The Reagan administration continued to negotiate with the European NATO allies the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in those countries to reply to the Soviet SS-20s, whose launch sites were already being set up in significant numbers in Eastern Europe. Personal income taxes were broadly cut by 25 percent. He sent a powerful message when 13,000 air traffic controllers (whose union, PATCO, had supported Reagan in the 1980 election) struck illegally; he gave them, as government employees, 48 hours to return to work, and then fired the 90 percent of them that did not obey the order, on August 5, 1981. Flights were reduced in number and military air controllers were substituted, and there were no mishaps. This dramatic step indicated with great clarity that a new hand was on the government, replacing the uncertain grip of his predecessor.
The progress of Reagan’s program was assisted by his great aplomb in coping with an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, in Washington. As he left a hotel after a midday speech, he was wounded in the chest by a bullet from an assailant who also shot the president’s press secretary, a member of his security unit, and a municipal policeman. The president, though he had a collapsed lung and a bullet only about an inch from his heart, walked into the hospital, where he was driven at speed, though he had to be assisted into the operating room. He removed his oxygen mask to say to the gathered group of doctors and emergency nurses: “I hope you’re all Republicans.” The presiding doctor (a Democrat) responded with equal gallantry that at that moment, all Americans were Republicans. The president recovered quickly and addressed the Congress four weeks later to prolonged and thunderous applause, and in the face of his enhanced popularity, his congressional opponents were resistless against his taxing and spending cuts and increases in defense outlays.
Reagan developed a comprehensive strategy for squeezing the Soviet Union and forcing the end of the Cold War. He opened close relations with the Vatican, concerting policy with the Holy See’s secretary of state, Agostino Cardinal Casaroli, and through his ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson. Wilson was a member of a subcommittee of the National Security Council that specialized in coordinating anti-communist activities with the Roman Catholic Church. When Casaroli came to lunch in the White House early in Reagan’s term, he told the president and secretary of state and other select luncheoners that there were approximately 100 million Roman Catholics behind the Iron Curtain who took their religion seriously, almost all of whom detested communism, and that the (Polish) pope (since 1978), John Paul II, intended, without urging impetuosity on the faithful, to tighten the screws on the Soviets. Like most Poles, the pope was unimpressed with communism and especially the Russian-imposed version of it in Poland, and the Polish and Ukrainian and Russian Uniate Catholic communities were particularly strong and aggrieved at communist religious and national oppression. This was a break from relatively placatory recent popes, other than Pius XII in 1948 and Paul VI in 1976, when, on each occasion, the Italian Communist Party made a determined charge to join the government or even lead it in that country, and they responded strongly (Chapter 11, and earlier in this chapter).
Later in 1981, the United States imposed sanctions on communist Poland in response to the imposition of martial law in that country to combat militancy from the Catholic industrial unions. The United States and the Holy See also cooperated in Central America and elsewhere in Latin America. Reagan regularly disparaged the Soviet Union, ending what had effectively been a condition of unilateral verbal disarmament, describing it as “an evil empire” in a widely telecast speech on June 8, 1982, and on March 3, 1983, as a “sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”
Reagan extended increased assistance to the anti-Russian resisters in Afghanistan, and to the pro-Western factions in the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, as well as, eventually quite controversially, in Central America. Reagan was annoyed by Soviet industrial espionage in the U.S., and he authorized CIA director William Casey to develop a complicated plan, ostensibly devised by the private sector, for the collection and pipeline-transmission of natural gas from a large gas-producing area, designed to generate such pressures that it would blow up the whole field. This was represented as a superior and very advanced design, which was deliberately allowed to get into the hands of Soviet agents. Reagan and Casey were vastly amused about a year later when one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history was recorded in the principal gas-producing region of Siberia. This humiliating fiasco drastically reduced the Soviet appetite for industrial espionage.
