and the energy crises of the 1970s. A deep recession had wrung hyperinflation out of the economy, and growth was rebounding. An American high-technology revolution was taking hold. Reagan formally announced he was seeking reelection January 29. His campaign was framed by inspirational television commercials, including one titled “Morning Again in America,” which opened with glimpses of a farmhouse, followed by scenes of a wedding party and of an elderly man raising the American flag while young faces watched in adoration. As the flag filled the screen to the sounds of soft and stirring music, an announcer said, “It’s morning again in America … And under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is stronger, and prouder, and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”
After the tense months of the previous autumn, Reagan wrote repeatedly in his diary early in 1984 that he had come to realize Soviet leaders might have a genuine fear of the United States, and he yearned to talk them out of it. He acknowledged “my own attitudes toward the Soviets were changing a little.”1 The president of Yugoslavia, Mika Spiljak, visited Reagan at the White House February 1, and the president asked a lot of questions about the Soviet Union. “He believes that coupled with their expansionist philosophy they are also insecure & genuinely frightened of us,” Reagan wrote in his diary. “He also believes that if we opened them up a bit their leading citizens would get braver about proposing changes in their system. I’m going to pursue this.”
At Andropov’s funeral in Moscow, Chernenko had sent a conciliatory signal during a talk with Vice President Bush, saying, “We are not inherently enemies.” Reagan had yet to see a Soviet leader face-to-face and wondered if he should meet Chernenko. “I have a gut feeling I’d like to talk to him about our problems man to man & see if I could convince him there would be material benefit to the Soviets if they’d join in the family of nations, etc.,” he wrote February 22.
When Suzanne Massie, author of several books on Russian culture and history, came by to see Reagan on March 1, after a trip to Moscow, Reagan expressed admiration for her insights and said “she reinforced my gut feeling that it’s time for me to personally meet with Chernenko.”2
The next day, Reagan held a high-level meeting to plan next steps with the Soviets. The secret gathering, kept off Reagan’s public schedule, brought together all of Reagan’s top cabinet and staff advisers on Soviet affairs. Reagan announced at the opening of the meeting he wanted to arrange a summit, to show Chernenko he was not the sort of person who would “eat his own offspring.” But the session wandered off, and ended without a decision.3 “I’m convinced the time has come for me to meet with Chernenko along about July,” Reagan wrote that night.4 On March 5, Reagan met West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Reagan recalled, “He confirmed my belief the Soviets are motivated, at least in part by insecurity & a suspicion that we & our allies mean them harm. They still preserve the tank traps & barbed wire that show how close the Germans got to Moscow before they were stopped. He thinks I should meet Chernenko.”
Reagan concluded that he needed a “more hands-on approach” to the Soviets. He sent a seven-page letter to Chernenko. “I tried to use the old actor’s technique of empathy: to imagine the world as seen through another’s eyes and try to help my audience see it through my eyes,” he said. “I said it was my understanding that some people in the Soviet Union felt a genuine fear of our country.” The letter ended with a handwritten postscript, recalling “Soviet losses in warfare through the ages.” He added, “Surely those losses, which are beyond description, must affect your thinking today. I want you to know that neither I nor the American people hold any offensive intentions toward the Soviet people.”5
But Chernenko didn’t reciprocate, and rejected a summit. Reagan and Chernenko exchanged a half-dozen letters in the spring of 1984, to no effect. After a strategy session on the Soviets March 23, Reagan concluded: “I think they are going to be cold & stiff-necked for a while.”
