Reagan the Astute

Ronald Reagan
THE REAGAN DIARIES
Edited by Douglas Brinkley
784pp. HarperCollins. £16.64.
978 0 06 087600 5
 
For years, otherwise reasonable people, including not a few genuine Washington insiders, firmly believed that the late-to-rise and early-to-bed Ronald Reagan was not all that important in the Reagan Administration. Word had it that he was stupendously ignorant as well as lazy, frequently confusing historical events within living memory with Hollywood depictions of the same, supposedly mixing up the countries and rulers he had to deal with to the great embarrassment of accompanying State Department officials and his Druze protocol official Selwa Roosevelt, and so averse to reading that his daily intelligence briefing had to be reduced to bite-sized video clips. That being so, it could even be reassuring to believe that Reagan was a mere cipher perpetually manipulated by a shifting cast of hard-faced men, starting with his first political mentors from the ultra-anti-Communist John Birch Society and ending with the Administration officials supposedly selected for him by his California kitchen cabinet of businessmen who had funded all his campaigns.

That two of his most important Cabinet appointments, George Schultz at the State Department and Caspar Weinberger at the Pentagon, both came from the globally active but very privately held Californian engineering giant Bechtel was just one of many little facts that added plausibility to the portrait, starting with a range of cultural interests that included Cow Girls of Montana, no books to speak of, and the theatre only if “Chuck” Heston or another of Reagan’s A-film heroes was on stage (many were often welcomed in the White House), and involving a working day that was certainly shorter than that of his recent predecessors. So persuasive was this depiction of an affable if often perplexed old actor dutifully reading his scripts, a nice man but with cotton wool between his ears, that it was accepted by pundits worldwide for quite a while, and even by some of the foreign officials who met him at summits. Until I sat with him and a few others serving on the transition team to discuss the El Salvador war in detail and depth, I too half-believed the stories that floated from one Washington dinner party to the next, with the usual embellishments that were elaborated further in diplomatic reporting to foreign capitals. As we now know, Soviet reporting was even more incompetent, for it depicted an impossible Reagan, both childishly inane and a would-be mass murderer plotting a surprise nuclear attack against the Soviet Union – KGB watchers were actually sent to monitor American bases worldwide, to detect any signs of incipient nuclear attacks.

Not coincidentally, many Europeans were also frequently demonstrating against Reagan the cowboy with nuclear weapons, some of them no doubt just the usual physiological anti-Americans, others believers in peace at any price who logically enough wanted their own side to desist because aggressors will not, and others still useful innocents manipulated by KGB “active measures”, furiously denied at the time but now gleefully recalled as highly successful by their executors. Nobody could then know of course that Reagan was America’s post-nuclear President: early on he told his utterly shocked military chiefs what he could tell nobody else without destroying deterrence, that he would never authorize the use of nuclear weapons, even if the United States were attacked with them.

Memoirs, biographies and policy studies gradually replaced the bungling-bumbling caricature with more realistic depictions, but it is only now, with the publication of his diaries, that we encounter a shrewd and watchful Reagan determined to have his way not only with political opponents and evil or misguided foreigners, but also with his own officials and bureaucracies – the greater challenge in many cases, for diversions can be very subtle, and obstructionism is so easily disguised.

Reagan’s policy towards the Soviet Union of replacing coexistence with de-legitimization had been proclaimed right through the 1980 campaign in which he defeated President Carter’s re-election attempt, but it was so shockingly revolutionary that many in Washington and around the world took it for granted that it was mere talk, destined to be quietly set aside once the new Administration took office. When State Department officials came to brief his transition officials on policy towards the Soviet Union, they did it by listing the inter-agency issues that would have to be resolved to prepare for the next “ministerial with Gromyko”. They focused on process, incidentally noting that there would be close consultations with Anatoly Dobrynin as usual, because in their eyes the only possible policy was to pursue coexistence. That Andrei Gromyko had held his office as Foreign Minister since 1957 and Dobrynin his Washington post as Ambassador since 1962 underlined the stolid continuity of the Soviet Union, which those senior State Department officials assumed would simply continue, as did most people around the world. It followed that any attempt to de-legitimize the Soviet Union was utterly unrealistic in their view, and very dangerous of course, for the recent invasion of Afghanistan had showed that Soviet leaders were willing to use their vast military forces very boldly. (These days it is widely assumed that the decrepitude of the late Soviet Union extended to its armed forces, but that is simply not true. For example, by the time US Intelligence detected and assessed that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had started, five army divisions and four assault regiments had already secured Kabul and seized key locations throughout the country.)

