The American Spectator

Books in Review

He Did It His Way

By Conrad Black from the September 2009 issue

Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster
By Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson
(Crown, 464 pages, $32.50)

THIS IS A VERY WORTHWHILE BOOK, whose title incites hopes for a vast plot confected and executed in all its intricacy by a much more complicated figure than Ronald Reagan is generally reckoned to be. It is a meticulous, even laborious compilation by Reagan White House insiders Martin and Annelise Anderson, from National Security Council and subcommittee minutes and Reagan's personal diaries, of the president's methodical pursuit of a victorious but unrancorous end to the Cold War and a steady reduction and even removal of the threat of nuclear weapons. It makes no pretense to dramatic or elegant writing and is even awkward at times, near the beginning. But it is based almost entirely on primary documentary sources, and makes its points almost irrefutably.

As Reagan described to one of his biographers, at the end of World War II, "All I wanted to do...was to rest up a while, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world...I was disappointed in all these ambitions." This was one of his rare references to his first wife, Jane Wyman, and these were his last days as a "hemophiliac bleeding heart Democrat."

The authors' central premise is that when he became president, Reagan had an integrated plan, based on convictions he had been publicly expressing since before there was any real thought of his candidacy for public office, for winning the Cold War without overly aggravating international tensions. He steadily implemented the plan, and brought it to almost complete success.

Reagan's remarkable presentational and oratorical talents, the greatest of any U.S. president in the time of recorded comment except Franklin D. Roosevelt, enabled him to put his ideas across so persuasively it was easy to lose sight of how carefully he had developed his concepts and marshaled his tactics for pursuing them. When asked early on in his presidency his plan for the Cold War, he said, "We win and they lose."

It was a plan based in part on his dealings with attempted Communist infiltration of Hollywood during his six terms as head of the Screen Actors Guild, and on his time as vice president for public and personnel relations of General Electric, where he and the legendary head of labor relations, Lemuel Boulware, outsmarted the red-tainted electrical workers' unions. Reagan was an impassioned opponent of moral relativism. He was untouched by the leftist fear that the U.S. was a swashbucklingly selfindulgent and embarrassing country, or even a menace, and that it had been partly responsible for the outbreak of the Cold War and that it was not necessarily morally superior to the Communists. He thought Communism evil, socialism a losing ticket, and the U.S. a certain winner in the Cold War if America could be allowed to be America.

The authors cite from speeches and articles Reagan wrote all through those years as he advanced steadily toward the nation's highest office. The country came gradually to him, not the other way round, as in tragic or unusual circumstances the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations ended unhappily. He could have been forgiven for thinking that for once, the office really did seek the man.

Reagan is convincingly represented as a swift reader and learner and a very intelligent man who masqueraded as a bit of a charming lightweight. He had never bought the line that the USSR was any great success story. Reagan began as president by proposing substantial tax reductions, which were adopted partly because of the huge wave of support generated by his courage and aplomb after his attempted assassination in March 1981. As the economy responded, he moved decisively to strengthen all aspects of the U.S. military. And he moved to squeeze Soviet access to Western technology, tightening credit and discouraging export permits for sophisticated, and especially defensesensitive, manufactures.

One of the early initiatives Reagan approved, after French president François Mitterrand shared with him valuable French intelligence about Soviet industrial espionage, was to devise a computerized method of regulating pressures in gas wells and pipelines, assuring that the wells and pipelines would explode with great force, and then making sure that Soviet agents came upon the supposedly state-of-the-art pressure system. A few months later, a gas field and pipeline in Siberia blew up in the greatest non-nuclear explosion ever recorded. Reagan and CIA director William Casey were greatly amused.

Reagan also embarked on a low-key effort to create a glut of resources that the USSR exported and which provided most of its hard currency receipts. In 1984, he sold Saudi Arabia a fleet of sophisticated advance warning radar detection aircraft (AWACS), despite the objections of Israel and its more demonstrative lobbyists in the U.S. In the 18 months after this sale was approved, the price of oil, as a consequence of Saudi over-pumping, declined from $30, where it had been for several years, to $13 in March 1986. This assisted the U.S current account and depleted Soviet cash inflows, as an oil exporter.

As the U.S. economy, fueled by Reagan's tax cuts, surged forward out of the Carter "malaise" and the U.S. military expanded, Reagan made contact with Soviet president and Communist Party chairman Leonid Brezhnev, suggesting resumption of arms control talks, which had been deferred after the invasion of Afghanistan. Exchanges continued sporadically but ineffectually with Brezhnev up to his death in November 1982, then with Yuri Andropov until he died in February 1984, then Konstantin Chernenko, who died in March 1985, and finally with a younger generation leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan urged the virtues of nuclear arms reduction on all of them.

DESPITE THE REGULAR DENUNCIATIONS of him as a warmonger apt to press the proverbial nuclear button at any moment, Reagan, from these first exchanges, and in private and telltale utterances for many years before that, sought the abolition of nuclear weapons—at least in the sense that Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had proposed, of international control of them—and a universal policy to advantage the defense in the nuclear equation. He thought the chosen policy of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, equivalent strength and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), an insane and immoral idea.

In October 1981, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger suggested the zero nuclear option for Europe, which had been talked about for a year in Germany. Reagan was intrigued, despite the trenchant opposition of Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who was emerging as a tirelessly obstreperous colleague.

On November 18, 1981, Reagan spoke to the Society of Newspaper Editors and proposed non-deployment of U.S. intermediate cruise missiles and mobile Pershing missiles to Western Europe, in exchange for the withdrawal of the 750 Soviet intermediate- range Soviet missiles already in Eastern Europe. This was the zero option. The Russians responded dismissively.

On December 15, 1981, Reagan opened his effort to coordinate his Eastern European policy with the Vatican's. The Holy See's secretary of state, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, came to the White House and Reagan referred to Eastern Europe's "terrible hunger for God," and the fragility of Russia's hold on the satellite countries, as the swift rise of the Solidarity movement in the Pope's Polish homeland was already demonstrating.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Nuclear Weapons, Ronald Reagan, Cold War