Reagan: The Life (66 page)

And the tax code had to be overhauled. “Let us go forward with an historic reform for fairness, simplicity, and incentives for growth,” Reagan said. “I am asking Secretary Don Regan for a plan for action to simplify the entire tax code, so all taxpayers, big and small, are treated more fairly.” Alluding unspecifically to people who weren’t paying their fair share, the president suggested that tax reform could capture the lost revenue. “And it could make the tax base broader, so personal tax rates could come down, not go up.” Reagan looked about the House and then into the camera. “I’ve asked that specific recommendations, consistent with those objectives, be presented to me by December 1984.”

Reagan smiled ever so slightly as he spoke the date. Yet the lawmakers didn’t catch on until he was halfway into his next sentence. “Our second great goal is to build on America’s pioneer spirit …” Hesitant laughter interrupted him, slowly gathering strength. “I said something funny?” he asked innocently. The laughter swelled, rolling across the room in two intersecting waves, one of Republican relief and the other of Democratic derision. The Republicans were relieved to hear that tax reform was being postponed until after the November balloting; the Democrats hooted at Reagan’s unwillingness to specify whose oxen would be gored while the voters could still act on the information.

Don Regan had a thin skin and selective sight and hearing. The Treasury secretary had battled within the administration for tax reform and apparently won; now he hardly noticed the Republican support on account of the Democratic gibes. “
From my seat just below the rostrum where the president stood, I could see the faces of many congressmen and senators,” he recalled. “Their features shone with mirth. They shot knowing glances at one another. They were laughing at the president and at me. I suppose that some of them thought that the president’s proposal was an election-year gambit designed to get votes. Even as my blood rose, I realized that most of them were laughing because, like the men in the White House, they thought that true tax reform was a pipe dream. They may even have believed that the president thought so too, or else that he was a true naïf—for who else would believe that a measure that engaged the most selfish concerns of the most powerful interests in the nation could be accomplished by the deadline he had set, only eleven months in the future? The laughter swelled to a louder pitch. My anger rose. I said to myself, Just wait. I’ll show you guys.”

N
EAR THE END
of his speech Reagan departed from the usual annual-message script by addressing not simply Congress and the American people but a particular audience abroad. “
I want to speak to the people of the Soviet Union,” he said, “to tell them it’s true that our governments have had serious differences, but our sons and daughters have never fought each other in war. And if we Americans have our way, they never will.” Avoidance of war, however, to be enduring required the active pursuit of peace. “People of the Soviet Union, there is only one sane policy, for your country and mine, to preserve our civilization in this modern age: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

He paused to let this message sink in. He had been accused of wanting war, of believing the United States could win a nuclear war. He had never believed this, but neither had he stated his disbelief so clearly. Now it was on the record for all to hear and read.

He drew the corollary. “The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used,” he said. “But then would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” The answer, he said, lay with the Soviet people and their government. “Americans are a people of peace. If your government wants peace, there will be peace. We can come together in faith and friendship to build a safer and far better world for our children and our children’s children.”

Reagan addressed the Soviet people, rather than the Soviet leadership, partly for rhetorical effect. The American people wanted peace, he said; the Soviet people presumably wanted the same thing. Governments should give their people what they wanted. But Reagan reached out to the Soviet people for another reason, more practical: he couldn’t tell, at this point, who the Soviet leadership was. In the wake of the Korean Air shoot-down,
Yuri Andropov had disappeared. Illness was rumored, reported, then confirmed. Communications between the White House and the Kremlin languished. Finally, in February 1984, came word he had died.

As Reagan awaited news of the succession, he reflected on a dawning revelation. “
Three years had taught me something surprising about the Russians. Many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were genuinely afraid of America and Americans. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. In fact, I had difficulty accepting my own conclusion at first. I’d always felt that from our deeds it must be clear to anyone that Americans were a moral people who starting at the birth of our nation had always used our power only as a force of good in the world. After World
War II, for example, when we alone had the atomic bomb, we didn’t use it for conquest or domination; instead, with the
Marshall Plan and General MacArthur’s democratic stewardship of Japan, we generously rebuilt the economies of our former enemies.” By contrast, the Soviet Union had seemed bent on conquest. “We had limitless reasons to be wary of the Red Bear, because from the day it was born on the streets of Russia it was dedicated to consuming the democracies of the world.”

Reagan’s preconceptions had accompanied him to the presidency. “During my first years in Washington, I think many of us in the administration took it for granted that the Russians, like ourselves, considered it unthinkable that the United States would launch a first strike against them. But the more experience I had with Soviet leaders and other heads of state who knew them, the more I began to realize that many Soviet officials feared us not only as adversaries but as potential aggressors who might hurl nuclear weapons at them in a first strike; because of this, and perhaps because of a sense of insecurity and paranoia with roots reaching back to the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, they had aimed a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons at us.”

Reagan had belatedly recognized what political scientists dubbed the “security dilemma”: the paradoxical circumstance, especially acute in the nuclear age, that measures one side considers defensive are often seen as threatening by the other. America’s nuclear arsenal was originally designed to deter a Soviet conventional attack in Europe, but the Soviets deemed it threatening. To defend themselves they built their own arsenal, which the Americans considered threatening. And so on, to second-strike arsenals and Reagan’s projected Strategic Defense Initiative.

His discovery of the security dilemma prompted Reagan’s reassurance to the Soviet people—and to his American and Western European critics—that he believed a nuclear war could never be won and therefore must never be fought. It also prompted him to pursue arms control with Andropov’s successor,
Konstantin Chernenko.

