James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

The reality, which the public did not see, is that by 1988, Reagan was leaving much of the business of governing to his subordinates. When senior officials briefed him, he rarely asked questions or gave detailed responses. At one point, the CIA director, William Webster, expressed bewilderment to National Security Adviser Colin Powell. “I’m pretty good at reading people, but I like to get a report card,” Webster said. “I can’t tell whether I’m really helping him or not, because he listens, and I don’t get a sense that he disagrees with me or agrees with me or what.” Powell advised him not to take it personally. “Listen,” he said, “I’m with him a dozen times a day, and I’m in the same boat.” 3

During Reagan’s final year, his top three advisers tried to resolve many foreign-policy issues on their own. The idea had first been suggested by Secretary of State George Shultz. Each morning at 7 a.m., Shultz and Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci would gather in Powell’s White House office. The aim was to reach consensus and avoid the sort of interagency disputes that would need to be brought to the president. Sometimes the secretary of defense gave way, and sometimes the secretary of state did. Shultz, in particular, was happy to put the years of bickering with Weinberger behind him. “We decided that the three of us had to agree on the day’s events, the policy issues,” recalled Carlucci. “Because if we agreed, that was it. Reagan was past the point where he could intervene in the system. We worked it that way for over a year.” 4

After the three men reached consensus, Powell carefully informed the president of the policies they had decided to pursue, giving him a chance to object if he chose. He rarely if ever did. “I would never, ever, characterize it as me, Frank and Shultz making the decisions, but we made it easier for him [Reagan] to make decisions,” recalled Powell. “I would never usurp the authority of the president. I don’t think we ever did anything that he did not agree with.” 5This pattern of decision making extended down from these top three officials to others within the senior ranks of the Reagan administration. The U.S. government’s foreign-policy apparatus “kind of ran on automatic,” said Richard Armitage, then an assistant secretary of defense. “We knew generally where Reagan wanted to go, where his red lines were.” 6

In retrospect, Reagan’s behavior during the final year raises the question of whether he was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease, which would disable him a half decade later. “The last year (in the White House), he was starting to have some trouble,” said Powell, who as national security adviser spent more time with Reagan than anyone but his wife and personal staff. “I don’t know that he had Alzheimer’s. I don’t know when Alzheimer’s starts. But there were a few times in that last year when he looked like he wasn’t quite as focused as he should be.” 7

Yet Powell also discovered that when crisis loomed or quick action was needed, Reagan would prove attentive and decisive. Once, when American ships were in the midst of a skirmish with Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf, the Pentagon told Powell the marines needed permission to enter Iran’s territorial waters. Powell walked into the Oval Office and explained the situation. Reagan stopped everything and listened closely to the details. “Right, go ahead and do it,” he said. 8

The most acrimonious foreign-policy dispute within the Reagan administration in 1988 concerned Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. In February, he had been indicted on drug charges in Miami, and soon afterward, the United States imposed economic sanctions against Panama. Over the following months, with Reagan’s support, State Department officials negotiated a possible deal with Noriega under which the charges against him would be dropped and the sanctions would be lifted if he would leave the country. But Vice President George Bush determinedly argued against lifting the indictment against Noriega. He was joined by several other high-ranking officials, including Attorney General Ed Meese, Treasury Secretary James Baker, and White House chief of staff Howard Baker. The opponents maintained that a deal with Noriega would be immoral, diminish respect for law enforcement, and undermine American efforts to stop drug trafficking.

This was not a dispute that could be resolved at the morning meetings of Shultz, Powell, and Carlucci. It was, above all, a dispute between Reagan and Bush. For seven years, the vice president had consistently supported the administration’s policy, but he was now running for president himself. He had survived the Republican primaries, defeating Dole and several conservative challengers, and he had by this point effectively won the Republican nomination. A deal with Noriega would have drawn criticism from the public in the midst of the election campaign.

Through the weeks of internal controversy, Reagan was by all accounts energetically involved. He was unyielding. He did not want to use American troops to remove Noriega from Panama. “I’m not giving in,” he told Bush and the other opponents at one White House session in May. “This deal is better than going in and counting our dead. I just think you are wrong as hell on this…. What you guys are settling for is that we have to go in there with considerable loss of life, and how does that look to the rest of Latin America?” 9

In the Panama dispute, Reagan emerged as the pragmatist and Bush, the moralist. The president overrode the objections and approved the deal. It soon fell apart in Panama. Noriega, who had originally accepted the agreement, told American officials that his own supporters in the Panamanian Defense Forces would not go along with the idea of his departure. In 1989, after Bush became president and after months of further upheaval in Panama, more than twenty thousand American troops were dispatched to oust Noriega from power.

On the morning of March 11, 1988, Suzanne Massie appeared at the White House to deliver an unusual plea directly to Reagan from one of Gorbachev’s top advisers in Moscow. Powell, Chief of Staff Howard Baker, and Kenneth Duberstein, Baker’s deputy, gathered with Reagan in the Oval Office to hear Massie’s message.

A memorandum of this conversation lies buried in the archives of the Reagan Library; its contents were not made public at the time or in the years since. According to the notes, “Mrs. Massie delivered an oral message to the president that she received in Moscow from Central Committee Secretary Anatoly Dobrynin.” 10

As Soviet ambassador to Washington for more than a quarter century, Dobrynin had been the master of back-channel communications between the Soviet leadership and American presidents since John F. Kennedy. Although he was called back to Moscow by Gorbachev in 1986, Dobrynin was still a key adviser for dealing with the United States. He had been part of Gorbachev’s entourage both at Reykjavik and at the Washington summit. Massie said she understood that the message sent by Dobrynin originated “even higher,” presumably from Gorbachev himself. That seems plausible, since during these same weeks, Dobrynin also relayed messages directly from Gorbachev to Jack Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow. 11But it is also conceivable that Dobrynin was acting on his own.

The message was a plaintive one. Soviet officials believe “that the President still thinks of the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ whose social and political positions have placed it on the ‘ash heap of history,’” Massie reported. These phrases were, of course, taken from Reagan’s own past speeches. According to Dobrynin’s message, despite the outpouring of goodwill at the Washington summit, Soviet officials were still worried “that the Administration’s overall perception of Soviet international behavior has not changed.” As a result, Soviet officials had a request, Massie said: if Reagan believed there had been changes in Soviet policy, “then it would be important for the President to state this prior to the Moscow summit. The Soviets ask what concrete steps they could take over the next few months to prompt such a statement by the President.”