Committee on the Present Danger had gotten their message out there: The Soviet Union was actively trying to off us. Now. While the naive among us thought we were at peace!
Ronald Reagan was a big fan of the Present Danger crowd; they would later claim he was a member. And it is certainly true that he hired on many Present Danger men to serve in his administration, and not as bureaucratic pikers but as national security adviser (Richard Allen), as director of Eastern European and Soviet Affairs (Richard Pipes), as chief negotiator on the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and later special adviser on arms control (Paul Nitze), and as director of Central Intelligence (William Casey). Casey, in particular, represented an incredible shift to the… well, incredible. Willard C. Matthias, one of the CIA’s best-known and best-respected analysts going back to the 1950s, a man who tried to warn the Johnson administration in 1964 that a war in Vietnam was not winnable, summed it up like this: “With Casey’s arrival at the CIA, the campaign to shift control of national estimates to the hard-line anti-Communist faction of the intelligence community was over. The rational approach, with its commitment to keeping Soviet behavior under continuing review, was replaced by one that simply identified the USSR as an implacable and changeless enemy determined to enslave the world. The only question was when and how the Soviets would attempt to do so. The issue was ‘slavery’ versus ‘freedom.’”
Even before he was elected, Reagan had been making Casey’s slavery-versus-freedom argument himself, and he really believed it. He could occasionally be shocked when presented with the logical operational extension of his hard-line rhetoric, as when his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, suggested a US military attack on Cuba. “Give me the word,” the nation’s chief of diplomacy said to the new president in March 1981, “and I’ll turn that island into a fucking parking lot.” One of Reagan’s most loyal and longtime aides, Mike Deaver, later said that Haig’s pronouncement had “scared the shit out of me” and had also shaken the boss. Deaver asked Chief of Staff James Baker to make certain Haig was never again in a room alone with the president.
But Reagan did not soften his own tough talk. In a nationally televised interview in March of 1981, when CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite suggested that Reagan might be laying it on a little thick about the Soviet leaders being “liars and thieves,” the president stuck by his assessment, paraphrasing another hysterical Bircher trope: “We’re naive if we don’t remember their ideology is without God, without our idea of morality in the religious sense—their statement about morality is that nothing is immoral if it furthers their cause, which means that they can resort to lying or stealing or cheating or even murder if it furthers their cause…. If we’re going to deal with them, then we have to keep that in mind.”
That same month, the Reagan administration went into production on a new publication called Soviet Military Power. The illustrated, ninety-nine-page booklet, released just as Reagan was asking for added funding for MX missiles and B-1 bombers, was no internal government-eyes-only threat assessment. This was straight-up politics, complete with dozens of specially commissioned artists’ renderings of the Soviet military’s 25,000-ton ballistic missile submarines, MiG-23 Flogger counter-air jet fighters and MIRVed intercontinental missiles, each of which looked like a cel from a deranged Team B–authored episode of Jonny Quest. On one page was the outline of the Soviets’ Nizhny Tagil Tank Plant ominously superimposed on a map of Washington, DC. The tank factory covered the Mall from the Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial. “There are 135 major military industrial plants now operating in the Soviet Union with over 40 million square meters in floor space, a 34 percent increase since 1970,” the booklet informed readers. High-tech Soviet shop classes, the booklet noted, were graduating thousands of welding engineers every year. And they had “perfected two new methods for refining steel and other alloys—electroslag re-melting and plasma-arc melting.” Nine hundred thousand mad Soviet scientists were at work designing and testing new weapons systems, giving the Soviets, according to best guesstimates, a running head start on twenty-first-century weapons technology: “The Soviet high energy laser program is three-to-five times the U.S. level of effort… they have worked on the gas dynamic laser, the electric discharge laser and the chemical laser… in the latter half of [the 1980s] it is possible that the Soviets could demonstrate laser weapons in a wide variety of ground, ship and aerospace applications…. Research in behavioral modification, biological warfare and genetic engineering all have the potential to result in the development of new and extremely effective weapons.”
