James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Harmony appeared to prevail. Kissinger served as head of a presidential commission appointed by Reagan to study American policy in Central America. Brent Scowcroft chaired another commission appointed to study missile deployments. In public, the Nixonites continued to line up behind Reagan throughout his first term, suppressing the disagreements that would burst into the open only a couple of years later.

On November 6, 1984, Reagan was elected for a second term, defeating Walter Mondale everywhere but Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Summarizing the campaign two weeks later, Henry Kissinger complained in his newspaper column that both Democrats and Republicans had wrongly suggested that there could be some resolution to the Cold War. The Democrats had argued peace might be attainable through negotiations, while the Republicans talked as though military power would lead to peace. Kissinger ridiculed all such suggestions. “There are no final ‘happy endings,’” Kissinger wrote. “Whatever they may agree on, the United States and the Soviet Union will remain superpowers impinging globally on each other. Ideological hostility will continue. Specific, precise arrangements can, indeed must be made. But they are more likely to ameliorate tensions than to end them.” 1

It was a classic statement of the belief in the permanence of the Cold War. In this view, since the basis of the conflict between the two superpowers was geopolitical, and since neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had the military strength to defeat the other, there could be no way for the Cold War to end. Moreover, since each power had enough nuclear weapons to obliterate the other, and each side viewed its nuclear weapons as fundamental to its security, the unending nature of the Cold War was linked inextricably to the nuclear standoff. This static view failed to reckon with the possibility that the Cold War was also a battle of ideas in which the belief system of one of the two superpowers might crumble, or that it was an economic competition, in which one of the two superpowers might not last. The Kissingerian view also did not envision the possibility that an American president or a Soviet leader might consider the elimination of his nuclear arsenal.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did not see themselves as examples of Cold War inertia or as resistant to fundamental change. They were simply applying their views of the way the Cold War had worked, based on their own experiences in government. Over the next several years, however, Ronald Reagan and a new Soviet leader would gradually begin to operate in a different fashion, based on different assumptions. The Nixonites would insist all the while that this could not happen, that the possibility of far-reaching change was illusory.

The new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11, 1985. During Reagan’s first term, the Soviet leadership had passed in remarkably short order from Leonid Brezhnev, who died in November 1982 after eighteen years in office, to Yuri Andropov, who spent fifteen months at the helm, to Konstantin Chernenko, who lasted only eleven months. Gorbachev thus became the fourth Soviet leader in four years. In Moscow, the progression of aging Soviet leaders from frailty to illness to death watch to funeral had became almost a ritual; the repeated deaths served as a symbol of a system in decay and a leadership unable to summon the energy to change. Gorbachev was picked above all because, at the age of fifty-four, he was relatively young, healthy, firm of voice, and unlikely to die any time soon.

Gorbachev represented a new generation of Soviet leaders. They were known as shestidesyatnaki, Russian for “men of the sixties.” They had come of age in the early 1960s, the brief period of Nikita Khrushchev’s challenge to orthodox Stalinism, between the terrifying repression of the Stalin era and the stagnation of the Brezhnev years. 2Gorbachev and the leaders around him, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he soon appointed as his foreign minister, were eager to get the Soviet Union moving again, to reinvigorate or even to change the system.

The ascension of Gorbachev thus brought to the fore old and unresolved questions in the United States about the nature of the Soviet regime and its Communist system: Could the system ever be changed? Did the nature of the regime matter to the United States? Was the Cold War primarily a conflict of tanks and missiles, or was it a contest of beliefs and economic systems?

Nixon sketched out his own vision of an everlasting Cold War a few months after Gorbachev took office. Writing both in the New York Times and at greater length in Foreign Affairs magazine, the former president warned that Gorbachev represented merely a new face for the same old Soviet policies. “We must disabuse ourselves from the start of the much too prevalent view that if only the two [American and Soviet] leaders could develop a new ‘tone’ or ‘spirit’ in their relationship, our problems would be solved,” said Nixon. “Such factors are irrelevant when nations have irreconcilable differences.” The extensive press coverage of Gorbachev’s personal qualities—his firm handshake, sense of humor, and more fashionable dress—represented an obsession with style over substance, Nixon wrote. “Anyone who reaches the top in the Soviet hierarchy is bound to be a dedicated Communist and a strong, ruthless leader who supports the policy of extending Soviet domination into the non-Communist world.” 3Nixon’s words sounded sober and prudent, but they turned out to be largely wrong. Over the next few years, Gorbachev would demonstrate that he was a dedicated Communist but not a ruthless one, and that he did not press for Soviet domination in the non-Communist world. Indeed, he even loosened the grip on the Eastern European countries already in the Soviet orbit.

Nixon formed this initial judgment of Gorbachev from a distance, at his home in Saddle River, New Jersey. The following summer, Nixon visited Moscow and met Gorbachev for the first time. The session at the Kremlin late in the afternoon of July 18, 1986, lasted for more than an hour and a half. Afterward, Nixon wrote a private memo, twenty-six pages long, and sent a copy to Reagan. Once again, he portrayed the new Soviet leader as having the same aims as his predecessors:

Gorbachev is the third General Secretary of the U.S.S.R. that I have met. He is without question the ablest. While not quite as quick, he is as smart as Khrushchev. Unlike Khrushchev, he has no inferiority complex…. Gorbachev is as tough as Brezhnev, but better educated, more skillful, more subtle…. Brezhnev used a meat axe in his negotiations, Gorbachev uses a stiletto. But beyond the velvet glove he always wears, there is a steel fist…. In essence, he is the most affable of all the Soviet leaders I have met, but at the same time without question the most formidable because his goals are the same as theirs and he will be more effective in attempting to achieve them. 4

Nixon’s personal impressions of Gorbachev fit the conventional American Cold War images: since the 1940s, Soviet leaders had been characterized as having steel fists (or flinty eyes or iron resolve) so often that Americans sometimes forgot that all these metallurgical allusions were merely metaphors. In fact, Gorbachev was not quite so formidable; under economic pressure, the new Soviet leader was beginning to establish more limited goals for Soviet foreign policy.

While Nixon’s views of Gorbachev embodied old stereotypes, his impressions of American politics were as shrewd as ever. He offered Gorbachev some sophisticated advice about why he should try to do business with the Reagan administration. Nixon told Gorbachev it would be a mistake to try to avoid negotiations with Reagan, in hopes that Reagan’s successor would take a softer line. Reagan had the ability to get whatever deal he made with the Soviet Union through the Senate, Nixon pointed out—unlike, for example, Jimmy Carter, who had negotiated a proposed treaty on strategic arms control that could not win Senate approval. Moreover, Nixon told Gorbachev, the Soviet Union should want to make sure that after Reagan left office in 1988, he would support good relations with Moscow and not stand in the way. “Failure to reach agreement while President Reagan is in office might run the risk of developing a situation where President Reagan might become a powerful critic of his successor’s Soviet-American initiatives,” Nixon asserted. 5