Summer's greetings to everyone, near the beginning of June. I wanted to mail an issue of TLJ while this season of remembrance season is still with us. Ronald Reagan died on Saturday, June 5, 2004. This week marks the second anniversary of his death.
As summer of 2006 gets underway, please think of who among your friends, relatives, and colleagues shares your interest in Ronald Reagan and American politics. Think of one or two people, and forward this issue of TLJ to them with your compliments. If you received this copy from a friend, and you'd like to have your own issue delivered to your inbox, you can subscribe easily at http://techwritepublishing.com/tlj/. Thanks!
For June, we're happy to publish part five of Lou Cannon's biographical essay about Ronald Reagan. This installment looks back at Reagan's policy toward the Soviet Union. Quite a lot of time has passed since the Berlin Wall came down, enough time to see a new global war develop, a conflict just as deadly and difficult as the Cold War. We need Reagan's brand of competent leadership now. What a difference Reagan made during his time at the wheel!
The Role of a Lifetime (Part V), by Lou Cannon
I mentioned earlier a short story that Reagan wrote as a young man deploring the horror of war. As he expressed in Kansas City, Reagan was haunted by the notion that the United States and the Soviet Union could blunder into war if the policies of mutual assured destruction continued. Reagan felt that it was up to him to end this policy and prevent nuclear war. At The Washington Post, when he was running for president in 1980, Reagan acknowledged that the U.S. military buildup he advocated would lead a to an intensified arms race. But Reagan saw this as desirable because he believed the Soviets could not compete economically and would come to the bargaining table. To Reagan, unlike some of his boosters, the arms race was always a mean towards an end.
Reagan's detractors didn't see it this way. They feared that the combination of his polices and his rhetoric would incite the Soviets and perhaps ignite a war. Reagan said some harsh things about the Soviet Union, most of them true. Some Soviet leaders were even harsher in response. One of them compared Reagan to Hitler. But when Gorbachev, beginning with the Geneva summit in 1985, sat down with Reagan he learned to appreciate Reagan's candor and commitment. According to a Soviet participant at Geneva, Gorbachev was standing with a group of Soviet officials and one of them became highly critical of Reagan's positions and of Reagan personally. Gorbachev, showing irritation, interrupted. "This is the president of the United States, elected by the American people," he said.
Reagan respected Gorbachev, as well, and said after his return to the United States from Geneva that he was a different sort of Soviet leader. Already, without perhaps quite realizing it, the two men were creeping along the road to the first treaties of the nuclear era that reduced the arsenals of the superpowers and put us on the path to the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union.
In February 1993, the Princeton Conference on the End of the Cold War brought together nine leading former U.S. and Soviet diplomats, including former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz and Alexander Bessmertnykh, who had been the deputy Soviet foreign minister in the crucial last years of the Reagan administration. While they differed on details, all agreed that the Cold War had not ended automatically. The participants gave credit to Reagan and Gorbachev, none more eloquently than Bessmertnykh, who said of them:
"As for the common things, I would say that those two men were very idealistic. They each had their own ideals, which they had tried to follow all through their lives. Their ideals were not similar, but the dedication to those ideals was similar. They both believed in something. They were not just men who could trim their sails and go any way the wind blows... this is what they immediately sensed in each other, and why they made good partners."
Bessmertnykh scoffed at opinions in "the American press" after Reykjavik that Reagan had fallen short as a negotiator. "It was not true at all," he said. "Reagan handled negotiations very, very well. He might not have known all the details. He used little cards when he would come to details. He didn't like the formal part of negotiations... He would try to rush through this formal part, and then he would throw away the cards and then he would start talking the direct way. I was across the table at all the summits and followed this president for all those years, and I personally admired the man very much. He was a good politician. He was a good diplomat. He was very dedicated. And if it were not for Reagan, I don't think we would have been able to reach the agreements in arms control that we reached later, because of his idealism, because he thought that we should really do away with nuclear weapons. Gorbachev believed in that. Reagan believed in that. The experts didn't believe, but the leaders did."
Even though Reagan appreciated that Gorbachev was different - and better - than any of the Soviet leaders who had become before, his great goal remained to end communism as we knew it. As Condoleezza Rice, then a Russian expert, said to me in 1999, the Cold War was "frozen in time" when Reagan became president and called the Soviet Union an evil empire. "It was like there was this crazy aunt in the basement that no one wanted to talk about and that once you said she was there everyone said they knew it all along," Rice said. Reagan somehow did. Before he became president he told Richard Allen, who became his first national security adviser: "My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, some would say simplistic. It is this: We win and they lose. What do you think of that?"
But that's not the whole story. Reagan and Gorbachev both knew that winning and losing would have no meaning if there were a nuclear war. Reagan knew there had been close calls on both sides during the years when Mutual Assured Destruction was the policy of both superpowers. Gorbachev knew this, too. So the oft-asked question of who won the Cold War - however it is answered - may not be the most important question. That question would be: How was it that the Cold War ended peaceably? And the answer would be that both leaders recognized the dangers of the alternative.
Next issue, Lou Cannon concludes The Role of a Lifetime, his biographical essay about Ronald Reagan. He considers Reagan's attitudes about using force to spread freedom and democracy beyond America's borders.
Links
You can buy two of Lou Cannon's books about Ronald Reagan in a boxed set: Governor Reagan and President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (Second Edition). The set is titled Ronald Reagan: A Life in Politics. Click the link to go to Amazon's page for these books.
Also see the latest articles at the TLJ weblog, Opponents of the War in Iraq Need a Strategy and Bush Says U.S. Is Winning in Iraq, Sacrifices Ahead. For a long time now the weblog has served as TLJ's alter ego. Since the war has been such a significant event in our time, you'll find a lot of ideas and links about that issue there. Please have a look.
Please forward TLJ to anyone who might be interested, especially people interested in American politics. Also, please browse TLJ's home on the web, and make recommendations about what you'd like to see there. The site contains articles, speeches, links, past issues of this journal, and many other resources.
If you'd like to contribute an article, a letter, or anything else to the TLJ weblog or to this journal, please write to me at steveng@TechWritePublishing.com. TLJ welcomes your comments about what you read here, or your thoughts about any other political issue. Thanks!
Steven Greffenius is the author of The Last Jeffersonian: Ronald Reagan's Dreams of America. To learn more about the book, please visit http://techwritepublishing.com/tlj. To order a copy, please visit TLJ's page at Amazon.
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