210
There were personality differences between the president and the secretary of state, and General Haig retired from that office in July 1982 and was replaced by George P. Shultz, a former marine combat captain and dean of business administration at the University of Chicago; Nixon’s labor secretary, budget director, and secretary of the Treasury; and president of the engineering giant Bechtel Corporation. He was as well-qualified as Haig and temperamentally more emollient.
The president played what proved to be a decisive card on March 23, 1983, when he outlined his Strategic Defense Initiative, a plan for building a defensive anti-missile shield that was a combination of ground-launched and space-based missile-interception systems. It was ridiculed widely by the left and even the center in the United States as “Star Wars” (after the series of successful science fiction movies of that name that had recently been produced) and criticized by most of America’s allies as “destabilizing” of the equilibrium that Democratic presidents had promoted with the USSR As Reagan suspected, most of America’s allies were happy with an apparent equal correlation of forces between the two superpowers, because it enabled them to exercise maximum influence of the delicate balance between them, with minimum effort. The chief exception to this was the formidable Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, with whom Reagan developed a warm and close rapport, starting with American support of the British in the brief war that country had with Argentina over the strategically unimportant Falkland Islands in 1981. (This did not prevent Thatcher’s foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, from referring, ill-advisedly, to SDI as “a Maginot Line,” an unfounded comparison.)
Despite the shrieks of impracticality and provocation of the domestic and international left, Reagan, as was his custom, carried U.S. public opinion with his plain and eloquent arguments that it was a completely defensive, conventional (no nuclear aspect) system and innocently asked what possible objection anyone could have to it. He said it was chiefly designed to deal with accidental missile firings, or the missiles of rogue states of the future. Groups of concerned scientists, the spiritual heirs of those scientists who had righteously opposed the development of the atomic bomb, claimed that space launch platforms of up to 45,000 tons would have to be sent into orbit. This was preposterous, but it was beside the point, because Reagan’s target was the psychology of the Kremlin and the Soviet economy. He correctly judged that the Soviet Union must be spending a backbreaking share of its wheezing command economy on its military capability and that Russian fear of American military-scientific prowess would incite Kremlin paranoia, already inflamed by the mighty Peacekeeper missile.
The Soviet leadership saw the possible compromise of their nuclear deterrent capability. This was precisely what Reagan had intended. It was nonsense, because the science to shoot down missiles was bound to stay behind the science of propelling offensive missiles to their targets for a long time, and no sane person would conceivably embark on nuclear war on the assumption that he had a leak-proof nuclear missile defense. Again Reagan, though not a chess player, was a brilliant poker player, and as it became clear that American opinion supported the president and bought into his peaceful intentions, and he achieved initial funding for his program, the Soviet leadership became steadily more obsessed with, as they considered it, the mortal threat of SDI to their world status by negating the strength of their nuclear capability. In his more playful moments, Reagan even suggested he would share the technology with the USSR, an utterly absurd prospect, yet one that he carried off with great, apparently earnest, and brilliant histrionic virtuosity, (as one might expect from a retired professional actor).
And he lost no opportunity to embarrass the Russians and make the most of their heavy-footed errors, as when they shot down a South Korean airliner, KAL 007, killing hundreds of passengers, when it accidentally entered Soviet airspace in the Far East, on September 1, 1983. Reagan called it a “massacre,” and it was outrageous, but was clearly not an intentional downing of a civilian airliner, just a trigger-happy response by a pilot to a nighttime intrusion. (The American cruiser
Vincennes,
on July 3, 1988, would have even less excuse for shooting down an Iranian civil airliner on a familiar flight path on a scheduled flight to Dubai, in Iranian airspace, in broad daylight, with antiaircraft missiles, killing 290 civilians.) Reagan in his first four years showed no interest at all in meeting with the Soviet leaders, as all his predecessors since Roosevelt had done. Leonid Brezhnev had died in office on November 30, 1982, after 18 years as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was succeeded by former KGB (secret police) director Yuri Andropov (who had masterminded the crushing of the Hungarians in 1956). But his health was fragile from the outset, and he died on February 9, 1984, and was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who was 75 and evidently far from robust.
