Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (122 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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There was another very cordial summit meeting in Washington, in December 1987, and in February 1988 Gorbachev promised the complete Soviet evacuation of Afghanistan within a year. The Soviets did leave within a year, having taken 28,000 combat dead for no remotely justifiable reason, and devastated much of the country. The puppet government they left behind was quickly overrun by the mujahedeen and Taliban the Americans in particular had armed, and the pro-Soviet regime crumbled in the next several years and its leaders either fled or were summarily executed.
Soon after the Afghan departure announcement, Gorbachev withdrew the Brezhnev Doctrine and declared that all the former satellite states were free to do as they wished as autonomous states. Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, playing off the popular Frank Sinatra song “My Way,” called this the “Sinatra Doctrine,” an amusing send-up of the penchant of Soviet and American leaders to lay claim to having established a doctrine. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and of the Warsaw Pact were widely predicted and were clearly presaged. President Reagan visited Moscow for another of his rapid-fire summits with Gorbachev in May 1988, and gave a well-received address at Moscow University praising the virtues of free enterprise. Many Western Sovietologists were now predicting the imminent collapse of the USSR itself, as leaders of the constituent republics and other more local jurisdictions were reorganizing in random and unprecedented ways. The USSR was like a jalopy going at excessive speed and starting to fall apart. Gorbachev never lost his faith in socialism and claimed all his reforms were designed to strengthen it. Though he had seen the astounding productivity of western Canada’s large farms, he never fully decollectivized Soviet agriculture. He did not grasp, then or subsequently, that the notion of “communism’s human face” was completely impractical; if it wasn’t totalitarian, or at least very authoritarian, it could not be imposed at all, and however it was imposed, it didn’t work very well. And this fact Ronald Reagan grasped with perhaps more conviction than any other American president.
The Democrats nominated three-term Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis for president and distinguished Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen for vice president. Dukakis was an intelligent and articulate man but appeared somewhat desiccated during the fall campaign. Bentsen was witty and knowledgeable and impressed the voters. Vice president George H.W. Bush won a fairly spirited nomination race with the Republican leader of the Senate and 1976 vice presidential candidate, Robert Dole, and chose as his vice presidential nominee Senator J. Danforth (Dan) Quayle of Indiana. Quayle had a good policy record and was quite amiable but seemed to lack gravitas and had some difficulty explaining why he spent the Vietnam War in the National Guard. He survived the grilling of the White House press corps and the national media, but never entirely got over the impression that he was a lightweight. The campaign was not very elevated, and the Republicans, under their chief strategist, Lee Atwater, lampooned Dukakis for his opposition to the death penalty, belief in paroling convicts, and opposition to obligatory recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance (which Bush and Quayle then mechanically and solemnly uttered at the start of all their campaign appearances no matter how mundane).
Like Eisenhower in 1960, had the Constitution and age (Reagan was now a sprightly 77) allowed it, the president would certainly have been able to win a third term, and Bush ran, essentially, as his stand-in and heir to his achievements and popularity. On election day, Bush and Quayle won safely enough, 48.9 million votes (53.4 percent) and 426 electoral votes from 40 states to 41.8 million votes for Dukakis and Bentsen (45.7 percent) and 111 electoral votes from 10 states and the District of Columbia. The Congress was almost unchanged, with Democratic gains of one Senate and two House seats. It was the fifth Republican victory in six presidential elections starting in 1968.
