During his tenure, Clark had overseen nearly a hundred of the most important NSDDs to be issued by any president. He had been a vital liaison to the Vatican. He stood aside Reagan when the president called the USSR an Evil Empire, when he pursued SDI, and for every fiery salvo directed at Moscow. NSC member Norm Bailey spoke for the stalwarts when he said that in Clark’s two years as national security adviser, he “did more than any other individual to help the president change the course of history and put an end to an empire that was, indeed, the embodiment of ‘evil.’” Bailey maintained that the nation owed a “very great debt” to the laconic rancher who embodied the image of the stoic, silent cowboy.2
A year that had been the NSC’s loud call to arms suddenly seemed to be finishing with a whimper, or, perhaps in Bill Clark’s case, with a characteristic whisper. But the letdown from Clark’s departure was short-lived. There was no time for the hard-liners to mourn, as a storm was stirring in the Caribbean, and one of the Cold War’s hottest years was about to get even hotter.
GRENADA
Since Ronald Reagan became president, there had been a lot of nasty words exchanged back and forth between Washington and Moscow. There had even been martial law in Poland, declarations of defensive technology initiatives, and the destruction of a civilian airliner. Neither the United States nor the USSR, however, had invaded a country since Reagan walked into the Oval Office on January 20, 1981. That was about to change.
On October 19, 1983, a radical Marxist group inside Grenada had murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop in a Cuba-inspired coup d’etat.3 A violent Marxist military council trained by Cuba put itself in charge, shot and jailed Bishop supporters, enacted its own martial law, and imposed a shoot-on-sight, twenty-four-hour curfew. These edicts threatened not only those citizens of the island, but also the roughly 1,000 Americans present, most of which (some 700) were students at the St. George’s School of Medicine.
The coup was not completely unexpected, and in actuality this was exactly the sort of Havana-backed deadly mischief the Reagan team feared for some time. Just a few months earlier, Maurice Bishop had come to Washington, where he met with Bill Clark in an attempt to explain the current situation in Grenada. After this meeting, Reagan had initiated a special task force to consider contingency plans for Grenada, placing Vice President Bush at its head.
This was not the first time that the president had been concerned about Grenada. Seven months earlier, on March 23, in no less than the SDI speech, Reagan had warned:
On the small island of Grenada… the Cubans, with Soviet financing and backing, are in the process of building a 10,000-foot runway. Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Whom is it intended for? The Caribbean is a very important passageway for our international commerce and military lines of communication. More than half of all American oil imports pass through the Caribbean. The rapid buildup of Grenada’s military potential is unrelated to any conceivable threat to this island country of 100,000 people and totally at odds with the pattern of other Eastern Caribbean states, most of which are unarmed.4
For the public, this statement was an early glimpse into Reagan’s sense of the island’s strategic importance. Though not mentioned in that particular speech, he was also apprehensive about how the turmoil might affect Panama Canal traffic.5 Overall, what concerned Reagan most was how Grenada fit into the picture of global Communism. He dubbed the coup a “Communist power grab.”6 Intelligence told him that the USSR and Cuba were building military installations on the island, including the landing strip, and stockpiling materiel.
With this intelligence, Grenada posed the hazard of not only a joint military installation orchestrated by Moscow and Havana but also another full-fledged “Cuba” operating in the Western Hemisphere. He was already committed to ceding “not one inch” of territory to Communism anywhere, least of all in America’s backyard, where he already dreaded Communism’s existence in Nicaragua and its prospects in El Salvador.
After Bishop was shot, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Grenada’s Caribbean neighbors were worried, and six of them sent a cable to Washington asking for help, which included a request to invade the island. That was the green light Reagan needed. Cap Weinberger’s Pentagon had already drawn up plans, and was now awaiting orders.
“He was very unequivocal,” recalled Reagan’s new national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, who replaced Clark on October 17. “He couldn’t wait.”7 When a White House staffer warned there could be a “harsh political reaction” to a U.S. invasion, Reagan replied: “I know that. I can accept that.” He ordered simply: “Do it.”8
They did. On October 25, 1983, some 5,000 U.S. troops charged the shores of Grenada in the largest U.S. military operation since Vietnam. There were remarkably few casualties, particularly when measured against what Americans had been tragically accustomed to only eight years earlier. In total, only 19 died, with a little over 100 wounded. By comparison, the United States lost 58,000 dead, or over 300 killed per month, to the Vietnam experience.9 The commander of the task force in Grenada, Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf III, boasted: “We blew them away.”10
While Americans supported the attack, it was quickly denounced by the international community. Even Reagan’s buddy Margaret Thatcher shouted at him on the telephone, in the harshest, most disapproving tone and language she ever directed at her friend: “As soon as I heard her voice,” said Reagan of their phone conversation, “I knew she was very angry.”11 Her response was indicative of the larger international reaction, as Reagan received almost no support abroad. The vote at the U.N. Security Council was 11 to 1 against the United States, while the General Assembly vote was a staggering 108 to 9, with America joined only by El Salvador, Israel, and (tellingly) the six Caribbean neighbors that requested U.S. assistance in the first place.12
Yet, once the job was done, U.S. troops found an enormous cache of weapons, armored vehicles, and military patrol boats. This included 10,000 assault rifles, 4,500 submachine guns, 11.5 million rounds of ammunition, 294 portable rocket launchers with 16,000 rockets, 15,000 hand grenades, 7,000 land mines, 23,000 uniforms, and much more.13 Also significant, during battle U.S. troops engaged 800 Cuban soldiers, making it clear that Grenada was not as isolated as many had believed.
Though the intervention later received some Pentagon criticism, with operational problems under the surface, it was a decisive victory and an emotional one. Only thirty hours after the start of the “rescue mission” (as Reagan called it), the first evacuated medical student to debark the airplane dropped to his knees and kissed the tarmac as he touched the soil of Charleston, South Carolina. It was the sort of smiling military triumph that had become frowningly unfamiliar to Americans. The student’s gesture brought a lump to the throat and tear to the eye of many Americans, their president included.
Images like the student and of the triumphant American soldiers provided an additional success for the war in that it played a notable role in restoring military morale, a process which Reagan had implemented at the start of his presidency. Here the stakes were much larger than simply an island; Grenada held the possibility to exorcise some of Vietnam’s ghosts, reminding Americans of their nation’s military might and the just cause for which Reagan wanted them to fight.