The Dead Hand

seemed an unyielding presence. “It was not at all clear then that the Soviet economy was approaching bankruptcy, that Afghanistan would become Moscow’s Vietnam, that the appearance of a Polish labor union called Solidarity portended the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, or that the U.S.S.R. would disappear in just over a decade,” he said.³⁰

The study led to a top-secret order, National Security Decision Directive 32, which Reed drafted. Titled “U.S. National Security Strategy,” the directive incorporated the long-standing Cold War policy of containment. But the Reagan directive also went further, and raised a new, more ambitious goal: to force the Soviet Union “to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.” Reagan wrote in his diary after a briefing on the Soviet economy, “They are in very bad shape and if we can cut off their credit they’ll have to yell ‘Uncle’ or starve.”³¹

The extreme delicacy of Reagan’s directive was evident in the way Clark handled the paperwork. Reagan took the draft directive home with him to review on the evening of May 4, 1982. On May 5, at 9:30 A.M., in the presence of Reed and Clark, he signed it. But it was so explosive that Clark did not put it into the White House filing and distribution system until May 20. Clark apparently feared there would be interference from others in the cabinet.³²

Reagan had struck a confrontational approach to the Soviet Union from the outset of his presidency, from his first words about lying and cheating, to his rearmament program, and with the CIA’s covert actions in Afghanistan and Central America. The new directive accelerated this drive and made it the official policy of the United States.

On May 9, Reagan turned to nuclear arms control in a commencement address at his alma mater, Eureka College, marking the fiftieth anniversary of his own graduation. In one eloquent passage, Reagan talked about the horror of nuclear war and vowed to “ensure that the ultimate nightmare never occurs.” He also used the address to make his first major proposal since taking office for controlling long-range nuclear weapons—including the ballistic missiles that were so fearsome and fast. He called for both the United States and Soviet Union to reduce their ballistic missile warheads to “equal levels, equal ceilings at least a third below the current levels,” and then specified that “no more than half of those warheads be land-based.” These words sounded equitable, but they were not. The Soviets had a much larger share of their warheads on land-based missiles, while the U.S. weapons were predominantly at sea and in the air. Reagan was often ignorant of such details, and nearly a year later, he confessed that he did not realize that the Soviet strategic force was heavily concentrated in land-based missiles. The Eureka speech underscored his passive management style, often more focused on performing than the details of governing.³³

Brezhnev wrote back to Reagan that the Eureka College proposal “cannot but cause apprehension and even doubts as to the seriousness of the intentions of the U.S. side.”

While reading Brezhnev’s letter, Reagan jotted down in the margin, “He has to be kidding.”

When Brezhnev complained that Reagan’s proposals were one-sided, cutting deeper into Soviet weapons than American ones, Reagan wrote, “Because they have the most.”

At the bottom of the letter, Reagan added, “He’s a barrel of laughs.”³⁴

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Across the United States, the nuclear freeze movement gained ground in 1982, inspired by antinuclear protests in Western Europe. Churches, universities and city councils in the United States were organizing to protest the nuclear arms race. A march from the United Nations to New York’s Central Park on June 12 drew three-quarters of a million people. Jonathan Schell published The Fate of the Earth, a best seller which declared that nuclear weapons threatened human existence and called for their elimination. The American Catholic bishops drafted a Pastoral Letter on War and Peace expressing fear of the nuclear arms race. Reagan went to Europe in early June concerned that he was being depicted “as a shoot from the hip cowboy aching to pull out my nuclear six-shooter and bring on doomsday.” Reagan recalled later that “I wanted to demonstrate that I wasn’t flirting with doomsday.” But he also used the trip to advance his confrontation with Moscow. A few days before departure, he wrote in his diary that he was fed up with those who advised him to go easy on the Soviets, so as not to upset the allies. “I finally said to h–l with it. It’s time to tell them this is our chance to bring the Soviets into the real world and for them to take a stand with us—shut off credit, etc.”³⁵

One of the most secret but daring thrusts by Reagan came on June 7. He met Pope John Paul II for fifty minutes in the Vatican library. Both had survived assassination attempts the previous year. Their talk centered on Poland, the pope’s birthplace, where the Soviet-backed regime had imposed martial law and outlawed the Solidarity movement. The journalist Carl Bernstein reported in 1992 that Reagan and the pope agreed on a plan to support Solidarity underground, smuggling in tons of equipment, including fax machines, printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers and word processors. The goal was to destabilize General Wojciech Jaruzelski, a pointed and direct challenge to the Kremlin.³⁶ The pope’s authorized biographer, George Weigel, recalled that both Reagan and John Paul “believed that Communism was a moral evil, not simply wrongheaded economics. They were both confident of the capacity of free people to meet the Communist challenge. Both were convinced that, in the contest with communism, victory, not mere accommodation, was possible.” Weigel recalled the pope later said the Vatican had maintained a distance from the U.S. covert campaign in Poland, but he confirms the close coordination on intelligence. Weigel quotes the pope saying that while Reagan decided the policy, “My position was that of a pastor, the Bishop of Rome, of one with responsibility for the Gospel, which certainly contains principles of the moral and social order and human rights… The Holy See’s position, even in regard to my homeland, was guided by moral principle.”³⁷

On the day after seeing the pope, Reagan traveled to London for an open declaration of his policy, delivered to the British Parliament. He spoke in the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords, calling for a “crusade for freedom.” His speech overflowed with optimism about the demise of totalitarianism and the triumph of individual endeavor over collectivism, and described anew his abhorrence of nuclear war. There was not much applause for these statements at the time. Britain was still fighting in the Falklands, which dominated the headlines, and the speech did not get the attention it deserved as one of the most important Reagan ever delivered.

The boldest part of the address was Reagan’s assertion that Soviet communism would expire. “It may not be easy to see,” Reagan declared, “but I believe we now live at a turning point.

In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis—a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.

It is the Soviet Union which runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It is also in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the Soviet gross national product has been steadily declining since the ’50s and is less than half of what it was then. The dimensions of this failure are astounding: a country which employs one fifth of its population in agriculture is unable to feed its own people… Overcentralized, with little or no incentives, year after year, the Soviet system pours its best resource into the making of instruments of destruction.

Reagan closed the address with a prediction that the “march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

On a quick visit to Berlin two days later, Reagan drove to Checkpoint Charlie, the drab opening in the Berlin Wall. He stepped out of his limousine, surveying the thirteen-foot-high wall, stretching out in both directions, gray and pockmarked, East German guards looking back at him from their guardhouses. Of the wall, he said, “It’s as ugly as the idea behind it.”³⁸

On June 25, Reagan recruited George Shultz, the chairman of Bechtel, to be his new secretary of state, replacing Al Haig. Shultz had been in Europe and recalled thinking about the state of the world as he flew home for his first meeting with Reagan.

“Relations between the superpowers were not simply bad,” he recalled, “they were virtually non- existent.”³⁹

At the same time, Reed, the National Security Council official, was growing more worried about the lack of a serious plan for the president’s command and control in the event of a nuclear alert. No one wanted to advertise it,