Power Game (107 page)

Within weeks, Anderson drafted a ten-page memo proposing that Reagan, as a candidate, come out for developing a “protective missile defense system.” Reagan liked the concept but his top political handlers, John Sears and Michael Deaver, vetoed the proposal as political suicide, fearing such talk would add to jitters that Reagan was a warmonger. “Hey,” Deaver told Anderson, “Ronald Reagan does not go out and talk about nuclear weapons.”

After his election, Reagan was lobbied on strategic defenses by Edward Teller, a nuclear physicist who helped develop the U.S. hydrogen bomb, and by some of Reagan’s “Kitchen Cabinet” and millionaire conservative financial backers (among them, Joseph Coors, the brewery owner, and Karl R. Bendetsen, a former Army undersecretary and later chairman of the Champion International Corporation). Teller, an ardent advocate of a space-based defense weapon—the X-ray laser—had first pushed space-based defenses with Reagan when he was governor of California. With support from Clark and Meese, the Bendetsen group met Reagan twice in 1982 to promote strategic defenses.

“We gave him a written proposal,” Coors recalled. “We had hoped that the president would set up a separate agency outside the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs.” Coors had in mind a massive crash project comparable to the hush-hush Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II.
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Teller’s tales of the scientific potential for supermodern defense intrigued the president. Reagan questioned the Bendetsen group about the cost, duration, and technical difficulty of the project, but he was noncommittal. What really put strategic defenses on Reagan’s agenda was the House vote in December 1982 blocking funds for the MX missile. That vote stymied Reagan and, according to aides, drove home to him how difficult it would be to get funds to continue a major buildup of offensive land-based missiles.

Politically, diplomatically, and militarily, Reagan needed a bold stroke to escape his stalemate and put life back into his foreign policy game. Clark saw that and favored doing something on defense, but he lacked specific knowledge. Within the NSC apparatus, Bud McFarlane became Reagan’s idea man, and he put together the pieces on defense, operating secretively.

McFarlane is a quintessential staff man. New to Reagan’s personal circle, he gained influence because he understood arms issues and had good links to Congress, a rare combination in the Reagan foreign policy team. McFarlane’s father had been a Texas congressman, and McFarlane himself had worked on the Senate Armed Services Committee staff for Chairman John Tower. In early 1983, McFarlane was the
White House link with leading House Democrats, trying to devise a compromise to save the MX missile.

In an administration that had no high-level strategic thinkers, McFarlane knew much more about nuclear strategy and Soviet-American relations than Reagan, Clark, Shultz, Weinberger, Casey, or Meese. He had learned these issues in the mid-1970s as a staff aide to Henry Kissinger, his mentor and model.

Personally, McFarlane is a curious amalgam of boldness and insecurity. He is superearnest, methodical, and prone to bureaucratic circumlocutions about “families of options,” delivered in a monotone. Yet he can be a jokester, entertaining friends with flashes of humor and hilarious spoofs of Kissinger’s pompous Germanic elocution.

More than once, I heard McFarlane say he felt he was not on a par with the cabinet power brokers who had won Reagan’s admiration by success in the corporate world. After McFarlane’s promotion to national security adviser in late 1983, he made awkward confessions that he felt over his head in a job once filled by Kissinger. During his twenty-year Marine career, McFarlane had risen to lieutenant colonel but no farther. He is not an imposing figure—short, slight, squint-eyed—but he is ramrod straight and emphatic about duty and self-control. He was surprising in his policy and personal daring, though depressed by exposure of the Iranian arms debacle and evidently fearful of being forever a pariah in governmental circles, he attempted suicide with an overdose of Valium pills in early 1987.

Back in January 1983, McFarlane watched in dismay as Reagan’s defense consensus crumbled—beset by opposition in Congress, torn by internal disagreements on the MX missile among the Joint Chiefs, under fire from the nuclear freeze movement and the Catholic bishops’ berating the immorality of nuclear deterrence. Actually, the administration was pushing ahead with Trident submarines and their new eight-warhead missiles, with new Stealth strategic bombers and modernized cruise missiles. But Reagan talked incessantly about trailing Moscow in land-based ballistics missiles, as if no other weapons systems mattered.

