The Democrats nominated former vice president Walter F. Mondale, after a close battle with Senator Gary Hart, which was highlighted by Hart challenging the press to find him with a woman not his wife, which they managed to do several times. It was nonsense, of course, but the Democratic nomination was unlikely to be worth much more than it had been in 1904 (against TR), 1924 and 1928 (against Coolidge and Hoover), 1956 (Eisenhower), and in 1972 against Nixon. Mondale tried to spice up his prospects by choosing for vice president the first female and fourth overt Roman Catholic (after Kennedy, Muskie, and Shriver) to be nominated for national office, New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. She was a lively and scrappy candidate, but some of the questionable business connections of her husband were exploited for partisan purposes. Reagan and Bush were massively financed and organized and were unassailable on their record, and Mondale made his life more difficult by promising tax increases and suggesting a rather cap-in-hand approach to the Kremlin on arms control. The highlight of a bland campaign was when, in answer to a question, Reagan said in a debate that he would “not hold my opponent’s comparative youth and inexperience against him” (Reagan was 17 years older, and the oldest major party candidate ever to seek the office, 73).
On election day, Reagan and Bush won another historic landslide, 54.5 million votes (58.8 percent) and 525 electoral votes (the highest total in history) to 37.6 million votes (40.6 percent) and 13 electoral votes. Mondale won his home state of Minnesota by only 3,764 votes. The Republicans gained 16 congressmen and lost one senator, but the control of neither house changed hands. It was a completely clean, courteous, good-natured election, with none of the acrimony and skullduggery that had been a feature of most elections since Eisenhower’s time.
9. SECOND TERM AND ASSESSMENT OF RONALD REAGAN
Konstantin Chernenko died on March 10, 1985, and was succeeded by Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Soviet Union finally had a leader appreciably below the age of 60 for the first time since the young (and in his macabre way, dynamic) Stalin of the twenties and thirties. Gorbachev had had responsibility for agriculture and had traveled to a number of non-communist countries as a rising Kremlin figure, including a tour of large western farms and ranches with Canada’s Pierre Trudeau, and had conversations with Margaret Thatcher that she found quite promising. On April 8, 1985, he stopped the deployment of SS-20 intermediate missiles in Eastern Europe, to confuse the imminent NATO deployment of U.S. Pershing and ground-launched cruise missiles. He also dusted off the old saw invoked by half the Western leaders and all the post-Stalin Russian leaders about banning all nuclear weapons, as if this were remotely feasible and would actually make war less rather than more probable. Reagan was on a much more sensible line with the creation of nuclear defenses, but it would shortly be clear how sensitive a point this was with the new leaders of the Kremlin. The venerable Andrei Gromyko was finally removed as foreign minister after 28 years and elected president, replaced by the foreign policy untested Edward Shevardnadze of Georgia.
Gorbachev announced a policy of openness (“Glasnost”) and of restructuring (“Perestroika”), which included a determined crackdown on the grave national problem of alcoholism, the denunciation and scattered prosecution of corruption, which was pandemic in Soviet government, the introduction of contested elections for some party offices, and the acceptance of private ownership of some small businesses. These steps were widely applauded in the West, and doubtless welcomed domestically, but there is no evidence that Gorbachev had any idea how vulnerable the Soviet system was to such shock therapy. It was a tremendous patchwork of ethnic and tribal groups and more than half the population of the USSR were not Russians. Ethnic and sectarian attachments die with difficulty when they are violently attacked, as by Stalin, rather than subsumed into a new world of egalitarian prosperity, as the North and South American and Australian immigrants from Europe were (and they retained their religions and as much connection to their native culture as they wished).
Reforms on this scale are always hazardous, and for a time, no matter how well-managed, the transitory regime has many of the worst aspects, and few of the best, of both the old era and the one to which the state aspires. This brought down the Shah, as the most tenacious and generally oppressive of the old coexist very awkwardly with the vulgarity and
arrivisme
of the new. Instead of following Deng Xiao-ping’s model in China of massive economic reforms forced through by a state and party apparatus of scarcely loosened authority, Gorbachev tried comparative democratization without substantive economic changes. The move against alcoholism was almost as much a disaster as Prohibition had been in the United States in the twenties. The black market took over, and while alcoholism declined somewhat, government revenues plummeted.
