Penguin History of the United States of America (130 page)

Their discomfiture was greatest in the Department of the Interior. A legacy of the great westward movement of the nineteenth century was that the federal government was possessed of something like half the land west of the 100th meridian.
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This was land (much of it intended for homesteading) that the nineteenth-century market had not been able to
absorb; and beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency (or perhaps with the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872) most of it had come to be set aside for conservation purposes, and was to be developed only under strict controls. After 1962, when Rachel Carson published her appalling warning,
Silent Spring
, environmental protection had become a hugely popular cause, making the despoliation of the wilderness ever more difficult. To win votes, the Nixon administration had set up the Environmental Protection Agency (part of the Interior Department, which also administered the public lands), and it had been operating with fair success for nearly ten years when Reagan took office.

Oilmen, timber men, ranchers, developers, mining corporations: these westerners had long been chafing at the ever more stringent federal regulations which prevented them from getting their hands on the vast wealth of various kinds locked up in the national domain, and with the coming of Reagan and his slogan of deregulation they thought that their time had arrived (it was one of the reasons they had voted for him). James Watt, who had once compared environmentalists to Nazis, was made Secretary of the Interior, and said that his mission was to ‘mine more, drill more, cut more timber, to use our resources rather than keep them locked up.’
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Appropriations for the EPA were cut by half, and the agency’s new head, Anne Burford, set out to water down, if not to thwart, all the regulations enforcing the environmental laws which had been passed since 1969. Watt had a genius for making enemies, and Burford was a fatally inexperienced administrator, but what really destroyed them was their cavalier assumption that having won a presidential election they could safely ignore the law, defy the environmental movement and cosy up to their business friends. Had Washington been a mere state capital they might have got away with it; but Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the national press and the ever-more active lobbying system easily saw them off. Both had to resign in 1983. They had not really understood the difference between private and public life; when their opinions and activities became embarrassing to the President, they had to go, and the
status quo
was restored. (Burford was replaced by William Ruckelshaus, the EPA’s first director). Similar embarrassments occurred elsewhere: the business mentality found it hard to grasp that you do not own the government because you are appointed to it, nor can you ignore the laws against conflict of interest. By 1983, 225 of Reagan’s appointees had been investigated for improprieties or even criminality. The great reform foundered amid allegations that Reagan’s was the most corrupt administration in American history.

The pattern which has emerged from consideration of Reagan’s domestic record appears again when his conduct of foreign policy is examined. Once more the victory of 1980 is seen to have brought to power an eager crowd
of ideologues; once more their excesses threaten the prospects of the administration, and indeed nearly bring about the destruction of the President himself; once more common sense reasserts itself, and the normal course of US policy is resumed; but this time there is also an unexpected and tremendous pay-off, which ensures Ronald Reagan’s place in history.

He was in many respects an untypical conservative; what he chiefly seems to have wanted to conserve were the achievements and attitudes of the Roosevelt years (even if he sometimes asserted that FDR opposed the welfare state); but there is little doubt that his anti-communism was strongly and sincerely held; was, perhaps, his conservatism’s essence. He and his friends judged, rather unfairly, that the United States was not safe from Soviet aggression while Carter was President, and they interpreted Soviet policy in the late 1970s, especially the invasion of Afghanistan, as renewed proof of communist ambition and hostility. What President Reagan famously called the ‘empire of evil’ was spreading its wings again, and America was required to re-commit herself to resistance. The fact that she had already been doing so under Carter, for example by launching the extremely expensive Trident nuclear submarine programme, was firmly ignored, and the defence budget went up by roughly 50 per cent in five years. (This delighted both the Pentagon and its contractors, many of whom were generous contributors to Reagan and the Republican party; it was less welcome to Reagan’s economic advisers, who were trying to balance the budget.) During Reagan’s first term, arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union gradually sank into the sand, not without moments of drama; by 1984 Moscow had abandoned negotiations with Washington as hopeless. The CIA was once more given its head, and the White House gaily undertook to defend American and Western interests aggressively, whatever it took, wherever was necessary (except in South-East Asia). This mode of conducting the most important business of the United States nearly ended in complete disaster, for Reagan at any rate.

