By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The "Cold
War" as we have seen so far, the Cold War was not predetermined. Leaders made
choices. During the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and
Winston Churchill were besieged by competing impulses and clashing priorities.
They distrusted one another. Yet as allies they labored diligently at wartime
conferences to modulate their differences and plan for victory and peace. As
the most horrible war in history came to an end, leaders in Washington and
Moscow, including the untutored and provincial Truman and the evil and paranoid
Stalin, recognized that cooperation was preferable to conflict. So did their
successors.
Cooperation might
mean collaboration in preserving the peace when the advent of atomic weapons
made war even ghastlier than before. It might mean collaboration in punishing
and controlling foes whose eventual revival was taken for granted and whose
long-term behavior was a frightening imponderable. It might mean collaboration
in reconverting wartime economies and reconstructing devastated areas. Moscow
might receive reparations from the western zones of Germany and might get
credits from Washington in exchange for its acceptance of a liberal peace based
on open markets and selfdetermination. If conflict
could be avoided and an arms race modulated, American and Soviet leaders might
be able to focus on their domestic priorities and direct funds to meet the
needs of their societies as defined by their respective political cultures.
Stalin and Truman; Malenkov and Eisenhower; Kennedy, Johnson, and Khrushchev;
Brezhnev and Carter; and Reagan, Bush, and Gorbachev never doubted that they
represented alternative ways of organizing human society. But the question they
faced was whether they could identify and pursue common interests
notwithstanding their ideological differences.
Until the mid- and
late 1980s, they were unable to do so. The Cold War emerged and persisted for
four decades because these leaders were trapped by their ideas and ideals and
beleaguered by the dangers and opportunities that lurked in the international
system. Their beliefs heightened their sense of danger and accentuated
messianic impulses. Their rhetoric and programs mobilized domestic
constituencies and empowered interest groups and bureaucracies that opposed
policy changes and made them increasingly difficult. Foreign allies and clients
often developed their own stakes in the bipolar system, manipulated the United
States and the Soviet Union in behalf of their own interests, and made it
harder for the two powers to relax tensions and reconfigure their relationship.
Leaders in both countries often glimpsed the mutuality of their interests but
became hostages to their ideas and constituents rather than agents of change.
It took an exceptional man, Gorbachev, to reconceive the nature of threat and
to focus on domestic resurrection rather than external opportunity. It took an
exceptional man, Reagan, to muster the inner conviction, personal charm, and
domestic political strength to leverage his opponent's concessions into a
framework that preserved and institutionalized his own nation's global
hegemony.
The Cold War lasted
as long as it did because of the ways in which American and Soviet ideas
intersected with evolving conditions of the international system. U.S. and
Soviet leaders thought they represented superior ways of organizing human
existence. The men in the Kremlin sincerely believed they were reconfiguring
human society and eradicating human exploitation. By eliminating private
property and a marketplace economy, they thought they could supplant human
greed as the driving force behind human progress.
Planning would
replace the anarchy of the marketplace. Workers would no longer be at the mercy
of their employers, and oppressed peoples would no longer be subject to
imperial domination. The Communist Party would serve as the vanguard of the
proletariat and the liberator of colonial peoples. The trajectory of history
envisioned the end of capitalism, perpetual peace, universal justice, and the
emancipation of mankind.
The men in the White
House had a different vision of how history should unfold. Their aim was to
fashion a world order along the lines of democratic capitalism. They wanted
people to be free and markets to be open. Political parties should compete for
power in governments that represented their citizenry. Individual rights and
private property were the keys to human advancement and personal opportunity.
God, they often said, intended people to be free. Certainly, men and women
could not worship as they pleased if they were not free.
These contradictory
visions of mankind's future were inseparable from Soviet and American ideas
about the past. Historical memories and ideological assumptions shaped
perceptions of fear and opportunity. For Soviet leaders, from Stalin to
Brezhnev, capitalist countries could neither escape conflict with one another
nor resist the temptation to crush an ideological foe. History since 1917, as
they understood it, confirmed the implacable hostility of capitalists, the
volatility of the international capitalist economy, and the enmity of other
powers like Germany and Japan, whose governments were controlled by fascists
and militarists. Notwithstanding the immense suffering that Soviet citizens had
endured, their utopian experiment had survived and, allegedly, demonstrated its
superiority. If the Kremlin remained vigilant, history's trajectory portended a
glorious future for communism.
U.S. officials, no
less than their counterparts in Moscow, were inspired by their ideals and
shaped by their experience. For Americans, their past confirmed that
totalitarian governments, whether fascist, Nazi, or communist, were likely to
expand and to crush human freedom-the freedom to speak, to practice religion,
to own property, and to trade. Americans had learned from the interwar years
that freedom and liberalism could not be safe at home if they were at risk
abroad; the United States could not be secure if a totalitarian adversary
controlled the human resources, raw materials, industrial infrastructure, and
technological know-how of Eurasia and used those assets to challenge the American
way of life.
The international
environment posed danger and opportunity to leaders in Moscow and Washington.
In Europe, the suffering bequeathed by the years of depression, war, and
genocide was almost beyond human comprehension. Almost forty million Europeans
had perished during the war, but the suffering did not end when the guns fell
silent. The anguish, the turmoil, the hunger, the upheaval, were just beginning
for millions and millions. As Europeans yearned for a better future, communism
and communists competed vigorously for their allegiance, especially in France
and Italy. Stalin's reputation was not tarnished by his brutality but exalted
by his wartime victories. Europeans wanted change, security, welfare, peace.
They have suffered so much, Dean Acheson acknowledged, that they will demand
that the whole business of state control and state interference shall be pushed
further and further. For Stalin, opportunity beckoned in Western Europe; for
Truman there was peril-in the prospect not that Soviet armies would march to
the Atlantic but that demoralized peoples would choose alternative ways of
organizing their societies.
While U.S. officials
worried about the configuration of West European politics, Stalin could not
relax about his East European periphery. Everywhere his armies went, they
marauded. Soviet troops raped and despoiled, intensifying the distrust that
traditionally existed between Russia and many, if not all, of its neighbors.
Proximity to Soviet behavior usually meant revulsion; lived experience was very
different from utopian imagination. In Romania, Hungary, and Poland, communist
partisans were few; in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and eastern Germany, they had
no chance of triumphing in free elections. Free elections in the lands occupied
were not likely to lead to governments friendly to the Soviet Union. These
countries had assisted the enemies of the Soviet Union in the past and might do
so in the future. Even Soviet minions and clients were susceptible to
capitalist blandishments, like the Marshall Plan. Nobody could be trusted in a
world beset by capitalist adversaries who neither controlled their own penchant
for conflict nor resisted the temptation to surround, squeeze, or maybe even
crush Stalin's utopian project to remake mankind. For him, the postwar Soviet
occupation of other countries in Eastern and Central Europe offered an
opportunity to gain defense in depth, as the Americans liked to call their own
security perimeter, which stretched across the oceans and included all of the Western
Hemisphere.
Security could not be
entrusted to others when the future of Germany was so uncertain. And the
international configuration of power depended on the future of Germany. On this
fact, American and Soviet leaders agreed. They also agreed for many decades
that Germans, left to themselves, could not be trusted. From Stalin to
Gorbachev, German power was feared; from Truman to Bush, German power had to be
harnessed in behalf of the West. Tension in Europe abated when the wall that
divided Berlin seemed to resolve the German question and when the sovereignty
of two German nations was recognized, one bourgeois and democratic, the other
communist; the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 confirmed this understanding. To the
extent that it allayed the fears of Brezhnev and his colleagues about German
revanchism, the Helsinki Agreement was the high point of detente and, in Soviet
eyes, worth the price of agreeing to reconfirm the legitimacy of human rights.
Thereafter, Kremlin leaders could focus on negotiating strategic arms
agreements and expanding trade with the West. But to their chagrin, Brezhnev's
comrades would learn that the security of their way of life was far more
endangered by the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act than by the
resolution of the German question-a fine illustration of how their vision of
the morrow was buried in fears of the past rather than in any understanding of
the future.
The same could be
said about U.S. officials in the 1970s. After Helsinki and SALT I, their apprehensions
did not wane and the Cold War did not end. The growth of Soviet military
capabilities and ferment in the third world continued to conjure fears they
could not overcome. They were haunted by the threat of Soviet gains in the Horn
of Mrica, the Persian Gulf, and southwest Asia; an
arc of crisis defined that part of the globe, said Zbigniew Brzezinski. If U.S.
officials did not calm regional turbulence and thwart Soviet inroads, critical
sources of petroleum and other raw materials might fall outside Western
control, and the industries of Western Europe and Japan would be at risk. As
the great economic advances of the 1950s and 1960s slowed-as cheap oil
disappeared, unemployment mounted, and inflation soared-social peace showed
signs of unraveling and people wondered, as Time magazine put it, "can
capitalism survive?"
