James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

In a 1960 letter to Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, who had published an article by Trumbo and defended his right to freedom of speech, Reagan recalled how his views had been formed during that era. “I once thought exactly as you think…. It took seven months of meeting communists and communist-influenced people across a table in almost daily sessions while pickets rioted in front of studio gates, homes were bombed and a great industry almost ground to a halt.” What bothered Reagan above all, he wrote, was the discovery that Communist Party members operated in secret and did not tell the truth. “I, like you, will defend the right of any American to openly practice and preach any political philosophy from monarchy to anarchy,” he told Hefner. “But this is not the case with regard to the communist. He is bound by party discipline to deny he is a communist so that he can by subversion and stealth impose on an unwilling people the rule of the International Communist Party which is in fact the government of Soviet Russia.” 4Anticommunism for Reagan, then, was not primarily foreign policy or geopolitics; it was personal and moralistic in nature, driven by his experiences with people he considered sophisticated and devious, who did not abide by the small-town Midwestern values he had absorbed in his youth.

Stuart Spencer, who as a political consultant worked over two decades in campaigns both for and against Reagan, said he gradually learned that Reagan was a practical politician, less impassioned than his conservative public positions might indicate. There was, however, a single exception. “He was obsessed with one thing, the communist threat,” Spencer said. “Everything else was second tier.” When Spencer asked Reagan why he wanted to be president, he recalled, “I’d get the speech and the program on communism.” Spencer concluded that communism was “the driving force behind his political participations. It was the only thing he really thought about in depth…. With everything else, from welfare to taxation, he went through the motions.” 5

This was an exaggeration, since it turned out Reagan did care about taxes, and Spencer’s list of Reagan’s concerns omitted the subject of nuclear weapons, about which Reagan also cared a great deal. But there was no doubt that anticommunism ranked at the top of Reagan’s priorities, and that his outlook differed from Nixon’s. Reagan’s version was transformational; he was unwilling to accept the permanence of the Soviet Union. His anticommunism was based on what he perceived to be the untrustworthiness of Communist Party members, including Soviet leaders; their philosophy; and their political system. This was the other side of Reagan’s generally sunny personality. “I think communism was the only thing that Reagan actually hated,” said Kenneth Adelman, who worked in the Reagan administration. “It was hard to hate anybody else or anything else in his life.” 6

Reagan’s personalized version of anticommunism also implied, however, that once a Soviet leader could establish that he was straightforward rather than deceitful and was trying to alter the Soviet system, then Reagan might be willing—more willing, in fact, than Richard Nixon—to give credence to that leader and to try to do business with him.

It took some time, until well into the 1970s, for these different versions of anticommunism to burst into the open. Nixon and Reagan had echoed each other in their attacks upon the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, with both arguing repeatedly that the Democrats were too accommodating toward the Soviet Union. After Nixon, as president, began to move American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union and China in startling new directions, Reagan refrained from criticizing him. He accepted the American opening to China, for example, as a stratagem that would tie down Soviet troops in Asia that might otherwise be used in Europe.

When Nixon hosted a lavish poolside party at his estate in San Clemente for Leonid Brezhnev in June 1973, introducing the Soviet leader to Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Gene Autry, and a flock of other Hollywood celebrities, Reagan was among the few political leaders invited to the festivities. He was apparently moved by the event and impressed with the artfulness of Nixon’s diplomacy with Brezhnev. “I just think it’s too bad that [Watergate] is taking people’s attention away from what I think is a most brilliant accomplishment of any president of this century, and that is the steady progress towards peace and the easing of tensions,” Reagan declared a few days later. From the White House, Nixon continued to shower Reagan with briefings, phone calls and official trips; Reagan stayed in Nixon’s corner to the bitter end. 7

It was only after Nixon left the White House that Reagan mounted a full-scale challenge to the foreign policy Nixon had forged. By 1975, the political dynamics had shifted. Reagan was in position to challenge Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor, for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. Although he was president of the United States, Ford had never won an election outside his congressional district in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Reagan possessed a solid base within the Republican Party, because he was both California’s leading Republican and the acknowledged leader of the party’s growing conservative wing. Moreover, Ford had angered conservative Republicans, including Reagan, at the very start of his presidency by naming Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. 8

Reagan finished his second term as governor of California and left Sacramento in early 1975. He was sixty-three years old, no longer so coy or hesitant about running for president as he had been in 1968. Events overseas were working in his favor. In the spring of 1975, North Vietnamese troops overran South Vietnam, forcing the humiliating, chaotic American withdrawal from the country. There was an opening among Republican conservatives for a political leader who would talk both about America as a force for good in the world and also about the need to rebuild and reassert American military strength.

Reagan’s campaign against Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination focused on foreign policy, particularly American policy toward the Soviet Union. Reagan took aim at two targets in particular: first, Henry Kissinger, the architect of Soviet policy as national security adviser and secretary of state under both Nixon and Ford, and second, détente, the vague word used to describe the relaxation of tension between Washington and Moscow and the several arms-control and trade agreements negotiated between the two governments. Détente dated back to Richard Nixon’s summit with Brezhnev in Moscow in May 1972. During the following two years, while Reagan supported the Nixon administration, the leading challenger to détente had been Senator Henry Jackson, a Democrat, who was a determined supporter of a strong national defense.

The policy of détente seemed to incorporate several intellectual trends of the 1960s and early 1970s. Some American scholars had been arguing that the political systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were gradually converging and that both countries might evolve toward some sort of democratic socialism. Others asserted that the Soviet system no longer fit the totalitarian model, that it had become more pluralistic since Stalin’s death, that the Soviet leadership now enjoyed greater popular support and legitimacy than in the past. 9

To be sure, Nixon and Kissinger did not themselves put forward such arguments. Instead, they claimed, particularly to conservative audiences, that détente was merely a temporary tactic aimed at outflanking American liberals and counteracting the Democratic Congress, which, in reaction to the Vietnam War, was seeking to reduce America’s involvements and troop deployments overseas. Kissinger later argued that the aim of détente was not to eliminate the adversarial relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union but merely to control it. In fact, Kissinger maintained, he shared the same anti-Soviet goals as the conservative and neoconservative critics of détente.