He asked me to try to see what Soviet imperialism looked like from their side. “You are always beating up on us about Cuba, Cuba, Cuba,” he said. “Do you know who gave Cuba to us? You did. Castro was a revolutionary, not really a Marxist. He came to the United Nations. He stayed in the Hotel Theresa in Harlem. Your government ignored him, made him a pariah. So he dropped into our laps.
“You beat up on us constantly over Nicaragua,” he continued. “But all we will give the Sandinistas is enough to defend themselves. Not enough to bother their neighbors. In the future, you won’t see us so quick to join somebody else’s revolution.” Those days were ending, Dobrynin went on. No more foreign adventures that cost the Soviet Union billions of rubles and returned nothing but despotic regimes and bad relations with the United States.
What Gorbachev wanted, Dobrynin continued, was to fix the Soviet Union at home. The new regime wanted to move toward free markets. But the switch was not easy. “You take bread,” Dobrynin said. “We subsidize the cost. It’s so cheap that it’s more economical to feed pigs bread than slop. It costs more for the plastic to wrap it in than for the bread itself. We know this is insane. We know it can’t go on much longer. But you don’t just cut off a bread subsidy after sixty years. Then we would really have another revolution.” Gorbachev, he said, had also tried to impose higher taxes to make the country more fiscally responsible, “But then you run the risk of killing off any entrepreneurial spirit.”
I knew I was listening to an old pro, a diplomat as smooth as pre-revolutionary silk. Still, I did not automatically discount what Anatoly Dobrynin told me. I went back to my hotel and wrote down every word I could remember.
On March 1, President Reagan was in Brussels to meet with the other fifteen NATO heads of state. The changes shaking the Soviet Union were rattling all our old comfortable assumptions. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose country was the likely battleground in any East-West war, wanted further agreements to reduce tactical nuclear weapons, like our Lance missiles with a range of sixty miles. At home, the Reagan administration was under pressure from people who wanted to know, with the Soviet threat reduced, why we were still spending almost four times as much per capita on defense as our average NATO partner.
The NATO leaders sat around a huge circular table at the Brussels headquarters with their staffs occupying satellite chairs behind them. President Reagan was to be the last of the sixteen to speak. At the end of the first day, as his turn approached, and after hearing his predecessors burbling over Gorbachev, I was not sure the notes we had prepared for Reagan were adequate. At the next break, I went to him and whispered, “Sir, your notes are really not good enough, and I apologize. I’m afraid you’re going to have to wing it.”
He looked at me pleasantly. No panic. “Okay,” he said. He was to follow Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who began by saying he knew a little about living next door to a superpower too. Mulroney then compared the three-thousand-mile undefended border between his country and ours to the bristling border between the Eastern bloc and the West. That armed frontier represented the past, he said. The U.S.-Canadian model must represent the future. Mulroney was eloquent, and he helped steer the day away from the Gorbamania that had dominated so far.
Finally, it was President Reagan’s turn. He spoke about what we were trying to achieve with the Soviet Union. He covered our goals and expectations simply and convincingly. He spoke without notes, and his words obviously moved the other heads of state. Ronald Reagan was a more complex man than the one-dimensional figure his critics tried to paint. On this day, he again showed his grasp of the historic changes taking place in our relations with the Soviets; and he conveyed his beliefs in homey, uniquely Reaganesque terms. He was confident and comfortable in his own skin, more than anyone I have ever known.
As we were coming out of the NATO session, Chris Wallace, of NBC News, asked to interview me. “I’d like to get some background off-camera first, if you don’t mind,” Wallace said. I agreed and briefed him for a good fifteen minutes. “Let’s go on camera now,” he said, which we did for a twelve-minute taped interview. During that time, I told him that the talks were going fine, although some disagreement was inevitable when so many leaders met. After the interview, he asked me follow-up questions, off-camera, for another ten minutes. Altogether I had talked to Wallace for well over half an hour, and I was happy to get back to my room to grab a little rest.
