Chapter 11
THE REAGAN YEARS:
Death Squads for Democracy
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan threw down the gauntlet in Berlin: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
And on November 9, 1989, less than two and a half years after Ronald Reagan spoke those stirring words, the wall came down. The Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe soon crumbled. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed. The Cold War was over. Many credit Reagan with winning the Cold War. And some lionize him as one of the United States’ great presidents. But was Reagan really the heroic champion of freedom and democracy who brought closure to the most dangerous era in human history? Or was there a darker side to the man and his administration that made a mockery of his words? What really lay behind the smiling facade of this most unlikely of presidents?
Ronald Reagan, the folksy, homespun actor turned General Electric pitchman, had been California governor since 1967. He espoused strong family values but was estranged from his children and was the first president to divorce. A man of limited knowledge but deep religious beliefs and strong conservative convictions, he provided little guidance on policy and had no interest in or grasp of detail. His vice president, George H. W. Bush, confessed to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that he at first found Reagan’s views on international relations “almost unimaginable.” Bush, Dobrynin wrote, was “simply amazed to see to what extent Reagan was dominated by Hollywood clichés and the ideas of his wealthy but conservative and poorly educated friends from California.”1 National Security Council Soviet expert Richard Pipes admitted that at NSC meetings the president seemed “really lost, out of his depth, uncomfortable.” Very early in the new administration, counterterrorism coordinator Anthony Quainton was summoned to brief the president. In Quainton’s words, “I gave that briefing to the President, who was joined by the Vice President, the head of CIA, the head of the FBI, and a number of National Security Council members. After a couple of jelly beans, the President dozed off. That… was quite unnerving.”2
Jimmy Carter was deeply troubled by Reagan’s complete lack of curiosity when he tried to brief the incoming president on the challenges he would face, assessments of world leaders, and command and control of nuclear weapons. Carter aide Jody Powell recounted, “The boss really thought it was important for Reagan to know this stuff before he was sworn in and as he ran through it he couldn’t believe that Reagan wasn’t asking any questions. He thought maybe Reagan wasn’t taking any notes because he didn’t have a pad and pencil and finally offered him one, but Reagan said, no thanks; he could remember it. It was just the damnedest thing.”3
Many of Reagan’s close associates were struck by the depth of his ignorance. Upon returning from his late 1982 Latin American tour, Reagan told reporters, “Well, I learned a lot…. You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.”4 Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau wondered, “What planet is that man living on?” when the president told him that “the Soviets [had brought] an American priest to Moscow in order to send him back to be a spokesman for Actors Equity.”5 Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill was startled when Reagan, admiring O’Neill’s desk that had belonged to Grover Cleveland, told him that he had played Cleveland in the movie The Winning Season. O’Neill reminded him that the desk had belonged to President Cleveland, not Grover Cleveland Alexander, the pitcher. O’Neill, who served in the House for thirty-four years, said that Reagan “knows less than any President I’ve ever known.”6
Reagan’s simplistic worldview seemed to be a pastiche stitched together from Hallmark greeting cards, Currier and Ives lithographs, Benjamin Franklin aphorisms, Hollywood epics, and Chinese fortune cookies. He wrote, “I’d always felt that from our deeds it must be clear to anyone that Americans were a moral people who… had always used our power only as a force for good in the world.”7
He often displayed a striking inability to differentiate between reality and fantasy. In a late 1983 Oval Office meeting, he told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that as a photographer during the Second World War he had filmed the Allies liberating the Nazi death camps and had been so moved by the suffering he witnessed that he had decided to keep a copy of the film in case he ever encountered a Holocaust skeptic. Shamir was so impressed with Reagan’s story that he repeated it to his cabinet and it was printed in the Israeli paper Ma’ariv. Reagan later repeated a variant of the story to Simon Wiesenthal and Rabbi Marvin Hier, telling them he had been with the Signal Corps filming the camps and had shown the film to someone just a year after the war. Hearing the story, Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon noted that Reagan had never left the United States during or immediately after the war. The story was entirely fanciful.8
Reporters then had a field day revealing other Reagan whoppers. Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, perhaps to dispel the notion that the president’s flights of fancy were a product of old age or related to his diminishing mental powers, wrote that he first became aware of Reagan’s habit of altering the truth in 1968 when, to highlight how lawless society was becoming, Reagan asserted that eight Chicago police officers had been killed in one recent month alone. Royko, curious, discovered that no cops had been killed in Chicago in months and only one or two in the entire year.9 Reagan often repeated his story about the Chicago “welfare queen” with eighty names, thirty addresses, and twelve Social Security cards who had a tax-free income of over $150,000. The numbers would change—she sometimes had 127 names and received over one hundred different checks—but the point—an attack on greedy, dishonest blacks who stole from hardworking white Americans—remained the same.10
Compiling lists of Reaganisms became a national pastime. Reagan often made up apocryphal quotes from prominent individuals including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Winston Churchill. Perhaps it was fitting, therefore, that his press spokesman, Larry Speakes, admitted that he had made up quotes and attributed them to Reagan, anticipating what he would have wanted to say.11
For meetings with visitors and even with his own cabinet officials, Reagan read from three-by-five-inch file cards provided by staffers. Visitors would be mortified on those occasions when he unknowingly read from the wrong set of cards. He extrapolated from personal experience to form his views of the world. Facts could be ignored or contradicted when they didn’t support his preferred narrative. When William Clark, a former California Supreme Court justice, took over as national security advisor in 1982, he was shocked to discover how little Reagan actually knew about the world. He instructed the Pentagon and CIA to produce films explaining security issues and describing the world leaders Reagan would be meeting.12