The aging men in the
Kremlin were heartened. Systemic conditions appeared to be confirming their
idea of history's trajectory. Their own society was advancing more slowly than
it had in the past, but they could take heart in the travails of Western
capitalism. For a brief while in the 1970s, there were even fleeting hopes for
communist gains in Europe as Spain and Portugal threw off their neofascist
governments, leftist parties competed vigorously for power, and the souls of
Europeans as well as Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans seemed up for
contestation once again. Upheavals in Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Indochina,
Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Yemen tantalized the Kremlin. New leaders from these
and other nations genuflected before their patrons in Moscow, spouted
Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, and enticed ever more aid out of aging military
leaders and party ideologues who saw a chance for vindication and
reincarnation.
The Cold War lasted
through the 1960s and 1970s because these revolutionary nationalist upheavals
and regional turbulences engendered exaggerated hopes in Moscow and aroused
exaggerated fears in Washington. In Moscow, defense managers and party
ideologues were eager to exploit new opportunities, and for a few years Kremlin
leaders were awash in petrodollars that financed foreign adventure. They sent
arms, deployed agents, and empowered surrogates in faraway places like Angola,
Ethiopia, and Yemen. In the United States, there was a political groundswell
against this perceived Soviet adventurism. Disaffected liberals-soon to become
the intellectual forefathers of neoconservatism-joined with traditional
conservative groups, ethnic blue-collar workers in the Northeast, defense
industrialists and business entrepreneurs in the South and Southwest, and
evangelical Christians. These business, ethnic, and religious groups had little
in common but their fear of Soviet power, their antipathy to atheistic
communism, and a desire to redirect what they regarded as a wrongheaded liberal
tendency in American politics. They believed strongly that the United States
had to rebuild its military strength. Jesus "was not a sissy,"
asserted Jerry Falwell, the emerging leader of America's so-called Moral
Majority. For these groups-and their representatives in the Congress-the
contest for the soul of mankind abroad was related to the struggle to fight
feminists and gays at home, preserve traditional culture, stifle the growth of
big government, and maintain the underpinnings of an interconnected global
economy open to the free movement of goods, capital, and people.
The hopes and fears
of politicians, bureaucrats, defense managers, and ideologues in Moscow and
Washington obscured the subterranean crosscurrents in the international system.
For while the oil crisis of the 1970s eroded the strength of Western capitalism
and brought huge revenues to Moscow, it diverted attention from the profound
technological changes imperceptibly transforming capitalism in the United
States, Japan, and Western Europe. Electronics, microprocessors,
pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology were creating knowledge-based industries and
services that would not only rejuvenate economic productivity in the United
States but also refashion and refurbish its military capabilities. But for the
time being in the 1970s, the United States seemed vulnerable. Its economy was
battered by stagflation, its relative military power was diminished, its
alliances were shaky, and its position in the third world was more vulnerable
than ever before.
Systemic developments
seemed to be playing to the advantage of Moscow. "The global swing away
from democracy in the 1960s and 1970s was impressive," writes the renowned
political scientist Samuel Huntington.5 Soviet leaders talked with pride about
their accomplishments and aspirations. "The world is changing before our
very eyes, and changing for the better," Brezhnev declared to the
twenty-fifth Congress of the CPSU Central Committee in February 1976. "We
have created a new society, a society the like of which mankind has never known
before. It is a society with a crisis-free, steadily growing economy .... [I]t
is a society governed by the scientific materialist world outlook. It is a
society of firm confidence in the future, of radiant communist prospects.
Before it lies boundless horizons of further all-around progress. "
But for Soviet
leaders vigilance was forever necessary because capitalists were forever
seeking to undo Moscow's mighty achievements and thwart the trajectory of
history. The Americans had tried and failed to set back revolutionary forces in
Indochina. The imperialists had been dislodged from Iran when the Shah was
overthrown, and they were being challenged in Central America by the Sandinistas.
But the Americans nonetheless were scheming with the Chinese renegades to
encircle the Kremlin, and plotting to insert themselves in Mghanistan
where the People's Democratic Revolution of 1978 was devouring itself in
incompetence, repression, and corruption. Detente between the superpowers began
to founder on these Soviet perceptions of threat. Soviet leaders deployed
troops to Afghanistan not because they aimed to seize oil in the Persian Gulf
but because they dreaded the prospect of encirclement. If the communist
revolution were reversed in Kabul, where would the forces of reaction stop?
Ideology shaped
perceptions-this is one of the great lessons of the Cold War-accentuating
fears, highlighting opportunities, and warping rational assessments of interests
in Washington and Moscow. And in the early 1980s, the relationship of fear to
opportunity evolved. U.S. officials sensed that the Kremlin was growing more
vulnerable. The Soviet Union's economic growth rate was slowing to a trickle.7
The appeal of the Soviet model of development was waning. The Chinese were
abandoning it. Almost everywhere "the vogue of revolution" was
disappearing. "There was a sweeping loss of faith throughout Latin
America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia in the promise of revolution and in
the dominant revolutionary ideology-socialism." In India, for example,
socialism and planning were seen as failures that had created enormous
inefficiencies. As the first generation of revolutionary nationalist leaders
passed from the scene in Asia and Africa, the "force of anti-colonial and
nationalist sentiments" declined. New leaders were willing to open their
economies and learn from the West. The colossal failure of governmental
human-engineering projects, like Mao Zedong's attempts to remake China's
economy, society, and culture, made people aware that" certain kinds of
states, driven by utopian plans ... [were] a mortal threat to human
well-being." Among Western intellectuals, the light generated by communist
utopianism and the Soviet Union's heroic defeat of Nazism finally disappeared
after fading for almost two decades. Asians and Africans studying in Paris and
London in the 1970s and 1980s were receiving different cues and learning vastly
different lessons than had the previous generation.
The optimism of
official Soviet rhetoric was belied by confidential reports and internal
memoranda from Soviet experts and officials, especially during the Polish
crisis of 1980-81, when it became clear that the Poles could no longer tolerate
their communist government and wanted change, and when the Polish pope, John
Paul II, championed human rights and positioned the Church as the guardian of
individual freedom and personal conscience. When he visited Poland in June
1979, his trip commanded enormous attention. "Christ cannot be kept out of
the history of man in any part of the globe," he exclaimed. The huge crowd
in Warsaw's Victory Square cheered rhythmically, "We want God, we want
God."
The men in the
Kremlin did not want God, but they understood the popularity of the Pope and
the enthusiasm for Solidarity. Fearing that the movement would "spur
workers in the Soviet Union ... to press for improved living conditions,
greater freedom, and an independent trade union of their own," they knew
that Solidarity had to be thwarted. Recognizing that military intervention
would be costly and self-defeating, they orchestrated the Polish government's
imposition of martial law, but the communist hold on Poland and Eastern Europe
would never be the same.
Soviet leaders now
worried less about their security and more about their vision. From Malenkov to
Brezhnev, the justification for the existence of the Soviet regime and
one-party rule was that the Bolsheviks projected the best and boldest vision
for the future. It is customary to trivialize their rhetoric and mock their
vision. The Soviet nomenklatura was corrupt, complacent, and self-referential.
But Soviet leaders were not cynics; they were "authentic true
believers," writes Martin Malia, the eminent scholar of Soviet politics
and ideology. The archival materials recently brought to light underscore the
importance of taking their public rhetoric seriously. In speech after speech,
whether by Malenkov or Khrushchev, Kosygin or Brezhnev, or even Andropov or
Chernenko, Soviet leaders pronounced that they would promote the welfare of
Soviet peoples and bring about a more humane society guided by social justice.
In November 1961, at the twenty-second Party Congress, they declared
improvements in social welfare and increases in distributive equality to be
their central policy goals. "As Lenin taught us," declared Andropov
in a typical speech in 1979, "the ultimate goal of socialism is to secure
the 'complete well-being and free all-around development of all members of society.
Although they stepped
back from Khrushchev's boast that communism would surpass capitalism in a
generation, and although they constantly reformulated the stages they were
traversing toward communism, Brezhnev and his colleagues always spoke in heroic
terms about the need to accelerate economic development, technological
innovation, and agricultural outputY They were
excited by their ability to turn out military hardware to protect "Great
October," and they gloried in statistics showing substantial gains in
Soviet coal, steel, and electrical production. But the revolution also was
designed to deliver more dill and more potatoes for Soviet consumers, as
Khrushchev once put it at a Presidium meeting. IS In fact, Soviet leaders never
ceased talking about their obligation to provide more housing, more food,
better health care, and more education to the Soviet people. And "most
people," writes the historian Stephen Kotkin,
"simply wanted the Soviet regime to live up to its promises."
