Thomas Mallon - Finale - A Novel of the Reagan Years

The President’s spokesman was right to deflect it, but he allowed Gorbachev to derive a net plus just from making the offer. What is missing from our refusal is direct, persistent, in-your-face reference to Chernobyl. Without that, turning down the Soviet proposal makes the U.S. look cavalier about the possibility of nuclear accidents — at a time when Soviet incompetence has discharged into the atmosphere enough radioactivity to kill 40,000 people: their own citizens and Europeans.

It is vital for the U.S. to draw attention to this, but to do it in humane ways: we should flood the Soviets with well-publicized offers of medical aid and research that can improve their long-term situation — offers they cannot refuse without appearing paranoid and callous. We should extend an unlimited, no-strings invitation to medical refugees from this calamity, while pointing out, continually, how what’s occurred on their soil has poisoned the environment of a whole continent. Remind our allies and the American public that the Soviets are both the perpetrators and the victims of what is, in effect, their own Hiroshima. Cement the impression that they are technologically ossified and dangerous all at once.

Any deflation of the Soviets’ pride puts them in a weaker position both globally and at the negotiating table. I’m not saying that Chernobyl isn’t a tragedy; I’m merely saying that it’s also an opportunity. The Soviets have been shaken by this event; I saw plenty of evidence for that during my recent trip. Confidence has lessened, not increased, during Gorbachev’s premiership. The man at the next summit will be less in control, not more so, than he was at the last one — so long as the Administration doesn’t inadvertently contribute to the constant and deliberate buildup that Gorbachev receives in the American press.

On the subject of national pride and its effect upon the two countries’ strengths in negotiating: It is imperative that the United States relaunch the space shuttle before the Soviets can get a version of their own into orbit — an enterprise they do not appear to have abandoned. And in the meantime, the Administration must resist every tendency, both subconscious and overt, to see the Challenger and Chernobyl as being somehow equivalent disasters. They are not: seven lives willingly put at risk by those living them do not match the slow deaths of 40,000 people who had no inkling of what they were in for. Chernobyl is an ongoing catastrophe on the grand scale, and the proper “use” of it can assure that a summit takes place on the U.S. President’s own terms and timetable.

The warning against “equivalence” sounded very much like Jeane, who for years now had been attacking the liberal inclination to see the Soviet and American systems as not much different morally; to view both of them, essentially, as failed experiments in idealism. Nixon’s thinking lately appeared to be moving her way, to be entertaining the possibility that his own bold attempts at rapprochement had gone further than they needed to, because the Soviet Union, while on the march, and still expanding, was expanding like a gas , a cloud sufficiently weak at its point of origin that the larger it got, the weaker its whole existence might be getting. This was the wildest hope in the geopolitical air, and still a minority point of view by far, but Anders Little thought that Nixon was beginning to pick up its scent.

Who should get this fax? Certainly Adelman and Perle. And maybe Elliott Abrams over at State. There was no need to send it to Shultz and Weinberger: Reagan’s State and Defense secretaries had both served in Nixon’s own cabinet, and to act as if Nixon required a third party to convey his postpresidential thoughts to them would be to imply, insultingly, that he couldn’t now reach out to them directly.

Anders’s real quandary involved Admiral Poindexter. Nixon wanted to be in touch with the still-new national security advisor because, having once put Henry Kissinger in that job, he continued to believe it was where the real action and influence lay. But Poindexter, an odd, hard-to-read figure, might think Anders had overstepped if he delivered this memo without its having been requested. And yet, that’s what Nixon surely wanted, even more than direct conversation with Reagan himself. The two presidents did talk, often, and the former one was always careful to speak respectfully of the incumbent to Anders Little; but Nixon dropped hints of frustration, too, indications of uncertainty about how much of what he said really registered with Reagan — even about how much of it was, literally, heard.

Anders still couldn’t believe he was in a position directly to aid a man for whom — with his parents back in 1960, at the age of twelve — he’d rung doorbells in Mooresville. What Nixon really wanted, even now, was to become a “back channel” for the president; a crucial, occasional, out-of-sight envoy to Moscow and Beijing. Such a position would not require confirmation by the Senate — a prospect about as likely as Gorbachev becoming the GOP’s presidential nominee in ’88—but it would still demand, for starters, keeping Nixon on various radar screens here, including Poindexter’s. That much Anders could do.

Anders needed to concentrate his mind before calling Nixon back with a response to the fax, so he got up and went out into the corridor to do another couple of brisk laps around the EOB. He’d gone about a dozen yards before he ran into a pretty girl with a big Dynasty -style mane of blond hair. He’d seen her a few times previously but couldn’t remember her name: Tawny? Dawn? Fawn?

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey.”

He couldn’t recall whom she belonged to, so he looked up at the sign on the door she was heading toward, room 392, DEPUTY DIR / POL / MIL AFFRS. He now remembered: she was Ollie North’s girl. Anders never saw much of North, and the colonel, who managed to be furtive and swaggering all at once, didn’t particularly interest him. If Anders’s job put him “down in the weeds”—ensnared in statistics and throw weights and warheads — North was there in a more literal way, spending his time on the survival of the Contras in the jungles of Nicaragua.

“Summer doldrums?” he asked Dawn or Fawn, hoping quickly to get through a few pleasantries and then hit his fast indoor stride.

“Maybe for you guys!” she said, with a big smile. She shifted a wad of gum from one side of her mouth to the other.

“Not for you?” asked Anders. “You got your money, after all.” After some fierce politicking by the administration, the House had reversed itself late in June and voted $100 million in aid to the Contras.

Dawn or Fawn shook her head and its golden hair. “It’s not enough. And we’re still out of cash until the appropriation comes through in October. Ever hear of a bridge loan?”

“Yeah,” said Anders. He and Sarah had had to take one out a couple of years ago, before they could get a mortgage on the house in Tenleytown.

“Well, we’re sort of looking for one. Got any spare dough?” She flashed him another big smile.

“I’ve got about enough for a Diet Coke in the machine down the hall.”

She laughed and headed into 392. Anders waved goodbye, did two fast circuits of the floor, then reentered his own office. He took a deep breath before dialing Nixon’s direct number in New York.

“What do you think?” asked the former president, without so much as a hello.

“An excellent memo, sir.”

“Who should see it?”

“Well,” said Anders, “I should think Adelman, Perle, and Abrams. For a start.” He paused, trying to make himself say “Poindexter.” When he couldn’t quite do it, he found himself adding, “And probably the VP.”