and-not-quite-true Holmesian melody about duty and soldiering. He even made a point to buck tradition and make his speech from the back side of the Capitol Building, facing west, so that, near the end of that talk, he could steer the nation’s gaze toward
the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row on row of simple white markers…. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedoms. Each one of those markers is a monument to the kinds of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno… on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam. Under one such marker lies a young man—Martin Treptow—who left his job in a small-town barber shop in 1917 to go to France with the famed Rainbow Division. There, on the Western Front, he was killed trying to carry a message between battalions under heavy artillery fire. We are told that on his body was found a diary. On the flyleaf under the heading “My Pledge,” he had written these words: “America must win this war. Therefore, I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure, I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.”
Private Treptow, it turns out, is actually buried back home in Bloomer, Wisconsin, and nobody on Reagan’s team was able to verify the contents of this battlefield diary. These problematic actualities had been pointed out to Reagan before he gave the speech. But he waved off the fact-checkers. He wasn’t going to let them get in the way of a useful bit of salesmanship.
Our military leaders heard this new tune and instantly recognized it as something they could dance to. They’d grown weary of falling short of recruitment quotas, and they chafed at the news that the public approval ratings of the military, as measured by Gallup pollsters, were at an all-time low. The general in charge of Army recruiting had already read the riot act to the boys at the N. W. Ayer agency. The era of selling velvet jackets and vacation pay was coming to an end. “I got it straight with them that I was in charge of the advertising,” he later said. “They weren’t in charge of it, I was.”
Beginning in 1981, the Army started spending money on high-production-value, high-testosterone action ads featuring airborne jumps, attack helicopters, tanks with laser-guided firing systems and the latest computers, stirring music with one-off lyrics (“There’s a hungry kind of feeling, and every day it grows”), can-do copy (“In the Army, we do more before nine a.m. than most people do all day”), and, of course, the toe-tapping jingle you couldn’t get out of your head: “Be… all that you can be… ’cause we need you… in the Aaaaaaaar-my.” And just at the moment the Army sales force took this bold and combative new tack, the Reagan administration buried them in money; the Army’s ad budget arced to more than $100 million during Reagan’s years in office.
The new president was ready to put our money where his mouth was; he was anxious to expend enormous pots of the national resources to improve our war-making capabilities. And it was an easy sell at first. He’d run on cutting taxes, gutting welfare programs, and spending big on the military. By the time his first budget came up for a vote, Ronald Reagan was also riding a wave of public popularity, largely on the strength of having survived a near-fatal assassination attempt with remarkable grace, at least according to the information released by the White House public relations officers. His personal approval rating in the country was more than 70 percent. So Congress—its members could read a poll—overwhelmingly passed Reagan’s initial defense appropriation request, which clocked in at a nearly 20 percent increase. In something as huge as the Pentagon budget, a 5 percent increase would have been enough to rattle desks all over Washington; 10 percent was almost unimaginable; getting up toward 20 percent was fantasy talk. That kind of enormous one-year jump was unprecedented—at least it was without our troops actively fighting on a battlefield somewhere. And that play-money request from Reagan came with a promise of more: the administration’s announced strategy was to
By the time that first massive defense appropriation passed, coupled with the largest tax cuts in American history, Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, was already trying to flag to the president a new threat. The projected annual budget deficit had ballooned to $62 billion, Stockman advised, and—at current taxing and spending levels—was sure to hit $112 billion within five years. The yearly deficit, which had generally hovered around 2 percent of GDP in the postwar years, would jump to unprecedented peacetime levels, as much as 4 or 5 percent. When Stockman suggested that the country’s financial situation would benefit from a small reduction to the planned increase of the annual defense budget in the coming years, Reagan would have none of it. “When I was asked during the campaign about what I would do if it came down to a choice between defense and deficits,” he explained to Stockman, “I always said national security had to come first, and the people applauded every time.”
Reagan had plenty of politically astute advisers on his team who knew that they could not count on the president’s personal popularity for the long haul. And they knew they could not count on Americans to forever turn a blind eye to exploding budget deficits. Key to managing public expectations and acceptance of this massive defense spending spree was to manage the public’s perception of the need for it.
The more or less paranoid contention that America was a nation under existential threat was the propulsive force of the Reagan presidency. The threat that Reagan exalted above all others—the Enemy—remained an important and lasting mental bedfellow for the president, even as other things faded for him. Just a year after he left office, while reluctantly testifying at the federal criminal trial of one of his former staff members, Reagan could no longer place the name of the man who served him for more than three years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (“Oh dear. I have to ask for your help here. His name is very familiar”) or recognize the leader of the Nicaraguan military group he’d pledged to support “body and soul.” He could not recall the specifics of a single meeting with the defendant, Adm. John Poindexter, with whom he’d met one-on-one every day for nearly a year. He had virtually no recollection of signing the momentous presidential finding that could have led to his impeachment in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Looking back now, it is sadly apparent that this was not simply a legal tactic but a physical manifestation of the Alzheimer’s disease that had already begun to eat away his mind. When attorneys presented him with transcripts of his speeches and press statements, Reagan beheld them with the delight of first discovery. But in the middle of this arduous and, as he admitted, confusing day and a half of back-and-forth with lawyers, in an instant of unexpected and shocking clarity, Reagan offered an unsolicited reminder to these young attorneys of just what he’d been up against as president: “We only had to heed the words of Lenin, which was what was guiding them, when Lenin said that the Soviet Union would take Eastern Europe, it would organize the hordes of Asia and then it would move on Latin America. And, once having taken that, it wouldn’t have to take the last bastion of capitalism, the United States. The United States would fall into their outstretched hand like overripe fruit. Well, history reveals that the Soviet Union followed that policy.” It was a stirring moment in an otherwise sad and dreary courtroom exercise, when the ex-president let loose with his eloquent little peroration and showed a flash of the ol’ Gipper. He could still remember his best lines. And deliver them too.
Never mind that Lenin didn’t ever say or write this. Reagan likely got the quote from
When Team Reagan started down the road to military buildup, its ideological and quasi-intellectual backup came from the post–World War II phenomenon of the permanent national security hawk nest, the out-of-power roost for ex-military, ex-intelligence, ex-Capitol Hill, defense industry, academic, and self-proclaimed experts on threats to the United States and how (inevitably) those threats were being ignored by the naive government apparatchiks these restless hawks were eager to replace. The Think Tanks and Very Important Committees of the permanent national security peanut gallery are now so mature and entrenched that almost no one thinks they’re