I must have dozed off when I was jolted awake by the phone. It was someone from the press office back in the White House wanting to know if I realized what I had done. I did not know what the caller was talking about. I was informed that I had disagreed publicly with the President and had shot him down on network television.
I immediately went to Marlin Fitzwater’s press center and had the staff bring up the taped NBC Nightly News on a monitor. Wallace and his crew had caught the President coming out of the meeting, and Chris had asked him if there had been any disagreement among the NATO partners over the continuing Soviet threat. The President had said he had never seen such harmony. Wallace asked the President if they had disagreed about anything? “No,” Reagan said, as the camera cut away from him and back to Wallace. “But even some of his own advisors disagreed about that,” Wallace continued. And there I was on camera saying, “Where you have sixteen nations, all each sovereign, certainly there will be differences and there will be heated debate and discussion from time to time.” These were the seven seconds plucked from over a half hour of substance I had given the guy.
Shortly afterward, I ran into Wallace and told him, “Chris, that was a cheap shot.”
He remained unfazed. “I needed an angle,” he said. “And if that’s the worst that ever happens to you, you’re lucky.”
By now, I was well aware that this jungle had tigers. Back in Washington, I briefed the press on Panama on April 5, my fifty-first birthday. I was asked about a leaked account that we might consider kidnapping Manuel Noriega. And I replied with one of my new rules for handling the media: “I don’t discuss options.” As the conference neared an end and I was about to get off with my skin still intact, I suddenly felt someone’s teeth sink in. The Reverend Jesse Jackson had recently delivered his advice on Panama, and a reporter asked me, “Is it proper for Jesse Jackson to involve himself in foreign affairs?” I instantly understood the game. This reporter was saying, “Won’t you please take a shot at Jesse so we can get the brothers arguing and make some news?”
“I am an admirer of the Reverend Jesse Jackson,” I said, “and I appreciate his, as well as anyone’s, opinions.” Translation: “You ain’t gonna get me and Jesse bashing each other for your entertainment.”
More lessons in the care and feeding of the media. You do not have to answer every question put to you. They get to pick the questions. But you get to pick the answers. And I learned the hard way from the Chris Wallace encounter to aim beyond the audience of one who is asking the question. Shape your answer, instead, to the audience of millions who will be watching you on the tube.
Sometimes breaking starch for appearance’s sake reaches global levels. The Kuwaitis wanted us to sell them Maverick air-to-ground missiles and F/A-18 aircraft from which they could be launched. AIPAC, the American Israeli Political Action Committee, the major lobby of the American Jewish community, had beaten back a sale of Maverick missiles to Saudi Arabia about a year before. AIPAC also officially opposed the sale of the planes to the Kuwaitis. I sensed, however, that AIPAC was not looking for another knock-down-drag-out fight with the Reagan administration. “It’s not the plane we object to so much,” an AIPAC official confided to me, “but the Maverick missiles they carry.” There were two types, he knew, a smaller D model and a bigger G model. The Saudi sale that AIPAC had successfully blocked involved D-model Mavericks. “We have to be consistent,” the AIPAC official said. “We opposed the Saudis on the D model. So we have to oppose the Kuwaitis on the same basis.”
I listened, puzzled. “You realize
the G can do all the damage the D can do, plus a hell of a lot more, don’t you?” I said. “Yet you won’t oppose the sale of F/A-18s if they carry the bigger G model?”
“We need to be consistent,” he repeated.
The Kuwaiti crown prince, Saad Al Abdullah Al-Salim Al-Sabah, was in town to try to close the sale. I went to the prince’s hotel suite to join Rich Armitage and Robert Oakley of my National Security Council staff, who were explaining to his highness the problem with the sale. I described to the prince the difference between the D and G Mavericks. We could not sell him F/A-18s with the smaller D-type, but I thought we could sell the plane with the more destructive G-type, I pointed out. The prince asked me to repeat. I did, as he and his advisors looked at each other as if to say, “And they call us mysterious.” He asked if they might withdraw for a private consultation.
When the Kuwaitis came back, the prince said, yes, they would be willing to buy the F/A-18s and the G-model Mavericks with the bigger bang, if I would write out and sign this arrangement. I figured they feared that nobody would believe the deal otherwise. I agreed.
