“We respond,” charged Reagan, aiming at the Carter administration, “by finding human rights violations in those countries which have been historically our friends [and] allies. Those friends feel betrayed and abandoned and in several specific cases they have been.” Slamming the Soviets, as well as Cuba, and Carter policy, he added: “A Soviet slave state has been established 90 miles off our coast; our embassies are targets for terrorist attacks; our diplomats have been murdered and half a hundred Americans are captives going into the 5th month now in our embassy in Iran.”26
Reagan contended that America’s problem was weakness; it needed to get strong. He telegraphed his “peace-through-strength” credo: “May I suggest an alternate path this nation can take, a change in foreign policy from the vacillation, appeasement, and aimlessness of present policy?” He answered his own question: “That alternate path must offer three broad requirements,” he explained. “First it must be based on firm convictions, inspired by a clear vision of, and belief in America’s future. Second, it calls for a strong economy based on the free-market system which gave us an unchallenged leadership in creative technology. Third, and very simply we must have the unquestioned military ability to preserve world peace and our national security.”27
Notably, these would become the three legs to his administration’s approach in the 1980s. Underscoring these goals was his intent to restore morale and prestige, a point he made on three different occasions in the speech. Each time he revisited the idea of returning to greatness, Reagan added more detail and emphasis— devoting one sentence to the goal the first time, then one-and-a-half paragraphs the next, and finally a three- paragraph passage at the end of the speech.28
Reagan concluded the address by saying: “But while we do all these things and they are essential, we must above all have a grand strategy; a plan for the dangerous decade ahead.”29 Years later, when the former president told adviser Martin Anderson about how he had come to the Oval Office with a “plan,” he could have pointed to this prepresidential address.30
At all levels, this speech reflected the plan which Reagan would put into motion in less than a year.31 The strategies for victory laid out in this self-written speech became the foundation from which the future Reagan administration would work. It was a foundation that Reagan alone had laid out.
MARCH–JUNE 1980: THE GAUNTLET OF AN ARMS RACE
In Reagan’s eyes, rebuilding the military would not only reinvigorate American confidence but would weaken the Soviets and bring them to the negotiating table. Reagan had started down this line during the campaign against Ford, and picked it up with vigor after the loss, stretching it through November 1980. He recommended that President Carter use the “trump card” of threatening an arms race if the USSR did not agree to acceptable limits on nuclear arms. Carter had “one trump card that has never been used,” averred Reagan. “We know and the Soviet Union knows that if there is to be an arms race, they can’t even get in the same ballpark as us.” If the Soviets “have to compete with us, I’m sure they’ll come running to the table and say ‘wait a minute,’ because they know they can’t.”32 He asserted flatly: “The Soviet Union cannot possibly match us in an arms race.”33
While identical Reagan quotes from the period could be cited over and over,34 he gave two telling interviews in March and June of 1980 that merit careful attention. The first was with the National Journal, in which Reagan estimated: “An arms race is the last thing they want us to do. The Soviet Union, I believe, is up to its maximum ability in developing arms. Their people are denied so many consumer products because it is all going into the military.” Thus, “They know that if we turned our full industrial might into an arms race, they cannot keep pace with us. Why haven’t we played that card?”35
Also intriguing was a two-hour June 1980 interview Reagan gave to a group of Washington Post editors and reporters, including Lou Cannon. In the opening of his write-up of the interview, Cannon focused on what he found most remarkable among Reagan’s comments: “Ronald Reagan said yesterday that a rapid U.S. arms buildup would be good for the United States because it would strain the defense-burdened Soviet economy and force the Soviets to the arms control bargaining table.” Reagan said: “The very fact that we would start [a rapid arms buildup] would serve a notice on the Soviet Union. I think there’s every indication and every reason to believe that the Soviet Union cannot increase its production of arms….They’ve diverted so much to the military that they can’t provide for the consumer needs.” To Reagan, the United States could not expect to bring the Soviets to the table without a buildup; employing one of his frequent lines, he told the Post, “So far as an arms race is concerned, there’s one going on right now but there’s only one side racing.”36
Lou Cannon still marvels at this interview, understanding the magnitude of what Reagan said that day. In an oral-history testimony years later at the University of Virginia, Cannon recounted the moment, adding information:
[W]e asked him if he feared an arms race with the Soviet Union. He replied that he welcomed an arms race because he was convinced the Soviets couldn’t compete with us. Reagan believed that showing we were serious about a buildup would lead to negotiations with the Soviet Union because their economy could not support an arms race. Reagan was right. Of course, one never knows what the road not traveled might have held. Still, it seems that the fact that the United States was intent on technological competition with the Soviets was certainly a factor influencing a wise leader like Gorbachev in deciding to negotiate a lower level of armaments….
Many people were surprised by the foreign policy developments and the fact that you finally wound up with Reagan and Gorbachev strolling through Red Square proclaiming a new era. I wasn’t surprised with that because I knew Reagan envisioned this sort of rapprochement.37
Cannon, a liberal and once a Reagan doubter, also later spoke of the 1980 incident at Hofstra University. He recalled that one of the Post reporters had responded to Reagan: “You’re going to start this horrible arms race, aren’t you? This is going to get worse, [between] the Soviets and us.” Reagan calmly answered, “Oh, it won’t.”38 It did, however, get worse before it got better.
JUNE–JULY 1980: THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION
With the July 1980 GOP convention approaching, the summer of 1980 brought the Reagan campaign to a fever pitch, and this time, Reagan did not need to overcome an incumbent Republican. His path was clear, with only President Carter standing in the way of the Oval Office. Now, it seemed, Reagan was craving the cup of Cold War victory more than ever. In June 1980, he sent a private letter to a New Jersey man named Severin Palydowycz. “[W]e must restore our prestige in the world,” wrote Reagan, before commenting: “We must also keep alive the idea that the conquered nations—the captive nations—of the Soviet Union must regain their freedom.”39 In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Reagan called for a “great national crusade to make America great again.” The Crusader urged:
More than anything else I want my candidacy to unify our county; to renew the American spirit and sense of purpose…. They [Democratic politicians] say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith…. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view…. I will not stand by and watch this great county destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose. We have come together here because the American people deserve better from those to whom they entrust our nation’s highest offices and we stand united in our resolve to do something about it. We need a rebirth of the American tradition of leadership.40
Yet, what Reagan said privately on the way to the convention was more revolutionary than anything he or his fellow Republicans mouthed for the cameras. Stuart Spencer, a nonideological political guru who was close to Nancy, accompanied Reagan on the long flight from Los Angeles to Detroit. The two men talked about delegate
