LATE MAY 1982
While NSDD-32 had laid the groundwork, much of the administration’s thinking remained elusive to the public until the days immediately following NSDD-32’s authorization. In a speech at Georgetown’s Center for Strategic and International Studies on May 21, Bill Clark offered a rare public admission by a Reagan official. In that speech, Clark explained the administration’s aims as candidly as then possible: “We must force our principal adversary, the Soviet Union, to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings.” This was a cornerstone of a “new strategy” by the United States, reported Richard Halloran in the New York Times. Halloran noted that the strategy was based on the classified NSDD-32, authorized the previous day. (Not providing the exact number of the directive, the Times referred only to “an eight-page National Security Decision Memorandum.”) That strategy laid out by Clark on that day, said the Times, “made official a theme that several administration officials have hinted at, that of exploiting Soviet economic weaknesses.” The Times reported that nine drafts of the strategy document had been examined in previous months. It quoted Clark as saying that “the President played an extraordinarily active role” in commenting on all nine drafts. “When it was done,” said Clark, “the study and the decision were the President’s.”75
One of the chief contributors to Clark’s Georgetown speech was Tom Reed, who delivered a second speech on NSDD-32 to the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association a few days later. In that unnoticed address, Reed shared the ambition of the administration that NSDD-32 would start the process to “one day convince the leadership of the USSR to turn their attention inward, to seek the legitimacy that comes only from the consent of the governed.”76
Despite these public declarations, it was not until the release of the five-year defense plan that the public began to feel the larger significance of NSDD-32. On May 29, a top-secret document known as the “five-year defense plan” was released to the public. Pentagon officials termed it the “first complete defense guidance of this Administration,” drafted for Secretary Weinberger’s signature. It was a document designed to “form the basis,” reported the New York Times, for DOD’s budget requests for the next five years. It was also a “basic source” for NSDD-32, which, added the Times, was now “the foundation of the Administration’s overall strategic position.”77
Although the release of this “overall strategic position” was captivating, the public was more attuned to the plan because of its examination of strategy for fighting a nuclear war with the USSR. Importantly, examining options for fighting a nuclear war did not mean an endorsement of the policy. On the contrary, it was merely standard procedure for military planners to devise options for potential scenarios. This was true in May 1982 as well, though one might not have imagined judging by the hysterical reaction of those who feared that the plan meant the Reagan administration favored nuclear war. The 125-page unpublished document instructed the armed forces to draw up scenarios for defeating the USSR at any level of conflict.78
More significantly, the DOD plan, formally titled, “Fiscal Year 1984–1988 Defense Guidance,” echoed NSDD-32’s economic-warfare aspects. In a front-page article on May 30, the New York Times reported that the plan stated that Western trade policies “would put as much pressure as possible on a Soviet economy already burdened with military spending.”79 The Times was candid with readers: “As a peacetime complement to military strategy, the guidance document asserts that the United States and its allies should, in effect, declare economic and technical war on the Soviet Union.”
The DOD plan spoke of challenging the USSR with military systems the Soviets could not afford to match, advocating that the United States develop weapons that “are difficult for the Soviets to counter, impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment.” This emphasis on “putting economic pressure on the Soviet Union,” asserted the Times, in the article’s biggest nonrevelation, was a marked departure from the Carter administration.80
Moreover, reported the Times, the plan made clear that, “Particular attention would be given to eroding support within the Soviet sphere of Eastern Europe.” Again, here was more formal intent to stir dissension within the Soviet empire, and the Communist bloc in particular. The plan said that the Reagan administration should “exploit political, economic, and military weaknesses within the Warsaw Pact.” American “special operations forces” would conduct operations in Eastern Europe with the aim of diminishing Soviet support. The Times explained that special operations were a euphemism for guerrillas, saboteurs, commandos, and “similar unconventional forces.”81
While the administration had put a portion of its cards on the table through the release of the DOD plan, Reagan officials still kept a few aces up their sleeves. Despite their strong language and clear purpose, NSDD-24 and NSDD-32 were merely the beginning of the directives handed down by Reagan that would change the face of the Cold War. Carefully crafted to maximize their potential impact, these initiatives would search new fronts for confrontation with the Soviet Union, always seeking ideas and means to erode Soviet infrastructure.
Though confident in these endeavors, Reagan hoped to enlist the aid of a crucial figure. Economics had constituted one front; religion was another. It was thus that he decided to keep true to his words of the previous Christmas and engage Pope John Paul II in helping him elicit change in the Soviet empire.
10. The Vatican and Westminster: June 7–8, 1982
ON MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1982 RONALD REAGAN WAS IN ROME. He was there as part of a brief trip to Europe. It was a straightforward trip lacking many stops, but in its simplicity, it contained unparalleled steps in the rhetorical and symbolic war against the Soviet Union. For two seminal days in June 1982, Reagan made some of his strongest gestures to date, signaling to America and to the world his belief that Communism’s days were running out.
With a media crush outside, as reporters jockeyed for position and at times literally tripped over one another, Reagan and the pope met at the Vatican, a little over a year after assassination attempts that almost took their lives.1 The day he was shot the pope had received a cable from Reagan, in which the president expressed his shock and prayers.2 Since then, the staffs of the two men had worked diligently to arrange a meeting between them. “It was always assumed the president would meet with the Holy Father as soon as feasible,” said Bill Clark, among those most excited about the prospects, “especially after they both took shots…only a few weeks apart. I don’t know if any one person said ‘we have to see the pope.’ It was just assumed because of their mutual interests that at some point the two men would come together and form some sort of collaboration.”3
Reagan had long coveted such an idea, and the events in Poland the previous December merely reinforced the importance of such a meeting. Not only had he long viewed the pope as the key to Poland’s fate, but among his earliest goals as president was to officially recognize the Vatican as a state “and make them an ally.”4
Now, for the first time, the men spoke face to face inside the venerable Vatican Library. The subject of the shootings was broached. Pio Cardinal Laghi said that Reagan told the pope: “Look how the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence intervened.” Bill Clark said that both men referred to the “miraculous” fact that they had survived; indeed, only later did we learn that both men had come perilously close to dying.5
The Protestant and Catholic, said Clark, shared a “unity” in spiritual views and in their “vision on the Soviet empire,” namely, “that right or correctness would ultimately prevail in the divine plan.” That day, each shared their view that they had been given “a spiritual mission—a special role in the divine plan of life.” Both expressed concern for “the terrible oppression of atheistic communism,” as Clark put it, and agreed that “atheistic communism lived a lie that, when fully understood, must ultimately fail.”6
Together they expressed a common vision to end the Cold War. As Reagan said, “We both felt that a great mistake had been made at Yalta and something should be done. Solidarity was the very weapon for bringing this about.”7 It was an important unity, and in his dramatic 1992 story for Time magazine, Carl Bernstein
