A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  To anyone capable of evaluating the strength of the U.S. and Soviet economies, Reagan’s defense budget illustrated another reality: he intended to spend the Soviets into the ground. The United States could continue to grow its defense sector severalfold without severe economic disruption. Soviet leaders knew that, and they knew they could not. Perhaps even more obvious, there was an innovation gap between the communist and capitalist systems that translated into nonmarket sectors like the military. A top-down structure like Soviet Russia adopted new technologies reluctantly and eyed with suspicion anything that threatened to overturn the existing military hierarchy.82 The vise had been set. On March 8, 1983, Reagan gave it another twist.

  Speaking to the American Association of Evangelicals, Reagan told the assembled clergy that “appeasement…is folly,” for they could not ignore the “aggressive impulses of an evil empire.”83 Intellectuals and the media were angered and dumbfounded by the speech, which was received quite differently behind the Iron Curtain. Two former Soviet historians later reminded westerners, “The Soviet Union finds life-giving energy only in expansionism and an aggressive foreign policy.”84

  The “evil empire” speech paved the way for one of the most momentous events of the post–World War II era. On March 23, 1983, in a television address, after revealing previously classified photographs of new Soviet weapons and installations in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada, and reviewing the Soviet advantage in heavy missiles, Reagan surprised even many of his supporters by calling for a massive national commitment to build a defense against ballistic missiles. He urged scientists and engineers to use any and all new technologies, including (but not limited to) laser-beam weapons in space.

  A hostile press immediately disparaged the program, calling it Star Wars after the 1977 George Lucas film, but unwittingly the media and critics had only underscored the moral superiority of the system. In the film Star Wars everyone knew that Luke was the good guy and the evil emperor was a decrepit and corrupt dictator, much like the Soviet tyrants. Reagan’s concept baffled reporters and Washington liberal elites who secretly viewed it as lacking sufficient intellectual weight. Stu Spencer, a political strategist, explained why Reagan was at once so popular with the public and so despised by the chattering classes: “Reagan’s solutions to problems were always the same as the guy in the bar.”85

  The Gipper had always viewed MAD as an insane policy. He told Lou Cannon, “It’s like you and me sitting here in a discussion where we are each pointing a loaded gun at each other, and if you say anything wrong or I say anything wrong, we’re going to pull the trigger.”86 As early as 1967 he had been asking scientists and engineers about the technology of defeating ICBMs with antimissiles. He found support from Admiral James Watkins, the chief of naval operations, a devout Catholic who hated MAD and who was outraged by a pastoral letter from the U.S. Catholic bishops condemning the nuclear arms race without ever implicating the USSR as its cause. Watkins and army general John Vessey were encouraged to get beyond the narrow MAD thinking that had shackled the United States for twenty years.

  Kremlin insiders were terrified about the proposed program, largely because they knew it would work. Since the early 1970s, Soviet scientists and engineers had conducted a dedicated program of testing for ruby quartz lasers and charged-particle beam weapons. When confronted by the massive cost of such weapons, however, especially when having to acquire technology commonplace in the United States, the Soviet Union gave up on lasers in favor of blunt instruments like the single warhead silo-buster missiles.

  Several realities of Star Wars were irrelevant. It would not be ready for years. It might violate existing arms control treaties (but not the proposed START). Even when deployed, it could not be 100 percent effective against incoming warheads. And there were other complaints about Reagan’s proposal. America’s allies, except for the staunch supporter Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of England, were ill at ease with anything that would give either side a distinct edge, a stance that had evolved from the fear of provoking the Soviets into an invasion the Europeans could not withstand. The Soviets railed against it. But all of these criticisms of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), as the program was formally called, were completely irrelevant to its intended result: to render obsolete, once and for all, much of the USSR’s advantage in nuclear missiles.87

  Reagan had been briefed on the concept in 1982. He and his national security adviser, Robert S. McFarlane, both despised the MAD strategy, believing it was both immoral and destabilizing. It locked the country into a position of barely staying even with the Soviets instead of permitting opportunities to seek superiority. Once he and McFarlane agreed on SDI, it took only a year to flesh out and propose in a national policy initiative. Star Wars “was an example of Reagan’s ability to grasp a big new idea, simplify it, and sell it to the American people with consummate skill.”88 He wanted reductions, not limitations, but he knew that the Soviets would never negotiate while they held all the cards. Star Wars changed all that, literally in the space of an hour.