In Moscow, the KGB director, Vladimir Kryuchkov, opened a conference at headquarters saying that RYAN— spotting preparations for nuclear attack—was still the overwhelming overseas intelligence priority. Kryuchkov declared that the risk of nuclear war had reached “dangerous proportions,” the Pentagon was driven by “the fantastic idea of world domination” and the White House was engaged in “the psychological preparation of the population for nuclear war.” Kryuchkov’s speech text landed on Gordievsky’s desk in London. It said the top priority was to get a copy of the secret war plans of the United States and NATO.6 Another urgent priority for Gordievsky and the London office was to monitor field exercises involving the cruise missiles stationed at the Royal Air Force base at Greenham Common. But according to Gordievsky, the London office had no intelligence sources for this; they sent British press reports to Moscow instead.7
Early in 1984, Reagan had signed an order formally launching the research effort into his Strategic Defense Initiative.8 In the Kremlin, however, Soviet leaders were still worried about the threat from Pershing IIs and the ground-launched cruise missiles. The Pershing IIs were fast, but the cruise missiles more numerous. While 108 Pershing IIs would be deployed in West Germany, the plan was to station 464 cruise missiles in Belgium, Britain, Italy, Netherlands and West Germany. The cruise missile was a modified navy sea-launched Tomahawk, about twenty-one feet long, each carrying a single nuclear warhead. It would fly at 550 miles per hour to a target as far as 1,350 miles away. The ground-launched cruise missile was a wonder of technology. It could soar at high altitudes over hostile territory and then swoop down to fifty feet above ground level and be steered toward its target with a sophisticated, terrain-sensitive and radar-avoiding guidance system. The Soviets had nothing like it.9
In Moscow, Anatoly Chernyaev, deputy director of the International Department of the Central Committee, attended a briefing June 4 given by Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who was then deputy chief of the Soviet military’s General Staff. “It was amazing,” Chernyaev said, with “missiles homing in on their targets from hundreds and thousands of kilometers away; aircraft carriers, submarines that could do anything; winged missiles that, like in a cartoon, could be guided through a canyon and hit a target 10 meters in diameter from 2,500 kilometers away. An incredible breakthrough in modern technology. And, of course, unthinkably expensive.”10
On June 28, Herbert E. Meyer, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a think tank inside the CIA, sent a memo to CIA director William Casey titled “What Should We Do About the Russians?” Meyer noted the war scare of the previous year, and the paralysis in Moscow. He also saw the Soviet system under deep internal strain. “Decades of overemphasis on military production have wrecked the country’s civilian industrial and technological base,” he said.
More precisely, the Soviets have failed miserably to generate the kinds of innovations on which modern economies are increasingly dependent: robotics, micro-electronics, computerized communications and information- processing systems. Even if the Soviets could develop such systems, they could not deploy them without losing the political control on which the Communist Party depends for its very survival. For after 40 years of fear among Western intellectuals that technology would lead inexorably to Big Brother societies throughout the world, it now turns out that technology, in the form of personal computers and the like, has put communications and information processing beyond the control of any central authority. Unwilling and unable to develop and deploy innovations like these—as we in the West are doing with such robust enthusiasm—the Soviet Union can now produce little but weapons.11
Reagan tried a back-channel gambit to reach Chernenko in April. Brent Scowcroft, who had been President Ford’s national security adviser, carried a letter from Reagan to Chernenko on a private trip to Moscow.12 He never got to see Chernenko, however. The letter went undelivered. “He believes the Soviet cold shoulder is due in part at least to their not wanting to help me get re-elected,” Reagan noted after talking to Scowcroft on his return.13 Scowcroft told reporters, “If you compare the political or psychological atmosphere between the two powers, it’s as bad as it’s been in my memory.”14
When the Soviets announced May 8 they would boycott the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Reagan concluded that Chernenko wasn’t completely in control, and the lion of the old guard, Gromyko, was running foreign policy.15 In June, the Soviets proposed opening talks on space weapons, but when Reagan asked to include ballistic missiles, Chernenko refused. “They are utterly stonewalling us,” Reagan wrote in his diary. Reagan cared about his reelection campaign, but his horizon was longer than just the vote. If “America was back,” then in his own mind, it was time to engage the Soviet Union. Reagan still did not have a Soviet partner, his first term was almost over and the paralysis in the Soviet elite was even worse than Reagan could have imagined at the time.16
On August 11, 1984, at Rancho del Cielo in California, Reagan prepared for his Saturday radio address. He often made wisecracks in the warm-up, considered off the record by reporters and technicians present. Asked for a
