The Dead Hand

microphone check on this day, the president said, “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” The remark soon leaked, and made headlines around the world, once again reinforcing the caricature of Reagan as a reckless gunslinger. TASS denounced the remark as “unprecedentedly hostile toward the USSR and dangerous to the cause of peace.” The president was chagrined. “Doing a voice level with no thought that anyone other than the few people in the room would hear I ad-libbed jokingly something about the Soviets,” he admitted in his diary. “The networks had a line open & recorded it and of course made it public—hence an international incident.”

On August 13, two days after the radio gaffe, at a lunch in Los Angeles, Shultz suggested, very tentatively, that Reagan invite Gromyko to the White House after the opening of the United Nations General Assembly in September. The president quickly agreed. “It’s the right thing to do,” Reagan said. “Try to work it out.”¹⁷ The meeting was arranged; it would be Reagan’s first with any member of the Soviet Politburo since becoming president. Reagan wrote in his diary, “I have a feeling we’ll get nowhere with arms reductions while they are suspicious of our motives as we are of theirs. I believe we need a meeting to see if we can’t make them understand we have no designs on them but think they have designs on us. If we could once clear the air maybe reducing arms wouldn’t look so impossible to them.”

Reagan spent most of Saturday, September 22, working on the speech he was to give the following Monday at the United Nations. It was “ticklish,” he acknowledged. “I don’t want to sound as if I’m going soft on Russia but I don’t want to kill off the Gromyko meeting before it takes place.” In his speech, Reagan offered not a word of criticism of the Soviet Union; the “evil empire” was gone. As he spoke from the podium, Reagan was watching the faces of Gromyko and the Soviet representatives, sitting in the front row, right below the microphone. “I tried to catch their eyes several times on particular points affecting them,” he recalled. “They were looking through me & their expressions never changed.”

Reagan finally got his chance to talk to Gromyko eye-to-eye in the Oval Office on September 28. They lectured each other. At one point, Gromyko recalled, Reagan reached into a side drawer and pulled out some charts on nuclear weapons. As the meeting broke for lunch, Reagan asked Gromyko to remain behind in the Oval Office. They spoke alone, in English, without interpreters. Gromyko had said the world was sitting atop a huge mountain of nuclear weapons that should be reduced. “My dream,” Reagan said, “is for a world where there are no nuclear weapons.”¹⁸

Reagan escorted his guest down the long colonnade from the West Wing to the main White House mansion for a reception. Gromyko was amazed at the number of “English long-case clocks” in the White House and wondered if Reagan was a collector. A small chamber orchestra played classical music. Reagan introduced Nancy. At the end of the reception, Gromyko took Nancy aside and said, “Does your husband believe in peace?”

“Of course,” she replied.

“Then whisper ‘peace’ in your husband’s ear every night,” he said.

“I will, and I will also whisper it in your ear,” she said. And with that she leaned over with a smile and whispered softly, “Peace.”¹⁹

At the end of the visit, the Soviet Embassy called Don Oberdorfer, diplomatic correspondent of the Washington Post, and asked for a photograph of Reagan talking to Gromyko that appeared in the morning paper. It showed Reagan’s hands on both of Gromyko’s arms. The photo was rushed over to Gromyko before his departure. Gromyko had first come to Washington forty-five years earlier. Although no one knew it then, this was his last trip to the White House. Reagan had finally met a member of the Soviet Politburo, but had yet to find one with whom he could do business.²⁰

Although Reagan wanted to talk to the Soviet leadership, he also approved policies to directly challenge the Soviet Union. At the behest of CIA director Casey, he vastly expanded proxy wars against Soviet influence in the Third World. In 1984, covert U.S. support for the mujahedeen fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan reached a major turning point. The secret aid pipeline from the United States and Saudi Arabia, through Pakistan, suddenly bulged; by one account the total had tripled to hundreds of millions of dollars, in a matter of weeks.²¹ At the same time, Reagan wanted to channel money to guerrilla fighters, known as contrarevolucionarios, or contras, who were opposing the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan called the contras the “moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” and he cast Nicaragua’s Sandinista junta, led by Daniel Ortega, as the front line in the war on communism. But Congress had cut off the aid to the contras, and money was running out in 1984. Reagan instructed McFarlane, his national security adviser, to keep the contras alive, “body and soul.” That summer, McFarlane reassured Reagan that Saudi Arabia had pledged $1 million a month into a secret bank account for the contras. The driving force in Afghanistan and Central America was Casey. “By the end of 1984, Casey’s covert war in the Third World against the Soviet Union and its surrogates was in full swing,” recalled Gates, who was then his deputy.

In the summer of 1984, the RYAN operation seemed to expire. Gordievsky said anxiety in Moscow about nuclear war “was visibly declining.”²² Chernenko didn’t share Andropov’s sense of alarm and paranoia about nuclear attack. Although there were no arms control negotiations that year, Soviet officials protested with increasing frequency about what they called “militarization of space.” Shultz said Dobrynin brought up kosmos—the Russian word for outer space—at every meeting.²³ This was aimed directly at Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, although the actual program was barely getting started. By one account, that summer the program comprised two dozen people working out of a dilapidated office building in Washington.²⁴

Reagan’s dream got a lucky break that summer. The army, in a program started in the 1970s, was studying rocket interceptors, and created an experiment, using a test interceptor with an infrared homing device and computer. It was called the Homing Overlay Experiment. The first three tests had failed. In the fourth and last test on June 10, 1984, the interceptor was launched from Meck Island in the Kwajalein Islands, and more than one hundred miles high, it locked onto a Minuteman missile carrying a dummy warhead. The interceptor found the Minuteman in part because the dummy warhead was heated up for the test, and the Minuteman turned sideways, to be easier to detect. The missile was destroyed. The Pentagon announced the test was a stunning success. “We do know that we can pick them up and hit them,” a spokesman said. The Kremlin was rattled.²⁵

Reagan’s reelection campaign aired one commercial that hinted at voter fears about the arms race. It was a thirty-second spot written by the same team that created “Morning Again in America.” But this commercial had a darker undertone, one that warned of uncertainty. The goal was to acknowledge the danger but also suggest there might be a way out. The ad shows a grizzly bear wandering in the forest. “There is a bear in the woods,” the announcer says in a tone of seriousness and authority. “For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some say the bear is tame. Some say it’s vicious. Since no one knows, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear, if there is a bear?”²⁶

On November 6, 1984, Reagan was reelected in the largest electoral-vote landslide in U.S. history. He won 59 percent of the popular vote, carried 49 states and received 525 electoral votes to 10 for Walter Mondale.

Between the summer vacation and the election, Shultz had been talking privately to Reagan about the work of a second term. Shultz could not tell if Reagan absorbed what he said, but he kept lecturing. He told Reagan the Soviet Union was caught in an inconclusive leadership struggle, from one generation to another, bound up in a stagnating economy and “extreme distrust verging, in some instances, on paranoia” about the United States. It wasn’t clear how the leadership succession would be resolved, Shultz said, but one of the most promising candidates was a member of the younger generation, a man with a broader view—Mikhail Gorbachev.²⁷

————— PART ————— TWO