James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Reagan was still courting the conservatives, attempting where possible to win them over. Even before Gorbachev had left Washington, Reagan granted an Oval Office interview to five conservative columnists. In it, Reagan contradicted Kissinger by arguing Gorbachev was different from previous Soviet leaders. Where Kissinger paid attention to geopolitics, Reagan’s focus was on ideology. “In the past, Soviet leaders have openly expressed their acceptance of the Marxian theory of the one-world communist state,” Reagan told the interviewers. “Gorbachev has never said that.” 16Reagan’s view, it turned out, was considerably closer to the truth than Kissinger’s: Gorbachev was not merely a “transitory personality,” as Kissinger suggested. He was altering Soviet ideology in ways that were of transcendent importance for American foreign policy and for the balance-of-power considerations that preoccupied Kissinger.

Although the old hands, such as Nixon and Kissinger, had their qualms and the political right was infuriated by Reagan’s Soviet policy, the American public clearly liked it. The polls showing the popularity of the Gorbachev visit were too clear for presidential candidates to ignore. Vice President Bush, who before the summit had been shown on television issuing admonitions to the Soviet leader, was back on news shows a few days later boasting, “I had three private meetings with Mr. Gorbachev!”

On the final day, Bush had a scheduled breakfast with Gorbachev at the Soviet embassy and was scheduled to ride with him to the White House. But Gorbachev was held back to talk with aides about the arms-control issues, and Bush was shuffled off into a small room. Soviet officials soon came to apologize for the delays and suggest Bush might go ahead on his own. “Oh, I’ll wait as long as it takes,” Bush told them. He did not want to miss a chance to be seen with Gorbachev. 17

Dole, Bush’s principal rival for the Republican nomination, had for months refused to say what he would do when the Senate was asked to ratify the treaty banning intermediate-range missiles. Gorbachev held a brief private meeting in Washington with Dole, and one week later, Dole announced his unqualified support for the INF treaty. Reagan’s summit with Gorbachev had altered the political climate inside the United States.

The Washington summit made an equally large impression upon Gorbachev himself. After arriving back in Moscow, Gorbachev began to sound a different tune. On December 17, less than a week after returning home, he delivered a report to the Politburo that described the Washington summit as a fundamental turning point:

In Washington, probably for the first time, we clearly realized how much the human factor means in international politics. Before… we treated such personal contacts as simply meetings between representatives of opposed and irreconcilable systems. Reagan for us was merely the spokesman of the most conservative part of American capitalism and its military industrial complex. But it turns out that politicians, including leaders of governments if they are really responsible people, represent purely human concerns, interests, and the hopes of ordinary people—people who vote for them in elections and who associate their leaders’ names and personal abilities with the country’s image and patriotism. These people are guided by the most natural human motives and feelings…. [And] now we’ve embraced the purely human factor in international politics. It is also a major component of the new thinking, which has borne fruit. And it was in Washington that we saw it so clearly for the first time. 18

The Soviet leader viewed the agreement he and Reagan had signed to ban intermediate-range missiles as one of historic significance. “The INF Treaty represented the first well-prepared step on our way out of the Cold War, the first harbinger of the new times,” Gorbachev wrote in his memoir. “We had reached a new level of trust in our relations with the United States and initiated a genuine disarmament process, creating a security system that would be based on comprehensive cooperation instead of the threat of mutual destruction.” 19

By a curious dynamic, Gorbachev’s deepening diplomacy with the Reagan administration helped to spur forward his domestic political reforms and to alter his view of the established order inside the Soviet Union itself. Increasingly, Gorbachev came to view the Cold War confrontation with the United States not merely as a foreign policy issue but as a domestic one: the Cold War supplied the rationale used by the Communist Party leadership to resist change and political liberalization at home.

“Paradoxically as it may seem, efforts towards disarmament and new relations with the West—originally meant ‘to create favorable external conditions for perestroika ’—in fact became its locomotive,” said Gorbachev’s adviser Anatoly Chernyaev. “To succeed with a new foreign policy, we had to demolish the myths and dogmas of a confrontational ideology. And this, through the general secretary’s own ideas and those of the reformist press, immediately influenced society’s intellectual life.” 20

Reagan and Shultz, ignoring the warnings of their critics, were happy to help Gorbachev open the Soviet political system. Reagan had one year left in the White House. He was becoming ever more detached from White House business, but he knew which foreign-policy issue deserved his attention.

At the beginning of 1988, White House chief of staff Howard Baker sat down with Ronald Reagan to discuss ideas for foreign travel during Reagan’s final year as president. Reagan had already agreed to visit Moscow in May, and he was committed to attend the annual economic summit of industrialized nations in Toronto in June. Beyond those two trips, Baker had a few others to recommend: How about Israel or India or Australia?

Reagan vetoed them all. He said he didn’t want to travel to Israel because then he would have to choose which Arab countries to visit on the same trip, undoubtedly displeasing the ones he left out. He ruled out India because he’d already been there on a refueling stop during a trip to Asia seventeen years earlier. “It was the middle of the night, and I was asleep the entire time,” he said. “But I was there, so I don’t need to go to India.” When Reagan’s executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, supported the suggestion for a presidential visit to Australia, Reagan joked, “Well, you guys are all free to go to Australia—but you ain’t taking me.” 1

By 1988, Ronald Reagan was not interested in new ventures or conquests. He was, in fact, increasingly removed from the daily routines of his own presidency. In February, Reagan reached the age of seventy-seven; he was the oldest president in American history. He was also the first in more than a quarter century to serve two full terms. After Dwight Eisenhower, five presidents had left the White House without lasting for eight years: one had been assassinated, one had resigned in midterm, one had decided not to seek reelection, and two had been defeated seeking additional terms.

A year earlier, at the peak of the Iran-Contra scandal, there had been some speculation that Reagan himself might go the way of Nixon. But he had survived, and by early 1988, had regained much of his earlier popularity. A New York Times/CBS poll showed that in the wake of Gorbachev’s visit to Washington, Reagan’s public-approval ratings had risen to 50 percent, unusually high for a president entering his last year. 2In political terms, there was little reason to change course. As a result, Reagan’s final year in office often took on the nature of a prolonged farewell. For each event on the presidential calendar—the State of the Union address, the presentation of the budget—reporters noted that it would be Reagan’s last. White House aides encouraged a mood of continuing sentimentality.