McFarlane feared the United States could not match two new Soviet ICBMs (the single-warhead SS-25 and the ten-warhead SS-24) because both were mobile missiles and Moscow had such vast territory for hiding them. “The traditional concept of offensive deterrence was becoming less stable,” McFarlane believed, “so defense was conceptually an answer”—offering some protection for America’s vulnerable deterrent forces. Moreover, McFarlane reasoned that the Russians feared a technological race with the United States on defenses. Finally
and “most compelling,” he later told me, SDI offered “something which would leverage the Russians” to make concessions in arms negotiations.
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As McFarlane told others, he pushed SDI with President Reagan as the best “bargaining chip” for negotiating deep cuts in Soviet ICBMs.

But it is an axiom of the foreign policy game that every major weapon system requires endorsement from the top military hierarchy. McFarlane worked “back channels” to fish for Pentagon support. Through Rear Admiral John Poindexter, then number three on the national security staff, McFarlane found a willing ally in Admiral James Watkins, chief of naval operations.

Watkins had been worrying for some time that the nation was near a dead end in the offensive arms race. Hunting for new ideas, Watkins lunched with Edward Teller on January 20, 1983. He was moved by Teller’s vibrant optimism about emerging defense technologies and his worrisome assertions that the Soviets were already hard at work on strategic defenses.
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McFarlane and Poindexter encouraged Watkins to push his views with the other Chiefs. “You can be assured that your input is always going to be welcomed” at the White House, Poindexter told Watkins.
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In the power game, timing can be everything—and the moment was ripe for defense. The Joint Chiefs were due to meet with Reagan on February 11 to examine the “strategic equation.” At their private dress rehearsal on February 5, Watkins laid out the rationale for “forward strategic defense.” He took pains to emphasize that he did not advocate scrapping the offensive side of nuclear deterrence, but he favored a new push to see how defenses could be combined with offensive deterrence. This idea was an embryo, Watkins emphasized, something that required much more study. As a devout Catholic, he added a moral argument: “We should protect the American people, not avenge them.” Later, Reagan hungrily grasped that line.

The other Chiefs had reasons for liking the defense notion. They were all—especially the Air Force—exhausted by the political wrangle over the MX missile. The Army already had a $1 billion-a-year program for testing and research on ballistics missile defenses and saw a chance to do more.

On February 11, 1983, Reagan met with the five uniformed Chiefs in the Roosevelt Room. Secretary Weinberger, still bent on the offensive buildup, told the president the Chiefs had another idea. “We have not studied this,” Weinberger cautioned. “It’s not something I can endorse at this time.”
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The session followed the McFarlane-Clark script. It began with a
look at trends in the arms race. Then General John W. Vessey, as chairman, laid out Watkins’s logic, telling Reagan the Chiefs felt the time had come to take another look at defense.

“Do you all feel that way?” the president asked.

The room got very quiet, as Reagan looked around at Vessey, Watkins, General E. C. Meyer of the Army, General Charles Gabriel of the Air Force, and General Robert Barrow of the Marines. Clark and McFarlane wanted the Chiefs on record. “It was a very, very auspicious moment,” one top White House participant told me.

Each Chief endorsed the general concept. Meyer said he felt that the historic balance between offense and defense had gotten “out of kilter—whether you’re talking about defense against tanks, defense against aircraft, or defense against missiles.” Watkins told the president he had heard hopeful things about developing defensive technologies against missiles.

“Wait a minute,” McFarlane said. “Are you saying that you think it possible, not probable but possible, that we might be able to develop an effective defense against ballistics missiles?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Watkins replied.

“Mr. President,” McFarlane said, throwing his weight behind the idea, “the implications of this are very, very far-reaching. If it were feasible to find an alternative basis for maintaining our security against nuclear ballistics missile weapons, that would be a substantial change, obviously.”

Reagan nodded, “I understand that.”

