There is No Alternative

by Claire Berlinski

  When I ask Lawson about this, he replies that his psychological interpretation is slightly different. “I think,” he says, “that people who are in positions of power come very easily, after a time, to value power more highly than anything else. And when they encounter someone who has even more power than they have, they are in awe of it. And I think that was the question with Reagan—though she was very happy to criticize him when she thought he was getting things wrong. But nevertheless, she was to some extent in awe of him.” If she found it easy to admire Gorbachev, Lawson believes, it was because “at that time, nobody fully realized the extent of the fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union.”

  Perhaps. There is no doubt that whatever its psychological roots, Thatcher’s love for Reagan was very real and very deep. Charles Powell was present at all of Thatcher’s meetings with Reagan. “It was interesting, because of course they adored each other, and they thought very similarly, but their styles could hardly have been more different. I mean, he was a chairman, presiding loftily over world affairs, while also sort of greeting Miss Multiple Sclerosis from Kansas. She was the chief operating officer, deeply immersed in details of policy, and sometimes, there was just the two of them there—just, you know, a hanger-on like me in the background—and she was rather going on, as one might say, and you could see his eyes sort of straining to the clock on the wall, you know, counting the minutes to lunch, when he could decently say, Maggie—Margaret, let’s go and have a drink, and have lunch, and she would be going into the finer details of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. It was a curious sort of dialogue, though she had huge respect for him. She was very respectful of American presidents. She was not at all an informal person, she called him ‘Mr. President’ 99 percent of the time, very rarely relapsed into ‘Ron,’ even in very private settings—”

  “And did he call her—”

  “He always called her ‘Margaret.’”

  By the time Reagan died, in 2004, Thatcher was already very ill. She was not strong enough to speak at the funeral. She instead sent a prerecorded eulogy to be played at the National Cathedral in Washington. It is a sad thing to watch. Her diminishment is palpable. There is no doubt of the depth of her grief. The voice of this once-indomitable woman is weak; her eyes are bleak and watery. She gasps for breath between phrases.

  Recalling the attempt on Reagan’s life, she remembers that he had told a priest, after his recovery, that “Whatever time I’ve got left now belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs.” The words “Big Fella” could scarcely sound less natural coming from her mouth. Her attempt to pay tribute by mastering this casual Americanism is touchingly awkward, like an elderly tourist struggling earnestly to order a meal with a Berlitz phrase book.

  “For the final years of his life,” Thatcher concludes in her funeral oration, “Ronnie’s mind was clouded by illness. That cloud has now lifted. He is himself again—more himself than at any time on this earth. For we may be sure that the Big Fellow Upstairs never forgets those who remember Him.” She cannot quite bring herself to refer to God as “the Big Fella” a second time. It is obvious that she is aware that her own mind, too, is clouded by illness. The words “we may be sure” seem especially to pain her. She was a woman who was once unsure of nothing. It is clearly no longer so.

  In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met again, in Reykjavik. Gorbachev proposed the complete elimination of nuclear weapons in exchange for Reagan’s abandonment of the Strategic Defense Initiative. To the horror of many of his advisors, Reagan said no.

  I would have been one of the horrified, but I would have been wrong. We now know, from both Soviet officials and the Soviet archives, that Reagan’s insistence upon pursuing SDI prompted panic in the Kremlin, leading to an expensive increase in Soviet military spending and accelerating the economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

  SDI “played a powerful psychological role,” claims KGB general Nikolai Leonov. “SDI was a very successful blackmail,” agrees Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet foreign ministry’s spokesman during this period: “The Soviet economy couldn’t endure such competition.” 224 According to Genrikh Trofimenko, a high-ranking official of the Brezhnev era, “Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that [America] won the Cold War because of your president’s insistence on SDI.”225

  Thatcher was immensely relieved by the failure of the talks, not because she was profoundly committed to keeping SDI, but because she thought the offer to give up all the nukes was madness. She was in favor of a gradual reduction of nuclear weapons, but their immediate wholesale elimination? Had Reagan lost his mind? It would have “left the Soviets confronting western Europe with a huge superiority of conventional forces, chemical weapons and short-range missiles.”226

  Reagan was well aware of Thatcher’s views on this score; she had visited him in Washington the month prior and told him precisely this, in no uncertain terms. “I regarded the quid pro quo for my strong public support of the President as being the right to be direct with him and members of his Administration in private,” she said of this meeting.227 As Bernard Ingham says, “She believed in being a candid friend, and when Mrs. Thatcher is candid, she can be really candid.”

  Reagan famously hesitated after turning down Gorbachev’s offer. He passed a note to George Shultz asking, “Am I wrong?” Shultz whispered, “No, you’re right.”228 It is clear from memoirs of the meeting that Reagan’s concern, above all, was to protect SDI, which he saw as the best hope given to mankind of eliminating forever the threat of nuclear war. But I have to imagine that somewhere in his calculations, too, was the thought that the last thing he wanted to do, upon leaving that meeting, was phone up Margaret Thatcher and explain to her that he had given away the store.