But the regime fell short
of its promises. The Soviet economy gained relative to the United States in the
1950s and 1960s, advancing from about a quarter to a little more than a third
of per capita U.S. production, but by 1980 it was falling behind. In fact, many
other nations, including Italy, Spain, Japan, and South Korea, narrowed the gap
between their per capita production and the American level better than did the
Soviet model
More important for
Soviet peoples themselves, increases in per capita consumption slowed noticeably
in the late 1970s. Growth rates for consumption had peaked in the late 1960s,
when advances per year were at a hefty rate of about 5 percent. Although in the
mid-1970s most Soviet citizens (about 74 percent) thought life was improving,
the government's expenditures on social consumption--education, health care,
social security, and housingwere taking a turn for
the worse; soon spending on education and health care barely increased to keep
up with the times. The food supply was not improving. Soviet consumers ate far more bread and potatoes and much less meat and fish
than did Americans, British, Spaniards, Italians, or Japanese. Workers began
expressing their discontent. In the last years of Brezhnev's rule, strikes,
theoretically forbidden, "became larger and more frequent,"
particularly at major automotive plants in Gorky, Togliatti, and Cheliabinsk. Many Soviet citizens had once been willing to
accept or acquiesce to one-party rule and authoritarian government in return
for employment security, health care, educational opportunity, and better and
more equal living conditions. But when the regime faltered in carrying out its
side of the deal, people's disaffection grew. The Kremlin could not compete for
the soul of mankind when it could not win the trust of its own citizens-another
great lesson of the Cold War.
Gorbachev understood
this growing demoralization. He did not want to retract Soviet power, but he
believed the first priority was to refashion communism at home so that it could
have a demonstrative appeal elsewhere. In order to do this, he needed to shift
resources from the military to the civilian sector, which he could not do so
long as his own society felt beleaguered by an intractable, formidable foe.
Changing the zero-sum game of the Cold War was Gorbachev's great challenge and
his greatest achievement. He accepted the argument that the U.S.S.R. must
reduce the threat perception of the adversary; to accomplish this he had to
make wrenching changes in his own perception of threat.
Basically, Gorbachev
came to feel that Soviet security was not threatened by capitalist adversaries;
it was far more endangered by communist functionaries, economic managers, and
demoralized workers than by any external foe. Rigid controls, leveling
practices, and alcoholism had sapped individual creativity, eroded
productivity, and interfered with the potential of national planning. When he
made his decisions to modulate the arms race, he did so because he was scared
of his society's growing impoverishment. "We are encircled not by
invincible armies but by superior economies," he said.
While altering his
conception of threat and changing his views about the functioning of capitalist
systems, Gorbachev never ceased to believe that communism represented something
better than capitalism. But capitalists need not be seen as intractable foes.
Nor was it necessary to believe that economic conflicts with the United States
were more salient than the mutual interests that bound the U.S.S.R. to its
antagonist as well as to socialist economies. Common human interests, Gorbachev
and Shevardnadze came to feel, transcended class ties.
Gorbachev's
achievement was a uniquely personal one, although he was not alone. He was
general secretary of a party with a monopoly of power; traditions of deference
were ingrained. When he made his fateful decisions to de-ideologize
international politics, to let the Berlin wall come down, to agree to the
unification of Germany, to withhold force against secessionist republics within
the U.S.S.R., and to end regional disputes in south~rn
Mrica and Central America, he rarely asked the
Politburo for advice or consulted with the Defense Council. He did confer with
experts, advisers, and other officials in an ad hoc fashion, but he had no
process and no blueprint. He twisted and turned. Rather than implement a
policy, he followed a vision that, however blurry at first, became clearer as
he trekked forward.
Strong as was his position
as general secretary (and then president), Gorbachev was not unassailable.
Malenkov and Khrushchev had both been pushed aside. Indeed, Gorbachev perhaps
at times exaggerated his vulnerability. From 1985 to 1989, he worked to remove
opponents from key positions and to promote people who held a more flexible
disposition. But he could never satisfy some of his allies, who tired of what
they saw as his ambivalence. His vacillation, however, was a reaction to an
unpredictable environment where so much was contingent on the responses of
friends and foes. As the man most responsible for Soviet affairs, he
appreciated the formidable obstacles he faced and understood the daunting
nature of the enterprise he was contemplating. His acceptance, however grudging,
of a unified Germany within NATO suggests how profound were the changes he was
willing to tolerate even when they awakened tortured memories and infuriated
political foes. In a functioning democracy, Gorbachev might not have been able
to make these changes; in fact, he could do so in Soviet Russia only so long as
he functioned as general secretary of the party representing the dictatorship
of the proletariat. When he altered the structures of Soviet domestic
governance in 1989, he vastly complicated his own efforts to bring about the
changes he wanted. But he felt he had no choice, given the ends he pursued.
Gorbachev would not
have persevered with his reforms had he not found sympathetic listeners in
Washington. Reagan's greatness was not his buildup of force but his inspiring
of trust. In March 1985, when Gorbachev became general secretary, the
rearmament phase had peaked in Washington and Reagan was constrained by new
budget deficits, growing antimilitarism in Congress, and mounting skepticism
about the practicality of Star Wars. Unlike so many of his predecessors,
however, Reagan could persuade the American people and the American Congress to
appreciate the changes under way in the Soviet Union. Reagan, thought
Gorbachev, would have the strength and might have the will not only to convince
his countrymen to accept armsreduction treaties but
also to imagine the possibility of transcending the Cold War. Although
Gorbachev frequently ranted to the Politburo about Reagan's inflexibility, he
nevertheless appreciated a partner who could help him to reconfigure the image
of the Soviet Union in the West and thereby allow him to concentrate on reforms
at home.
The many
conversations that Reagan and Shultz had with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze about
human rights, religious freedom, and democratic practices had an impact.
Gorbachev and Shevardnadze frequently responded favorably to the American
requests to intervene in certain cases because they wanted to make headway on
issues they deemed more important, such as anns
reductions. But they also responded positively because they were embarrassed by
the cases, which revealed flaws in a system they continued to regard as
superior to capitalism. Dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov upset Gorbachev
because he felt they were aberrations and got too much attention. Accusations
of mass repression in the Soviet Union incensed him because he considered them
untrue, part of a Stalinist past that had been disavowed. When Gorbachev
learned from the KGB just how many political prisoners there were (only
250-300), he did not mind jousting with Reagan and Shultz about the virtues of
their respective systems. Still, in tactful and respectful yet forceful ways,
Reagan and Shultz never let Gorbachev forget the gap between the promise and the
reality of communism in the Soviet Union.
Reagan's ideological
fervor was very important in bringing about the end of the Cold War because it
gave him tremendous confidence about the appeal of his way of life. His
predecessors had also believed that democratic capitalism worked well in the
United States and represented the best system of political economy, yet they
were not sure that others agreed. They worried incessantly about communism and eurocommunism, state planning and nationalized industries,
Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and revolutionary nationalist impulses. But by the
late 1970s and early 1980s, the world economy was changing and Reagan's beliefs
meshed with evolving international realities. Shultz spoke frequently about the
trend toward economic globalization and the pace of technological innovation.
Planned economies would never keep abreast of the changes wrought by the
information and communications revolutions, he said. Only free men and free
women operating in democratic societies and motivated by free markets and
personal incentives could harness the new technology and employ it to generate
economic growth and material advancement. Command economies and nationalized
industry might have generated impressive results when the output of steel and coal
were benchmarks of success, but not when electronics, computers, data
processing, and biotechnology had redefined the meaning of modernity in
production. Command economies and national ownership might have seduced
revolutionary nationalists in the third world during the era of decolonization,
and communist rhetoric might have appealed to demoralized and hungry Europeans
in the wake of depression and war, but the world was changing dramatically. Men
and women around the globe were discovering, Reagan declared, that
"Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive. "
Reagan believed that
if people had a choice, they would always choose personal freedom, private
markets, and entrepreneurial opportunity. In this respect, he expressed what most
Americans thought. He was a salesman for the American way of life, certain that
he offered salvation for the souls of mankind everywhere. Consequently, he was
afraid neither to compete with nor to talk to his opponents. He knew, moreover,
that most Americans were sure he would not betray their interests or their
ideals. Reagan could talk to the men from the evil empire with less fear of
partisan recriminations and conservative criticism. Unlike Truman, he was not
facing a Congress dominated by the virulent anticommunism of an opposition
party; unlike Eisenhower, he did not have to deal with an American political
culture aroused by McCarthyism; unlike Kennedy and Johnson, he was not haunted
by fears that his domestic policies would be undercut by the appearance of
weakness in foreign policy; unlike Carter, he did not have to worry that he
would be accused of temerity. Reagan could lead the American people to accept
the end of the Cold War-on American terms, of course.
Reagan's legacy is
instructive. He believed in strength. Strength tempered the adversary's
ambitions and tamped down its expectations. But the purpose of strength was to
negotiate. Even while he denounced the tyrants who ran an evil empire, he
reached out to talk to them. In one of his most famous speeches, he asked the
American people to imagine what Ivan and Anya would say to Jim and Sally if
they should discover one another in a waiting room. "Would they debate the
differences between their respective governments?" Or would they talk
about their hobbies, their children, and their careers? All people "want
to raise their children in a world without fear and without war," Reagan
said. "They want to have some of the good things over and above bare subsistencb that make life worth living. They want to work
at some craft, trade, or profession that gives them satisfaction and a sense of
worth. Their common interests cross all borders."
