James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Reagan and Shultz decided to play up the positive elements in Gorbachev’s message. As Shevardnadze was leaving town, the United States and Soviet Union released a joint statement saying that they had reached an “agreement in principle” to conclude a treaty banning intermediate-range missiles. The statement said Shultz would go to Moscow the following month to work out a date for a summit later in the fall in which the treaty could be signed. At the White House, the president appeared before reporters and was asked how he would respond to complaints by conservatives that he was in too much of a hurry for the summit. “I don’t know of anything in my life I waited over six years for,” Reagan replied. 5

Reagan’s announcement of the impending treaty was too much for Henry Kissinger. He argued again that these missiles were essential to the close relationship between the United States and its allies. When Shultz phoned Kissinger to tell him about the agreement, Kissinger warned the secretary of state that it “undoes forty years of NATO.” In public, Kissinger went further. He accused the Reagan administration of talking and behaving like the antinuclear activists who spearheaded the massive street demonstrations of the early 1980s. “The most conservative U.S. administration of the postwar era stigmatized nuclear weapons with arguments all but indistinguishable from the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament,” Kissinger wrote in Newsweek . He claimed that the proposed agreement had produced “a crisis of confidence” between the United States and Western Europe. “Many Europeans are convinced a gap is being created that in time will enable the Soviet Union to threaten Europe while sparing the United States.” 6This was, overall, a profound misreading of where Gorbachev and the Soviet Union were headed.

Throughout the fall of 1987, there was a sense of impermanence in the air, a series of reminders that things do not always proceed in orderly fashion. In the United States, the stock market crashed, falling by 508 points (or more than 22 percent) on Black Monday, October 19. At the time, the Reagans were preoccupied with their own personal difficulties. Nancy Reagan was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. For several days, the president shuttled between the White House and his wife’s room at Bethesda Naval Hospital. When one reporter asked whether the market crash might be “your fault,” Reagan jibed, “Is it my fault? For what? Taking cookies to my wife?” 7Four days after Nancy Reagan returned to the White House, her mother died, and the Reagans quickly left Washington for the funeral in Arizona. For most of October, official White House business was a secondary concern for the Reagans.

During that same month, there was a change in the senior ranks of the Reagan administration, another sign of the old order passing. In early October, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger announced his resignation, explaining that his wife was in poor health. During Reagan’s early years in the White House, Weinberger had been the cabinet’s most powerful hawk, an ardent proponent of new weapons systems and defense spending. But in Reagan’s second term, members of Congress had grown increasingly skeptical of his incessant pleas for more money and weaponry. Weinberger’s former senior aides Richard Armitage and Colin Powell used to joke about Weinberger’s proclivity for “taping”—offering Capitol Hill exactly the same answers in the same words and phrases he had used repeatedly in the past. “You have to change your answers a little bit, and Secretary Weinberger never did, so there were a lot more complaints from Capitol Hill,” recalled Armitage. 8

Weinberger’s departure followed by only a few months the resignation of his own top Soviet specialist, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, the neoconservative who had for years ardently opposed arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union. Perle left the Pentagon after he, too, found the climate on Capitol Hill increasingly inhospitable; he had clashed repeatedly with Senator Sam Nunn, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. 9

Reagan appointed his national security adviser, Frank Carlucci, to replace Weinberger as defense secretary, and promoted Colin Powell, the deputy national adviser, to replace Carlucci. Earlier in the year, the president had named William Webster as CIA director, replacing William Casey, who had died of a brain tumor. During the previous years, Weinberger and Casey had been the secretary of state’s principal bureaucratic adversaries. Now, for the first time, Shultz was the unchallenged leader of Reagan’s foreign policy team. Where previously the Reagan administration had bogged down in fractious disputes over how to deal with the Soviet Union, the new team of Shultz, Carlucci, Powell, and Webster worked together in relative harmony.

Conservatives grew even more dismayed than they had been six months earlier when Reagan had chosen the moderate Howard Baker as his White House chief of staff. Howard Phillips, the chairman of the Conservative Caucus, wrote furiously that Reagan had become “the speech reader-in-chief for the pro-appeasement triumvirate of Howard H. Baker Jr., George P. Shultz and Frank C. Carlucci.” Senator Steven Symms similarly suggested that Reagan had changed: “Peace and freedom are inseparable, as the president used to say. I’m concerned that we’ll end up keeping the peace and losing the freedom.” New York Times columnist William Safire, commenting on Weinberger’s resignation, wrote, “The Russians… now understand the way to handle Mr. Reagan: Never murder a man who is committing suicide.” 10

In the late summer and early fall of 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev disappeared from sight for more than seven weeks. Rumors spread that he was ill, that he had suffered an attack of food poisoning, even that there had been an attempt to assassinate him. None of these reports was true. On September 29, Gorbachev reemerged at the Kremlin after an extended vacation, eager to revitalize the Communist Party leadership with a flurry of initiatives. He had been busy writing a book about perestroika for Western audiences and preparing a speech for the seventieth anniversary of the Communist revolution. 11

But as Gorbachev soon found, Moscow was in flux too. The following month, at a meeting of the party’s Central Committee, Gorbachev confronted opposition not merely from traditionalist Communist Party officials such as Yegor Ligachev, but also from a new source: Boris Yeltsin, the populist mayor of Moscow. Yeltsin excoriated the party for not moving far enough or fast enough; he also warned about the glorification of Gorbachev as party secretary, arguing that it was a form of personality cult and violated the principle of collective leadership. Ordinary people in the Soviet Union were beginning to lose faith in Gorbachev’s reform program, said Yeltsin, who tendered his resignation as a candidate for the Politburo.

Gorbachev reacted bitterly, portraying Yeltsin as an opportunist. “Those who pointed to his overgrown ambition and lust for power were right,” Gorbachev wrote many years later. “Time has only confirmed this evaluation.” At the Central Committee session, Communist Party leaders took the podium, one after another, to denounce Yeltsin. The episode altered the political dynamics in Moscow, weakening Gorbachev’s position. New battle lines were being drawn. It was no longer simply Gorbachev’s reformers against the old guard of the Communist Party. From that point onward, the Soviet leader was forced to navigate between one group of party officials increasingly resistant to his proposals for change, and others who believed that the Soviet leader was too cautious. Gorbachev was obliged to worry about what he called “the extremists on either side.” 12