Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (35 page)

Only then, on November 25, did Reagan appear again before the press. Looking old and stricken, he announced that Poindexter had resigned, that North had been relieved of his duties, that aides had not kept him properly informed, and that he was forming a special review board (to be headed by former senator John Tower of Texas) to look into the controversy. Meese then shocked the press by describing the diversion. Within a few weeks, Reagan felt obliged to ask a panel of judges to appoint an independent special prosecutor to investigate. The man they selected was Lawrence Walsh, a Republican and a former federal judge. The House and Senate pursued their own separate investigations. All these developments badly damaged the political standing of the president, whose party had already suffered losses in the off-year elections: Gaining eight seats, the Democrats had regained control of the Senate, fifty-five to forty-five. The news that the administration, which had posed as the firmest foe of terrorism, had traded arms for hostages especially stunned Americans. Reagan—of all people—had bribed terrorists! In early December a
New York Times
/CBS poll showed that the president’s job approval ratings, which had been higher than 60 percent since mid-1985, had plunged from 67 percent to 46 percent.
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Investigators sought answers to a key question: Did the president know that North and others had been turning over profits to the contras? Reagan finally made a public stab at answering this question in a nationally televised talk in early March 1987. Lamenting “activities undertaken without my knowledge,” he said that what had taken place was “a mistake.” “As the Navy would say,” he added, “this happened on my watch.” He emphasized that he had never intended the arms sales to be connected to release of hostages. “A few months ago,” he explained, “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
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Reagan’s carefully crafted half-confession seemed to mollify many listeners, but investigators kept digging: Was it truly the case that Reagan himself had not known about the business of arms-for-hostages? Poindexter, falling on his sword, testified under oath that he had approved the diversions to the contras himself and had not told the president about them. “I made a very deliberate decision,” he said, “not to ask the president so I could insulate him . . . and provide future deniability.” His statement helped to shield the president, though it also exposed Reagan’s abstracted, hands-off style of management. Was he or was he not informed of the activities of his aides? Did he or did he not recall what he had been told? As the final congressional report concluded, “If the President did not know what his National Security Advisers were doing, he should have.”
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Investigators could find no “smoking gun” that directly connected Reagan to the diversions to the contras. Independent prosecutor Walsh, who spent years pursuing the evidence, reported in 1994 that Reagan had “created the conditions which made possible the crimes committed by others” and that he had “knowingly participated or acquiesced in covering up the scandal.” Walsh added, however, that there was “no credible evidence” that the president “authorized or was aware of the diversion of profits from the Iran arms sale to assist the contras, or that Regan [Reagan’s chief of staff], Bush, or Meese was aware of the diversion.”
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The focus on what Reagan did or did not know about the diversions was understandable. The Watergate scandal had led people to look for a smoking gun and had intensified congressional suspiciousness about presidential excesses in the making of foreign and military policy.
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Still, the focus on presidential actions (and inactions) tended to deflect public attention from serious discussion of the administration’s fundamental policies—the badly misguided and illegal arms-for-hostages trading and the provision of covert aid to the contras in defiance of the Boland amendments. Oddly enough, Walsh seemed to sympathize with Reagan’s frustrations concerning congressional opposition to aid for the contras. It may have been unfair, he later told Reagan’s biographer, for Congress abruptly to have cut off such aid while the contras were active in the field. Still, in his final report, Walsh said that if Congress had had all the facts in 1987–88 that he finally put together in 1994, it should have considered impeachment of the president.

Congress never seriously considered taking such a step. Though the Iran-contra scandal damaged Reagan’s presidency, the American people still showed affection for him—far more than they had ever displayed for Nixon in 1974. They tended to believe that Reagan, known for his inattention at meetings, truly did not know everything that his aides were doing. In this odd sense, public awareness of his poor management skills may have worked to his political advantage. Democrats also looked ahead: They realized that if Reagan were to be impeached and removed from office, Bush would become president and would thereby become more formidable as an incumbent opponent in the election of 1988.

Walsh’s investigations did not have much impact. Though he secured fourteen indictments and eleven convictions, most of the convictions followed plea bargains and resulted in light fines or community service. Other convictions—of Poindexter and North—were overturned on appeals. Only one small fish went to jail, for misrepresenting his income on federal tax forms. In October 1992, Walsh managed to indict Weinberger (an opponent of arms-for-hostages) on a charge of making false statements (about what he had known at the time) to investigators. On Christmas Eve 1992, however, twelve days before Weinberger’s trial was to begin, President Bush pardoned Weinberger and five others, including McFarlane.
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W
HILE REAGAN WAS STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE
the Iran-contra scandal, he was also moving ahead toward historic accommodations with the Soviet Union. These not only helped many Americans forgive him for the Iran-contra scandal; they also represented the most remarkable foreign policy achievements of his eight years as president.

Almost no one, of course, could have anticipated that Reagan, the consummate Cold Warrior, would seek such accommodations, let alone manage to make them. The Kremlin, moreover, was something of a geriatric ward between 1981 and early 1985, ruled by aging—then dying—leaders who evinced little desire for a serious softening of Soviet-American relations. But Reagan had always hoped to end the potentially catastrophic arms race. Shultz, moreover, shared these hopes and worked patiently to achieve them. Even as Reagan was denouncing the Soviet Union as an evil empire in 1983, American negotiators were holding ongoing discussions with Soviet representatives concerning arms reductions. Though the Soviets broke off these talks after the United States sent Pershing II missiles to Western Europe, Reagan still dreamed of progress in the future. In March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took control in Moscow, Reagan saw a chance to reopen serious summit talks with the Soviet Union.