Reagan believed that
leaders were obliged to work in behalf of these common interests. "The
fact that neither of us likes the other system is no reason to refuse to
talk," he said. "Living in this nuclear age makes it imperative that
we do talk. "28 Moreover, as he tried to find opportunities to talk, he
discovered that the fears of the adversary were not feigned and that the dreams
of the enemy were not dissimilar to some of his own-for example, the abolition
of nuclear weapons. With patience and determination, with dignity and grace,
Reagan crossed the ideological divide without altering his principles or
ideals. "Tell the people of the Soviet Union," he said to Gorbachev
on 2 June 1988, "of the deep feelings of friendship felt by us and by the
people of our country toward them."30 In his "farewell address"
to the American people a few months later, he advised, "We must keep up
our guard, but we must also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate
tension and mistrust. "
Reagan's shrewdest
insight was his understanding that the Cold War would be won by the system that
could respond most effectively to people's wish for a decent living, a peaceful
environment, and an opportunity for free expression, religious piety, and
individual advancement. Mter World War II, it had
been far from certain that democratic capitalism would have the capacity to
avoid another depression, sustain the peace, and satisfy the yearnings of
Asians and Africans for autonomy and self-determination. The Cold War tested
the capacity of two alternative systems of governance and political economy to
deal with the challenges of a postcolonial and postindustrial age.
The overriding
achievement of Cold War America was that its leaders usually remained patient
and prudent in dealing with the Soviet Union. Although ideology and historical
experience accentuated their sense of threat and tempted them to overreach when
danger loomed or opportunity beckoned, they recognized that nuclear weapons
made any armed great power conflict irrational. They realized they had to
achieve their overriding strategic goal-a favorable correlation of power in
Eurasia-without war. They were most successful at this during the early postwar
years, when they calculated interests carefully, rebuilt Germany and Japan,
helped to reconstruct Western Europe, forged the North Atlantic military
alliance, and avoided embroilment in China's civil war. They did less well in
the 1960s and 1970s, when they allowed fears of revolutionary nationalism and
regional turbulence to overcome any reasoned assessment of national interest.
Forever worried that their adversary would seek to blackmail them in a crisis,
exploit opportunities in the third world, and shrink the world capitalist
market, they built up and maintained a nuclear arsenal that exceeded U.S.
needs, got sucked into conflicts (like the one in Vietnam) that drained U.S.
resources, and supported authoritarians (like the Shah in Iran) and insurgents
(like the Mujahedin in Afghanistan) who disdained U.S. ideals. These Cold War
policies did not cripple America's ability to compete with a much weaker
adversary-in the case of Mghanistan, American policy
actually worked to America's shortterm advantage-but
they inflicted misery on millions of people in Asia, Africa, and Central
America who were having difficulty enough dealing with the problems of
modernization and industrialization.
Like the men in the
Kremlin, U.S. leaders recognized that the ultimate proof of the superiority of
their system would be measured by its capacity to give security, opportunity,
and a high standard of living to its people. Yet, unlike the men in the
Kremlin, they had to contend with a well-established democratic culture and a
host of democratic political processes. At critical moments during the Cold
War, public opinion-real and imagined-and legislative intentions complicated
the presidents' efforts to modulate conflict and reduce tensions. But in the
final phase of the Cold War, in the middle and late 1980s, something like the
opposite happened: Congress reined in defense and intelligence officials when
it thought Reagan was overspending on defense, exaggerating the potential value
of Star Wars, overreacting to a perceived communist threat in Central America,
and in fact disobeying the law (as in the Iran-Contra scandal). Although Reagan
fumed at this, his efforts to reach out to the Kremlin may well have been aided
by the legislative constraints: his rearmament programs and interventionist
proclivities had in fact been playing into the hands of Gorbachev's foes and
making it harder for Gorbachev to reach his goals.
No one, then, was
more responsible for ending the Cold War than the Soviet leader. Reagan was
critically important, but Gorbachev was the indispensable agent of change.
Without losing his political faith, he transcended the Marxist-Leninist
ideological postulates that defined the nature of threat and opportunity in the
international system. He used his authority to retract Soviet power in ways
that his predecessors had considered unimaginable. He understood how nuclear
weapons had transformed the traditional security imperatives of the Soviet
Union and how economic shortcomings required the government to reconfigure
Soviet priorities. His predecessors had occasionally recognized this, but their
unchanged perception of threat and of opportunity, as well as their sense of
mission, prevented them from shifting course and sticking to a new direction.
Gorbachev believed
that external threats to the Soviet Union were small and external opportunities
even smaller. Success, for him, depended on democratizing socialism and making
it work more productively for Soviet citizens. He failed miserably in these
efforts, but for him, a geopolitical world with a relaxation of tensions at its
core would be the key to a successful reformation of socialism with the
well-being of Soviet people as its centerpiece. This nexus brought together
geopolitics and ideology in ways that could not have been imagined when the
Allies met at the Elbe River in 1945, and when Stalin and Truman first pondered
the risks and opportunities of the postwar world.
The End of the Cold
War P.1
On 13 March 1985,
Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, and
Ambassador Arthur Hartman met the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the
Kremlin for the first time. Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev's predecessor, had
just been laid to rest. Gorbachev thanked the Americans for paying their
respects and then delivered a sweeping statement of his government's aims.
"The USSR has no expansionist ambitions .... The USSR has never intended
to fight the United States and does not have any intentions now. There has
never been such madmen in the Soviet leadership, and there are none now. The
Soviets respect your right to run your own country the way you see fit .... As
to the question of which is the better system, this is something for history to
judge."
Bush responded, and
then asked Shultz to say a few words. "President Reagan told me to look
you squarely in the eyes and tell you: 'Ronald Reagan believes that this is a
very special moment in the history of mankind,' " the secretary of state
said to Gorbachev. "You are starting your term as general secretary.
Ronald Reagan is starting his second term as president .... President Reagan is
ready to work with you." He invites you "to visit the United States
at the earliest convenient time .... If important agreements can be found, the
sooner the better."
Gorbachev then said:
"this is a unique moment; I am ready to return Soviet-U.S. relations to a
normal channel. It is necessary to know each other, to find time to discuss
outstanding problems, and to seek ways to bring the two countries closer
together." 1
For four years
President Ronald Reagan had been seeking a negotiating partner in the Kremlin.
Few suspected this was the case because his sharp rhetoric, ideological
convictions, and defense buildup had made him appear as the coldest of cold
warriors. During the 1970s, long before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he
had been one of the harshest critics of detente. He had assailed the second
strategic arms limitation treaty negotiated by President Carter and denounced
Soviet adventurism in the third world. But he was not simply hostile to Soviet
conduct. He detested the Soviet system. "When a disease like communism
hangs on as it has for half a century or more," he wrote in notes prepared
for a radio broadcast in 1975, "it's good now and then, to be reminded of
just how vicious it really is .... Communism is neither an edonomic
or a political system-it is a form of insanity-a temporary aberration which
will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature.
"2
Nor was this rhetoric
reserved simply for the campaign trail. In his first press conference as
president of the United States, he was asked about the long-range intentions of
the Soviet Union. Its goals, he said, were well known: "the promotion of
world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state." And to
this end, Reagan went on, "they reserve unto themselves the right to
commit any crime, to lie, to cheat."3 The communists believed in
"treachery, deceit, destruction, & bloodshed."4 They denied the
existence of God and the sanctity of human life. They vitiated the human
spirit. "Let us be aware," Reagan said in one of his most famous
speeches as president, "that while they preach the supremacy of the state,
declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual
domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the
modern world."5
Although Ronald
Reagan hated communism, he did not fear it, not nearly as much as many of his
predecessors. He was supremely confident of the superiority of American values
and of the American way of life. "The West won't contain communism,"
he told the graduating students at the University of Notre Dame on 17 May 1981,
"it will transcend communism."6 His adversaries in the Kremlin might
trumpet its inevitable victory, but Ronald Reagan saw a different reality.
Speaking to the British parliament in June 1982, he rephrased Winston
Churchill's 1946 iron curtain speech: "From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna
on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than 30
years to establish their legitimacy. But none-not one regime-has yet been able
to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root."7
The tide of history
was moving in a direction that belied the beliefs of Marxist-Leninists.
"Democracy is not a fragile flower," Reagan declared, nor was
capitalism a decaying system. "We are witnessing today," he said in
1982, "a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the
economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But
the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of MarxismLeninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union
that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human
dignity to its citizens."8
There were new
dynamics in the international system. The era of decolonization was over,
having expired with the breakup of the Portuguese empire in the 1970s. No
longer could the Soviet Union exploit the evils of Western imperialism or
present itself as the embodiment of a successful model of development.
