“Very much so, Mr. President.”
“As to your guys, well, those who are…so quick to react with their guns and rifles to anything when you land them in other countries, I shall describe them as ‘our best missionaries abroad.’”
“It will be a perfect description. Magnificent guys! Incidentally, Mr. President, I gave instructions to cook up photos depicting them giving a hand to doctors inoculating the locals…”
“Perfect of you, Cap! You are a big strategist and a great politician rolled into one. And in the future, in all countries we intend to conquer, we must inoculate all the locals against the ideological contagion brought in by the ‘Red agents’….”
“I would hate to hide from you, my President, that there are some killed and wounded.”
“Let this not trouble you. I’ll just say that it was the Americans who were dying and getting wounded while defending the lives of others and upholding freedom and peace…”
“You are a giant, Mr. President!”
“Thank you, my loyal minister, for this accurate comparison and [I’ll] be sure [to] repeat it to Nancy. She will be very pleased…”21
The phrase “our best missionaries abroad” is a slap at Reagan’s religiousness and anti-Communist crusading. Not stopping there, the TASS satire ended with a fanatical Reagan going nuclear a few days later:
Seated in his armchair in the Oval Office back from the news conference, Reagan thought he richly deserved praise for his firmness: “Well done for me to have told them that we can do any other country in like we did with Grenada.” Then his thought strayed and he clearly saw himself in “Air Force One” on the morrow after a nuclear free-for-all. He is eating his breakfast with gusto now and then glancing into the porthole. Enters the defense secretary who reports: “My President, the earth is over and done with,” and then proceeds to decorate him with the Pentagon medal “for the destruction of life on the planet.”
“Serves them right!” the President says. “Next time they will think twice before interfering with my attempts to restructure the world the way I like….”
Yes, the nut from California had finally done it: he had pushed the button. The Grenada “cowboy,” as the Soviet press dubbed him, had nuked the world.
Like the American left, a popular tactic on the Soviet side was to downplay the U.S. action as a petty operation directed at a tiny, and thereby unimportant, country—a line that contradicted Moscow’s obsessive attention. To buttress this viewpoint, the Soviets frequently borrowed from American columnists. To cite just one example, TASS devoted an entire statement to an article by Washington Post associate editor Robert Kaiser, titled, “Is This a Foreign Policy or a Recipe for Disaster?”22 Kaiser’s 3,000-word op-ed in the Sunday “Outlook” section excoriated Reagan policy, and the Soviets loved it: “History?” Kaiser begged. “It has no apparent place in Ronald Reagan’s view of the world, except for the caricatured version he has carried around in his head for years.” In this passage, Kaiser inadvertently gave the Soviet propaganda machine a gem on Grenada, and TASS seized it, quoting it liberally and circulating it around the world.23
Another line of Moscow’s propaganda assault, which was prolific in Pravda, was to refer to the Caribbean “adventure” as a “piratic attack.”24 Soviet commentator Valentin Zorin, who judged Reagan a “blockhead” who “does not care to think,”25 called the invasion “naked banditry.” Americans, he claimed, were “the most misinformed people on earth.” This was the result, he said, curiously speaking of the United States and not of the USSR, of “a gigantic propaganda machine…. When you leave the country, you get access to normal information.” Yet, a frustrated Zorin reluctantly conceded that, “A considerable number of Americans applauded Reagan.”26
“WE’RE GOING TO WIN THE COLD WAR”
The radiance exuding from Reagan and his team was clear in an internal report only days after Grenada. That November, Reagan and his contingent of underminers got an exciting glimpse of the depth of Soviet desperation, courtesy of Herb Meyer.
Meyer was special assistant to Bill Casey and vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, a prestigious seat at the CIA, where he observed the full scope and brunt of the Reagan strategy. That strategy, said Meyer, citing the tandem of Reagan and Casey, was “very dangerous…very gutsy….And there were a lot of people who said, ‘Oh dear, you’re right, the bear is wounded. Don’t poke sticks at a wounded bear.’ But the Reagan-Casey approach was: ‘Hey, my enemy is on his knees. It’s a good time to break his head.’”27
It was in this spirit that Herb Meyer revealed dramatic intelligence findings in the weeks after Grenada in November 1983. This intelligence demonstrated that the Soviets now understood Reagan’s rejection of their nation’s very existence: “[Y]ou could see that in the intelligence. What they were saying was: ‘Uh, oh, he caught on.’ Because they knew they could be had. One thing about a bully: he knows exactly how strong he is and how weak he is. And the Soviets knew that Reagan knew that they could be had.”28
This new development caused Meyer to write an extraordinary memo, read carefully up through the chain of command. In his memo, Meyer assessed that the USSR was entering a “terminal phase,” but in spite of this good news, there was a danger: a cornered Kremlin might opt for war. On the other hand, wrote Meyer, “If present trends continue, we’re going to win the Cold War.”29
It was a view that mirrored Reagan’s own precisely, only this time it was supported by concrete analysis from the intelligence community. This memo was the articulation of a point which Reagan had known long before he was president: that the Soviet system would weaken with each passing year, and at some point would collapse, giving rise to a wave of a freedom. It was a proclamation that he reiterated that December just before Christmas, telling French reporters from Le Figaro that contrary to what Communism professed, it was “freedom which is infectious and democracy which is the wave of the future. The tide of history is a freedom tide.”30
His year of strong words and decisive action was helping to expedite the Soviet demise. Now, as the focus turned to the election year ahead, the strategy to undermine would need to rely on the mechanisms that the NSC had already put in motion. Next, it was time to let the people decide who would lead them forward in the four years ahead.
14. Winning the Second Term: 1984
WITH THE COLD WAR STRATEGY NOW IN PLACE, RONALD REAGAN had to focus on another political strategy, one that, if it failed, would never allow an opportunity for that “take-down” strategy that had consumed the fertile anti-Soviet minds at Bill Clark’s National Security Council. The president needed to preserve himself before he could hasten the decomposition of the system that he believed was rotting as quickly as the occupant of Lenin’s tomb. In short, Ronald Reagan had to get reelected. As such, 1984 was not so much about formulating policy to win the Cold War but, instead, devising a political campaign to win Reagan the Electoral College.
Because Reagan believed that Grenada reflected America’s recovery and return to greatness, the operation continued to play a prominent role in his speeches and words well into 1984. In a January interview with the Washington Post, kicking off the election year, the president said he perceived a “new feeling,” a “great change” in the “confidence” of Americans. “I think the reaction of our people to the success of our rescue mission in Grenada was an indication.”1 These were sentiments that he would continue to reiterate throughout 1984, as he claimed that Grenada had not only helped that region “but perhaps helped all Americans stand a little taller.”2