Mikhail Gorbachev had made his last meeting with Ronald Reagan while they were both in office when he came to New York to address the United Nations in December. He announced a 500,000-man unilateral reduction in the Red Army. It was a fine capstone to a very productive, if rather unequal, relationship, and Gorbachev got off to a very good start with the president-elect (whom he had already met a number of times). By this time, large parts of the USSR itself were in disintegration mode. Popular Front, non-communist coalitions had gained control of the Baltic states and there was irredentist and separatist violence in the three Caucasus republics, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. In October and November 1988, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia all declared themselves to be legislatively sovereign, and declared their native languages and their traditional flags to be official. Gorbachev flew directly back from Washington to Armenia, which had been devastated by an earthquake, and was understandably incensed to be besieged by protesters complaining of mistreatment of Armenians in Azerbaijan, especially in the district of Nagorno-Karabakh, which sought to secede from Azerbaijan and unite with Armenia. There was immense agitation in both republics and daily demonstrations of up to 500,000 people in Baku, the Aziri capital. Gorbachev imposed a curfew on Baku (a city of two million) on December 5, and would have to try to impose order in Nagorno-Karabakh in February with paratroopers and a tank regiment, after it purported to secede from Azerbaijan.
It is always a matter of skill whether the political center is a position of strength or weakness, and Gorbachev, advocating socialism and union of the country, was caught between conservative communists who feared liberalization would kill communism and reformers who did not believe communism could be reformed. This was Gorbachev’s insoluble dilemma, because both groups were correct.
Ronald Reagan left office with a high approval rating. Though the only important domestic accomplishment in his second term was a bipartisan tax reform bill, he avoided the usual lame-duck problem with the great progress that he steadily made with the Soviet leader throughout his second term. Reagan had sharply lowered the personal tax rates of all taxpayers, and had produced very high rates of productivity increase (almost 4 percent per year for most of his time as president) and over 18 million net new jobs. Reagan’s reinvigoration of America’s economy and national morale, coupled to his massive strengthening of the American military and then his masterstroke of proposing development of an air-tight missile defense, had severely rattled the three infirm septuagenarians who preceded Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader. His calm firmness, gift for self-deprecation, constant good humor, sure political instinct, remarkable human qualities, absence of any officiousness or pomposity, and his unblustering espousal of good intentions impressed the nation and eventually the world. His almost hypnotic eloquence as an orator (he was in fact a benign demagogue, though his opponents tried to minimize his talents as those of a “good communicator”), as well as his exploitation of the addiction of his opponents to underestimate him, made him one of the most formidable politicians and outstanding presidents in the nation’s history. (Former defense secretary and longtime Democratic insider and Washington fixer Clark Clifford called him “an amiable dunce,” but Clifford didn’t think much of Eisenhower, either.)
Reagan stuck to prosperity through the economic growth of free enterprise and lower taxes, and peace through strength. He delivered both and his standing as a president became clearer after he had retired and the scale of his achievement towered over the simplicity of his methods. Ronald Reagan was fortunate in having Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Helmut Kohl, and Trudeau’s successor in Canada, Brian Mulroney, as allies, and Mikhail Gorbachev as the eventual Soviet leader opposite him. But that takes nothing from his status as probably, next to (in chronological order only) Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, the greatest American president. He was revered as an ex-president and mourned by the whole nation when he died, aged 93, in 2004, after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. For the first time, foreign leaders (Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney) were among the eulogists at the state funeral of an American president.
10. PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH
 
George Bush was formidably qualified to be president: after being a well-decorated combat navy aviator while only 20, in World War II, a Yale alumnus, and a successful businessman, he served two terms in the House of Representatives and ran two unsuccessful but very respectable campaigns for the U.S. Senate in Texas; served as ambassador to the UN, Republican Party chairman, representative to China, and director of the CIA; and became only the sixth person to serve two full terms as vice president. He would be, as Richard Nixon wrote, “a good man with good intentions ... [but] no discernible pattern of political principle ... no political rhythm, no conservative cadence, and not enough charismatic style to compensate.”
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He did, however, have a considerable aptitude for foreign policy and was well-respected personally by other national leaders. His secretary of state would be former White House chief of staff and Treasury secretary under Reagan, the very capable Houston lawyer and Bush’s political manager, James A. Baker. They had inherited a winning hand from their retired leader and didn’t have to wait long for America’s only remaining rival in the world to fold.
