James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Reagan, Shultz, and the rest of the American team grew increasingly excited by Gorbachev’s initiatives. By the second day, the two sides were trying to iron out the details of possible agreements. Reagan and Gorbachev began talking about going even further toward eliminating all ballistic missiles or possibly all nuclear weapons. “It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons,” Reagan said. “We can do that,” replied Gorbachev. 17Yet it finally became clear that all of Gorbachev’s proposals, from beginning to end, came with a single condition: that the United States accept severe limits on the development of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), confining all research to laboratories. It was a condition Reagan was unwilling to accept. At the end of the second day, after coming tantalizingly close to the most far-reaching arms control agreements in the history of the Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev walked out of the Reykjavik summit with no deal at all.

Reagan left the meeting both angry and upset. “I’d just never seen Ronald Reagan that way before, had never seen him with such a look,” said Kuhn, who accompanied him after the meetings and in his flight back to Washington. “He wasn’t certain that he had done the right thing by saying that we had to have SDI in return, instead of giving it up in return for eliminating all nuclear missiles.” 18

At the time, Reykjavik was widely perceived as a failure. In retrospect, it was a turning point in the Cold War standoff over nuclear weapons, despite the absence of an agreement. Each side had seen how far the other was willing to go. Both sides came to realize that they could try again. “As we all know, once you put positions on the table, you can say, ‘I’ve withdrawn them,’ but they’re not withdrawn,” said Shultz. “They’re there. We’ve seen your bottom line, and so we know where it is, and they all came right back on the table before long.” 19

Declassified documents show that soon after Reykjavik, Reagan attempted to galvanize the U.S. government to begin thinking about what the abolition of ballistic missiles would mean and how it could be accomplished. A memo from Poindexter to Reagan dated November 1, 1986, laid out plans for a study on “how best to make the transition to a world without offensive ballistic missiles.” The president was told that such a study would be a “follow-up to the proposals you made at Reykjavik.” (Soon, military officials began sending back replies on how expensive such a change would be: the U.S. Army would need more divisions, the Navy more antisubmarine warfare, the Air Force more bombers.) 20

Reykjavik also seemed to alter the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev. In the immediate aftermath, Gorbachev claimed to be irked. He told the Politburo two days after the summit ended that Reagan had “exhibited extreme primitivism, a caveman outlook, and intellectual impotence.” Yet such remarks seemed to be tailored for the consumption of Communist Party hard-liners. Whatever annoyance he felt soon passed, and Gorbachev began to see Reagan in a different light. According to Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign-policy adviser, it was at Reykjavik “that he became convinced it would ‘work out’ between him and Reagan…. After Reykjavik, he never again spoke about Reagan in his inner circle as he had before…. Never again did I hear statements such as, ‘The U.S. administration is political scum that is liable to do anything.’” 21

On the Sunday evening on which the Reykjavik summit ended in disarray, Brent Scowcroft was having dinner with Vice President George H. W. Bush at the Naval Observatory in Washington, the vice president’s residence. They were old friends who had worked together closely in the past: Bush had been CIA director while Scowcroft had been national security adviser in the final year of the Ford administration. The two men watched on television the scenes of Reagan leaving the summit with a grim face and Shultz, exhausted and depressed, telling a press conference of his deep disappointment.

“Geez, isn’t that a shame?” asked Bush, displaying his loyalty to Reagan. No, replied Scowcroft, “That would have been the worst thing that could have happened to us.” He was happy that the deal had fallen through. What bothered Scowcroft especially was the idea that the United States should do away with ballistic missiles, or remove them from Europe, leaving the continent under the threat of the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. “It would have been a disaster for us, an absolute disaster,” Scowcroft believed. 1

Scowcroft was reflecting the climate of opinion among those who had been involved in American foreign and defense policy over the previous decades. Even though no agreement was reached at Reykjavik, the realization that Reagan and Gorbachev had come close—that they had, in fact, talked about abolishing or restricting ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons—produced an intense counterreaction in Washington and among America’s allies. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher; West German chancellor Helmut Kohl; and the French prime minister, François Mitterrand, all voiced concern about the implication of removing American missiles from Europe. Shultz and the State Department supported what Reagan had been willing to accept at Reykjavik, but the response in the Pentagon and the National Security Council was frosty. American military officials, including notably the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were thankful that the dispute over the Strategic Defense Initiative had held up an agreement that they didn’t want in the first place.

“The chiefs thought they had dodged a bullet when Gorbachev insisted that the price had to be SDI,” recalled Colin Powell, who arrived in the Reagan White House a couple of months after Reykjavik. Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Reagan he and the other chiefs were upset by the idea of doing away with ballistic missiles. John Poindexter, the national security adviser, argued to Reagan the importance of nuclear weapons. “Reykjavik scared everyone. It was seen as a scary proof that Ronald Reagan might do something terribly reckless,” recalled Nelson Ledsky, a staff aide at Reagan’s National Security Council. 2

The objections to limiting missiles and nuclear weapons were linked to a broader, more generalized unease: the perception, commonplace in Washington at the time, that Gorbachev was a typical Soviet leader seeking in the usual fashion to reassert Soviet military power, and that Reagan might allow this to happen. “I was on the hawkish side, and very fearful that this kindly old gentleman [Reagan] was going to get suckered,” Fritz W. Ermarth, another National Security Council aide under Reagan, recalled many years later. “Now, you know, I think back on that [period] with some embarrassment…. Some of us worried that Gorbachev would actually succeed in revitalizing the system in some way. 3

In the vanguard of this outpouring of criticism of Reagan’s performance at Reykjavik were Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Since Nixon’s resignation in 1974, he and Kissinger had gone their separate ways. Their estrangement was based, above all, on the fact that after Watergate led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the former president had lived in ignominy and isolation, while his former secretary of state stayed in the limelight. During these years, Kissinger often got the credit for Nixon administration foreign-policy initiatives, such as the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union, and not infrequently, Nixon’s own role was minimized.

At Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev had begun to chip away at the underpinnings of the Cold War by holding out the prospect of a world without ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons. During the following months, Nixon and Kissinger put themselves forward in public as the champions of the existing Cold War order. For a time the two men acted independently of each other, as they had over the previous twelve years. Eventually, however, Nixon and Kissinger decided to join together in a coordinated public campaign aimed at throwing cold water on Reagan’s diplomacy with Gorbachev.