Senator Kennedy for “properly” labeling SDI:
They christened it [“star wars”] with full justification, since this initiative envisages deploying strike weapons systems in space aimed at targets not only in earth orbit, but also on the ground. All the while, the White House has convinced itself that they have been misunderstood, that they have goodwill toward all mankind….[The White House believes that] certain forces, it seems, have distorted the essence of the Strategic Defense Initiative by labeling it the “star wars” program….However, Washington is resorting to mediocre verbal balancing acts in vain. There is nothing defensive about it.92
Reagan was left alone to deal with the consequences of how SDI was mislabeled and misreported, including against hostile Soviet reporters, to whom he protested: “We’re not talking about star wars at all! We’re talking about seeing if there isn’t a defensive weapon that does not kill people.” The Soviet reporters were incredulous; after all, they had gotten the term from Reagan’s own American media which, the Soviets surely surmised, was certainly more objective on the matter than Reagan.93
THE WILLIAMSBURG SUMMIT
While the “Evil Empire” speech and SDI had created a furor in the spring of 1983, Reagan stayed the course on each of his crusade’s many fronts. Despite the turmoil and indignation from inside and outside his administration, stubborn old Reagan still refused to back down on the Siberian gas pipeline. In the face of mounting criticism from around the world, he refused to give up his unrelenting attack on the project.
In May, the issue finally came to a head at a G-7 economic summit held at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Accompanying Reagan were Secretary of State Shultz and Treasury Secretary Don Regan. The other attending leaders were President Mitterand of France, Prime Minister Thatcher of Britain, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone of Japan, Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani of Italy, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada, and Gaston Thorn, president of the Commission of the European Communities. During the summit, the allies reached a compromise, settling for a one-strand pipeline— instead of the two-strand initially planned—in exchange for a pledge from Western Europe to impose tighter restrictions on technology exports and lowinterest loans to the Soviet bloc. It was a victory for Reagan, or, at the very least, a notable half-victory.
During a Politburo meeting the following day, an angry General Secretary Yuri Andropov blamed everything squarely on Reagan. It was Ronald Reagan alone, said Andropov, who was the “bearer and creator of all anti- Soviet ideas.” The American president was seeking to “put together a bloc against the USSR.” To Andropov, the problem was not so much the Reagan administration and those around the president but Reagan himself.94
Andropov’s resentment was understandable. Reagan had slowed construction of the pipeline by nearly two years, and, in the end, prevailed in stopping the construction of the second strand altogether—a remarkable personal achievement in light of the opposition he had faced in Western Europe and in his own cabinet.
All of this caused considerable damage to the Soviet economy. At the time, Soviet economist Abel Aganbegyan figured that “each month’s delay” in the construction of the pipeline “costs us millions.”95 His estimates were correct. The Reagan NSC estimated that the Soviet Union after 1982 was deprived of an astonishing $10–15 billion in annual revenue—out of a total hard-currency income of $32 billion.96 By 1990, when the pipelines would have been fully operational, Russian natural gas would have accounted for an estimated 23 percent of Western Europe’s consumption.97
That loss was a massive blow to the Soviet economy, from which it never recovered. Equally significant, the lost revenue also deprived the USSR of the resources it needed to spend money on armaments and to subsidize client states. By 1990, a Communist despot like Fidel Castro suddenly found himself without his annual $6 billion check from Moscow, a sunken lifeline from which Havana likewise never recovered.
Williamsburg brought to a close a campaign that had begun more than a year earlier and had been one of Reagan’s toughest stances on international policy toward the USSR. While the construction of the pipeline was something that Reagan had hoped to avoid altogether, this compromise proved to be the first decisive victory in his foreign policy against the Soviets, during which he had shown the world his refusal to acquiesce to international pressure.
JUNE–AUGUST 1983: POLAND
As the pipeline front was coming to a close, Poland appeared to be cooling off. Since the drama of December 1981, progress appeared to have stagnated, particularly with the leaders of Solidarity in prison or in hiding. Yet, beneath the placid surface, the water was simmering, and Reagan was hoping to make it boil so furiously as to knock the lid off.
By summer 1983, the covert aid that Reagan had authorized under earlier NSDDs was flowing to the Solidarity underground, as were a constant stream of words from the Oval Office.98 These words constituted a powerful source of moral support for Poland’s freedom fighters, and were so ubiquitous that the final index to Reagan’s Presidential Documents—the official collection of all presidential statements—lists references to Solidarity or Poland on 216 pages, with multiple references on most pages, many of which came in 1983 alone.99 In these, Reagan was an unflagging championing of Solidarity, and served up stinging rebukes of Soviet or Polish government actions.
While martial law was quietly lifted in July 1983—a big victory for Solidarity’s man in the Oval Office— Reagan did not lift his verbal campaign on the subject. Poland, after all, still was not free. On June 23, speaking to Polish Americans in Chicago, the president said that Americans were bound to Poles, and that while time might pass, the American people would “never, never forget the brave people of Poland and their courageous struggle.” Though martial law had descended like a dark cloud, the will of the Polish people had never been broken. “No one,” he assured, “can crush the spirit of the Polish people.”100 He quoted Churchill, who once said Poland is like a rock: While it may occasionally be submerged by a tidal wave, it always remains a rock.101
A month later, on July 19, he commemorated free Poland in his observance of Captive Nations Week. The leader of the free world told all of those behind the Iron Curtain that he did not recognize their subjugation as a permanent condition. As for Poles in particular, the Crusader stated: “As Pope John Paul [II] told his beloved Poles, we are blessed by divine heritage. We are children of God and we cannot be slaves.”102
Every chance he could, Reagan spoke at Polish events and even festivals, always using this kind of language, frequently quoting John Paul II and Lech Walesa—on and on, as if America had elected its first Polish president.103 In fact, that thought occurred to Soviet hardliner Aleksander Bovin, who wrote in
These snipes regarding Reagan’s remarks on Poland were quite common with the Soviet press. Propagandist Bovin maintained that Reagan “does not give a damn about Polish workers’ rights.” His talk about human rights was “hypocritical sympathy,” a “cynical, dishonest, shameless farce and nothing more.”105
If the likes of Bovin wanted genuine “hypocritical sympathy” concerning Poland, they needed to look no further than TASS, which called the members of Solidarity “anti-socialist scum”—striking language from an official government news agency.106 Furthermore, TASS was irate that in his speeches Reagan “did not say a word about the liberatory mission of the Soviet Army and the Polish Army.” By Polish Army, TASS meant the good work of Jaruzelski and his military group in regard to the martial law crackdown. By the Soviet Army, TASS was referring to the Red Army’s role in driving the Nazis out of Poland in World War II. This role, said TASS, “apparently mean[t] nothing to Reagan.”107