  The Soviets had spent the better part of two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars constructing a specific class of weapons that, now, literally could be rendered useless in a matter of years. Clearly the Soviets knew SDI would work, and fully expected the United States to build and deploy it. That assumption left the Kremlin with two options, neither of them good. First, the Soviets could try to counteract SDI through technical modifications to their missiles—hardening the shells, spinning the rockets in flight, and using decoys. None of these were pursued because every one involved adding weight or cost to the missiles, and the USSR was already spending approximately 25 percent of its GNP on the military.

  A second alternative was to defeat Star Wars through advanced computer applications, finding ways to outguess the SDI satellites. Reagan, however, had already thwarted that by banning advanced technology sales to the Soviet Union. The Soviets’ hysteria over SDI, which became even more apparent later, belies the idea still promoted by some liberals that it had little effect in the downfall of the USSR. As Vladimir Lukhim, former Soviet ambassador to the United States, later said, “It’s clear SDI accelerated our catastrophe by at least five years.”89

  Communism’s Last Gasp

  After Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, and his successor, Yuri Andropov, died two years later, the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fell to another ailing leader, Konstantin Chernenko. In 1985 he, too, died, at which time Mikhail Gorbachev, the “young” (fifty-four-year-old) new general secretary took control of the Kremlin. Gorbachev was immediately celebrated in the western media as a new type of communist who, journalists contended, understood incentives.

  Lauded as a sophisticated and sensible reformer, Gorbachev differed little from any of his three dead predecessors, except that they were dead communists and he was still breathing. He did admit that the Soviet Union was in trouble. A dedicated Marxist-Leninist, married to a teacher of Marxism-Leninism, Gorbachev had no intention of abandoning the dream of victory over the West. As Arkady Shevchenko, a Soviet diplomat, pointed out, “Men do not reach the pinnacle of Communist power without…an abiding commitment to the rightness of the Soviet system.”90 As late as 1987, Gorbachev still thought “the works of Lenin and his ideals of socialism…an inexhaustible source of…creative thought, theoretical wealth, and moral sagacity.”91

  Indeed, Gorbachev saw the Stalin era and the Brezhnev period as simply a perversion of communist ideology, not its failure. In speeches before foreign audiences, he routinely portrayed the Soviet economy as “fundamentally sound and merely fatigued.”92 But his practical nature told him that the USSR was taking a beating in Afghanistan and was hopelessly outclassed by the U.S. economy, and that Reagan’s Star Wars proposal had theoretically eliminated the only significant advantage the USSR still held over America—its ICBMs.93

  Gorbachev also found himself bound by Andropov’s policy of installing mobile, short-range SS-20 nuclear mi
ssiles west of the Ural Mountains. Although a smaller and potentially less destructive class of missiles, the SS-20s were in fact extremely destabilizing weapons. Their mobility made them impossible to verify in treaty negotiations: How many were there? Where were they? Also, unlike every previous class of nuclear weapon employed by the Soviet Union, these missiles were not aimed at the United States, but at European capitals (Bonn, Brussels, Paris, London). Their purpose was crystal clear. They existed to frighten Europeans into breaching the NATO pact, “delinking” Europe from the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Once that had been accomplished, the Soviets could again regain the offensive through intimidation and, if necessary, well-placed force.

