Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Returning from lunch, Anders heard the sound of hammers coming from the direction of the vice president’s big ceremonial office. The renovations to it, which promised to be long and noisy, must at last have begun. Anders, who liked quiet, paused for a moment on the second-floor landing to look up through the skylight. A plump white cloud scudded invitingly through the blue; you’d never guess that outside it was a typical August day in the District of Columbia, steamy and unbearable.

He walked into his office, room 380A. The nameplate on the door looked impressive — ASST DIR / ARMS CNTRL / NSC / MR LITTLE — until one considered that it was made of cardboard. People came and went quickly around here; it was the rare bird who stayed in one job for four years, let alone eight. The Defense Programs and Arms Control Division of the National Security Council consisted of only nine people, and in truth Anders spent his days mostly being directed rather than directing anyone else. Besides, much of the real action on arms control was outside the White House, over at the Pentagon or State or the ACDA, with the big brains like Perle and Adelman. Even so, Anders — a convert to Reaganism rather than an early true believer — felt delighted to be here.

He had come out of Wake Forest as a moderate Democrat in the tumultuous spring of 1970, and had managed to remain one through two years of graduate study at Fletcher and four years as a researcher at Brookings. Anders’s politics, in fact, had been generally as tepid as his romances and two marriages. The first of those had occurred during the bicentennial year, when he also took a post at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. There, over the next five years, Anders got a bellyful of the Soviets and all their lying proxies, from Czechoslovakia to Angola. He became a considerably tougher, more ideological fellow.

Early in ’81 he had been assigned to a small committee charged with “facilitating the transition” from Carter’s mild exiting ambassador to Reagan’s fierce incoming one. Most of the career staff were horrified by the advent of Dr. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was sulky, brooding, and brilliant, determined to use the UN as an American bully pulpit instead of an altar for penitence. But Anders had welcomed the arrival of this unlikely academic who compared totalitarians (chiefly the Soviets) and authoritarians (mostly our guys, often South Americans) and saw a distinction, one worth exploiting. Non-Communist dictatorships might, and occasionally did, evolve into something better; Communist ones couldn’t, and didn’t. They needed overthrowing.

Jeane Kirkpatrick had spotted Anders Little as a young man on a road running parallel to the longer, wider one that she had traveled. In his case, the movement was from bland belief in coexistence toward implacable opposition to the Russians. She herself had always been a Cold Warrior, but had come to realize there was no longer much room for her kind inside the Democratic Party she had fervently supported from Truman through Humphrey. If she really wanted to sweep back the Communist tide, she’d now have to get her broom from the Republican supply closet.

For a period of several weeks she talked to Anders as if he were a favorite thesis supervisee. And then, once the transition between ambassadors was complete, he’d told her he needed to go to Washington; his new, second wife, Sarah, had a job offer there. Mrs. K. had raised her eyebrows, thrust out her lips, and thought. She disliked fecklessness and confusion, and Anders could see her thinking that thirty-three, his age then, was a bit early for a second marriage. But two days later, knowing that he, too, believed in Reagan’s view of the Cold War— we win; they lose —she’d gotten him a position on the National Security Council. The administration’s arms-control policies would be, she assured him, unambiguous: we would attempt to control their arms, and to build up our own.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick was not a pretty woman, and she was almost as old as Anders’s mother, but for the next few years, from his low-level vantage in Washington, he watched her performance at the UN with a starstruck ardor. Those scoldings to commissars and postcolonial despots that she’d delivered across the UN’s horseshoe table from inside her shoulder-padded suits: thrilling!

Jeane Kirkpatrick might have wound up being his boss down here. At the end of Reagan’s first term she’d wanted the national security advisor’s job, but by now she’d been passed over for it twice, and the likelihood of its ever coming her way seemed remote. Her relationship with George Shultz was better than what she’d had with Alexander Haig, his predecessor at State, but Jeane was still stronger drink than Shultz preferred; and Reagan, who found Shultz soothing, was determined to keep him happy — no matter how much the president himself liked Mrs. Kirkpatrick. So she was now back teaching at Georgetown, when she wasn’t out on the lecture circuit or writing her column. Anders saw her from time to time, and got to call her Jeane; he felt flattered when she complimented his ever-hardening views or teased him about being her “fly on the wall at the NSC.”

She had brought a number of important people his way — and the sender-ID number suddenly visible on the gurgling fax machine told Anders that the most improbable of them all was now checking in:

26 FEDERAL PLAZA

212-227-8388

Sure enough, the incoming cover sheet displayed the large, legible fountain-penmanship he’d come to recognize:

Read this over and call back to discuss distribution. RN

Anders could picture the thirty-seventh president sitting just as he’d been when Mrs. K. first sent him, with a letter of introduction, to Nixon’s office in downtown New York. Now, as then, the former president’s jacket would be on, and his tie firmly knotted; his polished wingtip shoes would be up on the hassock, a grudging concession to comfort and phlebitis. The eraser tip of a pencil would be lightly pressing against his lower lip while he made, on a yellow legal pad, some impersonal-sounding notes meant just for himself, and perhaps posterity.

When he and Anders first met, Nixon had been not much longer acquainted with Jeane than Anders was himself. Newly back in New York from his exile in San Clemente, the former president had made it his business to meet the new UN ambassador, who had quite loathed him during all her years voting for Adlai Stevenson. But she had long since come around to — and gone past — his view of foreign affairs. Jeane Kirkpatrick respected Richard Nixon as a supreme strategist and a kind of saturnine soul mate, but she currently regarded him, thanks to détente, and with no little historical irony, as being somewhat soft on Communism.

Nixon’s fax to Anders was brief and blunt, two typewritten pages, marked by its author’s penchant for the seesaw syntax of antithesis:

The President must beware of Gorbachev’s eagerness for a second summit, and must resist what the media claim to be the American public’s appetite for one. The President’s resistance to an initial summit throughout his first four years in office did him no political harm (he got re-elected with 49 states), while it did the U.S. a large amount of strategic good. Waiting for the Soviet Union’s new man, the one at last in a position to do something other than die in office, signaled RR’s own seriousness and strengthened the American position.

Gorbachev’s current proposal — for a unilateral Soviet moratorium on underground nuclear testing, in advance of a treaty that bans it altogether and which both countries can sign at the next summit — needs to be strongly rebuffed, however welcome it may be to the nuclear-freeze crowd and their friends in the press. The U.S. needs underground testing — to catch up and then to keep up. A “freeze” in this realm would be as damaging to our interests as a freeze in the production and deployment of missiles themselves. Gorbachev’s proposal is not a “gesture toward peace”; it’s an aggressive move.