He himself can largely be blamed for what happened. Henry Kissinger (who was still occasionally called to the White House to give advice) noticed that Reagan did not seem much interested in diplomacy; he only paid keen attention when the subject of his own speeches came up (an actor and his lines); ‘It was as though long-term strategy was something other people were paid to worry about.’
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He was a lazy man; next to Roosevelt, his hero was Calvin Coolidge, and he hung his portrait in the White House; he joked, ‘It’s true that hard work never killed anybody, but I figured why take the chance?’ He rationalized his natural distaste for hard work by adopting the principle that it was his business to lay down the main lines of policy and then leave his subordinates to get on with carrying it out. Jimmy Carter had often let himself be swamped by detail, so this attitude had something to commend it; but Reagan carried it much too far. He was also far too
casual about questions of legality and constitutionality, which encouraged similar attitudes in his subordinates, as we have already seen. Worst of all, his hands-off style meant that the administration was constantly at feud with itself. Nobody could say with any certainty what its policy was; it depended too much on who had last got the President’s attention.

So calamities occurred. In 1983, during an ill-judged intervention in the Lebanon, where a ferocious civil war was raging, 24 US marines were killed when their barracks was blown up. In 1986 Congress and the press discovered that elements in the Reagan administration, in defiance of public commitments to have no dealings with terrorist regimes, and of express Congressional decision, had entered upon an intrigue to sell arms to Iran via Israel; the money resulting from the sale was to be used to subsidize a rebellion in Nicaragua against a left-wing government which Washington right-wingers (including the President) regarded as a dangerous tool of the Soviet Union in Central America. They were as unreasonably obssessed with the
Sandinistas
of Nicaragua as the Kennedy brothers had been with Fidel Castro. Reagan at times talked as if he expected a red tide to come lapping at any moment at the borders of Texas. He propped up a particularly unpleasant regime of right-wing thugs in El Salvador, where there was also a civil war; he launched an armed intervention to overthrow a Marxist gang which seized power on the island of Grenada in 1983 (but that looked less like a principled exercise of American power than an attempt to make people forget about the recent disaster in the Lebanon). Public opinion did not share his anxieties; Americans were only anxious lest the President plunge them into another adventure like that in Vietnam. Public opinion was wise: left to himself, Reagan would no doubt have done so and, surreptitiously, that is just what his zealous but thick-headed assistant, Colonel Oliver North, tried to do. In his usual idle way Reagan let things get out of hand; he forgot that he had sworn to uphold and execute the laws. The Iran-Contra
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caper was as potentially damaging to the Constitution as Watergate itself; but Congress could not bear the thought of dragging itself and the country through the misery of another impeachment, this time of an immensely popular president.
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It was content to lay bare the truth through a series of reports and investigations, and to let Reagan exhibit himself as a shuffler, if not a liar, when he responded to investigators’ questions with such answers as ‘I just have no way of recalling anything specific as to what you are asking.’

But once more his luck saved Ronald Reagan from the consequences of his own inefficiency and bad judgement. In 1985 a new generation took command of the Soviet Union in the person of the new Secretary-General
of the Communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev and his associates saw that the old Bolshevik system, which had steadily decayed since its last era of vigour under Khrushchev, could no longer postpone reform if it was not to collapse (they did not see, but in a few years would discover, that it was going to collapse anyway). The arms race in particular, which the Americans under Reagan seemed to want to push even further, technologically, ever more expensively, was a strain that the Soviet Union could no longer support (military expenditure now amounted to nearly a quarter of its total GNP). And Gorbachev, who harboured no aggressive designs himself – in 1987 he pulled the Red Army out of Afghanistan – no longer believed in the American threat, in spite of Reagan’s noisy rhetoric. He and his foreign minister, Edvard Shevardnadze, tried to open serious disarmament negotiations with Washington, and this time, most fortunately for the world, met with a positive response.