Reagan assisted this process with one of his most successful Middle East initiatives: he sold Saudi Arabia sophisticated military hardware formerly not available to Arab powers, including a fleet of AWACS radar detection planes, in exchange for a private promise from the Saudi king of a reduction in oil prices. Saudi Arabia, because of its preeminence in OPEC, was able to deliver on this, and the oil price, which was $30 per barrel in November 1985, had fallen to $12 by March 1986. Oil was the chief Soviet export, as its manufactures were of inadequate quality for export and its other natural resources were uncompetitively expensively extracted and generally surplus to the world’s requirements (apart from small quantities of gold and diamonds).
This initiative was coincident with the first Reagan-Gorbachev meeting, at Geneva, in the house of the Aga Khan, the Ishmaelite leader, in November 1985. It was very cordial and a public relations success for both leaders. It was the first summit meeting in six years; Reagan promised full reciprocity in any genuine reduction of tensions and move to cooperation, but made it clear that the United States would never accept an inferior military status to any other country, and there seemed to be a similarity of view on arms reductions and Afghanistan between the two leaders. There was a divided view for a time in the senior councils of the West (Gorbachev had met the West German and French leaders too) whether the new Soviet leader was trying to gull the West into relaxed vigilance, or was really about to dismantle the authoritarian capabilities of the Soviet state, unaware of what a shambles of economic and jurisdictional meltdown was likely to occur.
In January of 1986, Gorbachev proposed the removal and nondeployment of all intermediate missiles from Western and Central Europe, and conjured yet again the benign fable that cannot fail to cross the lips of the world’s leaders for long, of the complete abolition of nuclear weapons by 2000. Ronald Reagan was happy to join him in these endeavors, though with oft-expressed wariness about the believability of any Soviet leader. In July 1986, Gorbachev pledged to withdraw from Afghanistan. On October 11, 1986, Gorbachev and Reagan met at Reykjavik, Iceland, and Gorbachev, with no prior hint of such an ambitious plan, proposed the complete abolition of all nuclear weapons except tactical battlefield nuclear systems, along with anti-missile defenses, for which, he claimed, there would then be no need.
Reagan, who was an idiosyncratic idealist and sentimentalist, as well as a sly old man now 75, professed to take the first option seriously, though he pointed out that he could not speak for his British and French allies, which were also nuclear powers. (There were also the Chinese, Indians, and Israelis and soon Pakistan and South Africa to think about, as well as all the nuclear-capable powers, dozens of them.) Reagan rejected scrapping his anti-missile defense program, but warmed up the almost equivalent fable of sharing it with the Soviet Union. This surrealistic exchange continued for two days, and then Reagan broke off the talks and the two leaders parted amicably enough, but in an atmosphere of disappointment. American allies were horrified, including the redoubtable Margaret Thatcher, who, when asked if she was for a “nuclear-free Europe,” instantly replied that she was for a “war-free Europe.”
But Gorbachev had fatally shown his hand, his acute fear of SDI; Reagan had called him, in poker parlance, and it was clear that the United States was finally in a commanding position in the Cold War. Its economy was booming while Russia’s was floundering, and in defense terms, mighty America, led by a tough but humane and sometimes slightly dreamy leader, who yet possessed great moral integrity, a consciousness of his strength, and a genius at holding national opinion behind him, was about to spend the Soviet Union to the mat and develop absolute military superiority while professing only the elimination of the horrible specter of nuclear weapons. It ranked with the greatest foreign policy initiatives of Roosevelt, Truman, and Nixon, as a brilliant stroke of pure grand strategy.
