Nixon’s conclusion about the president was damning: “There is no way he [Reagan] can ever be allowed to participate in a private meeting with Gorbachev.”
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REVERSAL OF ROLES
Reagan and Nixon had completed a remarkable reversal of roles. In the 1970s, Nixon had pursued a working accommodation with the Soviet Union; eventually, Reagan had emerged as the leading Republican critic of this policy of détente. Now, in the 1980s, Reagan sought agreements with the Soviet Union that would ease the nuclear dangers of the Cold War—and Nixon, joined by Henry Kissinger and other veterans of the Nixon administration, disparaged his efforts. Reagan the hawk had become a dove; Nixon the dove had returned as a hawk.
It is useful to summarize the powerful interests that were arrayed against Reagan in early 1987 as he and Gorbachev sought limits on missiles and nuclear weapons. First, Reagan’s bedrock conservative supporters had abandoned him—if not in all respects, then certainly in his policies toward the Soviet Union. “For Western Europe, the lights may soon be going out again,” mourned National Review in one Cassandra-like editorial; it deemed Reagan’s attempts to negotiate a deal with Gorbachev to be “catastrophic.”
Second, the U.S. intelligence community maintained that, stylistic changes aside, Gorbachev was trying to reassert Soviet power in the traditional fashion. Summarizing his views of Gorbachev through the end of 1987, Robert Gates, the CIA’s deputy director and leading Soviet specialist, concluded: “He changed the tone and the face of Soviet foreign policy, but not the substance.”1
Third, many in America’s national-security elite—those who, like Nixon and Kissinger, had been directly involved in setting policy toward the Soviet Union for the previous four decades—were determinedly resisting Reagan’s attempts to curb or eliminate nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Even Frank Carlucci, whom Reagan brought in as his national security adviser at the end of 1986, told the president he had problems with the far-reaching ideas that had been discussed at Reykjavik.2
Against all these forces, Reagan enjoyed a couple of advantages of his own. The first was his own personal popularity, underlined by his overwhelming victory in the 1984 election. The second was the latitude he enjoyed as a second-term president. While retaining the powers of the nation’s chief executive, he would not be obliged to run for reelection again.
What accounted for the striking divergence between Reagan and his critics from the right wing and from Washington’s foreign-policy establishment? Why was Reagan so much more willing to contemplate far-reaching changes in the Cold War, to view Gorbachev as at least potentially an agent of fundamental change in the Soviet Union? How did Reagan and Nixon come to such different conclusions?
Many attributed Reagan’s behavior as a short-term response to the political problems he faced at the time. In late 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal broke; it was revealed that Reagan’s National Security Council had been secretly selling weapons to Iran and using the profits to fund the Contra rebels fighting against the government of Nicaragua. In the months that followed, Reagan’s presidency had hit its nadir. He had shuffled the top ranks of his administration; Carlucci had been brought in to replace John Poindexter as national security adviser, and Baker had taken the place of Donald Regan as White House chief of staff. On March 9, 1987, the cover of Time magazine carried a picture of Reagan with the question: “Can He Recover?” By this analysis, Reagan’s eagerness for a deal with Gorbachev represented an attempt to revive his own flagging administration after Iran-Contra.
Yet this explanation does not fit the facts. Nixon and the other critics of Reagan’s Soviet policy had been upset above all by his willingness at Reykjavik to contemplate the elimination of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. But the Reykjavik summit took place well before the Iran-Contra scandal burst forth. Iran-Contra had not prompted Reagan’s attempt to eliminate ballistic missiles; on the contrary, it had slowed down the effort that was already under way. The declassified archives show that soon after Reykjavik, the Reagan White House told the Pentagon to begin examining and making plans for Reagan’s goal of eliminating ballistic missiles. The initiative flagged when Iran-Contra led to Poindexter’s resignation, and Carlucci, his successor, made plain his dislike for what had taken place at Reykjavik. “Carlucci did not agree with the president’s proposal to destroy ballistic missiles or with his aspiration to eliminate nuclear weapons,” Jack Matlock, then the NSC’s leading Soviet expert, concluded sadly.3
Reagan’s determination to do business with Gorbachev thus demands other explanations beyond Iran-Contra. One is that Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz had more firsthand contact with the new Soviet leadership than other Americans. They were dealing directly with Gorbachev and his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, and this put them in a better position to sense Gorbachev’s eagerness, indeed growing desperation, for a deal with the United States that might limit Soviet military expenditures and free resources for the failing Soviet economy. Gates and others at the CIA were able to scrutinize all the objective signs of change, or lack of change, in the Soviet Union, yet from the distance of Washington, it was not easy for them to judge Gorbachev’s intentions or state of mind.
Even those who were able to meet with Gorbachev a single time, like Nixon, tended to view him through the prism of the Cold War, with all its stale imagery of velvet gloves and steel fists. Reagan and Shultz, meeting Gorbachev more than once, were able to intuit, however imperfectly, that these clichés didn’t fit. Fritz Ermarth, who succeeded Matlock as the Soviet specialist at the National Security Council, was deeply suspicious of Gorbachev’s intentions at the time. Many years later, he reflected on why he had been wrong and Reagan and Shultz more accurate. “A lot of Gorbachev’s revolutionary potential—not just his avowed purposes, but these areas of naiveté—were revealed in these one-on-one meetings,” Ermarth said. General William Odom, the army intelligence official who served as director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, said two decades later that he felt he, too, had underestimated Reagan during this period. “Reagan grasped what Gorbachev was trying to do, and he wanted him to do as much of it as possible,” said Odom.4
Reagan’s views and behavior cannot be explained entirely as an outgrowth of his direct contact with Gorbachev. He was also following through on ideas and policies he had begun to articulate in his first term, well before Gorbachev had become the Soviet leader. Those ideas included a desire to talk to the Soviet leadership even while seeking far-reaching change in the Soviet political and economic systems. Both of these goals had been enshrined in NSDD-75, the policy directive that set forth the Reagan administration’s underlying approach toward the Soviet Union; the document had been approved a few weeks before Reagan’s “evil empire” speech.
The hawks who championed tough policies toward the Soviets discovered that Reagan, while supportive, also broke into high-level discussions to emphasize the importance of compromise and diplomacy. Conservatives who were heartened by Reagan’s rhetoric and his defense buildup either missed or intentionally overlooked this aspect of Reagan. For their own part, liberals tended to overlook or to dismiss Reagan’s talk about abolishing nuclear weapons. This strand of Reagan’s thinking, too, could be found in his speeches even before Gorbachev’s rise to power. It was considerably more significant than anyone appreciated at the time.
Beyond these other factors, there was the most important difference of all between Reagan on the one hand and critics like Nixon on the other: a disagreement about the nature of the Cold War. Nixon’s view of the Cold War as a geopolitical contest, with each side able to annihilate the other, implied that neither side could ever win. For Reagan, however, America’s contest with the Soviet Union was about economic systems and ideals. When the Cold War was viewed in this fashion, it was conceivable to imagine that one side might fail and end up on “the ash heap of history.”