Reagan took it all in. The enormity of the inhumanity pressed upon him, heavy like that wall that separated East and West and sat erect like a gray, cold tombstone to human freedom. He stood in stunned silence for several minutes. The presidential hopeful then turned to Allen and company, telling them, “We have got to find a way to knock this thing down.”3
Reagan’s forethought was part prophecy, part proclamation. Years later, Allen said correctly: “I believe the encounter with the wall and witnessing the armed harassment of an ordinary citizen seared into the governor’s memory the brutality of the communist system.” It “reinforced his dedication to placing it upon the ash heap of history.” “It was clear from his reaction,” said Allen, Reagan’s one-day national security adviser, “that he was determined to one day go about removing such a system.”4
DURING THE 1970S, RONALD REAGAN BEGAN TO OUTLINE MORE specifically the areas of U.S. Cold War foreign policy with which he disagreed, a process which he undertook forcefully and bluntly.5 While he continued his ardent criticism of Soviet Communism during his governorship, his rhetoric remained strong even after he left Sacramento in early 1975. In what became a clear buildup to his two presidential campaigns of the decade, Reagan began to highlight the specific flaws of current and past United States’ models for dealing with the Soviet Union. Using the voice that he had been cultivating for nearly thirty years, Reagan in the 1970s became the nation’s most vocal champion for taking a tough stance on Russia. When many of America’s politicians, both Democrat and Republican, seemed ready to extend olive branches of détente to the Evil Empire, Reagan did not sit quiet.
AREAS OF DISAGREEMENT
In the 1970s, a consistent Reagan refrain was that the United States should not accept the existence of the Soviet empire and its subjugation of Eastern Europe. Specifically, there were three concepts related to the Cold War that Ronald Reagan adamantly and vocally refuted during this period: Yalta, containment, and détente.
Yalta took place in the Crimea (Soviet territory) in February 1945 and involved FDR, Churchill, and Stalin. The travesty that resulted from Yalta was that Stalin broke his promise to hold free and fair elections in Eastern Europe, with those nations instead becoming Communist satellites and part of the Soviet bloc. At Yalta, critics charge, FDR and Churchill naïvely sold out Eastern Europe, condemning the historic cities of Eastern Europe to a future of Soviet totalitarianism. These were the enslaved peoples behind the Iron Curtain; the inhabitants of the “captive nations.”
Ronald Reagan refused to accept that fate for Eastern Europe. “Reagan rejected Yalta, as if it were irrelevant,” said Ed Meese. “He felt it simply wasn’t right.”6 He never stopped complaining of Yalta.7 Indeed, Pravda later devoted space to informing Soviet citizens of Reagan’s explicit desire to undo Yalta. The Communist organ told readers that Reagan had declared that the dividing line between Western and Eastern Europe could never be legitimate. “We wish to undo this boundary,” it accurately quoted him as saying.8
For similar reasons, Reagan disliked containment, the doctrine conceptualized in 1947 by George F. Kennan. This strategy sought to contain the Soviet empire within its present reach, but the problem for Reagan was that containment did nothing to free those already captive peoples along the Soviet border. Rather than preserve containment, Reagan wanted to go beyond it, to reverse it, to liberate the Soviet bloc. “For as long as I knew him,” said Richard Allen, “Ronald Reagan rejected the doctrine of containment.”9
Casper Weinberger, who had been with Reagan since 1967 and followed him to Washington as his secretary of defense, reiterated these sentiments, saying “The more he looked, the more he studied, the more he saw, the more he concluded that this [the USSR] was a regime that had to go. And this was certainly his own thinking well before the presidency, not some adviser’s.” Reagan came to this conclusion “quite early on. He did an awful lot of reading that people didn’t realize. He was very well educated on the whole thing.”10 Reagan, then, said Weinberger, determined that, “It wasn’t about containment; it was about winning the Cold War.”11
Reagan, added Weinberger, insisted that Communism was incompatible with freedom and “was ultimately going to have to be destroyed and defeated.”12 He was unambiguous regarding Reagan’s intentions:
He recognized the folly inherent in the policy of “containment” of communism and the Soviet Union. He was not content to rest with the assumption that in eighty or ninety years, the USSR might collapse. He said from the beginning that communism and democratic capitalism were incompatible, that communism had to be challenged and defeated.13
Weinberger stated categorically: “We were going to try to win the Cold War.”14
Rejecting containment meant seeking victory, and the Soviets knew that this was what Reagan was striving toward. They grasped what Reagan meant when he rejected containment, and as early as 1975, they tried to head him off before he could pick up steam. In April 1975, in what may have been the first shot at Reagan in the Soviet press, commentator Yuri Zhukov complained in the pages of Pravda: “The resurrected political dinosaur from California proposes a… ‘policy of rolling back communism.’ It is incredible but true!” Equally amazing, said Zhukov, Reagan “promises the restoration of the old system in the countries of Eastern Europe.”15 Clearly, the Kremlin understood the stakes.
To Reagan, winning meant not only rejecting containment, but also rejecting détente, the policy of so-called “relaxed” U.S.–Soviet relations that the United States began under Nixon and continued through both the Ford and Carter administration. Sure, détente might “lessen tensions” between the superpowers by stimulating treaties and trade. However, in so doing, Reagan believed it condoned the enslavement of Eastern Europeans, not to mention Russians, Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Georgians, and millions more. Also, by helping the USSR, détente sustained the USSR, and prolonged rather than shortened its totalitarian existence and control.
By this rationale, accepting détente was akin to a schoolyard situation: There is a bully who terrorizes the smaller kids. Only one kid in class can lick the bully, but this would-be hero refuses to act simply so he and the brute can get along. And yet, even that is not a sufficient analogy. To be applicable to Reagan’s world, the bully would not just push around the weaker children and take their lunch money, he would beat them and not permit them to say grace (he hates religion, after all) before their meals. Moreover, the reluctant rescuer in this scenario could and should be a beacon, a shining light to others, challenged by the forces of history to dispatch the thug—who looked to expand his thuggery to other schoolyards—to the ash heap of the playground.
Détente allowed the bully to have his way.
To Reagan, rejecting Yalta, containment, and détente was step one on the road to recovery for Eastern Europe—of freedom from the Soviet grip. As Margaret Thatcher said, his rejection of containment and détente “proclaimed that the truce with Communism was over.”16