Revolutionary nationalists were no longer flocking to Moscow to learn the
secrets of economic modernization and technological innovation. The Soviet
economy was sputtering, the Chinese communist economy was being reimagined, and
those of Eastern Europe, deeply indebted to Western creditors, were
floundering. Outraged by the rising cost of meat, Polish workers went on strike
in the summer of 1980 and demanded the right to form independent trade unions
and to express themselves freely. Garnering widespread support among the Polish
people, the Solidarity movement, as it was called, challenged the Communist
Party's monopoly of power and demanded that the Polish government comply with
the human rights provisions inscribed in the Helsinki Final Act. Although the
movement was suppressed after the Kremlin threatened to intervene militarily
and after the Polish government declared martial law in December 1982,
Solidarity's resonance was considerable. "Around the world, the democratic
revolution is gathering new strength," Reagan declared. Humankind was
rejecting "the arbitrary power of the state." Everywhere, peoples were
refusing to "subordinate the rights of the individual to the
superstate"; everywhere, they were recognizing that "collectivism
stifles all the best human impulses." If given the choice, Reagan
predicted, people would always choose democracy over dictatorship. They would
"leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history," as they had left
other tyrannies that had stifled the freedom and muzzled the voice of the
people.9
Reagan's confidence
in the superior appeal of Western values meant that he welcomed peaceful
competition with the Kremlin. He was not a warmonger, as so many of his critics
claimed, but he believed sincerely in peace through strength, and even more
sincerely in his capacity to deal with the Kremlin. Reagan's unique
contribution to the end of the Cold War was not his ideological convictions,
because they did not depart from those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson,
and Carter, nor his conviction that the United States must negotiate with the
Soviet Union from strength, a policy that Truman and Acheson had made axiomatic
during the formative years of the Cold War and that Eisenhower and Dulles had
perpetuated until the era of detente. What was unique about Reagan was his
willingness to reach out to a leadership he abhorred, men whose values he
detested; to appreciate the concerns of his adversary; and to learn from
experience. What was unique about Reagan was his confidence in himself and his
capacity to effectuate change. "We meant to change a nation," he
said, "and instead, we changed a world." 10 Of course, this was made
possible by time, circumstance, and the personal qualities and beliefs of the
new man who ruled the Kremlin. But Reagan had his own gifts: personal charm, a
core set of convictions, and optimism about himself and the way of life he
represented.
It was no accident
that Reagan entitled his autobiography An American Lzfe.
For him, America was a special place, a city on a hill, because it gave all its
citizens "the freedom to reach out and make our dreams come true." In
America, individuals" could determine their own destiny; their ambition
and work determine their fate in life." Every day was "Morning in
America," Reagan's campaign theme in 1984, because every day every man and
every woman could shape his or her destiny through hard work, self-discipline,
entrepreneurship, and personal creativity. Reagan thought his mission in
politics was to preserve the America of his imagination, the institutions and
values that nurtured individual opportunity and personal freedom. He thought
his own life embodied the American odyssey, from rags to riches, from obscurity
to eminence. He loved his life story. He loved being president. His optimism
was inbred, but the trajectory of his life proved, at least to himself, that
the America of his imagination was the America of lived experience.11
ciHe
wasn't a complicated man," said Nancy Reagan, his second wife, the person
who knew him best. "He was a private man, but he was not a complicated
one." He was also the most optimistic man she had ever known. "If he
worries, you'd never know it. If he's anxious, he keeps it to himself.
Depressed? He doesn't know the meaning of the word."12
The sources of
Reagan's basic disposition are somewhat hard to fathom, but not inexplicable.
He grew up in a poor, if not impoverished, family. His father was an
unsuccessful shoe salesman, moving frequently from one small illinois town to another, with a brief stint in Chicago. He
was also an alcoholic, periodically going through bouts of inebriation and
fighting with Reagan's mother, who preached tolerance. 13
As a child, Reagan
had a wandering existence until the family settled down in Dixon, illinois, when he was nine years old. He loved Dixon; it
was "heaven"-a small community where people knew and cared for one
another. Yet Reagan was not popular. "I was a little introverted," he
recalled, "and probably a little slow in making really close
friends."14 Ronnie was "a loner," Nancy explained in her memoir.
"There's a wall around him. He lets me come closer than anyone else, but
there are times when even I feel that barrier. " 15
Ronald Reagan's
optimism, serenity, and patience were most clearly shaped by his mother. From
his father he learned the "value of hard work and ambition, and maybe a
little something about telling a story. From my mother, I learned the value of
prayer, how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true."16 His
mother, wrote Nancy Reagan, "was a very religious woman whose faith saw
her through bad times. She was also an incredible optimist .... Ronnie once
said, 'We were poor, but I never knew it.' "17
Reagan's mother told
him that "everything in life happened for a purpose. She said all things
were part of God's Plan, even the most disheartening setbacks, and in the end
everything worked out for the best." She taught her boys not to let bad
things get them down. "You stepped away from it, stepped over it, and
moved on." 18 Those who knew him well knew that Reagan's faith ran deep.
"Ronald Reagan believed that God had a plan for everything."19
Not many boys in
Dixon went to college in those days. Reagan's father could not afford to pay
tuition, but Dutch, as Reagan was known in his youth, followed his dream and
enrolled in Eureka College, a small liberal arts institution affiliated with
the Disciples of Christ, situated not far from his hometown. Reagan was able to
secure a football scholarship and a part-time job. He preferred sports and
acting to studying economics, his major.20
Reagan graduated in
1932, during the depths of the Great Depression. He struggled to find a job, as
did all his contemporaries, and finally landed a position as a radio sports
announcer in Des Moines, Iowa. He worked hard at perfecting his rhythm and
delivery and enjoyed broadcasting college football and professional baseball
games. When he began to vote, he voted Democratic, following his father's
political loyalties. Dutch Reagan "idolized" FDR. He loved the
president's fireside chats. Roosevelt's "strong, gentle, confident voice
... reassured us that we could lick any problem. "21
In the mid-1930s,
Reagan went to southern California each year to report on the Chicago Cubs
during spring training for the baseball season. In 1937, he used the
opportunity to schedule a screen test at a Hollywood studio. The studio liked his
voice, if not his looks, although he was a strong, tall, handsome man in
splendid physical condition. He got a contract, began an acting career, and
repossessed his birth name, Ronald. Within a couple of years, Ronald Reagan was
a minor star, making popular movies and earning a very substantial income. He
won no Academy Awards, but producers, directors, and actors liked him. He was
modest, reliable, and hardworking. He had a great memory and learned his lines
quickly. His career was flourishing when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. As
a reserve officer, he was quickly assigned to active duty, but because of his
terrible eyesight he was not shipped overseas and spent the war years making
training films for the air force.22
After the war, Reagan
resumed his film career and became active in the Screen Actors Guild. These
were critical years in his political maturation. He was still "a New
Dealer to the core," and joined a host of political organizations.
Although he knew little about communism and almost nothing about the Soviet
Union, he quickly became suspicious of communist sympathizers. When a labor
dispute erupted in 1946 that threatened to shut down a number of studios,
Reagan wanted to have the Screen Actors Guild mediate the tangled conflict, which
involved producers as well as unions. "More than anything else, it was the
Communists' attempted takeover of Hollywood ... that led me to accept the
nomination as president of the Screen Actors Guild, and indirectly at least,
set me on the road that would lead me into politics." Although his grasp
of these events was less than perfect, they shaped his understanding of the
postwar world. "Now I knew from firsthand experience how Communists used
lies, deceit, violence, or any other tactic that suited them to advance the
cause of Soviet expansionism. I knew from the experience of hand-to-hand combat
[in Hollywood] that America faced no more insidious or evil threat than that of
Communism. "23
In the late 1940s,
Reagan's acting career floundered and his first marriage collapsed. Not long
thereafter he met Nancy Davis, and they were married in March 1952. A few
months later, he and Nancy took the train to Fulton, Missouri, where an old
friend had arranged for Reagan to give the commencement address at tiny William
Woods College. Reagan's speech, entitled "America the Beautiful,"
presaged much that he would be saying for the next forty years. He said that
America was less a place than an idea. The idea "is nothing less than the
inherent love of freedom in each one of us." America, he told the
audience, '\vas set aside as a promised land." He exhorted the new
graduates to join in the struggle against "totalitarian darkness" and
urged them to ensure that "this land of ours is the last best hope of man
on earth. "24
Soon thereafter,
Reagan realized that his acting career was over. He could not get the roles he
wanted, and he faced growing financial difficulties. He took a job as host of a
new television drama series sponsored by the General Electric Corporation. The
program was a great success in the early days of the new medium, and Reagan
became a household presence in millions of homes every Sunday evening. He also
went around the country delivering speeches for his new corporate employer.25
During the 1950s,
Reagan's political beliefs shifted. He became a staunch foe of government
regulation and opposed the progressive income tax, which in his view throttled
business enterprise and personal initiative. He shifted parties, registered as
a Republican, and in 1964 eagerly accepted the cochairmanship
of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in California. His speaking was
polished and effective. Toward the end of the campaign, some of Goldwater's
leading backers asked Reagan to prepare a half-hour address to be presented on
national television the week before the election.26
"The
Speech," as it became known, was nothing more than a compilation of the
ideas that Reagan had been articulating for a decade. The American people, he
warned, faced a stark choice between individual freedom and creeping
totalitarianism as embodied in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs.