Nor could the State Department satisfy Reagan by calibrating the normal coexistence policies in a hardline direction, because the Carter Administration had already done that in response to the invasion of Afghanistan, imposing a grain embargo among other things. It was only with considerable difficulty that Reagan’s first National Security Adviser, Richard Allen, managed to explain to the State Department diplomats who met the transition team that policy towards the Soviet Union would have to be defined in an entirely new way, with aims very different from the preparation of the next meeting with Gromyko, which was duly “de-scheduled”. The only concrete result of that session was the revocation of Dobrynin’s unique privilege of entering the State Department directly from the garage. When his car swept into the garage entrance as usual, it was stopped and sent back to park in the street, forcing Dobrynin to enter on foot like all other diplomats. More substantively, Dobrynin lost his famed access to the White House under the new Reagan policy of minimizing instead of maximizing communications as well as inter-state relations with the Soviet Union, which overturned decades of conventional wisdom because its aim was not to domesticate the Soviet leadership but rather to undermine and indeed overthrow the entire regime.

On Wednesday, February 4 1980, during his fifteenth day in the White House, in the context of a Cabinet discussion of the grain embargo, Reagan wrote in his diary: “Trade was supposed to make Soviets moderate, instead it has allowed them to build armaments instead of consumer products. Their socialism is an ec[onomic] failure. Wouldn’t we be doing more for their people if we let their system fail instead of constantly bailing it out?”. This was no mere outburst, because policies of economic denial and de-legitimization were quickly implemented, beginning with the previously sacrosanct sphere of arms-control negotiations. The new policy alarmed European leaders to the point of panic in some cases, and evoked furious reactions from détente enthusiasts, but it was not much resisted by the State Department because Alexander Haig was the Secretary, and he had just enough personal contact with Reagan himself to realize that nothing would change his mind. It was an opposite problem that emerged, because Haig loyally set out to achieve Reagan’s purposes strategically, and therefore wanted to turn the new entente with China into a veritable alliance – there was even talk of combining infinite Chinese manpower with US military technology across the board, and not just the long-range radars already secretly installed in Xinjiang. There was a price, however: the abandonment of Taiwan, starting with the denial of arms sales.

But Reagan’s outlook was ideological, not strategic. He was not just anti-Soviet power but anti-Communist, and therefore would not abandon Taiwan. He also firmly believed in firmness.

Tuesday October 29 1981 . . .
Met with [Chinese foreign minister] Huang Hua. There is a real push going on. China is virtually delivering an ultimatum re. arms to Taiwan. I don’t like ultimatums. We have a moral obligation & until a peaceful settlement is reached between the mainland & Taiwan we’re going to meet that obligation.

Huang Hua had evidently spoken as he did because he had been told of the State Department’s position, which he was trying to strengthen. Just as evidently, Reagan was alert to the attempt to derail his policy.

Friday January 10 1982 . . .
I have learned there is a China lobby and it has its moles in the State Dept. The [Washington] Post had a story on why we should cling to the P.R.C. & never mind Taiwan. A cartoon carried the same theme. The timing is amazing because no word has been spoken about plans [to sell F5E and F104 fighters to Taiwan] & I have told no one [outside the Executive Branch] what my decision will be.

The little inside joke is that “China Lobby” had always been used to describe the right-wing Republicans who had supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang regime in China and later Taiwan. As for the “moles” they were in reality top officials, not disloyal underlings, as Reagan well knew. He could spot their tricks easily enough:

Monday January 11 1982 . . .
Press running wild with talk that I reversed myself on Taiwan because we’re only selling them F5Es & F104s. I think the China Lobby in State Dept is selling this line to appease the P.R.C. which doesn’t want us to sell them anything. The planes we are offering are better than anything the P.R.C. has. Later on if more sophistication is needed we’ll upgrade & sell them F5Gs.

That last phrase, incidentally, is one of a myriad fragments of evidence in the diary that Reagan’s stance of casual bonhomie – in sharp contrast to the Carter and Clinton displays of relentless diligence – concealed much very detailed knowledge accumulated by reading the documents that kept landing on his desk. Unlike the F-4 Phantom or F-104 Starfighter, the F-5G was not a fighter in operational service that would often be depicted and reported in the normal course of events, but rather a project of the Northrop Corporation, whose existence was only known to specialists.