The erosion of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc accelerated dramatically. In March and April of 1989, there were the first free party elections in Russia since 1917 (and there hadn’t been any for positions of real authority before that). Gorbachev claimed that 84 percent of those elected were Soviet Communist Party candidates, but their party loyalty was soft in many cases. Two leading new legislators were Russian patriotic leader and reformer Boris Yeltsin and scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. Gorbachev was desperately struggling to maintain ultimate central authority even as he yielded jurisdiction to the constituent Soviet republics. He did address the European Parliament at Strasbourg on July 6, 1989, and raised a subject that clearly indicated where he would like to take Soviet foreign policy if he could keep his country together, when he spoke of “our common European home.” He was well-received, but this was the old ploy, much used by de Gaulle and his followers, of playing the continental solidarity card against the U.S. connection (except, of course, when American intervention was necessary to protect or liberate Europeans from each other, as it had been for the last 40 years). It could have been a real distraction to the West if Gorbachev’s own position had been stronger.
Whatever he thought of the satellite countries, he was too preoccupied to pay much attention to them now. On August 19, 1989, the democratic Catholic journalist and intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki was installed as prime minister of Poland, after the Solidarity labor movement backed by the pope had forced compromises on the government. Institutional democratic reforms followed quickly. In October, Hungary legislated itself to be a democratic republic; the Soviet Union pledged by treaty to withdraw; Imre Nagy and his followers, whom the Russians and their Hungarian followers had executed in 1956, were reinterred with state honors; and the borders were opened to the West. On November 9, the government of East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) announced that the barriers between East Germany and the West would be opened, and the Berlin Wall (the “Antifascist Protection Rampart”) was swarmed over by huge crowds on both sides, chipped at, and soon attacked and pierced by heavy equipment. The East German state, which in 1953 had “lost confidence in the people,” dissolved. The Czechoslovak communist state progressively disintegrated through the autumn and formerly imprisoned dissident and intellectual Václav Havel was elected president on December 29. The reform leader deposed by the Soviet intervention in 1968, Alexander Dubcek, returned as parliamentary speaker.
The 24-year dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu and the entire Communist Party government in Romania ended most dramatically of all. Ceausescu addressed a large crowd in the chief square of Bucharest on December 21, 1989, condemning dissent in a provincial town. The crowd booed and jeered and he fell silent, tried to regain attention, promised everyone a raise, and retreated inside, barricaded in the party headquarters by the crowd overnight. As reports came in of the state falling apart throughout the country, his elite forces suppressed and injured many demonstrators, the defense minister committed suicide, and the armed forces deserted. Ceausescu emerged again on December 22 to try to speak, and the crowd threw stones and bottles at him. The protesters smashed down the doors of the building and only missed lynching their ostensible leader and his wife by a few seconds, as they fled from the roof by helicopter. The army closed the airspace and the helicopter had to land. The Ceausescus were arrested by local police and held until a military unit arrived. The first couple was held for three days, then given a perfunctory drumhead “trial,” found guilty of a vast range of offenses from embezzlement to genocide, taken to a wall while Ceausescu sang the “Internationale,” and executed by firing squad. At least, unlike many other deposed leaders who were executed in this narrative, from Mussolini to Nuri as Said (Iraq) to Najibullah (Afghanistan), their corpses were not displayed and desecrated.
Apparently indifferent to the collapse in shame and shambles of the rule Stalin imposed and his successors maintained on Eastern Europe, contrary to Stalin’s commitments at Yalta in 1945, Gorbachev had another very jovial summit meeting with Bush, at Malta in early December. Also in December, the United States, supposedly motivated by the shooting of an American serviceman and the suppression of the results of free elections, seized Panama City with 24,000 troops who had been airlifted to the Canal Zone (which had not yet been vacated under Carter’s treaty with Panama). The authoritarian president, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA operative, was chased into the residence of the apostolic nuncio, and eventually surrendered to U.S. forces (who did not violate the Vatican’s diplomatic privilege). The democratically elected president, Guillermo Endara, was installed and the removal of Noriega appeared to be popular with the Panamanians and is justifiable.

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