James Mann: The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

For their own part, Reagan and his aides were even more eager to have the support of the Nixon foreign-policy network. The Reaganites were, at the time, extremely insecure about their prospects for winning the White House. Barry Goldwater, the last conservative Republican to win a presidential nomination, had lost in a landslide. Richard Allen, Reagan’s principal campaign adviser for national security, had told an interviewer in 1977 that while he favored Reagan’s candidacy, he doubted that any conservative Republican could become president, at least not for many years. In 1978, Allen told Reagan in a private memo that he needed to address “the problem of how you are perceived by a wide stratum of the public: for many, you come across as a ‘saber-rattler,’ a ‘button pusher,’ or as ‘too willing to send in the Marines.’ This false image is happily amplified by the media….” Allen advised Reagan not to retreat at all on issues, but to “soften the delivery of your message.” 3

It was this sense of fragility, and the fear of a Goldwater-style defeat, that prompted Reagan to pursue, in the days before and during the 1980 Republican convention, the idea of selecting Ford as his vice presidential running mate. Ford’s aides countered with a proposal that Ford would operate as a copresident in a Reagan administration and that Kissinger would have effective control of American foreign policy. On the surface, the notion seemed preposterous: Reagan had only four years earlier promised Republican voters that he would replace Kissinger as secretary of state. Nevertheless, Reagan and his aides dithered over the idea for several days and began to negotiate with Ford’s advisers, including Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, until Ford himself finally said no in the final hours before Reagan was scheduled to name his running mate.

Even after Reagan won the November election, lingering insecurities again prompted him, as president-elect, to appoint Haig as his first secretary of state. Haig not only enjoyed Nixon’s strong personal endorsement, he also was a symbol of continuity with the foreign policies of the Republican administrations of the early 1970s. As they prepared for the new president, Soviet leaders hoped that Reagan would turn out to be like Nixon: an avowed anti-Communist with whom they could do business, as they had in the days of détente. They had been intensely unhappy with the Carter administration, which had responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics and imposing a series of trade restrictions on the Soviet Union. “The mood in Moscow was, ‘Anyone but Carter,’ because Carter was so irritating to us at the end of his presidency… ,” recalled Alexander Bessmertnykh, then a Soviet Foreign Ministry official. “When Reagan won the election, everyone was happy in Moscow.” 4

In seeking to deal with Reagan, the Soviets had the benefit of one well-connected American adviser: Richard Nixon. Within days after Reagan’s victory over Carter, Nixon traveled to Washington for a private chat with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. “He had decided to talk with me about Reagan and asked me to bring his views to [Leonid] Brezhnev’s notice,” Dobrynin later recalled. Nixon advised the Soviets that Reagan was a pragmatic politician, but that it would take a long time to establish a relationship with him. “Nixon went on to say that he maintained private contacts with Reagan, who consulted him on various questions time and again,” wrote Dobrynin many years later. Nixon hoped “to make a positive contribution by drawing on his own long experience to help Reagan get a better idea of the Soviet Union and its policies.” 5

It took barely nine days after his inauguration for Reagan to serve notice that his administration would be different from those of his predecessors and that he would not be guided or kept in check by Haig. Before Reagan’s first presidential news conference, he took part in two preparatory “murder boards” in which his aides asked questions they thought might be posed by reporters. None of Reagan’s answers to questions about the Soviet Union in these rehearsals was particularly distinctive. But at the news conference itself, on January 29, 1981, when asked whether he thought détente was still possible, Reagan volunteered some new phrases about Soviet perfidy, words he realized his secretary of state and other advisers would have vetoed at the prep sessions:

Well, so far détente’s been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims. I don’t have to think of an answer as to what I think their intentions are; they have repeated it. I know of no leader of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership, that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their determination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use.

Now, as long as they do that and as long as they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards, I think when you do business with them, even at a detente, you keep that in mind. 6

Richard Allen, Reagan’s national security adviser, noticed that as Reagan said this, Haig seemed to gasp. After the news conference ended, walking back to the Oval Office, Reagan turned to his national security adviser and said, “Say, Dick, they do lie and cheat, don’t they?” Allen quickly responded: “Yes, sir.” 7

Later that day, Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin complained to Haig about Reagan’s “hostile statement,” which he said “will undoubtedly make a most unfavorable impression” on the Soviet leadership. “How is he going to do business with us?” Dobrynin asked. Haig explained that Reagan hadn’t meant to offend anyone in Moscow, but was instead merely expressing his own deep convictions. Dobrynin countered that such an explanation only made things worse. 8

This press conference was merely the beginning of a prolonged rhetorical campaign in which Reagan attempted to alter the language, the ideas, and the very thought processes used in American discussions about the Soviet Union. The purposes were to strip the Soviet Union of its legitimacy, to express a sense of moral condemnation toward the regime, and to characterize the Cold War as a battle of ideas and ideals. In Reagan’s first speech in Europe, an address to British members of Parliament at Westminster on June 8, 1982, he spoke of “the march of freedom and democracy, which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Reagan’s aides had deliberately given him that phrase to insert into the speech as a mocking reversal of the words of Leon Trotsky, who had said in 1917 that the opponents of the Bolshevik Revolution would be consigned to the “ash heap of history.” 9Reagan also warned, somewhat abstractly, about the dangers of “a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil.” Nevertheless, the Westminster speech was also, in its own peculiar way, optimistic about the future of the Soviet Union, more optimistic than Nixon or Kissinger had been: “The Soviet Union is not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world. It has happened in the past—a small ruling elite either mistakenly attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and foreign adventure, or it chooses a wiser course. It begins to allow its people a voice in their own destiny.” 10

Reagan’s ideological offensive culminated with his speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 1983, an event that symbolized the growing power of evangelicals in American politics. At the time, a movement for a freeze on nuclear weapons was gathering strength in both the United States and Europe. Two of America’s large mainstream religious organizations, the National Council of Churches and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, were moving toward support of the freeze. In inviting Reagan to speak at the convention in Orlando, Robert P. Dugan, Jr., director of the National Association of Evangelicals, wrote Michael Deaver at the White House to say that evangelicals “are not yet firmly positioned on the nuclear freeze issue. They are, thus, a major bloc of support for the Administration.” 11