"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny," he concluded. "We
will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we
will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of
darkness."27
Among Republican
conservatives, the speech was a smashing success and it transformed Reagan's
life. He was encouraged to run for governor of California, and in November 1966
he defeated the incumbent, Pat Brown. He served two terms in Sacramento and in
1976 challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. Although
he lost in a very close contest, he spent the next four years delivering
speeches and perfecting his messages for a run against Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Reagan was one of the
oldest men ever to campaign for the presidency, but his message was one of
spiritual renewal. America's greatest years lay in the future, he said. He
assailed Carter's talk of malaise. The American people were not to blame for
the country's difficulties, for they were optimistic, energetic, innovative,
and resilient. The Democrats, not the American people, were the source of the
problem. For decades, Democrats had been taxing and spending the American
people's money, triggering huge deficits, causing runaway inflation, and
eroding personal incentives to work and invest. The Democrats' arms
negotiations and defense programs had tied America's hands and eroded American
power. "We had to recapture our dreams, our pride in ourselves and our
country, and regain that unique sense of destiny and optimism that had always
made America different from any other country in the world." Vote for
Reagan and there would be a new "morning in America."28
Reagan won a decisive
victory over Carter in November 1980, and the Republicans captured a majority
in the Senate for the first time since 1954, although the Democrats still
controlled the House of Representatives. In his inaugural address on 20 January
1981, Reagan reemphasized his most fundamental convictions: "government is
not the solution to our problem; government is the problem .... It is time to
reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to
lighten our punitive tax burden." Under his leadership, the United States
would recapture its greatness. "We have every right to dream heroic
dreams," he told the American people. Adversaries should take heed:
"our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will
.... We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended us to be free.
"29
Reagan's priorities
were clear: to restore the nation's economic vitality and augment its military
strength. His staff worked feverishly to push through Congress his program of
tax and spending cuts. The defense budget skyrocketed-12 percent in fiscal year
1981, and 15 percent in 1982. Military officials envisioned spending $2.7
trillion during the 1980s. Increased funds were allocated for training, for
preparedness, for command and communications, for the B-1 bomber, for one
hundred MX intercontinental ballistic missiles, for fifteen Trident submarines,
and for research and development of the B-2 Stealth bomber and the Trident II
missile.30
Reagan's most
fundamental axiom on national security policy was that the United States must
negotiate from strength. The Soviets, he believed, respected "only
strength." The United States had been negotiating with its hands tied
behind its back. Greatly distorting what had happened during the 1970s, he claimed
that Washington had unilaterally disarmed, providing little incentive for the
Kremlin to negotiate in good faith. "[W]e're
going to be far more successful," Reagan declared, "if [the]
adversary knows that the alternative is a buildup. "31
Critical to Reagan's
way of thinking was his conviction that the Soviet system was in rotten shape.
State Department officials, national security advisers, and intelligence
analysts conveyed abundant information about Soviet economic problems, popular
malaise, and ethnic discontent. "The Soviet people are no longer confident
that their standard of living will continue to improve," reported the
CIA's directorate of intelligence. "Popular dissatisfaction and cynicism
seem to be growing." Corruption was rampant. Economic productivity was
declining. Ethnic discontent was mounting.32 None of this surprised President
Reagan. Among his core beliefs was the inefficiency of a command economy, and
its fundamental incapacity to satisfy the aspirations of people who wanted a better
way of life. "We could have an unexpected ally," he said as early as
1977, "if Ivan is becoming discontented enough to start talking
back." 33
Reagan wanted to
squeeze the Soviet Union. The United States would do whatever was necessary to
stay ahead of the Kremlin in the arms race, he insisted. "[W] e could
outspend them forever." The men in the Kremlin knew "that if we
turned our full industrial might into an arms race, they cannot keep pace with
US."34
To negotiate from
strength, however, meant a willingness to talk. Reagan grasped this fundamental
reality and wanted to engage the Soviets in a dialogue:
I wanted to let them know that we realized the nuclear standoff was futile and
dangerous and that we had no designs on their territories .... Somewhere in the
Kremlin, I thought, there had to be people who realized that the pair of us
standing there like two cowboys with guns pointed at each other's heads posed a
lethal risk to the survival of the Communist world as well as the free world.
Someone in the Kremlin had to realize that in arming themselves to the teeth,
they were aggravating the desperate economic problems in the Soviet Union,
which were the greatest evidence of the failure of Communism.35
After Reagan was
badly wounded in an assassination attempt on 30 March 1981, he lay in bed
mulling over these issues. "Perhaps having come so close to death made me
feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the
threat of nuclear war; perhaps there was a reason I had been spared. "36
He told Secretary of State Alexander Haig that he wanted to lift the grain
embargo and write a personal letter to Brezhnev. Haig opposed both ideas, which
agitated Reagan, who desired to engage with the Soviet leader "as a human
being." In his typically compromising way, the president allowed Haig to
write Brezhnev a formal letter that represented the tough-minded attitude of
the administration, but Reagan stubbornly went ahead with his own letter, which
he wrote in longhand to underscore its authenticity.37
In this letter, the
president emphasized the hopes the Soviet leader had kindled when Brezhnev
first met President Richard Nixon, a decade earlier. "Those meetings had
captured the imagination of all the world." At the time, Reagan reminded
Brezhnev, they had met one another at Nixon's home in San Clemente. "You
took my hand in both of yours and assured me ... that you were dedicated with
all your heart and mind to fulfilling those hopes and dreams." The peoples
of the world, Reagan continued, still retained those dreams. Regardless of race
and ethnicity, they shared similar aspirations for themselves and their
children:
They wanted the
dignity of having some control over their individual destiny. They wanted to
work at the craft or trade of their own choosing and to be fairly rewarded.
They wanted to raise their families in peace. . . . Governments exist for their
convenience, not the other way around .... Is it possible that we have
permitted ideology, political and economic philosophies and governmental
policies to keep us from considering the very real, everyday problems of
peoples?
Reagan concluded by saying he hoped that lifting the grain embargo would
catalyze "meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in
fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace. "38
Nothing came of this
letter, partly because Brezhnev replied coolly and was by then physically and
mentally incapable of taking any new initiative, partly because Reagan did not
know how to move his administration forward. His national security team had
been in disarray from the moment he took office, and things got worse before
they got better. The president's style of decision making, his aloofness, his
aversion to conflict, his disdain for facts and detail, and his penchant for
ideological verbiage contributed greatly to the disorder. Those who knew him
best, whether admirers or detractors, agreed on the way he operated. "He
made no demands, and gave almost no instructions," explained Martin
Anderson, a longtime admirer and one of Reagan's most influential economic
advisers. "Essentially, he just responded to whatever was brought to his
attention and said yes or no, or I'll think about it." According to David
Stockman, the president's first budget tsar, Reagan "gave no orders; no
commands; asked for no information; expressed no urgency." At some
meetings of the National Security Council, according to Richard Pipes, the
Soviet expert who served on the NSC staff, the president seemed "really
lost, out of his depth, uncomfortable." "Unlike some of his
predecessors," wrote Haig, "Reagan made no decisions on the spot, and
gave little indication of his own position on the issues."39
His advisers on
foreign and defense policy feuded, sometimes for personal reasons, sometimes
because of institutional rivalries, and sometimes over policy. Secretary of
State Haig, a former general and NATO commander, believed he was entitled to
shape policy as he pleased. He was never on intimate terms with the president.
Reagan's closest advisers and friends in the White House-Edwin Meese, Michael
Deaver, and James Bakerdisliked Haig, and he
reciprocated their feelings. Haig and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, an
old associate of Reagan's, also were at odds, the strife being as much departmental
rivalry as personal antipathy. Theoretically, the president's national security
adviser, Richard Allen, should have been able to ease these feuds, but he
lacked both intellectual stature and a personal tie to the president-indeed, he
did not even have direct access to him. Moreover, Allen had staffed the
National Security Council with many hard-line
anticommunists who regarded State Department officials with disdain, if not
contempt. "The entire first year and a half of the administration passed
in an atmosphere of unremitting tension between the NSC and State," wrote
Pipes.40
The feuding
bureaucracies took more than a year to produce a strategy statement for the new
administration. On 20 May 1982, President Reagan approved it. Times were
treacherous, e document stressed:
The growing scarcity
of resources, such as oil, increasing terrorism, the dangers of nuclear
proliferation, uncertainties in Soviet political succession, reticence on the
part of a number of Western countries, and the growing assertiveness of Soviet
foreign policy all contribute to the unstable international environment. For
these reasons, the decade of the eighties will likely pose the greatest
challenge to our survival and well-being since World War II.41
But there was no reason to despair. The Soviet Union had significant
vulnerabilities. "The economies and the social systems of the Soviet Union
and of most Soviet allies continue to exhibit serious structural weaknesses.
The appeal of communist ideologies appears to be decreasing throughout much of
the world, including the Soviet bloc itself." Soviet military difficulties
in Mghanistan after their intervention in December
1979 demonstrated the limits of the Kremlin's power-projection capabilities.
