James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Kohl’s visit to Moscow was particularly disquieting to East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker, who judged correctly that Gorbachev was gradually changing his attitudes toward the two German governments. According to Egon Krenz, Honecker’s aide, East German officials noticed how Gorbachev and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze stopped raising German issues in discussions with the Reagan administration. The East Germans believed Gorbachev was gradually abandoning them. Honecker’s paranoia was increased all the more by his difficulty in obtaining a full account from Soviet leaders of the Kohl-Gorbachev meeting. Chernyaev had advised Gorbachev not to give the East German leader the transcripts. “It is not necessary that he be aware of everything, especially not the atmosphere of the talks,” he wrote in one memo. “Honecker could draw some sort of ‘ideological’ conclusions that we can absolutely do without…. We determine our policy, which is by no means identical to Honecker’s.”

The talks with Kohl were merely prologue. By the fall of 1988, Gorbachev was already preparing a much bolder initiative, aimed at transforming the Soviet Union’s relationship with Western Europe.

Presidencies do not end all at once. Ronald Reagan began to yield some of the powers of his presidency in the summer and fall of 1988. The abandonment of efforts at a treaty on strategic weaponry was merely one part of a much broader trend. As cabinet officials resigned from his administration, Reagan allowed Vice President Bush to recommend their successors. When Ed Meese resigned as attorney general, Bush recommended the appointment of Richard Thornburgh, the former governor of Pennsylvania, to take his place. Reagan approved. When James Baker stepped down as treasury secretary to run Bush’s campaign, the vice president suggested Nicholas Brady to succeed Baker. Reagan went along with that appointment too, and it was the same for a new secretary of education. All of the new cabinet members stayed on in the next administration.

During the election campaign, Reagan spent his time on routine business and ceremonies, while following the polls on the Bush-Dukakis race. At one point, Dan Quayle was ushered into the Oval Office for advice on how to handle himself before his televised vice presidential debate with Lloyd Bentsen. In his diary, Reagan pronounced Quayle to be “a fine person,” but the tutelage didn’t work; Quayle was devastated by Bentsen’s quip “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” 11Late in the fall, Reagan made a few campaign stops for Bush in California, Wisconsin, and Ohio—enough to say that he had helped his vice president, but not enough to qualify as an impassioned effort.

Bush didn’t need much help. The political coalition that Reagan had assembled for the Republican Party in 1980 remained largely intact. The fact that Reagan had dramatically shifted course in his approach to the Soviet Union made little difference in the fall campaign. In the debates, Bush at one point alluded vaguely to the intense debates in Washington about Gorbachev. “I think the jury is still out on the Soviet experiment,” he said. 12Having successfully fended off challenges from conservatives in the Republican primaries, Bush proceeded to attack Dukakis and the Democrats as weak on national security in the general election. The strategy worked; Bush won with 54 percent of the vote.

Throughout that fall, Gorbachev had been pressing for political changes in Moscow that would reduce the power of the Communist Party and at the same time, strengthen his own position in the leadership. After the summit with Reagan in Moscow and the Communist Party conference that followed, Gorbachev’s leading opponent within the party, Yegor Ligachev, challenged Gorbachev’s ideas again by arguing that Soviet foreign policy should continue to reflect “the class character of international relations.” Gorbachev countered with a reorganization of the leadership. Ligachev was ousted from his position in charge of party ideology and instead placed in charge of agriculture; Andrei Gromyko, who had guided Soviet foreign policy since the early years of the Cold War, was forced to retire. While remaining Communist Party secretary, Gorbachev also took over Gromyko’s title as chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet—the Soviet president, or head of state.

Although the Reagan administration was in its last months, the Washington debates about Gorbachev intensified. On October 14, 1988, Robert Gates, deputy CIA director, delivered a speech in Washington in which he once again called into question Gorbachev’s reforms and his foreign policy. Gates asserted that the Soviet leader was pursuing a strategy to make the Soviet Union a stronger, more competitive adversary to the United States. Soviet military programs and troop deployments had not changed, Gates said. Most of these claims about Gorbachev would soon prove to be wrong. There was another theme in Gates’s speech that, in retrospect, had some validity: he argued that Gorbachev’s economic reforms were failing and raised the prospect that he might not be able to maintain control as the Soviet leader.

Gates’s speech infuriated the secretary of state. Shultz had been at odds with Gates for several years, both over Gorbachev’s significance and also over what Shultz saw, more generally, as improper attempts by the CIA to use intelligence analysis to influence policy. Even though the administration was in its final months, Shultz tried to have Gates fired. He argued to National Security Adviser Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci at their daily breakfast meeting that Gates had intruded on administration policy. Shultz pursued the same request with Reagan, to no avail. The president had spent most of the previous eight years breezily avoiding the disputes within his administration, and his operating style was hardly going to change in his final months in the White House. 13

Within weeks, it was clear that Gates, not Shultz, reflected the views of the incoming Bush administration. Two weeks after Election Day, Bush appointed Scowcroft, one of the principal critics of the Reagan administration’s policies toward Gorbachev and arms control, to be his national security adviser. The president-elect announced that Scowcroft would reevaluate the policies toward the Soviet Union pursued by Reagan and Shultz.

Soon afterward, Scowcroft in turn announced the choice of his own deputy national security adviser: the CIA’s senior Soviet expert, Robert M. Gates. There could have been no clearer signal that the Soviet policies of Reagan’s last years in office were being called into question and that the new Bush administration intended to take a more skeptical, hardheaded stance toward Gorbachev.

On the weekend after Election Day, Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, gave Secretary of State George Shultz an urgent message: Mikhail Gorbachev wanted to sit down with Ronald Reagan one more time. The Soviet leader was planning to visit New York for a speech to the United Nations General Assembly and hoped he could see the president while there. Gorbachev was eager for Bush to be at the meeting too. Reagan’s aides were dismayed; they feared Gorbachev might be planning to unveil some new proposal for which they would not be prepared. Bush was uneasy too. He was nervous that Gorbachev was trying to inveigle him into making some sort of commitments or into giving an overview of his policies before he had been sworn in as president. 1

Gorbachev was in fact eager to scrutinize Bush, but this was merely a secondary reason for his trip to New York. His main purpose was to speak to the United Nations. Since the summer, Gorbachev had been preparing an address that would demonstrate to the world a dramatically new Soviet foreign policy, including both new ideas and concrete steps to accompany them. Ever ambitious, Gorbachev envisioned this address as “the exact opposite of Winston Churchill’s famous Fulton speech” in 1946, in which Churchill had used the image of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe. Churchill’s words had symbolized the beginning of the Cold War; Gorbachev wanted to signify that it was coming to an end. Gorbachev also believed that a triumph abroad and further recognition of his role as a statesman would help to increase his standing at home, in much the same fashion that the summit with Reagan in Moscow had benefited Gorbachev politically a few months earlier. “I will not deny that I also hoped that a positive international response to my programme would strengthen my position and help overcome the growing resistance to change inside the Soviet Union,” Gorbachev later reflected. 2