James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

“Throughout, Nixon and I considered the Soviet Union ideologically hostile and militarily threatening,” Kissinger later wrote. 10This was not a point Nixon and Kissinger made to audiences of liberals, moderates, or independent voters, however. They believed at first that détente would prove politically popular in the United States—an assumption that had proven accurate in the 1972 campaign, when Nixon won reelection by a landslide, but was open for question four years later, after the Soviet Union had been posing new challenges to American foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere.

Running against Ford in 1976, Reagan said the policy of détente had become “a one-way street that simply gives the Soviets what they want with nothing in return.” In campaign speeches, he regularly promised Republican voters that if elected, “I will appoint a new secretary of state.” He said Kissinger’s stewardship of American foreign policy had “coincided precisely with the loss of American military supremacy.” Under Kissinger’s leadership, Reagan said, the United States had acted “as if we expected the Soviets to inherit the earth…. If you were a Russian official and you heard the American secretary of state deliver stern warnings to you for trying to dominate the situation in Angola, but all the time you knew he was packing his bags to come to Moscow to negotiate a new arms limitation agreement, would you really take his words seriously?” 11

Initially, Reagan’s attacks had little impact. He lost the first five Republican primaries in 1976, including New Hampshire, Florida, and Illinois. By late March, there was considerable speculation in the press that he might quit. Indeed, in a hotel room on the eve of the North Carolina primary, Nancy Reagan began talking with Lyn Nofziger, Reagan’s press secretary, about how to persuade her husband to withdraw. “Lyn, you know you’ve got to get Ronnie out of this race,” she told him. “We can’t embarrass him any further.” Walking in upon this conversation, Reagan angrily refused to consider dropping out. “I’m going to stay in it all the way,” he told them. Reagan soon won the North Carolina primary, scoring a stunning victory over an incumbent president. 12

After North Carolina, Reagan went on to win primaries in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, and California, keeping the Republican nomination in doubt until the Republican National Convention in Kansas City that July. There, Reagan and his supporters staged a final test of strength with Ford, seeking to win over some delegates by introducing a plank to the party platform that called for “Morality in Foreign Policy.” It unmistakably repudiated Kissinger’s policy of détente. In 1975, the Ford administration, out of deference to the Soviet leadership, had refused to permit the exiled Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn to visit the White House. The “Morality in Foreign Policy” plank praised Solzhenitsyn as a “beacon of human courage and morality” and for his “compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny.” 13Ford and his advisers (including his White House chief of staff, Dick Cheney) decided that if they attempted to defeat this plank, Ford’s own nomination might be in jeopardy, because some delegates might be angered enough to switch to Reagan. The Ford forces thus accepted the “Morality” plank as part of the Republican platform, and Ford went on to win the nomination. Nevertheless, on the issue of détente, Reagan had defeated Ford and Kissinger and won the support of the Republican Party.

The Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter, won the general election that November. During the following four years, in the radio commentaries Reagan often wrote himself, he advanced the same themes he had during his 1976 campaign. “We continue to believe we can maintain a détente with the Soviet Union, and that their leaders down underneath must be pretty much like us,” he complained in one 1978 radio commentary. But he said that Soviet leaders had continued to engage in treachery, deceit, destruction, and bloodshed. “Détente—isn’t that what a farmer has with his turkey—before Thanksgiving?” Reagan concluded. “This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.” 14

Reagan portrayed détente in terms similar to those he had used to describe the Hollywood battles of the 1940s: America was honest, open, and virtuous; the Soviet leadership was duplicitous, secretive, and evil. Once again, his portrayal raised the question of how he might respond in the future if there were Soviet leaders who did not quite fit into this paradigm.

The result of these struggles over détente was to produce two different viewpoints within the Republican Party on foreign policy: those of the Nixon-Kissinger team and of the Reaganites. The Nixon group included not only the former president and Kissinger but others who had served in the Nixon administration, such as former Kissinger aides Brent Scowcroft and Alexander Haig. They viewed the Cold War as, above all, a geopolitical struggle. The proper goals for U.S. foreign policy, they believed, were stability and a balance of power that favored American interests. The Soviet Union, in this view, was an enduring, immutable presence; its leadership was firmly entrenched.

The Reaganites, on the other hand, viewed the Cold War not as a test of military and diplomatic strategy, but as a struggle of ideas and economic systems. In this view, America should not simply accept the Soviet Union as an unpleasant reality and attempt to deal with it; rather, it should seek to change the nature of the Soviet system, which, in Reagan’s view, was neither legitimate nor well established at home. Communism, he wrote in 1975, was “a temporary aberration which will one day disappear from the earth because it is contrary to human nature.” 15While the Nixon group sought to maintain the relationship with the Soviet Union that had been worked out in the early 1970s, the Reagan Republicans did not accept the status quo and sought to challenge it.

“The concept of détente was, ‘We are here, they are here, that’s life, and the name of the game is peaceful coexistence and the avoidance of war,’” reflected Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, many years later. “Reagan rejected that concept, explicitly. Because [he believed] their system is fatally flawed, ours isn’t. And ours is open, representative, democratic. And so he didn’t accept the principle of détente.” 16

The acrimony between the former Nixon foreign-policy team and the Reaganites was temporarily submerged during the Carter administration, when the Republicans were able to join with one another to challenge a Democratic president. The Soviet Union’s foreign policy grew increasingly assertive, culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. By the end of the decade, Nixon himself had begun to characterize the Soviet Union in language that sounded strikingly similar to Reagan’s. In Nixon’s book The Real War , published in 1980, he noted with alarm how many countries had become communist over the previous six years. “The United States represents hope, freedom, security and peace. The Soviet Union stands for fear, tyranny, aggression and war,” Nixon wrote. “If these are not poles of good and evil in human affairs, then the concepts of good and evil have no meaning.” 1

After Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, easily defeating George Bush and several other candidates, the veterans of the Nixon administration went to great lengths to cultivate the Reagan team. Kissinger hosted a dinner at his New York apartment in honor of Nancy Reagan. Brent Scowcroft, the former Kissinger deputy who had become national security adviser in the Ford administration, made a private visit to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on Reagan’s behalf. “He characterized Reagan as pragmatic and not as incorrigibly anti-Soviet as his public statements made him appear,” Dobrynin later wrote. 2