Unrest in Poland revealed weaknesses in the Warsaw Pact. Inside the Soviet
Union, the growth of non-Russian nationalities posed a latent threat to
"the dominant Russian population. "
The strategy
statement also stipulated that the administration's policy should be designed
to nurture the economic well-being of the nation, strengthen its industrial and
technological base, and promote access to foreign markets and resources. The
United States should maintain and strengthen alliances and "wherever
possible" encourage and reinforce "freedom, the rule of law, economic
development and national independence throughout the world." With regard
to the Soviet Union, the United States had to be able to deter attack and
prevail in war. The strategy statement explained that the Soviet leaders did
not want war but would be inclined to engage in aggressive risk-taking in light
of their mounting military capabilities, believing they could intimidate or
blackmail the United States. The aim should be to "neutralize" these
efforts and "to contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and
military presence throughout the world, and to increase the costs of Soviet
support of proxy, terrorist, and subversive forces."42
William Clark, an old
friend of Reagan's and perhaps his closest confidant other than his wife,
claimed that the president focused much attention on this document.43 On 1
January 1982, the president had made Clark his national security adviser when a
minor scandal discredited Allen. Clark was a virulent anticommunist but knew
little about international affairs. His task was to improve communication among
the departments and with the White House. Like many other Reagan advisers, he
believed this goal could be achieved if Haig were removed as secretary of
state. In June 1982, Reagan, who loathed controversy among his advisers and
hated firing anybody, dismissed Haig and appointed George Shultz as secretary
of state. A man of great ability and experience in business, government, and
the academy, Shultz had been a professor of economics at the University of
Chicago, served as secretary of labor and secretary of the treasury in the
Nixon administration, and was currently president of the Bechtel Corporation.44
But Shultz's arrival
did not ease the difficulties besetting the national security process. He
immediately sensed that "a cult of secrecy verging on deception had taken
root in the White House and NSC staffs." He agreed with all the basic
Reagan doctrines. The challenge, in Shultz's view, was "to use freedom and
open markets as the organizing principles for economic and political
development, and to do so long enough to allow communism's failures to be fully
recognized and to play themselves out." But Shultz also believed that the
United States should negotiate with the Soviet Union to nurture a more
constructive relationship. He knew the president shared this view, but was
convinced that Clark, Weinberger, CIA director William Casey, and their staffs
were obstructing implementation of the president's wishes.45
Shultz thought that
he alone among Reagan's top advisers actually had experience dealing with the
Soviets. As secretary of the treasury, he had conducted extensive trade talks
with Nikolai Patolichev, then Soviet minister of
foreign trade, a hardened old communist who during World War II had been in
charge of tank production. On a trip to Moscow in 1973, Patolichev
had taken Shultz to a Leningrad cemetery where more than a million dead
soldiers lay buried. Shultz and Patolichev walked
solemnly among the graves as Patolichev vividly
described the fighting around Leningrad. The experience left an indelible
impression on Shultz:
I had learned
something of the human dimension to the Soviet Union. I learned that World War
II-the Great Patriotic War against fascism, the Soviets called it-was a matter
of deep significance to them. I also learned that the Soviets were tough ne~tiators but that you could negotiate successfully with
them. In my experience, they did their homework and had skill and patience and
staying power. I respected them not only as able negotiators but as people who
could make a deal and stick to it .... Their willingness to engage seriously
would depend entirely on how they perceived their interests. Such occasions
would come, I felt, when the Soviets concluded that we were not only strong and
determined but also willing to make agreements that were mutually
advantageous.46
Bill Clark's NSC staff did not see things in quite this way. Richard Pipes and
his colleagues labored during 1982 on a new document more precisely defining American
policy toward the Soviet Union. NSDD-75, "U.S. Relations with the
USSR," specified that the Reagan administration would seek to achieve
three broad objectives: "to contain and over time reverse Soviet
expansionism"; to promote, "within the narrow limits available to us,
the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political
and economic system"; and "to engage the Soviet Union in negotiations
... consistent with the principle of strict reciprocity and mutual interest.
"47 Clark explained to Reagan that what was distinctive about the document
was the second goal, "namely encouraging antitotalitarian changes within
the USSR."48 Nothing transformative was expected in the short term.
Neither Pipes nor Clark believed this was a strategy to dismantle communism in
the Soviet Union. Although their expectations were modest, they were
nonetheless significant: "the prospect for major systemic change in the
next few years is relatively low, [but] the likelihood of policy shifts is much
higher, and some of these could set the scene for broader changes in the system
over the long term."49
What separated Clark and
Pipes from Shultz was their relative indifference to the importance of
negotiations. When Brezhnev died in November 1982, and Yuri Andropov succeeded
him, Shultz warned Reagan that the new Soviet leader would inject more dynamism
into Soviet policy. "There is already evidence of greater foreign policy
energy and sophistication under Andropov," Shultz wrote Reagan on 15
January 1983, "and the Soviets will clearly pe on the offensive." The
United States needed to react with "strength, imagination, and energy."
It needed to revitalize its economic and military capabilities, promote
alliance cohesion, stabilize relations with China, compete briskly in the war
of ideas, and mediate regional conflicts in the Middle East, Central America,
and elsewhere. But to be successful, Shultz emphasized, America also needed to
enter a dialogue with Andropov. The Soviet Union was not about to collapse nor
lose its capacity to compete. "While recognizing the adversarial nature of
our relationship with Moscow, we must not rule out the possibility that firm
U.S. policies could help induce the kind of changes in Soviet behavior that
would make an improvement in relations possible. "50
Reagan endorsed
Shultz's policy, but he then proceeded to intensify his rhetorical and programmatic
onslaught against the Kremlin. The president was angered by the declaration of
martial law in Poland. He assailed the Soviets for aiding Castro, supporting
the Sandinistas, indirectly fomenting insurrection in El Salvador, and
escalating the fighting in Mghanistan. He denounced
them for their arms buildup, religious persecution, restrictions on Jewish
emigration, and violations of the Helsinki Agreement on human rights. Reagan's
vitriol reached new heights in a speech he gave to evangelical Christians on 8
March 1983, when he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire."
"Let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in totalitarian
darkness," he said, "pray they will discover the joy of knowing
God." "Religion," he believed, might "turn out to be the
Soviets' Achilles heel. "51
Shultz shared the
president's disgust with Kremlin policies, but he thought Reagan's rhetoric was
getting out of hand. White House officials had not told him that the president
would denounce the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," and Shultz felt
that he was being excluded from the decisionmaking
loop. He met with Reagan at the White House on 10 March determined to present a
new approach and to persuade the president, who he believed had become a
"prisoner of his own staff," to shift gears. Reagan, however, assured
him that he supported Shultz's ideas, and he encouraged him to go ahead with
his efforts to engage the Kremlin in a constructive dialogue.52
Reagan was no one's
prisoner. He\possessed his own complex and protean ideas about the nation's
security, however inept he was in thinking them through or finding the means to
implement them. On 23 March, with little consultation with either his secretary
of defense or his secretary of state, he announced his intention to launch a
program "which holds the promise of changing the course of human
history." He wanted to build a shield to protect the United States and its
allies from incoming missiles with nuclear warheads, something he had been
thinking about for several years. He knew it would take a long time, knew he
needed to reassure allies and adversaries alike that this initiative would not
endanger their security or contravene previous treaties. But the president
firmly believed that relying on the doctrine of mutual assured destruction
(MAD) to preserve peace was mad. It was also irresponsible, and a conventional
wisdom whose time had passed. Purposefully avoiding discussion with advisers
who he knew would oppose it, Reagan announced that he was initiating a
"long-term research and development program" designed "to
achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear
missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the
weapons themselves. We seek neither military superiority nor political
advantage. Our only purpose ... is to search for ways to reduce the danger of
nuclear war. "53
Reagan did not want
his support of "Star Wars," as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
came to be called, to ratchet up the arms race or intensify Cold War tensions.
He insisted that he would be willing to share the anticipated
technology-space-based lasers, mirrors, particle beams, and kineticenergy
weapons-with the Soviet leaders so that they, too, could gain reassurance.54
According to Jack Matlock, the experienced foreign service officer who at this
time succeeded Pipes as the Soviet expert on the NSC staff, Reagan did not want
to torpedo diplomatic negotiations with the Kremlin; he wanted to engage the
new Soviet leadership. Matlock later recalled:
From the time I
joined the NSC staff in 1983 my main duty [was] to devise a negotiating
strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. Many in his administration ...
doubted that the Soviet leaders would conduct negotiations in good faith, but
Reagan was an optimist. For all his distaste for the Soviet system, he
nevertheless believed that it could change if subjected to sufficient l(ressure and his personal negotiating skill.55
Throughout 1982 and
1983, Reagan repeated that he wanted to talk with Soviet leaders. He was ready
and willing to attend a summit conference with Andropov, notwithstanding the
Soviet leader's KGB background and aura of toughness. On learning of Brezhnev's
death, Reagan told a press conference:
"I want to underscore my intention to continue working to improve our
relationship with the Soviet Union."56 The United States, he insisted, was
accruing strength not to wage war, but to negotiate more effectively. We want
"to discuss practical steps that could resolve problems." Talks would
improve if the Soviets ended the bloodshed in Afghanistan and permitted reform
in Poland, but "we do not insist that the Soviet Union abandon its
standing as a superpower or its legitimate national interests. "57
Reagan exchanged
letters with Andropov reiterating his desire to preserve the peace and
eliminate the nuclear threat. "You and I share an enormous responsibility
for the preservation of stability in the world. I believe we can fulfill that
responsibility but to do so will require a more active level of exchange than
we have heretofore been able to establish. We have much to talk about. . . .