Reagan wrote of the “China Lobby” and the State Department and even of moles, but it was the Secretary of State himself who wanted Taiwan to wither away, to better implement the Reagan strategy. Reagan disagreed. “Friday March 26 1982 . . . Al and I are on opposite sides I’m afraid about China. He wants to make concessions which in my view betray our pledge to Taiwan.” Earlier in that day’s entry Reagan mentioned that he had called George Schultz, who would be Haig’s successor, to ask him to go on a mission to Europe and Japan, commenting “What a nice man – busy as he is [at Bechtel] he agreed”. But at that point Reagan was not yet thinking of replacing Haig, and he ended the remark on his disagreement with him over Taiwan with “We’ll have to work it out”. When Al Haig persisted, Reagan resisted. Far from being easily manipulated, as the legend had it, he did not even manipulate back – he just said no.

Monday March 29 1982 . . .
Meeting with Al Haig about China and Taiwan. State wanted to send a paper to the P.R.C. and letters from me because we are about to send mil.[itary] equipment and spare parts to Taiwan. I objected to some of the terms they wanted in these papers – the note of almost apology to the P.R.C. I’m convinced the Chinese will respect us more if we politely tell them we have an obligation to the people of Taiwan and no one is going to keep us from meeting it. We didn’t send the papers.

There was no disagreement about the strategy of squeezing the Soviet Union – at that point the Soviet army was maintaining some forty-two divisions on the Chinese border, most of them in remote locations at ruinous cost for transport alone. But there was a disagreement about diplomatic tactics – as always Reagan believed in firmness – and a much greater disagreement about the magnitude of the task. Reagan was convinced that there was no need to sacrifice Taiwan, because the Soviet Union was on its last legs: “March 26, 1982 Briefing on Soviet Ec. They are in very bad shape and if we can cut off their credit they’ll have to yell uncle or starve”. Haig obviously disagreed, and kept pressing for his more active Chinese alliance. “Tuesday May 4 1982 . . . Turned State dept down on a message they wanted me to send our Ambassador in China urging him to have informal talks with Chinese preceding George Bush’s arrival. The talks were to soften the Taiwan issue some more. We can’t do that – the Taiwanese have proven their friendship.” In the event, Taiwan barely came up during Reagan’s visit to China in April 1984, when he made it clear that he was not seeking an active alliance, the entente already established ever since Kissinger’s first visit being quite enough to keep the Soviet Union expensively off balance.

That was of course the essential Reagan strategy, to peacefully dismantle the Soviet Union by overstretching its economy in every possible way, from the simple – the acceleration of the military-technological competition through the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka “Star Wars”, and of the plain military competition by building up every branch of the US armed forces – to the more subtle effect of de-legitimization: it induced Soviet leaders to strive to supply more and better food and consumer products to compensate for the loss of ideological credibility, fervour having long gone. That stressed rigid Soviet planning even more without increasing output anywhere enough, until Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms came along to make the economy more flexible and more efficient by removing bureaucratic compulsion. But in the absence of all the varied material and social incentives that propel capitalist economies which could not just be synthesized, there was nothing else to keep the system operating. It duly collapsed, as some did nothing while others stole all they could. Before the final breakdown, by January 1988, Reagan could follow the unravelling:

Thursday January 5 . . .
NSC Time - Colin [Powell] brought in our expert on Soviet U. He sees a split developing between Gorbachev & Ligachev [the Intelligence community’s designated “hardliner” of the moment]. We’ll soon see an Ec. Plan to make Soviet enterprises self supporting. In June the once in every 4 yrs. Soviet [Party] Cong[ress] will meet. There should be some hint as to division in Soviet U. Under the Glasnost plans.

In the diaries there is very much more on politics of every sort – Reagan was not at all above manoeuvres high and low – and on all the large subjects of government, beginning with the economy and the tax-cutting supply-side fiscal policy. Reagan was harshly criticized at the time by most professional economists and conventional-wisdom pundits until the results by way of growth, employment and reduced inflation became too positive to be denied (the same happened with George W. Bush and his 2001 tax cuts, except that his critics still refuse to recognize that he was right, in spite of record-low unemployment). On the environment as on all else, Reagan favoured the market, with limits, of course, that tended to be more restrictive over time.

