In the 1970s, Reagan judged that the USSR had stepped into a void vacated by a defeatist America; to make a positive difference in the world again, the United States needed to reclaim its resolve. And such could not happen, he felt, under a president who produced “more Vietnams.” Any real use of U.S. military power needed to be rare and quick and successful—meaning rapid victory with few lives lost. Despite his hawkish reputation, Reagan was quite restrained in using military force, and did so infrequently.14 Grenada could be the anti-Vietnam. And it became the anti-Vietnam; it eroded the Vietnam Syndrome and reversed the defeatism.
Adding credence to that sentiment were the words from recent Republican commander-in-chief Richard Nixon, who commended Reagan and Grenada, noting that the operation “helped Reagan tremendously and lifted the spirit of the country. If you go in and nail the bastards without losing your men, you can go a long way politically…. [O]nce you make the commitment to do it, you’ve got to go in there and bomb the hell out of them with everything you’ve got.” Nixon assessed: “There can be no hemming and hawing or hand wringing. Make the goddamned decision, and do it…. Keep it as short as possible; the short operations always work best.” We saw that in Grenada, said Nixon.15
It was puzzling, then, that the Grenada operation was ridiculed by liberals because it appeared so easy. Future Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright dismissively likened the operation to a football game pitting an NFL team against “The Little Sisters of the Poor.”16 Her sarcasm was mild compared to Democratic Party voices like former vice president Walter Mondale, Jesse Jackson, Senator Pat Leahy, Senator John Kerry, and the editorial pages of the New York Times.
This form of criticism was as disturbing as baffling: The Grenada operation was not simple, as is true for any military operation—a fact painfully obvious to those of the Vietnam generation, like Madeleine Albright and John Kerry. In truth, there are no easy military victories, and as demonstrated by U.S. interventions from the Bay of Pigs to Desert One, many seemingly straightforward operations had turned into fiascoes.
Despite criticism from the left, the need for a morale boost in the form of a sound military victory had been clear to Reagan for quite some time, a point that he reiterated during a speech at the Heritage Foundation shortly before the invasion. This was one of Reagan’s most illuminating presidential talks, in which he again used the “sad, bizarre” line on Communism’s doom as well as assuring his audience that “a democratic revolution is underway.” He laid down his goaclass="underline" “The goal of the free world must no longer be stated in the negative, that is: resistance to Soviet expansionism. The goal of the free world must instead be stated in the affirmative. We must go on the offensive with a forward strategy for freedom.”17 Equally interesting, particularly in light of the Grenada operation soon to come, was what Reagan stated about morale:
You can all remember the days of national malaise and international humiliation. Everywhere in the world freedom was in retreat and America’s prestige and influence were at low ebb. In Afghanistan, the liberty of a proud people was crushed by brutal Soviet aggression; in Central America and Africa, Soviet-backed attempts to install Marxist dictatorships were successfully underway; in Iran, international law and common decency were mocked as 50 American citizens were held hostage; and in international forums, the United States was held up to abuse and ridicule by outlaw regimes and police state dictatorships…. All this is changing. While we cannot end decades of decay in only 1000 days, we have fundamentally reversed the ominous trends of a few years ago.18
Coming only weeks before Grenada, this statement is significant in two ways: First, Reagan sensed a turn around in the nation’s spirits before Grenada. Second, he unknowingly sensed such a turnaround as a time approached when his Caribbean neighbors would request U.S. help in Grenada. As a result, he was especially prone to view Grenada as not just a liberation but a morale restorer once the request came in.
As the crisis unfolded three weeks later, Reagan saw a chance to chip away at the syndrome that had tied the hands of recent American leaders. He later wrote:
Frankly, there was another reason I wanted secrecy [for the Grenada mission]. It was what I call the “post-Vietnam syndrome,” the resistance of many in Congress to the use of military force abroad for any reason, because of our nation’s experience in Vietnam….We were already running into this phenomenon in our efforts to halt the spread of communism in Central America, and some congressmen were raising the issue of “another Vietnam” in Lebanon while fighting to restrict the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief.
We couldn’t say no to those six small countries [Caribbean neighbors of Grenada] who had asked us for help. We’d have no credibility or standing in the Americas if we did. If it ever became known, which I knew it would, that we had turned them down, few of our friends around the world would trust us completely as an ally again.19
Moreover, very importantly, Reagan knew that the Americans in Grenada were at risk as potential hostages, posing a repeat of the Iranian crisis that had already sunk American spirit. Hence, doing nothing in Grenada could hazard another loss to morale and become an even greater detriment to the American position.
Further, there was an additional, previously unexpected need to boost American morale: Just two days before the invasion, 241 U.S. Marines were killed by a radical Muslim suicide bomber at their barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. While the decision to invade Grenada was made before the Beirut disaster, the operation became a face-saving counterweight to the tragedy in Beirut.
MOSCOW’S GRENADA REACTION
Despite the high morale that Grenada produced in the United States, Moscow was predictably unhappy with the invasion’s outcome. Reagan’s Grenada “triumphalism” nauseated the USSR—a measure of the operation’s success. The Kremlin knew that Reagan’s run for a second term was only a year away. Moscow hoped upon hope that Reagan would lose next November. Thus, to the Soviets, the win in Grenada was bad news not only because it stemmed Communism’s advance but because it boosted Reagan politically.
TASS decried how “the master of the White House” had “strived to convince his compatriots that they ‘can be proud’ of that operation.” What was there to be proud of? America had flung a “mighty naval armada” and thousands of Marines at a “tiny island state” that did nothing wrong in “a policy of state-inspired terrorism.”20 If that was not strong enough, TASS released this stinging satire of an imaginary conversation between Reagan and Secretary of Defense Weinberger:
The telephone rang in the U.S. President’s bedroom in late evening on November the Second.
“My President,” the familiar triumphant voice of the defense secretary was heard over the phone, “the island has been done with! The sky is cloudless over the whole of Grenada….”
“Caspar, dear, you are a hero! And I will accept no objections from you on that score! You have razed to the ground the island’s university and thus liberated a thousand of our guys studying there. Glory to you, Cap! Unless you object, at tomorrow’s news conference I shall refer to the invasion not as an ‘invasion’ as I was rather rash to describe it previously, but as a ‘remarkable operation,’ or even as a ‘rescue mission.’”