George Bush met Chernenko at Andropov’s funeral. The vice president returned with the impression that Chernenko might be easier to work with than Andropov had been. He said as much to Reagan, who hoped he was right. “
I’d like to talk to him about our problems man to man and see if I could convince him there would be a material benefit to the Soviets if they’d join the family of nations etc.,” Reagan wrote in his diary. Yet he didn’t want to move too fast. “We don’t want to appear anxious, which would tempt them to play games and possibly snub us.”

Chernenko wasn’t interested. He proved as adamant as Andropov had been, first lecturing Reagan on America’s provocations and then announcing that the Soviet Union would boycott the Los Angeles Olympics, as the United States had boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980. “
They are utterly stonewalling us,” Reagan grumbled.

He couldn’t really blame them. Reagan’s discovery of the security dilemma came wrapped in a newfound ability to imagine the world from Moscow’s perspective. Or perhaps the ability was simply newly exercised. To this point in his political career Reagan had been content to hurl imprecations at the Soviet Union, with the goal of affirming American rectitude and steeling American resolve for the defense buildup he deemed necessary. But now that he sought to engage the Soviet leadership in meaningful dialogue, it behooved him to put himself in their shoes. The Democrats in Congress continued to reject full funding for the
MX missile, while antinuclear groups in Europe were pressing their governments to drop plans to allow the deployment of American intermediate-range
missiles—Pershing IIs and
cruise missiles—to counter recently deployed Soviet missiles. Reagan had proposed to forgo deployment of the American intermediate missiles if the Soviets would agree to dismantle their existing missiles, but Moscow rejected this so-called “zero option” as unacceptably asymmetric. The antinuclear activists denounced it as a sham, designed to be rejected. Reagan recognized the political difficulties he faced on the arms front, and he realized that Chernenko did too. “
What would I think, I asked myself,” he wrote, “if I were a Soviet leader and saw this kind of fractiousness among the leaders of the United States and the Western alliance? I’d try to exploit it.”

Which was just what the Kremlin did. Moscow continued to brand the Americans as warmongers, hoping to increase the antinuclear pressure in Europe and perhaps in the American Congress. When reports indicated that Chernenko was sick and might prove to have an even shorter tenure than Andropov, Reagan set aside hope of progress with the Soviets before the 1984 election.

R
EAGAN
’
S NEW APPRECIATION
for the fear the Soviets might feel toward America was an insight he kept to himself. For public consumption he dwelled on the reasons Americans should fear the Soviets. “
In the last fifteen years, the growth of Soviet military power has meant a radical change in the nature of the world we live in,” he told a national audience in May 1984. This didn’t mean that a nuclear war was imminent; it was not, as long as America kept its arsenal strong. But the communists were a threat nonetheless. “They are presently challenging us with a different kind of weapon: subversion and the use of surrogate forces.” In one developing country after another—Vietnam,
Laos,
Cambodia,
Angola,
Ethiopia,
South Yemen, Afghanistan,
Nicaragua,
El Salvador—Soviet proxies had either seized power or were sapping the strength of those who held power.

Reagan focused this evening on Nicaragua, El Salvador, and their neighbors. Congress had funded the president’s Caribbean Basin Initiative but not at the level he desired, as Democrats in the House registered deep suspicion of the government of El Salvador and especially the Nicaraguan contras.
Edward Boland of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, sponsored amendments to defense appropriations bills forbidding the CIA, which was directing the contra war, to spend money for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. The administration and its allies responded that they weren’t trying to overthrow the Sandinistas, merely to get the Sandinistas to stop subverting the government of El Salvador. But the contras themselves were less discreet, and Congress approved the Boland amendments and slashed the administration’s request for Central America funding.

Reagan judged the Boland amendments unwise and possibly unconstitutional. But rather than challenge the restrictions frontally, he reiterated that the objective of the contra war was merely to tame the Sandinistas, not to overthrow them. He asked Congress for new funding and directed the CIA to proceed as before. He approved a more vigorous anti-Sandinista offensive, which included planting mines in Nicaraguan harbors to disrupt supplies from the Soviet Union and Cuba and generally weaken the Nicaraguan economy.

Reagan was pleased with the covert war until, in the spring of 1984, the mining operation burst into public view. At this point even some of the president’s staunchest backers expressed alarm. Barry Goldwater, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a scathing letter to William Casey, simultaneously releasing it to the press. “
Dear Bill,” Goldwater wrote, “All this past weekend, I’ve been trying to figure out how I can most easily tell you my feelings about the discovery of the President having approved mining some of the harbors of Central America. It gets down to one, little, simple phrase: I am pissed!” Goldwater felt personally betrayed. “During the important debate we had all last week and the week before, on whether we would increase funds for the Nicaragua program, we were doing all right until a member of the committee charged that the President had approved the mining. I strongly denied that because I had never heard of it. I found out the next day that the CIA had, with the written approval of the President, engaged in such mining, and the approval came in February! Bill, this is no way to run a railroad and I find myself in a hell of a quandary. I am forced to apologize to the members of the intelligence committee because I did not know the facts on this.” The administration had done itself grave damage. “The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don’t know what the hell he is doing?
Lebanon, yes, we all knew that he sent troops over there. But mine the harbors in Nicaragua? This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war. For the life of me, I don’t see how we are going to explain it.” Goldwater predicted that the president would lose his battle with Congress for new funding for the contras. “My simple guess is that the House is going to defeat this supplemental and we will not be in any position to put up much of an argument after we were not given the information we were entitled to receive; particularly, if my memory serves me correctly, when you briefed us on Central America just a couple of weeks ago. And the order was signed before that. I don’t like this. I don’t like it one bit from the President or from you. I don’t
think we need a lot of lengthy explanations. The deed has been done and, in the future, if anything like this happens, I’m going to raise one hell of a lot of fuss about it in public.”