On foreign policy, relations with Europe and Japan naturally loom large in the diaries, along with much on the various military episodes, both successful, as in Grenada, or not as in Beirut; there is also much detail on the Iran–Contra episode. Reagan was fully aware of the Iran end of that arms-for-hostages affair (legal but wildly imprudent), though he did not know of the Contra end, which violated the Congressional law that cut off funding to the rebels. Reagan’s studied pose of amiable vagueness that exposed him to accusations of incapacity and inattention greatly helped to shield him from the scandal, because many believed that the poor old dear did not know of the secret goings on, which he actually monitored closely and indeed commanded. It is most unfortunate that the scandal, the inquiries, the trials and the press and academic commentaries did not pause to first consider the utter incapacity of the CIA to operate covertly to any effect, which had driven the President’s men to do it themselves in the first place. An opportunity was missed, as it was after 2001, so the United States must still do without, or send out incompetents who fail.

The diary is also full of fun. Reagan did not merely take time off to have fun as all presidents must do to survive (Jimmy Carter failed in that too, visibly declining in office), he also enjoyed himself presidentially. Of course, he relished every opportunity of kicking the Soviet Union in the shins: “Friday July 24 . . . Then off to Ukrainian Church for lunch & ceremony recognizing Captive Nations Week. Extremely well received. The Soviets will be unhappy”. There are many other such entries.

During his 1984 China visit, the old movie actor enjoyed the opportunity of being bugged and debugged exactly as depicted in Hollywood spy movies – one just hopes that there was a real security expert around and not just CIA incompetents, because hidden microphones so easily found are only there for misdirection, to cover the real ones: “Friday April 27 A breakfast meeting with my gang at our Villa [in the Beijing leadership compound]. We kept a noisy tape going all through the meal to nullify any hidden microphones. We later learned there were such. Indeed Dave Fisher unscrewed the plate on his light switch & removed one for a souvenir. Later 5 were found in our quarters”. Back in 1981, Reagan enjoyed a lark:

Monday March 16 . . .
S[enator] Paul Laxalt came by . . . he had a letter from an Irishman in Nev.[ada] who complained because he didn’t think I knew the R. W. Service poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”. We put in a call to Nevada and after I convinced him I really was who I said I was I recited the poem to him. He’s a Dem[ocrat] who I think may now turn Repub.

There are some complaints in the diaries but no real bitterness, not even against those who accused him of being a racist, as several black politicians did. Having lived most of his life in the only American community where anti-Semitism was a career killer and racism was unacceptable, Reagan was if anything an anti-racist. Not coincidentally, he was the first American President who appointed officials who happened to be black because they were the best officials he could get, and not because they were black, including the “Colin” mentioned on many pages, for it was under Reagan that Colin Powell started his career in high office. In that too, George W. Bush is his successor. When he did encounter outright racism, Reagan knew what to do:

Monday May 3 1982 . . .
Read this morning of a black family – husband and wife both work in govt. printing office. They live in a nice house near U of Maryland. They have been harassed and even had a cross burned on their lawn . . . . We cleared the last part of the afternoon schedule and Nancy & I went calling. They were a very nice couple with a 4 year old daughter . . . the whole neighborhood was lining the street . . . I hope we did some good. There is no place in this land for the hate-mongers and bigots.

Regrettably, there is still a place for shoddy, thoroughly unworthy editors. Douglas Brinkley, to whom this precious historical document was unaccountably consigned, has not done any of the things that should have been required of the editor of such material. Any authentic diary as this one certainly is, must be full of incomplete, abbreviated or downright cryptic references which need to be elucidated by amplifications and insertions, explanatory footnotes and more extended notes too. Brinkley’s work in that regard is not subject to detailed criticism because, in an extraordinary and damaging omission, he does not provide any explanatory material at all – the square brackets in the above quotations are my own. The index is unacceptably cursory and full of mistakes, so that Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt and Lucky Roosevelt both appear, while the one Kirkpatrick listing covers two of them. Worse still, the diaries are incomplete, with many entries fully or partially abridged, not to conceal crimes or misdemeanours but just to shorten the text. The approach of this editor is best illustrated by his own explanation of how that came about: “Because the complete Reagan diaries would fill two or three fat volumes, I had to be selective in deciding what to choose to include in this abridged version” – the only one available so far. Anybody who thinks that three volumes, however “fat”, would be too many to publish a document of such importance, is bereft of historical sense and should never have been allowed near Ronald Reagan’s diary.

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Edward N. Luttwak is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. His books include Strategy: the Logic of War and Peace (1987) and Turbo-Charged Capitalism: Winners and losers in the new world economy, 1998, and Strategy: The logic of war and peace, 2002.