Reagan had changed, or rather a new side of his character had come to the fore. He was now in his second term, and wanted to be remembered as a statesman who had done something effective to prevent nuclear war, which filled him with genuine horror. (He seems to have been encouraged in this attitude by Nancy Reagan.) His Secretary of State, George Shultz, who was favourably impressed by Gorbachev, outmanoeuvred the hard men who had never believed that any good could come out of Moscow and did not believe it now. The result was a truly spectacular diplomatic process which culminated in a treaty eliminating intermediate-range nuclear forces, signed in Washington by Gorbachev and Reagan in December 1987, and ratified by the Senate in May, after which Reagan paid a wildly successful visit to Moscow. There was much negotiation still to be done by Reagan’s successor, George Bush; it would be many months more before the Berlin Wall came down and the Russians began their retreat from Eastern Europe; but these were consequences of the stunning fact that in 1987 the Cold War was abandoned.

It had lasted for forty years, and for thirty years before that relations between Soviet Russia and the West had been thoroughly abnormal. Its evaporation was a great gain not merely for human safety but also for common sense, and although many other individuals and factors helped to bring this victory about, Gorbachev and Reagan undoubtedly deserved the largest share of the credit. The collapse of the Soviet Union itself, signified by Gorbachev’s removal from office in December 1991, was perhaps an even more epochal event. The countries of Eastern Europe regained complete freedom of action; large fragments broke off from what had been the Russian empire of the tsars; Russia herself, though still huge, was a superpower no more; instead she had become an ordinary player on the world stage, beset with many appalling problems. For a moment America bestrode the world, apparently a colossus with all the answers to all the questions – political, social and economic.

It was an illusion. The United States still had many perplexities, some of
which had been made worse by the Reagan years. The republic’s immense enduring strength meant that less than ever would any nation go voluntarily and formally to war with it, though it had so many enemies (in large part acquired by America’s blind support for the reckless state of Israel, and in part by its propensity to turn to force rather than diplomacy when difficulties arose) that it was going to be continuously exposed to terrorist attack of various kinds, and to other provocations. The disappearance of the Soviet rival meant that America was actually weaker, at least in the sense that she could no longer discipline her wayward friends or credibly threaten opponents, unless she first won the support of the world community (as happened in the Gulf War of 1991, when the US rescued Kuwait from annexation by Iraq) or was ready to pay the price for acting unilaterally. The twentieth-century world was in this respect too beginning to resemble that of the nineteenth century, with the United States in the central but not supreme role that had once been the British Empire’s.

The reversion to an older order was also evident institutionally. Never again would the presidency be as insignificant as it had been under Franklin Pierce or Chester A. Arthur, but now that foreign policy seemed to be less starkly urgent, Congress was much more inclined to interfere in its conception and execution, and the presidency was correspondingly diminished. It did not help that modern presidents seem compulsively determined to dig their own graves (Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton…) or that the decay of the old party structures, inside and outside Congress, left individual Senators and Congressmen much freer to speak and act as they pleased than they had been since the 1820s. As then, so now: they were more mindful of Buncombe County than ever,
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and were less amenable to their chieftains – the Speaker, the committee chairmen, the majority and minority leaders as well as the President. From a philosophical point of view, perhaps this was beneficial: most free states today are too centralized for their own good, and the reviving importance of that bizarre, ill-organized, quarrelsome, voluble body called the Congress of the United States, coupled with the continuing vitality of American federalism, may also revive America’s claim to be the first of democracies – but only if Congress shows itself equal to its responsibilities, which it may or may not do. Meanwhile it certainly shows that it is as amenable as ever was the millionaires’ club to the representations of the great lobbies, for election expenses continue to rise insanely, and money has to be found somehow.