James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

A day later, at a press conference just before leaving Moscow, Reagan again rejected the “evil empire” wording. and elaborated further, this time emphasizing Gorbachev’s personal role. Asked what had changed in the half decade since he had branded the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Reagan replied, “I think that a great deal of it is due to the General Secretary, who I have found different than previous Soviet leaders…. A large part of it is Mr. Gorbachev as leader.” The president said he had read Gorbachev’s book Perestroika and found much in it with which he could agree. There had been a “profound change” in the Soviet government, Reagan said, and while there were fundamental differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, these differences “continue to recede.” 26

Those words were of singular importance for Gorbachev. Reagan was conferring a sense of recognition both on the Soviet leader himself and on the reforms he was carrying out. For years, the opponents of political liberalization within the Soviet Communist Party had pointed to the external threat from the United States as a primary reason for resisting change at home. Now, Reagan was undermining this rationale for preserving the status quo.

For Gorbachev, the timing of Reagan’s words could not have been better. The Soviet leader was just weeks away from the special party conference at which he would press for further political changes, including greater openness in the press and new limits on the power of the Communist Party. Once again, reformers within the party would do battle with conservative forces. Eventually, over the following years, the reformers would move beyond Gorbachev. But during this crucial period, Reagan was helping to strengthen Gorbachev’s hand, giving him the time and breathing room he needed to open up the Soviet political system.

Indeed, Reagan’s decision to jettison the phrase “evil empire” carried weight with several different audiences. For the American public, it signified a winding down of the Cold War. In Moscow, it helped Gorbachev within the Communist Party leadership, particularly with orthodox elements of the Soviet hierarchy and with veteran officials such as Dobrynin. Gorbachev was unable to obtain American approval for a formal diplomatic statement in support of “peaceful coexistence,” but he could claim to have succeeded in changing Reagan’s rhetoric.

Reagan’s abandonment of the phrase “evil empire” had an impact upon a larger Soviet audience too. It served to reinforce the notion that political life in the Soviet Union was indeed opening up. If Ronald Reagan, the most determined and most prominent of all anti-Communists, accepted that Gorbachev’s reforms were a sign of fundamental change, then others would be considerably less skeptical. The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky remarked after Reagan’s visit that the president’s words had emboldened reformers throughout the Soviet Union. 27

Gorbachev himself recognized the significance of what Reagan had said. “It meant that he [Reagan] had finally convinced himself that he had been right to believe, back in Reykjavik, that you could ‘do business’ with the changing Soviet Union,” wrote Gorbachev in his memoirs. “In my view, the 40th president of the United States will go down in history for his rare perception.” 28

Reagan’s words were not merely for public consumption, but reflected his own views. Upon returning to Washington, he offered essentially the same positive views of the Soviet Union to conservative friends. Responding to a letter from George Murphy, the former actor and U.S. senator, Reagan wrote a few weeks after his visit to Moscow: “Murph, for the first time, I believe there could be a stirring of the people that would make the bureaucrats pay attention…. If glasnost was just showboating, they may have to keep at least some of the promises, or face a public they’ve never seen before.” 29

It seems unlikely that Reagan, in such a short and carefully restricted trip, had sufficient basis for such broad conclusions about the changes in the Soviet Union. But there could be no denying the political impact of his words or his judgments about Gorbachev.

Within a week of Reagan’s return to Washington, his positive views of Gorbachev and of the Soviet Union were disputed by an unusual source: his own vice president, George H. W. Bush.

In the midst of his campaign for the presidency, Bush made clear that he disagreed with what Reagan had been saying in Moscow. On June 7, while appearing before a group of television executives in Los Angeles, Bush was asked about Reagan’s assertion that a profound change was under way in the Soviet Union. He replied: “I don’t agree that we know enough to say that there is that kind of fundamental change.” The vice president acknowledged that Gorbachev was “stylistically different, obviously generationally different” from previous Soviet leaders, but he said that when it came to Gorbachev’s intentions, “my view is, the jury is still out.” He did not believe that the Soviets were less threatening to the United States than they had been in the past. Asked directly by columnist George Will whether he disagreed with Reagan on Soviet policy, Bush carefully replied in the affirmative: “Maybe there’s a difference there.” 1

America was in the early stages of a political transition. Reagan would be leaving office in a half year, giving way to a new president with new policies. Now that they had become comfortable with Reagan, the Soviets were worried about his departure. Reagan had assured Gorbachev at the end of their last private talk in Moscow that he would do everything he could to make sure that the next president maintained a relationship of trust with Gorbachev and preserved continuity in American policy toward the Soviet Union. At one of the Moscow dinners, Gorbachev pleased Nancy Reagan by telling her, “I wish your husband could stay on for another four years.”

Yet Gorbachev also displayed an undertone of ambivalence about the prospective changes in Washington. When Reagan brought up the subject of human rights abuses in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev argued that the United States had its own problems; it just failed to acknowledge them. According to the notes of their conversation, “Gorbachev said he thought the President’s successors would be more self-critical than he was….” Nervous as he was about Reagan’s successor, Gorbachev was happy with the prospect of dealing with a new president who might not be so cheerily optimistic and might not take up the time of summit meetings with diversionary stories. 2

By mid-June 1988, the presidential primaries were over. Bush had clinched the Republican nomination, and he was preparing to run against Michael Dukakis, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, in the general election. Reagan had told Gorbachev that he was hoping and praying for Bush. The vice president, after all, had steadfastly supported Reagan for most of the previous eight years, until Bush was in the midst of his own 1988 presidential campaign.

Bush had first set himself apart from the president’s foreign policy earlier that spring, when he had pushed Reagan aggressively but unsuccessfully for a much more hawkish policy toward Manuel Noriega in Panama. That had at first seemed to be a one-shot affair arising from the political issue of drugs rather than larger questions of foreign policy. By June, however, Bush was beginning to distance himself from the Reagan administration on the central issues of Soviet policy too.

Bush had a political interest in staking out a tough-sounding public view of Gorbachev. He was hoping to emphasize national-security issues in his fall campaign against Dukakis, aiming to win over the support of the Republican right and to portray his opponent as a liberal in the tradition of George Mc-Govern. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, called Dukakis “a balloon ready to be punctured.” 3