The Reagan administration’s Middle East policy was not overly successful, and doubtless suffered from the assassination, by Islamist fanatics, of Egyptian president Sadat on October 6, 1981. Because of recurrent rocket attacks and sabotage missions across Lebanon’s southern border into Israel, that country invaded Lebanon and drove the Palestinian guerrillas into Beirut in June 1982, where the Israelis shelled them quite destructively. A UN resolution secured a cease-fire and a multinational force including 800 U.S. Marines was inserted to ensure that Palestinian terrorists did not reoccupy the south of the country. The French arrived on June 22 and the Americans on June 25. They were withdrawn after a short cooling-off period. After the Lebanese Phalange (Christian far right) massacred hundreds of Muslims in the Sabra and Shatila camps, a larger multinational force including 1,800 Marines was reintroduced. A relatively novel form of warfare for the international powers was encountered when suicide bombers crashed an explosives-filled car at the U.S. embassy on April 18, 1983, killing 17 Americans. Despite heavy precautions, a much deadlier strike came on October 23, when 241 Marines were killed in a suicide bombing of their barracks near Beirut Airport.
Support for the mission collapsed and Reagan saw that there was no alternative to pouring forces into an absorbent and terminally inflamed area of the world or pulling out as gracefully as possible. He chose the second and all American forces were out of Lebanon on February 26, 1984. But in the meantime, he scored an Eisenhower-like free goal, largely distracting his countrymen by invading the Caribbean island nation of Grenada two days after the bombing in Beirut, so he was able to address the nation simultaneously on both subjects. Grenada was a Commonwealth country of 100,000, where Queen Elizabeth II was the monarch. The prime minister, Maurice Bishop, had been murdered and the whole population was under house arrest, and there was a developing Cuban presence in the country. The neighboring island countries, led by Dominica, urged intervention, and the United States occupied the island with the Marine contingent on the aircraft carrier
Independence,
supplemented by other air- and sea-borne forces from several states, totaling 7,600 invaders, on October 25.
The incoming Americans were fired upon by a Cuban warship bearing the somewhat irritating name
Vietnam Heroica,
and it conferred great pleasure on many Americans to reduce that vessel to submerged fragments with an instant hail-fire of air-to-surface missiles. Though criticized by Britain and some other countries, it was a useful diversion and was generally popular in Grenada itself and in the U.S., and American forces were withdrawn completely after a few months. The United States suffered 19 dead and 116 wounded. Margaret Thatcher complained of the action as an unwarranted intrusion that annoyed her country at a time when she was campaigning against fierce opposition to deployment of NATO (i.e., U.S.) intermediate-range missiles in Britain. It was one of the very rare disagreements between Reagan and Thatcher, and it is not clear why Reagan did not try to involve a British component in the operation to make it a joint venture, other than his haste to put an easy victory on top of the tragedy in Beirut. Reagan took a number of opportunities for risk-free demonstrations of American military power, sinking in increments a significant part of the Iranian navy when that country challenged the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf, and shooting down Libyan fighters when they entered the declared airspace of a U.S. Sixth Fleet aircraft carrier battle group in the Mediterranean.
By the end of 1983, inflation had virtually stopped, net job creation was running at about 250,000 per month, and unemployment was in steady decline. The public enjoyed lower taxes, and though budget deficits had been larger than at any time since World War II, they were now in decline and sharp decline as a share of GDP. The country had been heartened by Reagan’s jaunty eloquence, and apparent reestablishment of the credibility of the United States and its alliance system after the tumult and irresolution of the previous 20 years. He and George Bush, who had filled his position with distinction, were renominated without opposition, and the Republicans presented the 1984 election as an occasion to celebrate “Morning in America.” It was the first authentic peace-and-prosperity reelection campaign since Eisenhower’s in 1956 (and if that were exempted because of the Suez War and the Hungarian uprising just before the election, the comparison would go back to Hoover in 1928).