“Its purpose,” noted Time magazine of the Soviet Military Power booklet, “[is to] send a red alert to Americans and their allies that the U.S.S.R. is gaining a military edge over the West. Naturally, there was suspicion that the timing was designed to help the Pentagon justify the vast sums needed for the new strategic systems.” Reagan’s secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger denied this allegation. “There is a very real and growing threat,” he said when unveiling the booklet produced by the Pentagon’s public affairs team. “It is not scare talk or any kind of propaganda.”
Of course, it was scare talk and propaganda, but it was quality scare talk and propaganda. In 1981, and 1983, and every year thereafter, right around budget time, the Pentagon released its newest installment of Soviet Military Power to the public, and then Reagan sent his chairman of the Joint Chiefs up to Capitol Hill to make headlines. A typical pronouncement from 1983: “The Soviets have armed themselves to the teeth and they continue to do so at a rate far in excess of any legitimate defense needs by any measure—theirs or ours. The plain fact of the matter is that, in the last ten years, Soviet military investment in hardware alone has exceeded ours by some 500 billion dollars.” And every year the Pentagon bite of the federal dollar got bigger and bigger. In Reagan’s eight years in office, military expenditure doubled from around $150 billion to $300 billion a year, until it represented nearly 30 percent of our overall annual budget and more than 6 percent of GDP. And all to chase the giant shadow projected on the wall by the Fantasia boys at the Committee on the Present Danger.
You didn’t have to be a defense contractor to cash in on this ’80s political phenomenon. Hollywood studios, those great coastal reflecting pools of received wisdom, had pretty much dispensed with introspective films like Deer Hunter and Coming Home that picked at the old scabs of the Vietnam War. Now they were happy to produce box-office gold while feeding the Soviets-as-maniacs paranoia. In Red Dawn, schoolboys C. Thomas Howell, Patrick Swayze, and Charlie Sheen went guerrilla to fight a spectacularly armed force of Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans who had invaded their peaceful Colorado town after (yes, Richard Pipes!) a Kremlin-ordered nuclear first strike destroyed most major American cities. The biggest moneymaking movie of 1986 was a Knights-of-the-Sky adventure pic that would have made Burgess Meredith and Hap Arnold blush: Top Gun. “Gentlemen,” says our flight instructor, “this school is about combat. There are no points for second place.” Young Tom Cruise was the lasciviously oiled, sun-burnished, leather-jacket-wearing, motorcycle-driving, soul-singing fighter pilot who overcomes self-doubt (a psychic leftover from his father’s service record in Vietnam) and the training-exercise death of his best buddy/navigator (“Talk to me, Goose”) to air-joust the Soviet MiG jets into bloodless submission and win the girl. Top Gun sold nearly fifty million tickets in US theaters.
And who was pushing back at this hypermilitarism? Well, it didn’t much matter. When a million people gathered at a Central Park rally to protest nuclear arms proliferation—the biggest single demonstration in American history—Team Reagan initially wrote them off as well-intentioned but hopelessly naive. But the administration soon moved on to suggesting the demonstrators were stooges in a Soviet plot. “In the organization of some of the big demonstrations, the one in New York and so forth,” Reagan asserted in a press conference a few months after the rally, “there is no question about foreign agents that were sent to instigate and help create and keep such a big movement going.” Reagan refused to elaborate on this theory “because I don’t discuss intelligence matters.” And it was true that the publications providing the most cogent and consistent counterweight to the new American militarization were generally the magazines whose ad revenue depended on discount-priced Oriental herbs, futons, prefab geodesic homes, all-cotton drawstring pants, send-a-crystal-to-a-friend, and the magic of Feldenkrais’s Awareness Through Movement seminars.
Not many mainstream American publications gave much play to the statement of Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev a month after Reagan’s first Soviet Military Power was issued: “It is dangerous madness to try to defeat each other in the arms race and to count on victory in nuclear war. I shall add that only he who has decided to commit suicide can start a nuclear war in the hope of emerging a victor from it. No matter what the attacker might possess, no matter what method of unleashing nuclear war he chooses, he will not attain his aims. Retributions will ensue ineluctably.” Nor that of Brezhnev’s deputy Konstantin Chernenko, who said nuclear war “must not be permitted…. It is criminal to look upon nuclear war as a rational, almost legitimate continuation of policy.” Nor that of Brezhnev’s other deputy, Yuri Andropov, who said that “any attempt to resolve