  Jimmy Carter had committed, in principle, to offsetting these weapons with Pershing and ground-based cruise missiles. Whether he ever would have deployed them was a question left unanswered by his defeat at the polls, but Reagan certainly had no hesitation in meeting the Soviet response. Working closely with Margaret Thatcher, Reagan persuaded NATO heads to accept the U.S. missiles on European soil. On November 14, 1983, after the Kremlin refused to withdraw its SS-20s, American cruise missiles and Pershings arrived in England and West Germany. When Gorbachev ascended to power, he intuitively concluded that the last hope of Soviet communism lay in the “Euromissiles,” and Soviet propagandists mounted a massive campaign to intimidate the Europeans into demanding the removal of the NATO weapons. Soviet spy Vasili Mitrokhin reported that the KGB was confident it “possessed a nerve-hold on Western public opinion when it came to European attitudes toward the United States and NATO.”94

  Still attempting to shape American public opinion, the Soviets supported and funded the nuclear freeze movement, which sought to freeze all new construction or deployment of nuclear weapons, leaving the Soviets with a huge strategic advantage. This included a “status quo ante,” that would return Europe to its condition before the missiles were installed. Virtually the entire European Left mobilized, using massive parades and demonstrations to intimidate the NATO governments.

  By the time Gorbachev had become general secretary—and inherited both Afghanistan and the Euromissile crisis—he knew that he could not defeat the West. Gorbachev never considered a non-Communist Soviet Union. As dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has said, “He wants to save it, together with his skin.”95 But the general secretary could read, and his senior economist at the Soviet Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies and economic adviser, Alexander Zaichenko, warned him that if he tried to rebuild the Soviet economic glass house, “it would shatter.”96 Zaichenko pointed out to Gorbachev that the USSR was spending 20 percent of its GNP on weapons and research, whereas the United States was spending only 3 to 4 percent.

  Reagan appreciated Gorbachev’s position, and he sensed in him a Russian leader who could actually be approached on a personal level. In 1985, at a Geneva meeting, Reagan managed to spirit Gorbachev away from his advisers—just the two men and their interpreters in a small cabin with a fire—and he spoke plainly, face-to-face with the communist premier. By the time the hour-and-a-half meeting ended, Reagan had told Gorbachev bluntly, “You can’t win” an arms race, then he offered the olive branch by inviting the Russian to visit the United States. Gorbachev accepted, then insisted Reagan come to Moscow. Meeting privately, the leaders of the two superpowers had accomplished far more than their advisers ever thought possible.97

  It did not hurt Reagan’s leverage that the Soviets found themselves bogged down in Afghanistan fighting against the Muslim rebels. At first, Gorbachev had planned to sharply escalate their attacks on the rebels, but in March 1985, Reagan and his advisers developed a plan to arm the Afghans with a powerful Stinger antiaircraft missile. New evidence shows that although the CIA had tried to keep the Pentagon from providing support to the rebels (because it would interfere with low-level programs the CIA had), Reagan and a group of CIA officers nevertheless managed to get Stinger missiles into the hands of the anticommunist forces.98 The missiles gave the Afghan warriors (including a young radical named Osama bin Laden) the capability of shooting down Soviet helicopters and even low-level fighters. Soviet losses mounted.

  Following the failure of the nuclear-freeze propaganda campaign, Gorbachev gave up on the Euromissles. He agreed to remove the SS-20s, and opened up a dialogue with Reagan leading to the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty(1987). The INF Treaty was the first of its kind. Both sides agreed to withdraw their weapons and to destroy the SS-20s and the Pershings. From there it appeared that Reagan’s START Treaty would have clear sailing. In fact, however, it would not be needed: the Soviet Union would collapse before further treaties were required. When Reagan left office, he had greatly helped to cut down the rotting tree of Soviet communism. All that was needed for it to topple was a push from his successor.

