She had recently visited Washington for the first time since her husband’s death more than a year earlier. While visiting the White House as a guest of George W. Bush, she had suddenly been confronted with the new atmosphere since she had lived there two decades earlier. In the middle of the day, as she was watching a television news show, Secret Service agents suddenly rushed in and, overcoming her attempts to ignore them, swept her away to the secure bunker deep underneath the White House.
The reason, it turned out, was that a small Cessna plane had flown off course from rural Pennsylvania into restricted air space over Washington. Air force F-16s were scrambled to intercept the plane and came close to shooting it down before the plane, run by a confused pilot, finally turned away. The incident was a reminder of how the White House was more edgy from day to day after the events of September 11, 2001, than it had been at the peak of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had vastly more firepower than any terrorist group, but was also considerably more predictable. In fact, during the eight years in which she lived in the White House, Nancy Reagan had never once seen the bunker beneath it—and had not even known of its existence. “Maybe they showed it to Ronnie,” she mused.1
By 2005, Mrs. Reagan, not surprisingly, had few new stories she was willing to tell. In talking about her husband’s second term and the final years of the Cold War, she returned to the familiar ground she had trod many times before. She dwelled on the episodes in which she had played a central role, such as the firing of White House chief of staff Donald Regan in early 1987 and her continuing feuds with Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa. She offered characterizations of her husband that fit with the reigning images. “He was absolutely without guile, Ronnie,” Nancy Reagan asserted. “He just assumed that other people were that way too.”
Absolutely without guile. This is the interpretation of Reagan that has endured, both with conservatives who yearn to see him as a man of uncomplicated virtues, and among liberals who cling to the belief he was a dunce. It is the version of Reagan that many took from his television appearances, where his answers to questions were often formulaic; from the meetings where he deflected visitors and confrontation with stories and jokes; even from his diaries, where he recorded the events of the day (most of them, anyway) in a sanitized fashion and with a few brief impressions. It is the view of Reagan put forward by his wife, who devoted most of her life to protecting his image, with guile when necessary. Indeed, this may even have been the way Reagan perceived himself.
Yet any examination of Reagan’s policies in the last years of the Cold War will show that he acted with what certainly looks like guile—or if not guile, then crafty instincts. His actions sometimes did not fit with his rhetoric—and it is the blend of the two, of his words and his actions, by which Reagan should be judged. Ringing anti-Soviet speeches served to marshal support for conciliatory policies. Conversely, the continuing diplomacy made it easier for Reagan to give speeches reaffirming a belief in democratic principles without raising the hackles of Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders. Visitors found Reagan virtually impossible to pin down, and often that was the point. “He had a facility for charming people while he was not budging an inch,” observed Frank Carlucci, his national security adviser.2
To be sure, Reagan’s personal operating style sometimes seemed strange or even, occasionally, embarrassing. He chose to sign an important arms-control treaty with Gorbachev at a date and time set by his wife’s astrologer. He used the valuable time of a summit meeting to tell jokes that made his own advisers cringe. He was so detached from daily events by his final year in office that his top subordinates made many decisions on their own without telling him.
Nevertheless, the judgments on which he based his policy toward the Soviet Union during this period usually turned out to be correct—even when, in retrospect, other prominent American political leaders and foreign-policy experts were wrong. Reagan guessed that Gorbachev represented significant change—that he was not just another in a line of leaders eager to reassert Soviet power around the globe, despite what both conservatives and old hands like Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were arguing. He sensed that the Soviet economy was in desperate shape. He figured, rightly, that the Soviet Union would eventually be willing to enter into arms-control deals without the series of conditions it had previously set. He decided that Gorbachev would not react strongly to his speech at the Berlin Wall, despite what the State Department and the National Security Council were saying. Above all, Reagan recognized that the Cold War was not a permanent state of affairs; that it could, one day or another, draw to a close.
It seems fair to ask: How much of this was attributable to Reagan himself? Or to put it another way, was Reagan merely a tool or vehicle used by other people, other interests? Such questions are raised not merely by Reagan’s veneer of guilelessness, but also by his often-passive approach to decision making. An examination of the record, however, shows that no one person or group “owned” Reagan.
One frequent claim, most prevalent during Reagan’s early years in the White House, was that he was merely the instrument of conservative forces—of right-wing groups in the U.S. heartland and of military hawks in Washington. But during Reagan’s eight years in office, this interpretation became increasingly implausible, and by his final three years in office, it was demonstrably false. If Reagan had been merely a puppet of the American right, there would have been no embrace of Gorbachev, no drive to reduce America’s supplies of nuclear weapons and missiles, no treaty to ban intermediate-range missiles in Europe, no negotiated deals for the release of the imprisoned journalist Nicholas Daniloff, no abandonment of the “evil empire” label. If Reagan had heeded the wishes of conservatives, then George Shultz would have been replaced as secretary of state by someone like Jeane Kirkpatrick.
During Reagan’s final three years as president, frustrated American conservatives regularly offered a contrary theory: that he had become the tool of a cabal of “moderates” inside his administration. They complained that the president, in his policy toward the Soviet Union, was carrying out the agenda of a group of officials including Shultz, Frank Carlucci, Colin Powell, and Howard Baker, with Nancy Reagan lurking in the background. The conservatives kept crying, “Let Reagan be Reagan,” a slogan implying that Reagan was who they thought he was or wished him to be.
In fact, this supposed “moderate” faction did not own Reagan either. Shultz and others at the State Department and National Security Council tried repeatedly but in vain to persuade Reagan to change the Berlin Wall speech and to remove its core sentence, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” In 1988, Shultz and others were eager for Reagan to conclude a second major arms-control treaty with Gorbachev to limit intercontinental missiles. But the decision was up to Reagan, not Shultz, and in the end, the administration decided to hold off.
The impact of Reagan’s second-term policies—his summit meetings with Gorbachev, his arms control treaty, his declaration that there was no more evil empire—could be felt both inside the United States and in the Soviet Union.
At home, Reagan gradually brought the American public toward an awareness that the Soviet Union was changing and the Cold War subsiding. He overcame the resistance of the political right, effectively marginalizing it. In the fall of 1987, not only the leading conservative columnists but all the Republican presidential candidates except for Vice President George H. W. Bush attacked Reagan for his nonconfrontational approach to Gorbachev. In the Senate, Republican conservatives such as Dan Quayle determinedly challenged Reagan’s arms-control treaty. But in the end, the opposition melted away; Reagan’s treaty won more than ninety votes. After all, Reagan had been the political leader and indeed, the symbol of American conservatism for two decades. In this end-of-Cold-War drama, he succeeded in defusing opposition at home where other American leaders might well have failed. Gorbachev and his aides recognized Reagan’s political significance. “His big plus was his authority inside the country,” said Anatoly Adamishin, the Soviet deputy foreign minister. “Other leaders, like [Vice President George H. W.] Bush, had to cater to political forces. But Ronald Reagan could overcome the resistance of the hawks.”3