1982:

  To the Soviet Embassy to sign the condolence book for Pres. Brezhnev. There’s a strange feeling in that place—no one smiled, well, that is except Ambassador Dobrynin. Back to the oval office to do the Saturday broadcast. Then an emergency. With all seven nations agreed on a uniform policy on East West trade, something we’ve been after for a year and a half, we got word that Mitterrand had some objections. My script was written as an announcement of our agreement and that as a result I was lifting the pipeline sanctions. The State Dept. chickened and wanted me to go with a back up script on crime. I put in a call to Mitterrand. He was unavailable. I had in my hand Chancellor Kohl’s and Margaret Thatcher’s messages of joy about the agreement. I said to hell with changing and did the announcement. Maybe Francois Mitterrand will get the message, and maybe the striped pants types at State will too . . . now we’re off to Chicago for the memorial service to Loyal [my father-in-law] by American College of Surgeons. . . .

  On November 15, I wrote:

  More flak from Paris but we’re not answering. We’ve told them if they are reneging for any reason about the east west trade agreement take it up with all of us, not just the U.S.