Historically, our predecessors have made better progress when communicating has
been private and candid. If you wish to engage in such communication you will
find me ready. I await your reply. "58
Andropov's written
responses were hopeful, but Soviet actions belied his words.59 On 1 September
1983, Soviet fighter planes shot down a Korean civilian airliner wandering
through Soviet airspace, killing 269 people. Reagan was "outraged."
Cutting short his summer vacation in California, he returned to Washington on
Labor Day weekend and wrote a speech conveying his "unvarnished"
feelings: the downing of the plane "was an act of barbarism, born of a
society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life
and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations. "60
1.
George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993),531-32.
2.
Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Marrin
Anderson, eds., Reagan in His Own Hand (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001),
10-12.
3.
"President's News Conference," 29 January 1981, Public Papers of the
Presidents: Ronald Reagan (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1982),57 (hereinafter cited as PPP: Reagan, year, page).
4.
Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, Reagan in His Own Hand, 15.
5.
"Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of
Evangelicals," 8 March 1983, PPP: Reagan, 1983,743.
6.
"Address at Commencement Exercises," ihid.,
1981,434.
7.
"Address to Members of British Parliament," 8 Juoe
1982, ibid., 1982,743.
8. Ibid., 745.
9. Ibid.,
746-47.
10.
Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, Reagan in His Own Hand, 4.
11. Ronald
Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990),28,22,27; also
see Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Public
Affairs, 2000); Edmund Morris, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York:
Random House, 1999); Richard Reeves, Prest~ dent
Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005); John
P. Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (New York:
W. W. Norton and Company, 2007).
12.
Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, Reagan in His Own Hand, xli; Nancy Reagan with
William Novak, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House,
1989), 104, 108.
13.
Reagan, An American Life, 19-34.
14.
Ibid., 31.
15. N.
Reagan, My Turn, 106; Cannon, President Reagan, 172-95; Morris, Dutch, 61.
16. Reagan, An
American Life, 22.
17. N.
Reagan, My Turn, 107.
18.
Reagan, An American Ltfe, 20--21.
19.
Michael K. Deaver, A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan (New
York: HarperCollins, 2001), 68; also see Paul Kengor,
God and Ronald Reagan (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
20.
Reagan, An American Life, 44-61; Morris, Dutch, 64-75.
21. Reagan,
An American Life, 66; also see Reagan to Ron Cochran, 12 May 1980, in Reagan: A
Ltfe in Letters, ed. by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise
Anderson, and Martin Anderson (New York: The Free Press, 2003), 27-31.
22.
Reagan, An American Ltfe, 75-104.
23.
Ibid., 114-15; Cannon, President Reagan, 242-44.
24. Kengor, God and Ronald Reagan, 94-96.
25.
Reagan, An American Life, 126-36; Paul Lettow, Ronald
Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York: Random House, 2005),
10--18.
26. Reagan,
An American Life, 129-30, 137-43; N. Reagan, My Turn, 124-31.
27.
Reagan, An American Life, 141-43.
28. Ibtd., 219. "Morning in America" was the theme of
the 1984 campaign, but it also captures the essence of Reagan's run for the
presidency in 1980. See James 1. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States
from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
145-51.
29.
"Inaugural Address," 20 January 1981, PPP: Reagan, 1981,3.
30. David
A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed (New
York: Harper and Row, 1986), 108-109; Ronald E. Powaski,
Return to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1981-1999
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15; John M. Collins, U.S.-Soviet Military
Balance, 1980--1985 (New York: Pergamon-Brassey's International Defense
Publishers, 1985), 19--22; Christopher Simpson, National Security Directives of
the Reagan and Bush Administrations: The Declarstfied
History of u.s. Political & Military Policy,
1981-1991 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995),46-49.
31.
"Address on the State of the Union," 26 January 1982, PPP: Reagan,
1982,78; "Interview with Walter Cronkite," 3 March 1981, ibid., 1981,
195; "President's News Conference," 19 January 1982, ibid., 1982,43;
also see "Intetview with Skip Weber," 9
February 1982, ibtd., 151; Reagan to John Matzger, 11 May 1982, in Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, A
Life in Letters, 405; Reagan to Irving S. Schloss, 28 June 1982, ibid.,
406-407.
32. CIA,
Directorate of Intelligence, "Soviet Society in the 1980s: Problems and
Prospects," December 1982, box 1, End of Cold War Collection, National
Security Archive (NSA); CIA, Directorate of Intelligence, "Soviet Elite
Concerns About Popular Discontent and Official Corruption," December 1982,
ibid.; Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five
Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996),
194-97.
33.
Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, Reagan in His Own Hand, 147; "Interview
with the Editorial Board of the New York Post," 23 March 1982, PPP:
Reagan, 1982,368; Reagan to Mrs. Jay Harris, 26 April 1982, in Skinner,
Anderson, and Anderson, A Life in Letters, 402-403.
34.
Reagan, An American Life, 267; Lettow, Reagan and
Nuclear Weapons, 35.
35.
Reagan, An American Life, 268; for signs of dialogue, also see Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's
Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Random House, 1995), 490-93.
36.
Reagan, An American Life, 269.
37. Ibid., 270-71;
also see Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, A Life in Letters, 737-41.
38.
Reagan, An American Life, 272-73. His real reason for lifting the grain embargo
was because "no other free world nations would join us and we were therefore
hurting our own farmers." Reagan to Franciszek Lachowicz,
9 December 1982, in Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, A Life in Letters, 377-78.
39.
Martin Anderson, Revolution: The Reagan Legacy (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover
Institution Press, 1990), 289-90; Stockman, Triumph of Politics, 76; Richard
Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 166; Alexander M. Haig, Jr.,
Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company, 1984),77.
40.
Pipes, Vixi, 153; Robert C. McFarlane and Zophia Smardz, Special Trust (New
York: Cadell and Davies, 1994), 171-83; Haig, Caveat, 80-86,311-15.
41.
National Securiry Decision Directive (NSDD) 32,
"U.S. National Securiry Strategy," 20 May
1982, NSDD 32, Executive Secretariat, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
(RRPL).
42. Ibid.
43. Lettow, Reagan and Nuclear Weapons, 61-70.
44. For
dismissal ofHaig and appointtnent
of Shultz, see Haig, Caveat, 311-15; Reagan, An American Life, 255-56, 360-62;
Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 3-15.
45.
Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 12, 10 (for quotations), also
162--67,268-70,309-22.
46.
Ibid., 119.
47. NSDD
75, "U.S. Relations with the USSR," 17 January 1983, in Simpson,
National Security Directives, 255--63; also see materials regarding NSDD 75, in
box 91644, William Clark Papers, RRPL.
48. Clark
to Reagan, 16 December 1982, NSDD 75, Executive Secretariat, RRPL.
49.
"Response to NSSD 11-82: U.S. Relations with the USSR," pp. 13-14,6
December 1982, ibid.; Lettow, Reagan and Nuclear
Weapons, 75-79.
50.
Shultz to Reagan, 19 January 1983, box 1, End of Cold War Collection, NSA.
51.
"Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of
Evangelicals," 8 March 1983, PPP: Reagan, 1983,359--64; Reagan to John O.
Koehler, 9 July 1981, in Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson, A Life in Letters,
375; Reagan to Suzanne Massie, 15 February 1984, ibid., 379; also see Dobrynin, In Confidence, 517-20; Shultz, Turmoil and
Triumph, 159-71.
52.
Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 267-71; Clark to Shultz, 26 May 1983, box 91644,
Clark Papers, RRPL.
53. Lettow, Reagan and Nuclear Weapons, 81-121, with quotations
from Reagan's speech on 111-12; John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A
Critical Appraisal of American National Security During the Cold War, revised
and expanded ed. (New York: Oxford Universiry Press,
2005), 356-59.
54. Lettow, Reagan and Nuclear Weapons, 117-21.
55. Jack
F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy of an Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the
Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995), 77; Lettow, Reagan and Nuclear Weapons, 124-26; for an overall
critique of Reagan and Star Wars, see Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the
Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2000).
56.
"President's News Conference," 11 November 1982, PPP: Reagan, 1982,
1450.
57.
"Radio Address," 8 January 1983, ibid., 1983,23-25.
58.
Reagan to Yuri Andropov, 11 July 1983, Executive Secretariat, National Security
Council (NSC), Head of State, USSR, box 38-39, RRPL; Reagan, An American Life,
576-82.
59.
Andropov to Reagan, 27 August 1983, Executive Secretariat, NSC, Head of State,
USSR, box 38-39; Shultz to Reagan, 29 August 1983, ibid.
60.
Reagan, An American Life, 584.
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