  Peter Walker, who takes credit for winning the miners’ strike, also takes credit for the success of Thatcher’s visit, in March 1987, to the Soviet Union—and again, he may well be right to stress his role. “Listen,” he tells me, “the reputation she had of never listening was wrong.” He had seen the brief the Foreign Office prepared for the prime minister before her trip. “It said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev is a hard-line Communist who tries to convince his people that he’s not.’ So I phoned up and said, ‘Would you ask Margaret if I could see her before she goes to Moscow?’ And I went ’round, and I said, ‘Margaret, I’ve read this brief, and it’s totally wrong.’ And I then took her through quotations from him over five years, all following the same argument, and I said, ‘This man thinks the system won’t work. And he wants to change it. The Foreign Office brief prepared for you is totally wrong.’

  “And she didn’t say, you know, ‘I hate the Foreign Office, how right you are.’ She said, ‘Well, thank you very much, it is very interesting to read all this before I go.’ And when she came back on Sunday, from her three-day visit to him, which had been recorded in the press as an enormous success—they really got on well—she phoned me from Chequers at my house in Worcestershire, and said, ‘Peter, thank goodness you briefed me on this man. I like him, we got on well, you’re absolutely right. Foreign Office, they always get it wrong.’”

  Perhaps this is the way it happened. In her memoirs, Thatcher does not refer to Walker’s counsel. But it is certainly true that Thatcher’s visit to the Soviet Union was a triumph, another pivotal point in the history of the Cold War. Again, Charles Powell recalls the details. “We had this famous meeting in the Kremlin, which—with one break when she had a lunch engagement—went on for thirteen hours, and I was the only other person present—”

  “Thirteen hours?”

  “Yes. A day of meetings which lasted a total of thirteen hours with him, yeah. And I spent my whole night dictating my notes of it to a secretary in the soundproof cellar at the British Embassy—”

  “Do you remember any of the dialogue?”

  “She launched into a coruscating attack on the record of the Soviet Union, at home, abroad, its failures and so on, what it needed to do to bring itself into the civilized nations. And he actually re
sponded in similar fashion. I mean, he talked about social inequalities in Britain, and the miseries of the miners, and Northern Ireland and all the other problems we had. And it was a real irony—we reached a stage where I was thinking of packing up my briefcase, thinking we were going to get slung out of the Kremlin, we wouldn’t even survive, so we might as well have a statement ready for how we were going to explain to the press that she’d been virtually expelled from the Soviet Union—”

  “Were you really thinking that, or are you exaggerating now for effect?”

  “Well, I’m exaggerating now a bit for effect, but it really was to the point where I thought, you know, that this was going to end in disaster, this meeting.”

  “At what point were you thinking that, exactly?”

  “Well, quite early on, because it started like that. But Gorbachev himself was very good at breaking the tension, and after about a sort of hour and a bit of this, he sort of suddenly, you know, broke into smiles, and sort of relaxed the tension, and moved on to something else, and after another couple hours again it sort of built up, it was rather like British weather, really.”

  “You don’t remember what he said that had everyone smiling, do you?”

  “I can’t, I’m afraid.”

  Too bad.

  There were only six people in the room: Thatcher, Gorbachev, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, Powell, and the two interpreters. The large delegations of advisors and ministers that had assembled for the meeting were kept waiting outside all day. “They just wanted to talk alone. They had the same instinct, that actually the best thing was to talk to each other without delegations. That was characteristic of her diplomacy—she hated having the Foreign Office involved.”

  “What else did they talk about?”

  “Everything from the Soviet and Cuban presence in Africa, to the whole question of intermediate and short-range missiles in Europe.”

  “The debate was mostly about the actual record of the Soviet Union, as opposed to the philosophical problem of communism?”

  “It was both, it was both. I mean, she was trying to persuade him that communism was fundamentally a misguided system, not to be reconciled with human nature—the concept of communism, with the state running everything and so on, was never going to work. She larded it with examples—the Gulag, the people she had met, like Sakharov—”229

  “Do you remember what his face looked like when she was—”

  “Oh, he could be quite angry, he could be quite stern, Gorby. He waved his arms a lot and so on . . . ”

  “Was there any point during the meeting when you noticed an expression on Gorbachev’s face that would have suggested that he felt she was getting the better of him?”

  “Can’t say I do, no. Gorbachev was also, you know, very convinced of his rightness. They were two quite similar people in that sense. I think Gorbachev in some ways found her quite useful—I mean, she was an anvil on which he could beat out his own ideas. If you could sort of take your views to destruction testing with Margaret Thatcher, then, you know, if they could survive that, then they were probably worth having. And of course, very few of his views did survive that. But I think his belief that he could negotiate with Reagan, that there could be a decent arms control agreement . . . I think, basically, I think he wanted to run his ideas past her, before he tried them on Reagan.”

  “Was there any flirtation between the two of them?”

  “A bit, yes, yeah, at times.”

  Thatcher did not, in the end, get herself thrown out of the Kremlin. Perhaps that hint of flirtation, and Gorbachev’s willingness to laugh, had something to do with this.

  “At the end of that thirteen-hour day you must have been exhausted,” I say.

  “I was in a total state of exhaustion.”