There was good reason to try. Gorbachev, fifty-four years old in 1985, was a much younger man than his predecessors. Well before taking power, he recognized that the freedoms—and prosperity—of the West had a seditious appeal to the largely impoverished, oppressed people of the Communist bloc. He knew that the Soviet system was badly in need of reform. As Politburo member Aleksandr Yakovlev later wrote, the USSR at that time “was in a state of long-lasting and potentially dangerous stagnation.” Only 23 percent of urban homes and 7 percent of rural homes in the USSR had telephones. Ethnic and religious divisions (Russians were only one-half of the population) fragmented the country. Spending for defense swallowed two to three times as much of GNP in the Soviet Union as in the United States. Military commitments in Afghanistan and Africa were draining the Russian economy and killing thousands of Soviet soldiers. Unrest, notably the rise of Solidarity in Poland after 1980, was spreading in the USSR’s Eastern European satellites.
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Hoping to ameliorate these difficult problems, Gorbachev pressed for
glasnost
, the opening up of Soviet society, and for
perestroika
, the restructuring of the economy.

Gorbachev was especially anxious to reduce military expenditures, which he knew were bleeding his country. It was obvious, however, that Reagan was not only building up America’s conventional weaponry; he was also calling for the extraordinarily ambitious Strategic Defense Initiative. Gorbachev believed that if the Soviet Union was forced to engage in astronomically expensive spending for defensive weapons, it might never remedy its internal weaknesses. He concluded that he had to try to reach an arms reduction agreement with the United States. Nothing else would enable him to advance the
perestroika
that would rescue the Soviet economy.

The rapprochement that ensued developed with almost breathtaking speed. Beginning with a meeting in Geneva in November 1985, for which Reagan prepared meticulously (even seeking the counsel of historians of Russia), the two men held five summit conferences and forged an occasionally contentious but increasingly productive personal relationship. Their friendship aroused consternation among hard-liners in both countries: The conservative columnist George Will charged that Reagan was accelerating the “moral disarmament of the west by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.”
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Defense Secretary Weinberger, a forceful hard-liner, was equally alarmed by Reagan’s efforts, believing that the Soviets would not negotiate in good faith. The two leaders brushed such opposition aside. Though Reagan continued to denounce Communist adventurism, as in Central America, his rhetoric softened after 1985.

Other summits followed the one at Geneva. The first of these, at Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, seemed at one point close to reaching an astonishingly sweeping agreement—which Reagan suddenly proposed—that would have eliminated all American and Soviet nuclear weapons within ten years.
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American aides at the conference were appalled by Reagan’s idea, which would have given the Soviets, whose conventional weaponry was more powerful, a considerable edge.
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But Gorbachev, alarmed by the thought of trying to match the SDI, then sought to limit research on it to the laboratory. Reagan grew angry, telling Gorbachev, “I’ve told you again and again that SDI wasn’t a bargaining chip,” thereby backing off from any sweeping agreement about strategic nuclear weapons. The two sides, having engaged in what one historian later called a “surrealistic auction,” parted without concluding a deal.
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In June 1987, Reagan expressed his continuing frustration when he stood before the Brandenburg Gate in divided Berlin and challenged the Soviets to bring on a new era of freedom in Europe. “Mr. Gorbachev,” he thundered, “open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Even then, however, quieter negotiations were making progress toward an agreement on arms reduction. In February 1987, Gorbachev made the key decision to separate the issue of SDI from deals that might be made on cuts in nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union, he said, would accept “without delay” the elimination within five years of Soviet and American intermediate-range missiles in Europe. This was a major breakthrough, enabling Reagan and Gorbachev to agree to an intermediate nuclear forces (INF) treaty, which the two leaders signed with great fanfare in Washington in December 1987. It committed both sides to the ultimate destruction of their intermediate- and short-range missiles, thereby reducing tensions in Europe. It included procedures for on-site monitoring, the absence of which had stymied many previous discussions between the two superpowers. It was the first time that the United States and the Soviet Union had agreed to scrap any nuclear weapons.

Reagan then had to convince Cold War hard-liners to accept the treaty. This proved to be problematic at first; some foes of the treaty likened him to Britain’s Neville Chamberlain, who had appeased Hitler in the 1930s. But Gorbachev soon announced that the USSR would begin to pull its troops out of Afghanistan and complete the process by February 1989. Reagan, meanwhile, worked to bring the Senate around. All but a few holdouts started to swing over to support the treaty, which was ratified in May with an impressive margin of victory, 93 to 5. INF was a major step toward reduction of tensions between the world’s two most powerful nations.

Then and later, politically engaged observers of this historic agreement argued about whether Gorbachev or Reagan deserved most of the credit for these remarkable developments—and, in time, for the ending of the Cold War. Some of these observers have emphasized Reagan’s role. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, a strong ally, stated simply, “Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.”
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Other observers have properly gone beyond citing the efforts of a single man such as Reagan, crediting not only the major role of Gorbachev but also the resoluteness of a host of Western leaders and of NATO for more than forty years. They further point to pressure from dissident groups within the Soviet bloc, such as Solidarity. To identify any individual as the person who “ended the Cold War” is to oversimplify a complex combination of technological and economic forces and to ignore the courage and determination of a great many people—leaders as well as followers—who had opposed the Soviets and their Communist allies for more than a generation.