Drift

congressional leaders to the White House residence on the night of October 24, 1983, secretly, to explain the plans for Grenada, the Army Rangers were already collecting their ammo and loading into their transport planes. The secretary of state briefed the three Democratic leaders and two Republicans on the situation on the ground in Grenada, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs laid out plans for a military operation involving two thousand American soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Only House Republican leader Bob Michel offered unquestioning support. The majority leader in the Senate, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, wondered if Reagan was making a serious political mistake, and perhaps a military one. House Democratic majority leader Jim Wright thought the situation called for a stronger diplomatic effort, not military force. Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd said point- blank he was against the invasion, and he’d say so in public.

Tip O’Neill, the venerable old big-city liberal and the Democratic Speaker of the House, was torn. He was sympathetic to Reagan’s worry that American hostages would be taken in Grenada; the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran just a few years earlier had been a grim national nightmare, and Jimmy Carter’s inability to free them had torpedoed his presidency. But O’Neill, like the other Democrats at the meeting, thought diplomacy was the wiser course to take in Grenada. There were no reports of Americans being menaced on the island, let alone being taken hostage. He saw no compelling reason for the United States military to execute a full-scale regime change; and he knew of no compelling constitutional argument that permitted Reagan to launch the operation simply on presidential say-so. Even if Operation Urgent Fury wrapped up within the sixty-day window that compelled Reagan, under the War Powers Resolution, to consult Congress and secure specific statutory authority for the war, it was hard to make the case that Grenada represented a “national emergency created by an attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” At the very least, the president should have begun the process of seeking approval from Congress before hitting the Go button. “You are informing us,” O’Neill pointedly told the president at the end of the administration’s presentation, “not asking us.”

Reagan reminded the congressional leaders that the rush of events had simply overtaken constitutional prerogatives. The safety of the American students was paramount; there was no time to lose. And then, prompted by something his national security adviser said, Reagan told the congressional leaders a story about how the Filipino people had cheered American soldiers after their liberation in World War II. “I can see the day, not too many weeks from now,” Reagan told the group, “when the Lebanese people will be standing at the shore, waving and cheering our Marines when they depart.”

O’Neill grew increasingly uncomfortable as Reagan kept going on about Lebanon in the middle of a meeting about Grenada. The Speaker began to suspect that part of the rationale for the invasion of Grenada was to use a quick-and-easy triumph as a distraction from the hideousness of the Beirut bombing.

Tip O’Neill was old-school. He worked hard to find common ground with the president, no matter how divergent their political philosophies. He’d always given the president the benefit of the doubt when White House factotums grabbed for a little extra on every deal the two men made—give a little, get a little was how O’Neill’s politics worked. Just three weeks earlier the Speaker had gone to bat for the president on the mission in Beirut, convincing skeptical House Democrats to vote for an eighteen-month extension of the 1,200-Marine US presence in the multinational peacekeeping force there. Reagan’s team had assured the Speaker that things were improving; that they could get Israeli and Syrian military units out of Lebanon, stand up a viable coalition government in Beirut, and train and equip a Lebanese Army capable of defending the country without an American presence. They just needed a little time.

Grenada was a tougher mission to back, but Tip O’Neill was also convinced that partisanship ended at the water’s edge in wartime. Even in a war against a tiny, poorly armed island military, he was not going to criticize the president while American troops were in a fight, and he would implore the House Democratic Caucus to do the same. On the way out of the meeting, O’Neill wished Reagan good luck, sincerely. He wasn’t interested in seeing American boys die. But he privately worried that Reagan’s insistence on making war in Grenada would start our own country down a dangerous new road.

The United States military might have been facing one of the weakest foes on the planet, but Operation Urgent Fury was no cakewalk. The Grenadian soldiers put up more of a fight than intelligence had suggested they would, but still, resistance melted away pretty quickly. Most of the damage the United States suffered in the invasion was self-inflicted. The lack of intelligence and basic tactical maps along with the inability of the various services to communicate with one another led to results ranging from comic to mortal. The SEALs sent to rescue Governor-General Scoon had to be rescued themselves. They had to use the house phone to call Fort Bragg to request fire from the US naval ships off the coast. The radio station selected to be used for Scoon’s address to the people of Grenada turned out to be nothing more than a remote transmission tower. Navy Corsair pilots accidentally blew up a mental hospital, killing eighteen patients. A US Marine liaison team mistakenly called in a naval air raid on a nearby US Army command post, wounding seventeen American soldiers and killing one. Helicopters were lost to small-arms fire, to the rotors from another chopper, and to a confrontation with a palm tree.

When word of the invasion began to reach home that first day, the early results were a cold slap in the face for Team Reagan. Members of the United Nations Security Council immediately began debating a resolution “deeply deploring” the US invasion of Grenada as a “flagrant violation of international law.” (The vote would go 11–1, with the United States exercising its veto power.) Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher called to register her anger with Reagan. Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress were not happy about being kept in the dark about this multimillion-dollar military adventure. “I was the designated person on the day of the beginning of the action when it became public to go to the Congress,” Secretary of State George Shultz told an audience a few years ago. “I spent all day long and there was hardly a good word said.” Sen. Lawton Chiles told reporters: “One day we’ve got the numbers of Marines’ deaths, which shocked us all, the next day we find we’re invading Grenada. Are we looking for a war we can win?”

The press corps, meanwhile, was apoplectic that they had not been brought along on the combat mission, and that a White House official had flat-out lied (“Preposterous!”) when asked in advance about the operation. The executive vice president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association called for a full-on congressional investigation into Reagan’s “policy of secret wars hidden from the American people.” Four years later, the conservative columnist and Republican defender William Safire was still pitching into Reagan’s national security team. “The United States Government may on rare occasion fall silent for a time, but it must not deliberately lie; only the presence of reporters pledged to temporary secrecy can help justify a news blackout. By breaching the democratic precedent, and by issuing a lie, the Reagan Administration engaged in self-corruption far more important than one victory in the Caribbean.”

Meanwhile, on Grenada, the way operations were unfolding did not exactly bolster the administration’s case that the point of Urgent Fury was saving the St. George’s University medical students. The plan to pluck the students from what was called the True Blue campus just a short hop north from the Point Salines airfield was executed to perfection. The Army Rangers swept in and secured all the students living on the campus without a serious hitch on the first day. But the Rangers found fewer than a third of the six hundred American students they’d been expecting on the campus. That’s because, the students explained, most of the students lived at the Grand Anse campus a few miles north.

Oops. In the full week after the crisis came to a head, nobody in the Pentagon or the White House made an effort to contact the school to see where everybody lived. Nobody picked up the telephone and called the dorms. Nobody checked the student-loan records to get actual addresses for the Americans studying at St. George’s. There was no plan to rescue students at the Grand Anse campus because nobody in the United States government knew there was a Grand Anse campus. Now the Army Rangers picked up the phone and called Grand Anse, and the students told them they thought a small group of Grenadian and Cuban soldiers had dug in around the campus. Whether they were to protect the American students or to hold them was anybody’s guess. But it must be noted that those Grenadians and Cubans had more than thirty-six hours after the first American troops landed to do as they pleased with the students. And they did them no harm.

While the Ranger commandos made plans for a new assault/rescue on the Grand Anse campus, the military kept reporters at bay, in Barbados. The last thing they needed now was reporters crawling around, which meant the media missed the most seamless operation of Urgent Fury. Firepower from the USS Independence took out a couple of hotels near the campus (part