  His bladder, he later told me, was also about to burst. Finally, he excused himself to look for the bathroom, but he couldn’t figure out how to get out of the room. Gorbachev, amused, watched him cast about helplessly. “It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life,” Powell recalls. Finally, Gorbachev took pity on him. Beaming broadly, he pushed a button by his chair. A door slid open. Powell escaped.

  Didn’t she need to go, I ask?

  No, she did not, says Powell. Not even once. The Iron Bladder held out for the whole thirteen hours.

  “At the end of that day, was anything concluded?” I ask Powell.

  “Nothing. Well, there were conclusions I think about arms control and the right way to proceed, and yes, there were some concrete conclusions on individual foreign affairs subjects. But I think something more was concluded: There could be, at last, after all those years, a genuine dialogue with a Soviet leader, in which you said blunt things and criticized each others’ systems, but you could bargain with, and come not necessarily to agreements, but to understandings of each others’ point of view—which led to the clear horizon in which the Cold War could be ended.”

  History hinged upon that visit, in both Britain and the Soviet Union. “It was really from that moment that one knew she was going to win the ’87 election,” Powell recalled, “because it was a huge PR triumph in this country . . . It was very hard for Labour to criticize her, because there she was, dealing with the Russians, dealing very forcefully, but no one could say that because she was the Iron Lady, because she was making these vitriolic speeches, that she was keeping Britain out of discussing the relaxation of tensions, or arms control, or anything like that.”

  More importantly, her visit was a PR triumph in Russia. Gorbachev permitted Thatcher to get out of her car and mix through the crowds. “These vast crowds had turned out to see her,” Powell remembered. “And Gorby treated her very well. When he invited her, she said, ‘Look, I’d like to come, but can I do what I want to do?’ And he said, ‘Yup, anything you want to do, I’ll let you do.’ This had never happened with a prime minister before. And she said, ‘Well, I want to do a television interview. And I don’t want it censored.’”

  Gorbachev agreed, and kept his word. This interview was broadcast live, as Gorbachev had promised. “She was interviewed by three Soviet generals,” Powell remembers, “and she rode right over them.”

  Hapless Soviet General: Excuse me, I would like to return to the question of nuclear weapons. You just said that nuclear weapons preserved peace for forty years, but many times we were at the verge of nuclear war during those forty years; many times we were saved only by accident, by chance, but with that, nuclear weapons developed. In the beginning, they threatened cities; now they threaten the whole of humanity. How can one speak of nuclear weapons as a guarantor of peace?

  Prime Minister: Are you not making my point? If you say that many times we were at the verge of war and we did not go to war, do you not think that one of the reasons we did not go to war was the total horror of nuclear weapons? After all, I think conventional weapons are awful. It did not stop a war, a terrible war, in which the Soviet Union suffered enormously. You cannot just act as if there had never been nuclear weapons. If conventional war started again, the race would be on as to who got the nuclear weapon first. One moment! That person would win.

  Hapless Soviet General: The thing is that there is a possibility of an accidental outbreak of a nuclear conflict. Time passes, nuclear weapons are improved and more and more sophisticated. There is a great possibility of an accidental—not political, that politicians will decide, but computers. The flight time of a Pershing 2 to the Soviet Union would be only eight minutes. Who will be deciding? Who will be in charge?

  Prime Minister: There are more nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union than any other country in the world. You have more intercontinental ballistic missiles and warheads than the West. You started intermediate weapons; we did not have any. You have more short-range ones than we have. You have more than anyone else and you say there is a risk of a nuclear accident? One moment! . . . 230

  “Taxi drivers in Moscow still speak of it,” says Powell. “They really do.”

  Nei
l Kinnock has a different perspective on Thatcher’s trip. He recalls discussing it with Gorbachev:NK: First of all, it wasn’t thirteen hours.

  CB: It wasn’t?

  NK: No. It was sporadically over a period of about nine hours.

  CB: Right.

  NK: And it arose because Margaret Thatcher, they went through the usual discussions, you know, governments do, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And eventually she started to tell Gorbachev what was wrong with the Soviet Union, and what he should do about it.

  CB: Uh-huh?

  NK: Now, I think the first part of that is fine, some other people think that breaks the code, but I think that’s bloody rubbish. I think it’s quite right to tell people what you think of their country. I’ve done it. But it’s very difficult then to say what they should do about it without inviting them to say, “OK, OK, fine, I’ve heard what you said, now this is what you should do about your country.” And that doesn’t really get you anywhere, you just get an exchange of prescriptions, but—

  CB: Well, what I understood, and correct me if I’m wrong, because I’ve only heard this from one source, is that Charles Powell was saying that Gorbachev did start telling her, “Look, you’ve got this problem with the miners, you’ve got—”

  NK: Yeah, that’s just what he did, you see, and Northern Ireland, and the whole thing. So that went on for some time. Then, what Gorbachev told me, when I asked him about it a few years afterwards, he said, “I thought at the time that she so completely failed to understand Marxist-Leninism, even though she claimed to understand it, that I should tell her where her analysis was wrong.” So there were exchanges on that basis, but they didn’t get on like a house on fire, they had a kind of ideological duel—