James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

During the course of the research, I found some surprises. The archives show that in dealing with the Soviet Union, Reagan on occasion operated in much the same way as he did in the Iran-Contra affair, secretly making use of low-level private intermediaries to carry personal messages back and forth. Even some of the plans for summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev went not through the secretary of state but through a lowly American author, a woman who had gotten to know both Reagan in Washington and a KGB official in Moscow. The archives also show that Reagan at one point had a frosty standoff inside the White House with former president Richard Nixon, who had been secretly brought back to his old haunts for the first time since he had left after his Watergate resignation. Nixon was more skeptical than Reagan that Mikhail Gorbachev represented a significant change in Moscow. Reagan sought Nixon’s support for his efforts to cut back on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; Nixon refused to give it.

In Reagan’s second term in the White House, his views and his policies were generally at variance with his image as a truculent Cold Warrior. Indeed, during the final three years of his presidency, Reagan was usually among the doves in the often-contentious American debates about the Soviet Union. Reagan was also horrified by the possibility of nuclear war, even during his first term in the White House. The rehearsals for nuclear war of the early 1980s that I had earlier discovered were not at all representative of Reagan’s overall approach to nuclear weapons. In fact, these doomsday exercises of the early 1980s may have scared Reagan into trying to change American policy; in his second term, he repeatedly prodded U.S. military and defense officials to accept cutbacks in nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

Increasingly, Reagan rebelled against the forces and ideas that had made the Cold War seem endless and intractable. From 1986 to 1988, the period at the heart of this book, Reagan was increasingly at odds over Soviet policy with three separate but overlapping constituencies, each of which had played a powerful role in influencing American policy during the Cold War. The first of these was the political right, that is, the same American conservatives who had supported Reagan from the beginning of his political career through his early years in the White House. Magazines such as National Review and columnists such as George Will despised Reagan’s unfolding diplomacy with Gorbachev.

The second constituency opposing Reagan was made up of the so-called realists, the group of officials who had teamed up to run American foreign policy during the Nixon and Ford administrations, including Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Brent Scowcroft. During the 1970s, this group had battled with conservatives (including Reagan himself) as they pursued détente with the Soviet Union. Yet in the mid-1980s, they, together with the conservatives, opposed the efforts by Reagan and his secretary of state, George P. Shultz, to reduce the arsenals of missiles and nuclear weapons that had been at the heart of America’s military strategy throughout the Cold War.

Third, leading American intelligence and defense officials also disputed Reagan’s view of Gorbachev. They argued that the Soviet leadership was not changing as much as Reagan and Shultz believed, and that Gorbachev represented merely a new face for the same old Soviet foreign policies.

At the end of Reagan’s presidency, these constituencies were all working to slow down Reagan’s diplomacy with the Soviet Union. When Reagan left office, the new George H. W. Bush administration took office convinced that Reagan had gone too far with Gorbachev. Bush froze diplomacy with Gorbachev for most of his first year in office, until just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Two decades later, in the aftermath of the U.S. intervention in Iraq of 2003, it is tempting to view American foreign policy as an unending struggle between, on the one hand, hawkish neoconservatives and, on the other hand, more cautious realists. And so it is all the more tempting to superimpose back onto the events of the 1980s the philosophical struggles of the post-Iraq milieu.

Yet in fact, this would be inaccurate. When one looks at what actually transpired during the final years of the Cold War, one finds that history did not play out in the way that we might imagine today. As Reagan proceeded to deal with Gorbachev and to consider cutbacks in nuclear weaponry, both the political right and the foreign-policy realists were against him. William Buckley’s National Review published, with approval, a critique of Reagan’s Soviet policy by Nixon and Kissinger. During his second term in the White House, Reagan repeatedly forsook the advice of his old conservative friends, while also rejecting the ideas of the national-security establishment. This book is an attempt to tell the story of that era, the period leading up to the end of the Cold War.

Anyone writing about Ronald Reagan encounters a special problem: Reagan rarely chose to explain his policy shifts or his not-infrequent changes in strategy or tactics. He had shrewd political instincts but rarely if ever articulated his underlying motivations. His interviews at the time, his private meetings, his autobiography, and his diaries have little to offer on questions of political judgments, trade-offs, or his reasons for reversing course.

Reagan was content to leave everyone with the impression that he was a man of simple principles, a leader utterly without cunning. He was often taken to be merely the instrument of others: at first of the political right and in later years, of a “moderate” group of officials, including Shultz. These impressions sometimes seemed to make sense until the people thought to be controlling Reagan would unexpectedly lose a major policy battle (or occasionally, their own jobs).

Reagan’s way of avoiding extended explanations was to offer a few deflecting phrases that would shut off discussion. When conservative leaders complained about his courtship of Gorbachev, Reagan would dismiss their arguments by saying, “I just think they’re wrong,” without specifying how or why. Like any politician, Reagan had an ego, but in his particular case, the ego wasn’t at all in the words or justifications he uttered. It was, rather, in his public performances. He proudly took note of the size of the crowds at his speeches or how much they cheered or how many letters or calls he received after he appeared on television. When his actions sometimes didn’t seem to fit with the principles he had laid out, Reagan simply restated those principles and left it to others to wrestle with the contradictions. Because he was so opaque, Reagan could not be understood through his words alone or through his actions alone.

I have chosen to probe Reagan’s role in the Cold War’s end through the use of four narrative parts. In its own way, each illuminates the way Reagan operated, the role he played, the influences on his thinking, and the underlying dynamics at work during the last years of his administration.

Part I examines the story of Reagan and Nixon, the two leading anti-Communist politicians of the Cold War. The relationship between the two men and the progress of their political careers offer some understanding of Reagan’s distinctive evolution. Their differing views of the Cold War help to explain how Reagan, after campaigning against détente with the Soviet Union in the 1970s, became such a strong proponent of easing tensions with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union a decade later.

Part II looks at Reagan’s curious relationship with an informal adviser, Suzanne Massie, whom he welcomed to the White House again and again to talk about life in the Soviet Union, even though she was not an established scholar or expert. The Massie story offers some insight into Reagan’s ideas and thinking about the Soviet Union during the mid-1980s, as he was beginning to change his approach to the regime he had called an evil empire.