Haig, the Reagan appointee who symbolized continuity with the Nixon-Kissinger era, had been eased out as secretary of state in 1982 and had been replaced by George Shultz, the former treasury secretary whom Nixon had denounced in his memo to Reagan as lacking a depth of understanding in foreign policy. Jack F. Matlock, Jr., who served as a Soviet specialist on Reagan’s National Security Council and later as U.S. ambassador in Moscow, described succinctly the underlying disagreement in approach between Haig and Reagan. “He [Haig] was less sanguine than Reagan and Shultz that the Soviet Union could change, and therefore posed more limited goals for U.S. policy than they eventually did,” wrote Matlock. “[He] would very likely have settled for something resembling a cease-fire in place. This would have reduced pressure for internal reform in the Soviet Union…. The world would have seemed safer to Western publics, but the East-West divide would have remained. The Cold War would perhaps have been dormant for a time, but would not have ended as a result.”17
The Nixon veterans reacted to Reagan’s first-term Soviet policies with a peculiar blend of horror and admiration. They were taken aback by Reagan’s rhetoric and by his emphasis on moral concerns and ideals, rather than geopolitics, as the basis for American foreign policy. Yet the old Nixon team also recognized that Reagan had managed to win public support for his defense buildup and anti-Soviet policies and had overcome the opposition of liberals and Democrats—goals the Nixonites had sought but failed to accomplish in the 1970s. “Reagan was succeeding at what Nixon and Ford had wanted to do,” observed Peter Rodman, a former aide to Kissinger.18
The Nixonites sought during this period to play the role of intermediaries between the Reagan administration and the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger met from time to time with Dobrynin to offer information on what the Reagan White House was thinking and to offer tips on how to cope with Reagan. In these conversations, they sometimes spoke in scathing terms about the president. “Henry Kissinger… stressed that the Reagan administration had no coherent program to deal with the Soviet Union because Reagan had never thought about it seriously, and the State Department was characteristically lacking in initiative and courage to suggest new ideas,” recorded Dobrynin.19 Conversely, Nixon and Kissinger also offered advice to the Reagan White House about what the Soviets were thinking and about how to deal with Moscow.
Harmony appeared to prevail. Kissinger served as head of a presidential commission appointed by Reagan to study American policy in Central America. Brent Scowcroft chaired another commission appointed to study missile deployments. In public, the Nixonites continued to line up behind Reagan throughout his first term, suppressing the disagreements that would burst into the open only a couple of years later.
-5-
NIXON DETECTS GORBACHEV’S “STEEL FIST”
On November 6, 1984, Reagan was elected for a second term, defeating Walter Mondale everywhere but Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Summarizing the campaign two weeks later, Henry Kissinger complained in his newspaper column that both Democrats and Republicans had wrongly suggested that there could be some resolution to the Cold War. The Democrats had argued peace might be attainable through negotiations, while the Republicans talked as though military power would lead to peace. Kissinger ridiculed all such suggestions. “There are no final ‘happy endings,’” Kissinger wrote. “Whatever they may agree on, the United States and the Soviet Union will remain superpowers impinging globally on each other. Ideological hostility will continue. Specific, precise arrangements can, indeed must be made. But they are more likely to ameliorate tensions than to end them.”1
It was a classic statement of the belief in the permanence of the Cold War. In this view, since the basis of the conflict between the two superpowers was geopolitical, and since neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had the military strength to defeat the other, there could be no way for the Cold War to end. Moreover, since each power had enough nuclear weapons to obliterate the other, and each side viewed its nuclear weapons as fundamental to its security, the unending nature of the Cold War was linked inextricably to the nuclear standoff. This static view failed to reckon with the possibility that the Cold War was also a battle of ideas in which the belief system of one of the two superpowers might crumble, or that it was an economic competition, in which one of the two superpowers might not last. The Kissingerian view also did not envision the possibility that an American president or a Soviet leader might consider the elimination of his nuclear arsenal.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did not see themselves as examples of Cold War inertia or as resistant to fundamental change. They were simply applying their views of the way the Cold War had worked, based on their own experiences in government. Over the next several years, however, Ronald Reagan and a new Soviet leader would gradually begin to operate in a different fashion, based on different assumptions. The Nixonites would insist all the while that this could not happen, that the possibility of far-reaching change was illusory.
The new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was appointed general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 11, 1985. During Reagan’s first term, the Soviet leadership had passed in remarkably short order from Leonid Brezhnev, who died in November 1982 after eighteen years in office, to Yuri Andropov, who spent fifteen months at the helm, to Konstantin Chernenko, who lasted only eleven months. Gorbachev thus became the fourth Soviet leader in four years. In Moscow, the progression of aging Soviet leaders from frailty to illness to death watch to funeral had became almost a ritual; the repeated deaths served as a symbol of a system in decay and a leadership unable to summon the energy to change. Gorbachev was picked above all because, at the age of fifty-four, he was relatively young, healthy, firm of voice, and unlikely to die any time soon.
Gorbachev represented a new generation of Soviet leaders. They were known as shestidesyatnaki, Russian for “men of the sixties.” They had come of age in the early 1960s, the brief period of Nikita Khrushchev’s challenge to orthodox Stalinism, between the terrifying repression of the Stalin era and the stagnation of the Brezhnev years.2 Gorbachev and the leaders around him, such as Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he soon appointed as his foreign minister, were eager to get the Soviet Union moving again, to reinvigorate or even to change the system.
The ascension of Gorbachev thus brought to the fore old and unresolved questions in the United States about the nature of the Soviet regime and its Communist system: Could the system ever be changed? Did the nature of the regime matter to the United States? Was the Cold War primarily a conflict of tanks and missiles, or was it a contest of beliefs and economic systems?
Nixon sketched out his own vision of an everlasting Cold War a few months after Gorbachev took office. Writing both in the New York Times and at greater length in Foreign Affairs magazine, the former president warned that Gorbachev represented merely a new face for the same old Soviet policies. “We must disabuse ourselves from the start of the much too prevalent view that if only the two [American and Soviet] leaders could develop a new ‘tone’ or ‘spirit’ in their relationship, our problems would be solved,” said Nixon. “Such factors are irrelevant when nations have irreconcilable differences.” The extensive press coverage of Gorbachev’s personal qualities—his firm handshake, sense of humor, and more fashionable dress—represented an obsession with style over substance, Nixon wrote. “Anyone who reaches the top in the Soviet hierarchy is bound to be a dedicated Communist and a strong, ruthless leader who supports the policy of extending Soviet domination into the non-Communist world.”3 Nixon’s words sounded sober and prudent, but they turned out to be largely wrong. Over the next few years, Gorbachev would demonstrate that he was a dedicated Communist but not a ruthless one, and that he did not press for Soviet domination in the non-Communist world. Indeed, he even loosened the grip on the Eastern European countries already in the Soviet orbit.