James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

It was a demonstration of the impact that Reagan’s condemnations of the Soviet Union had had upon the Communist Party hierarchy. Soviet officials were now, in effect, seeking to negotiate a change in what Reagan would say about them. They were suggesting a trade of their actions for American words—an alteration of Soviet policies in exchange for an easing of Reagan’s rhetoric about the Soviet system. While he continued to praise Gorbachev as a leader, the president had still not retreated from the larger judgments of the Soviet Union that he had expressed during his early years in the White House. “I haven’t changed from the time when I made a speech about an evil empire,” Reagan had asserted in a television interview the previous December. That same month, when his old friend Nackey Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader wrote an editorial saying Reagan’s INF agreement would “give communism the advantage,” he wrote her a note which said, “Nackey, I’m still the Ronald Reagan I was and the evil empire is just that.” 12

During the early months of 1988, Gorbachev was especially sensitive to American criticism and eager for a few good words from Reagan. He was in the midst of the most far-reaching reversal of Soviet foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War: a decision to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan. On February 8, Gorbachev announced that the Afghan war was coming to an end; Soviet forces would be brought home over a ten-month period starting May 15, as long as certain conditions were met. American and Soviet officials continued to argue for several weeks over the terms, particularly whether the Americans would be allowed to continue to provide arms to the Afghan mujahideen. The Soviets ultimately yielded.

Inside the Soviet Union, the conservative opposition to Gorbachev’s reforms burst into the open with the publication in March of a letter by a Leningrad teacher named Nina Andreyeva that defended Stalin and his principles. The Soviet leadership was splitting into factions, with one group under Gorbachev, headed by Alexander Yakovlev, pushing to speed up reforms and another, headed by Yegor Ligachev, resisting the changes. Recalling this opposition, Gorbachev wrote a few years later: “The top levels of the Party and state apparatus seemed to believe that there was no need to replace the existing system—God forbid—it only needed a bit of fine tuning.” 13He had called for a special party conference in June 1988 to determine the future direction and pace of his reform program; the meeting was to be held only four weeks after Reagan’s visit to Moscow. An easing of Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric could be portrayed as a sign that Gorbachev’s policies had succeeded in changing attitudes in the United States. By contrast, Gorbachev’s conservative critics might seize upon continued rhetorical attacks from Washington as a demonstration that the Soviet leader was making too many concessions to the United States and getting little in return.

In advance of the Moscow summit, Dobrynin seemed to be searching for a way to open secret negotiations that would bypass the official channels of the State Department and Soviet Foreign Ministry. He suggested Massie as the message carrier. After raising the question of what “concrete steps” the Soviet Union could take, Dobrynin specified that the president could give his answer through Massie, who was planning to return to Moscow at the end of March. The former Soviet ambassador was seeking to put himself once again at the center of Soviet-American relations and to negotiate directly with the president of the United States.

Reagan spurned the offer. Initially, while Massie was in the Oval Office, the president began to reflect on the question of what, specifically, he might ask the Soviets to do. Should he ask that they cut back on arms supplies to Nicaragua, for example? But Reagan gave no immediate answer, and over the following days, the president decided to avoid doing business with Moscow in the way that Dobrynin had suggested. At the time, Shultz was talking regularly with Shevardnadze; the Soviet foreign minister had also just met with Reagan during a trip to Washington. When Massie checked back with the White House two weeks later before leaving again for the Soviet Union, she was given no response to Dobrynin’s message. 14

Reagan not only ignored the plea from Moscow, but also continued his rhetorical attacks on the Soviet Union. On April 21, 1988, appearing before a World Affairs Council meeting in Springfield, Massachusetts, Reagan said his own speeches about the Soviets of the previous few years had “made them understand the lack of illusions on our part about them or their system.” He boasted he had been willing to talk about the Soviet Union in the plain, blunt terms that Soviet experts had long avoided in public discourse. “We rejected what Jeane Kirkpatrick called moral equivalency,” the president asserted. “We said freedom was better than totalitarianism. We said communism was bad.” 15

Gorbachev was incensed. The president delivered this speech just as an American delegation headed by Shultz was arriving in Moscow to see Gorbachev and make arrangements for the summit. The following day, the Soviet leader vented his fury to Shultz, Powell, and the other American visitors. “The U.S. administration is not abandoning stereotypes,” he complained. “So how am I to explain this? Is the summit going to be a catfight? Does he really intend to bring this ideological luggage to Moscow?” 16

Shultz and Powell said later they had not seen Reagan’s Springfield speech before it was delivered, and others in the delegation blamed the conservative White House speechwriters. “It was hard-hitting and insulting and all the rest,” said Rozanne Ridgway, the assistant secretary of state for Europe. “It just struck us that every time we were going somewhere or were going to meet the Soviets, the speechwriters came out.” 17

Such remarks missed the larger point about Reagan’s rhetoric. The president’s job, interests, and priorities were not the same as those of the State Department. Reagan was the political leader; he needed to win public and congressional approval inside the United States for his foreign policy, and particularly for his diplomacy with Gorbachev. At the time of the Springfield speech and throughout the spring of 1988, Reagan was striving to obtain Senate ratification of the INF treaty he had signed the previous December. Reagan was aware that putting his signature onto that INF agreement, with Gorbachev, was not the final step in the process; after all, Reagan’s own predecessor had failed to win Senate approval for the arms-control treaty he had negotiated with the Soviet Union. There would be time later on for Reagan to modify his “evil empire” rhetoric, but he would not do so while the INF treaty was still pending.

Although the president was increasingly disengaged from routine business, he had been paying fairly close attention to Soviet policy since the beginning of the year, particularly because he had just concluded one summit with Gorbachev and was approaching another. Reagan’s diary shows his continuing interest. On New Year’s Day, he read Gorbachev’s year-end message to the American people. Four days later, he talked with aides about the tensions emerging in Moscow between Gorbachev and Ligachev. In mid-January, he spent a weekend at Camp David reading Gorbachev’s new book, Perestroika . 18

Above all, Reagan was preoccupied with getting the INF treaty through the Senate. The opponents of Reagan’s Soviet policy continued to disparage the treaty. The Wall Street Journal mounted a campaign against it, with a series of editorials and columns. “The INF treaty doesn’t address the real threat facing Europe, doesn’t reduce the number of missiles aimed at the U.S. and doesn’t destroy a single nuclear warhead,” said a Journal editorial on January 29. “So what, exactly, is this treaty’s relevance or point? What does it accomplish?” In early April, another Journal editorial branded Reagan a “utopian disarmer” and sought to link him to the left wing of the Democratic Party: “The administration that once decried the ‘evil empire’ now is pursuing radical arms reductions with a momentum that has even Jesse Jackson applauding,” the newspaper said. Reagan’s Springfield speech, delivered a few days later, was an attempt to respond to this critique. 19