The concept of stepping up research on defenses was vague, the discussion very general. The Chiefs did not make clear whether they were talking about a defense against all nuclear weapons or just ballistics missiles, whether they had in mind a defense of cities or silos, a limited defense, or a total national shield. Nor did they specify whether they were talking about building a land-based defense, permissible under the 1972 ABM Treaty, or a space-based defense, forbidden by the treaty. Nor did they examine cost, time-frame, or specific programs. Significantly, the Chiefs were not proposing an end to the doctrine of deterrence, but supplementing it with defenses.

“There was no program definition,” Vessey recalled later. “It was the idea that defense might enter the equation more than in the past. It was the idea that new technologies were more promising than they had been in the past.”
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“I don’t think any of us had a clear vision of what form this strategic defense would take,” Meyer added. “The issue needed to be debated
at the very highest levels by people concerned with policy and people concerned with technology.”
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“Well,” the president concluded, “I would like very much to pursue this. I think we need to hear further from you on whether we shouldn’t reorient our priorities and put a lot more effort behind this.”

The Chiefs left expecting that there would be more study and more talk with the President before a new policy was set.

The Power Cocoon

President Reagan was exhilarated by his meeting with the Joint Chiefs and eager to declare a brand new national strategy. The Joint Chiefs had talked of research to check possibilities for combining strategic defense with the existing strategy of deterrence through offensive nuclear weapons. But the president transformed that idea into a grand vision of a nuclear-weapons-free world. His national security aides found him suddenly talking about a Utopian plan to “render nuclear weapons obsolete.” Evidently drawing on his talks with Dr. Teller, as well as the tentative ideas of the Joint Chiefs, Reagan conveyed to his national security aides a desire to proclaim a radical shift of doctrine away from nuclear deterrence which had protected the country and its NATO allies for four decades.

“Reagan’s view of the political payoff was sufficient rationale as far as he was concerned,” Bud McFarlane told me much later. “By that I mean, providing the American people with an appealing answer to their fears—the intrinsic value of being able to tell Americans, ‘For the first time in the nuclear age, I’m doing something to save your lives. I’m telling you that we can get rid of nuclear weapons.’

“The president all of his adult life has operated in a universe which counts on happy endings, and I think if you count on happy endings and experience them enough, you begin to believe that’s what life is like and that the job of the hero is to be Frank Merriwell (a dime-novel success story). And it will turn out, because it always has—thirty-nine times! Every time he made a picture it turned out right. I never saw the president indicate the slightest hesitation [about strategic defense]. He was all the time, foursquare: ‘Let’s go to it.’ …

“He was terribly excited about that. He wanted to get it out, and he was less worried about details—such as changing strategic doctrine or how it would affect the Allies. He didn’t worry about those things.”
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Clark encouraged Reagan to move rapidly, but they needed McFarlane’s
expertise—and he tried to restrain the president. Reagan’s MX commission was seeking bipartisan support in Congress, and McFarlane urged waiting for its report in April. With the MX campaign launched, McFarlane suggested, the president could make strategic defense the next bipartisan effort, with support from Speaker O’Neill and other congressional leaders. But Clark—eager to make strategic defense Reagan’s legacy—opposed McFarlane, and Reagan sided with Clark.

Star Wars was developed secretly within a tiny power cocoon. To protect it from internal critics, Clark ordered McFarlane to have the NSC staff develop the idea on a “close-hold” basis—that is, in secret, without informing other agencies. Thus, with the Joint Chiefs unaware, McFarlane and three NSC staff aides, John Poindexter, Air Force Colonel Bob Linhard, and Ray Pollock, a civilian arms specialist, began developing options. Their work was complicated; they were not told whether to build up one specific program such as the Army’s existing ballistics missile defense, to plan for more ambitious research on technologies against all nuclear weapons, or to declare a massive new Manhattan Project for all defenses.

By mid-March, strategic defense had become a crash project. Clark and Deaver felt the president needed an upbeat defense speech to revive congressional support for his military buildup. Regular White House speechwriters began to draft a major address; on his computer, McFarlane secretly wrote the “annex” to his speech—the surprise on SDI. The White House staff was kept in the dark. No contact was made with the Joint Chiefs or civilian arms experts at the Pentagon or the State Department. Secrecy insured NSC staff control of the policy.