  Morning in America

  Not since 1972 had a starker contrast been put before the American electorate than in the election of 1984. Reagan’s conservatism had ridden a wave of triumph since 1980: the tax cuts had produced a tremendous boom, the stock market had taken off, and the armed forces were resupplied and rearmed. More important, the nation had shaken off much of the self-doubt that had lingered since Vietnam and deepened under Carter. At the GOP convention renominating Reagan and Bush, the theme was “It’s morning in America.” Reagan’s natural optimism merged with the rapidly improving state of the Union to make him almost unbeatable.

  Democrats ran former Minnesota senator and former vice president Walter Mondale, who was a New Deal liberal to the left of Carter. Mondale chose a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, as his running mate, but the gimmick backfired because she brought to the campaign a tremendous amount of baggage in the form of charges of corruption in her husband’s business and in her own campaign funding. Mondale, with little in the Reagan record to criticize, focused on the budget deficits and hoped to make an issue of the Gipper’s age. But to address the deficits, Mondale promised to raise taxes, claiming he was only being honest, and most Americans were wary of returning to the bad old days of high taxes and high unemployment. When a moderator raised the question of Reagan’s age in a debate, the president, off the cuff, responded, “I won’t hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him.” Even Mondale laughed at that clever turnaround, which left the age issue in the dust.

  Mondale was crushed, losing every state but his home state of Minnesota (which he nearly lost as well), whereas Reagan had rolled up 59 percent of the popular vote, exceeding the victory margins of every other twentieth-century candidate except Roosevelt in 1936. His optimism remained undaunted: “America is back,” he said. “It’s morning again.” For those who wanted to see the United States as the fount of evil in the world, this was distressing indeed.

  Of course, to many others—especially those still trapped behind barbed wire and towers—his reelection was a sign of hope. Ten women in a Soviet forced-labor camp managed to smuggle out an unusual message on a tiny piece of tissue paper, which Reagan could barely read with a magnifying glass. It said, “Mr. President: We, women political prisoners of the Soviet Union, congratulate you on your reelection…. We look with hope to your country, which is on the road of freedom and respect for human rights.”99

  Despite his massive victory, Reagan soon faced a hostile Congress. In 1986 control of the Senate had shifted back to the Democrats. This was partly because of poor timing for Republicans, who had a number of key retirements. In part it also reflected the unwillingness of many Republicans to sign on to Reagan’s values, distancing themselves from supply-side economics and the tax cuts. In 1986, Congress, browbeaten by the media over the deficits, tinkered with the tax code again, eliminating many deductions. This had no effect on the deficits, but it slightly reduced the rate of growth of the economy.

  Even so, the phenomenal expansion put in place by the tax cuts in 1981 had produced astonishing growth. Contrary to Reagan’s critics, who claim the “rich got rich and the poor got poorer,” the blessings reached across the entire racial and class
strata of American life. From 1982 to 1988, per capita income for whites rose 14 percent, and for blacks, 18 percent (compared to the Carter years of 2.4 percent for whites and 1 percent for blacks). Black unemployment was cut in half under Reagan, with 2.6 million African Americans joining the labor force, and the number of black families in the highest income bracket ($50,000 and over) rose by 86 percent.100

  Reagan broke ground in other ways. In 1981 he had named the first woman to the Supreme Court when he appointed the moderate Arizonan Sandra Day O’Connor, and in 1986, when Chief Justice Warren Burger retired, Reagan moved conservative William Rehnquist into Burger’s top slot. Rehnquist’s seat was filled by another Reagan appointee, the brilliant Antonin Scalia, who would often be alone in his dissents until the appointment of his future soulmate, Clarence Thomas, by George H. W. Bush. But in 1988, Reagan’s team failed him when, without properly solidifying support first, they sent to the Senate the name of another legal genius, Robert Bork, a federal appeals court judge and former U.S. solicitor general. The Democrats lay in wait for Bork. Caught completely unawares, the president saw his nominee fail to win Senate approval, giving rise to a new term: “to be borked.”