Everyone was happy. AIPAC had blocked the sale of D-model Mavericks to the Kuwaitis, just as it had to the Saudis, thus saving face. The Kuwaitis got a mystifying windfall. And the aircraft and missile manufacturers had a big sale. The moral? It can probably be found somewhere in Alice in Wonderland.
While the President had the final cut on all speeches, I had initial White House approval on those touching on national security. The draft before us this day, to be delivered on April 21 to the World Affairs Council of Western Massachusetts in Springfield, had been shepherded by Tony Dolan, chief of the hard-line speechwriters and a master of the Reagan voice. Ronald Reagan wanted to continue moving away from confrontation and toward cooperation with the Soviet Union. But behaving like a pushover is not a good bargaining tactic. Dolan therefore wanted some bite in this speech. Furthermore, the President was a conservative, and the country was going into an election year. Reagan would not be running himself, but the administration was determined to hold on to its conservative base and hand it to the next Republican candidate. The speech, consequently, had been written as an old-fashioned West-versus-East stem-winder to anchor the Republican right wing before the Moscow Summit. I was a shade apprehensive about the diplomacy of it, but from a hard-nosed political standpoint, I reckoned the strategy made sense.
On April 22, the day after the President delivered the speech, I was with George Shultz in the Kremlin, in the Hall of St. Catherine, a magnificent czarist chamber with high ceilings, ornate yellow-and-white walls, and massive crystal chandeliers shimmering above. Across the table from us sat Mikhail Gorbachev, face grim, voice tight, hand chopping the air, condemning the tough speech President Reagan had given in Springfield twenty-four hours before. “I have to believe,” he said, “that there is backward movement and an attempt to preach to us.” Otherwise, how to explain Reagan’s old-style Soviet-bashing? “Is this summit going to be a catfight?” he asked.
I noticed how Gorbachev had prepared himself for his attack. He did not have his steno pad today. In front of him was an empty file folder on which he had written all across the front, the back, and the inside, starting out horizontally and ending up scribbling diagonally down into the corners. I could picture the scene the night before: “Comrade Chairman, here are your briefing papers for tomorrow.” Short pause while Gorbachev leafs through them and throws them aside. “This rubbish has been overrun by events. I’ll do it myself.”
During our meeting, the Soviet leader pointed out that Richard Nixon had recently criticized the INF treaty. “Nixon has taken a break from the labor of writing his memoirs to take part in political debates,” Gorbachev noted sarcastically. “The dead should not be allowed to take the living by the coattails and drag them back to the past.” We should resist people “who want to put sticks in the spokes of Soviet-American normalization.” What was he to make of this renewed belligerency? Was this a return to the old politics, or was President Reagan simply playing to the American right? Very perceptive, Mikhail, I thought.
The dressing-down went on for a full forty-five minutes, including the translation. In the beginning, I had worried about the price we had paid for the Springfield speech. But I began to sense that Gorbachev too was playing to his own constituencies represented by the Soviets around the table. He could not let his nation be pummeled without appearing to strike back.
George Shultz had been out of town while the Springfield speech was being cleared. He had never seen it, and he was a little stunned by Gorbachev’s harangue. Shultz, however, wisely ignored the browbeating and when Gorbachev stopped at last, proceeded calmly to the agenda. Gorbachev’s tone changed. The Russian began describing his objectives under perestroika and glasnost. He was going to reform this lumbering giant of a nation. He was going to make the Soviet Union efficient. He was going to make it responsive to market forces. He was going to change the Communist Party. He was going to change the USSR in ways we never imagined. He was saying, in effect, that he was ending the Cold War. The battle between their ideology and ours was over, and they had lost. He looked directly at me, knowing I was a military man, and said with a twinkling eye, “What are you going to do now that you’ve lost your best enemy?”