Unfortunately, Reagan, as his tide appeared to crest, was suddenly threatened by a bizarre episode that would be known as the Iran-Contra scandal. A number of American civilians had been seized by the militant Islamist organization Hezbollah, supplied and to some extent directed by the Iranian and Syrian governments, in Lebanon, and Reagan, who was susceptible to emotional human appeals, had overlooked or more likely condoned the sale of arms to Israel, which sold them on to Iran, supposedly in exchange, apart from the cash payment, for the release, one by one, of the hostages in Beirut. Even more unfortunately, it didn’t stop there, and after a time, Colonel Oliver North, an aide to the national security advisor, Robert (Bud) McFarlane, had rerouted the profit on the arms sales—which Israel (to the destruction of which state the Iranian government never ceased to aspire) faithfully remitted from Iran—to the assistance of the anti-Sandinista Contras in Nicaragua. Support of the guerrillas had sometimes been approved by the Congress and sometimes forbidden, and there is not a clear basis to the constitutional ability of the Congress to determine such things.
One of the many unpleasant consequences of the Watergate affair was that the impeachment of the president became much easier to contemplate (and threaten) than it had been, and policy differences were routinely criminalized, especially when the White House and the Capitol were in different partisan hands, as was the case between 1969 and 2003 in 21 years with the Senate and 26 for the House of Representatives. An aircraft delivering arms to the Contras was shot down and the crew interviewed by officials of the Sandinista government. The story surfaced in an Arabic newspaper in Beirut in the first days of November 1986, and was endorsed by the Iranian government, which represented it as an act of cowardly and hypocritical boot-licking by the United States, especially when it emerged that McFarlane had turned up in Tehran in a disguise with a Bible for the Ayatollah Khomeini inscribed by Reagan.
It was a pitiful and farcical story, and the president’s almost indestructible domestic popularity descended almost 20 points, very abruptly. There was much hip-shooting talk of “constitutional crimes” and so forth. In the midterm elections in 1986, the Democrats gained five House seats and eight Senate seats, taking control of that chamber for the first time in six years. Reagan at first told the country, in November 1986, that he had not traded arms for hostages. He set up the Tower Commission (Republican senator John Tower of Texas, General Brent Scowcroft, and former senator and secretary of state Edmund Muskie) to look into the whole affair. North and his comely assistant, Ms. Fawn Hall, had destroyed some of the relevant documents, and the commission was unable to determine exactly how much Reagan knew about it all.
Reagan admitted in March that what he had approved, arms sales to Israel, had “deteriorated” into trading arms for hostages. He professed to have known nothing about the shipments of arms to the Contras. The CIA director, William Casey, suffered a stroke just before he was to testify before a congressional committee, and died without recovering. Watergate investigative reporter Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post
claimed to have entered Casey’s hospital room and interviewed him briefly and secured an acknowledgement of guilt, but Casey was unconscious and his room heavily secured at the time; this appeared to be an extension of the author’s talents for mythmaking, which were well enough demonstrated in the Watergate affair.
On June 12, 1987, Reagan visited West Berlin for the 750th anniversary of Berlin, and made almost as well-remembered a comment in a speech at the Berlin Wall as John F. Kennedy had made there almost exactly 24 years before: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” and repeated it several times as he labored the iniquity of it. Reagan had earned the esteem of the Germans, not least because when he visited the Federal Republic two years before and it was revealed that there were some Waffen SS draftees’ graves in a cemetery he was scheduled to visit, Reagan resisted the urgings of the Congress, his staff, and even his wife, kept to the visit (though he added a stop at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp first), and said that those conscripted into service for the Third Reich who gave their lives in combat at a young age were also victims. Reagan’s moral, as well as his physical, courage were evident and were the source of much of his great popularity.
After this, there were some indictments, and some misdemeanor convictions, in the Iran-Contra imbroglio that led to fines and eventual pardons, and the whole matter dried up and the president’s popularity revived, but it was a discordantly harebrained and absurd interlude. It did not alter the correlation of forces between the United States and the Soviet Union, however. And on November 24, 1987, at Geneva, an INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) agreement was signed, reversing and avoiding the deployment of all such weapons in Western and Central Europe. This was a remarkable strategic victory for Reagan, Thatcher, and West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who had held fast to their deployment schedules. They traded the nondeployment of missiles for the removal of a larger number of Soviet missiles that had already been deployed. And the American Pershing mobile missiles were not, in fact, as yet fully developed, and the ground-launched cruise missiles the U.S. would now not be deploying could just as easily be launched from American warships based in European ports and American aircraft flying from European bases.