James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Gorbachev hurriedly shifted ground. A week later, Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, arrived in Washington carrying a letter from Gorbachev. The letter repeated Gorbachev’s desire that at his next summit with Reagan, the two leaders should not only sign the treaty they had concluded on intermediate-range nuclear weapons, but also reach some sort of “agreement in principle” on long-range strategic weapons. Yet Gorbachev now made plain he would no longer hold up his visit to the United States to bargain for this separate agreement.

“If it suits your availability, then according to my schedule of events before the end of the year, the first ten days of December would be the most preferable period for my trip to Washington,” Gorbachev told Reagan. He had finally dropped his preconditions and agreed to come. 19

The Soviet leader was not, however, willing to do the American grand tour the Reagans had wanted. Gorbachev would not fly to California. He would not barnstorm the country the way Nikita Khrushchev had in 1959. He would not party with Hollywood stars as Leonid Brezhnev had in 1973. There were to be no national parks, no farm states, no visit to the Reagans’ ranch, not even a trip to Camp David. Gorbachev made clear he would spend time only in Washington. In explanation, Gorbachev later laid some of the blame on the KGB’s desire to protect him. “Security services (especially on our side) wanted to avoid complications and strongly recommended confining ourselves to Washington on this first trip,” Gorbachev claimed in his memoirs. 20

American officials came to a different conclusion. “Reagan wanted to take him to all these places, and Gorbachev was having none of it,” recalled Colin Powell, who was in charge of arranging the trip for the National Security Council. “He came to do business. He didn’t come to be a tourist. He also didn’t want to be seen as, ‘Oh gee, Mr. President, if I had only known [what the United States was like], I’d have given up communism.’ He didn’t want to be used by Reagan, even though Reagan wasn’t trying to use him.” 21

If any single member of Congress could be said to have embodied Ronald Reagan’s conservative revolution, it would have been the junior senator from Indiana, a well-groomed, blond-haired, blue-eyed scion of a publishing family named J. Danforth “Dan” Quayle. In 1980, the year in which Reagan won the presidency, Dan Quayle had run for the U.S. Senate against the Democratic incumbent, Birch Bayh. At the time, Quayle had been a member of the House of Representatives for only four years, while Bayh had served for eighteen years in the Senate.

The dynamics of the American political system were changing. In the past Bayh had regularly defeated his opponents by attracting overwhelming margins in the industrial parts of Indiana. In 1980, however, amid rising unemployment and other economic problems, his blue-collar support declined. Quayle attracted a wave of money from what was then known as the New Right, a collection of groups around the country that contributed funds to conservative candidates. He went after the votes of working-class Democrats by raising social issues, such as opposition to abortion. The race was expected to be close, but on Election Day, with Reagan at the top of the Republican ticket, Quayle won easily. His was one of the changeover seats that gave the Senate to the Republicans.

Quayle took a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He became a reliable vote for Reagan’s defense buildup and in the process, landed some important defense contracts for Indiana. In 1986, the Republicans lost control of the Senate, but Quayle had no trouble winning reelection. He ran as a strong supporter of Ronald Reagan.

Then there was a remarkable shift. In the fall of 1987, as Mikhail Gorbachev was preparing to fly to Washington, Dan Quayle took a leading role in challenging Reagan’s Soviet policy. The telegenic young senator repeatedly questioned the wisdom of the agreement that Reagan and Gorbachev were preparing to sign, known as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty. Quayle put forward many of the arguments that others, such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, had earlier been making: that American nuclear weapons in Western Europe were necessary to preserve the close relationship between the United States and its allies, and that a prohibition on intermediate-range missiles would leave the Soviet Union with an advantage in conventional military forces.

America’s Cold War adversary was not changing, Quayle maintained. “Let’s have no illusions,” he said. “We are dealing essentially with the same Soviet Union that we have for the past seventy years.” Quayle proposed amendments to the treaty that would have had the effect of killing it. He suggested that some of the missiles be held back from destruction until after progress was made on a separate agreement limiting the Soviet Union’s superiority in conventional weapons. 1

At times, it seemed hard to believe Reagan was a Republican president. His treaty with Gorbachev met with more enthusiastic backing from the Democrats than from his own party. Those Democrats who had long favored curbing the arms race, such as Senator Alan Cranston and Senator Claiborne Pell, quickly endorsed the agreement. Proponents of arms control were delighted to hear Reagan and his aides endorse some of their own arguments. “Those are the kinds of statements I want Reagan’s people to say, so I can quote them back for the next twenty years,” said James Rubin, then a representative of the Arms Control Association (later a senior aide to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright). “We want Reagan’s imprimatur on an arms control treaty.” Reagan’s stance caused conservative columnist George Will to inveigh against what he called “the cult of arms control.” Will wrote that “the Soviets want victories; we want agreements. Or, as Jeane Kirkpatrick has said, they are playing to win and we want to get out of the game.” 2

During the fall of 1987, the only Republican presidential candidate to support Reagan’s treaty was his own vice president, George Bush. Conservative Republicans Jack Kemp, Pat Robertson, and Pete du Pont were all against it. So was Alexander Haig, whose negative views about Reagan’s treaty were similar to those of other Nixon administration veterans. One Republican candidate, Bob Dole, remained noncommittal. By contrast, all the Democratic candidates supported the treaty. A newspaper cartoon that fall depicted Reagan at his desk, surrounded by the Democratic candidates: Michael Dukakis giving a thumbs-up, Richard Gephardt patting Reagan on the back, Al Gore and Jesse Jackson smiling broadly. The caption said it showed the president with his “strongest supporters.” 3

The political alignments were similar for Gorbachev’s visit: the reactions of Republicans and conservatives ranged from skeptical to hostile, while Democrats had few complaints. The early plans envisioned a speech by Gorbachev to a joint session of Congress, in exchange for a comparable address by Reagan later to a Soviet audience. To Gorbachev’s dismay, that idea had to be scrapped, because of intense opposition from Senate Republicans. Jesse Helms threatened a filibuster to block any invitation to the Soviet leader. Dole, the Republican minority leader, warned that a speech by Gorbachev might cause “a rather ugly scene” on Capitol Hill. 4

Bush, too, was nervous about the Gorbachev visit and the conflicts it generated among Republicans, particularly with the New Hampshire presidential primary less than three months away. As vice president, Bush could not distance himself from Reagan’s INF treaty—even though some of his own friends, such as Scowcroft, had been doing so. Moreover, Bush stood to gain politically if the Reagan-Gorbachev summit was a success. Yet Bush also took care to show the public—and Republican voters—that he was willing to criticize the Soviets. When a surprisingly large crowd of more than two hundred thousand people assembled on the Mall in Washington for a demonstration on behalf of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, Bush appeared before television cameras promising he would raise the issue personally with Gorbachev and help make it a key issue at the summit. Marrying the language of the Old Testament with the syntax of Reagan’s Berlin speech, Bush exclaimed: “Mr. Gorbachev, let these people go! Let them go!” 5