That night, back in my hotel room, I thought over this extraordinary day, and I felt a conviction deep in my bones. This changed Soviet line was no ruse to disarm us. This man meant what he said. Lying there in bed, I realized that one phase of my life had ended, and another was about to begin. Up until now, as a soldier, my mission had been to confront, contain, and, if necessary, combat communism. Now, I had to think about a world without a Cold War. All the old verities we had lived by were now as misleading as an out-of-date timetable.
After Moscow, George Shultz went with Eduard Shevardnadze for a visit to the Republic of Georgia, and I headed home, with a stop en route in London to update Prime Minister Thatcher. Again I was ushered into her sitting room, where we talked for almost an hour. As I was getting ready to leave, I mentioned one last Gorbachev line. “He told us, Madame Prime Minister,” I said, “‘I am going to do as much as I can for as long as I can. I will make it irreversible. And then someone else will come and replace me when I’ve worn myself out.’”
“Oh, dear boy,” she said, with a dismissing wave, “don’t believe everything you hear. Why, even I say things like that from time to time.”
Back home, the intelligence and policy communities were having a hard time coping with the changes in the Soviet Union. CIA Soviet specialists told me about an upcoming meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee at which, this time for sure, the hard-liners would hand Gorbachev his head. The meeting was held, and afterward Gorbachev fired a dozen or so generals and hard-liners. I felt sympathy for our Kremlinologists. The world they had studied and had known so well for forty years was losing its structure and rules. With all their expertise, they could no longer anticipate events much better than a layman watching television.
I had seen what was happening up close and began to pay less and less attention to the experts. George Shultz also started to ignore CIA Soviet assessments. The evidence was increasing that Gorbachev was dead serious about wanting to end the economic burden of the arms race, dump Soviet puppet states onto Western bankers, and get out of the wars-of-liberation business. Our professionals were reluctant to predict a future bearing no resemblance to the past. They thought Gorbachev would fail, and he did. They did not think he would fail from the left for not being revolutionary enough, but instead from the right for abandoning the Soviet dream, now turned nightmare. Our foreign policy and intelligence community was losing its archenemy; as the old joke goes, “What will all the preachers do when the devil has been saved?”
On May 6, the student of yesteryear who preferred drilling in the field house to sitting in his college classes was on the dais at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina, about to be awarded an honorary d
octorate. Jim Bostic, my White House Fellowship classmate and virtual younger brother, was now a successful executive with the Georgia-Pacific Corporation. Jim had also become one of Clemson’s alumni jewels, and had nominated me for the degree. Nine days later, I was at William and Mary to give the commencement address and receive another honorary Ph.D. I told my audience that this was my frequent-flier payoff for all the checks I had sent and would continue to send to the college. Mike had been class of ’85, Linda class of ’87, and Annemarie was entering William and Mary that fall. Next, I was invited to be commencement speaker at her graduation from Washington and Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia. Around this time, I phoned my Aunt Nessa Llewellyn. She had seen me on TV, she said, advising the President, getting those fancy degrees. “Lord,” she said, “how all these pickaninnies done well!”
… … …
On a hectic afternoon in May, one of my aides poked his head in my doorway and said, “Charlie Wick’s people want to know which elevator he goes up, does he turn right or left when he gets out, where will the light switch be when he goes into his room?” Along with preparing the substantive issues, we were handling the logistics headaches of the upcoming Moscow Summit. Charles Z. Wick, a close Reagan California friend, was now director of the U.S. Information Agency; and while my staff was swamped trying to make arrangements for over eight hundred people to go to Moscow, Charlie’s staff seemed to take up 40 percent of our time.
I called Wick and said, “Charlie, if you want to go to Moscow, your guys had better not make another phone call to this office.” Charlie immediately called off his auxiliaries. This is what goes on behind the drama of summit headlines.
Ronald Reagan was always looking for the homey touch, some way to break through suffocating protocol to camaraderie. He wanted to call Gorbachev by his first name. “You know,” the President said, “when I first met the Western leaders at the economic summit, I said, ‘My name’s Ron.’ And in a few hours it was ‘Ron’ and ‘Brian,’ and ‘François’ and ‘Margaret.’”
My American Journey Page 46