Reagan or Mondale?
Well, I am now through section one. It was an interesting read. In particular, Peter provided a nice summary of the 1970s Team B exercise, which has far too many parallels to the WMD intelligence fiasco that helped the President get us into Iraq. I won't say more about that, other than to recommend Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA, by Anne Cahn.
Instead, I really wanted to focus on the chapter about Reagan, who I think exerts a profound influence over contemporary public discourse. I've always wondered about the transition during which a President goes from being a controversial figure, of whom a relatively small segment of the population actually votes for, to being "Great."
After all, in 1864 and 1936, Abraham Lincoln and Frankling Delano Roosevelt each took 55 percent of the votes cast -- a solid win, but not a landslide. In retrospect, of course, it is hard to imagine that a significant fraction of the population would have rather seen George McClellan or Wendell Wilkie in the Oval Office.
But that's because we are thinking about the mythologized Lincoln and Roosevelt, Honest Abe and FDR, staring at us from the change in our pocket or cast in bronze.
It is too early to know whether future generations will say things like: "Grandpa, you voted for Walter Mondale?" I wasn't old enough to vote in that election, but I was old enough to remember the unprintable things that my father -- a Democratic-voting union member -- said about Reagan. And I've been fascinated about how both sides of the foreign policy debate have tried to appropriate the Gipper for their particular viewpoint, turning him into a symbol more than than the (very talented) politician that he was.
Peter does a marvelous job of walking one through the Reagan Administration, documenting how conservatives reacted to his relationship with Gorbachev and the arms control agreements of the late 1980s. That is a necessary counterpoint to the hagiography that passes for discussion among many conservatives about Reagan.
Although I think Reagan was utterly sincere in his desire to abolish nuclear weapons, I wonder if Peter is engaging in the same revisionist mythmaking as those who want to claim Reagan for the far right.
Central to Peter's claim is that the Reagan Administration got a serious reality check by the "War Scare of 1983." Although it looks that way in hindsight, I am not sure that is how folks in the Reagan Administration experienced it. It makes for a nice story, but the reality was much more complicated than that.
The "war scare" passed in late 1983. Peter mentions that the events, particularly an early 1984 CIA summary of the events, had a "profound impact" on Reagan the arms controller and nuclear abolitionist. But by August, Reagan had apparently recovered enough cheery bonhomie to make his now infamous joke about starting a nuclear war with Russia during a microphone check -- "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes."
It's a little hard to imagine that someone who realized that the superpowers had narrowly averted a nuclear war a few months before would be cracking wise about a nuclear holocaust six months later. Frankly, it's more the sort of juvenile thing you'd expect from the current occupant of the Oval Office. (Maybe this also explains John McCain's surreal "Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran" moment -- misguided imitation.)
Peter's general point -- that Reagan was able to recognize that Gorbachev was a different kind of Soviet leader -- has an element of truth. But I don't think Reagan ever really understood Gorbachev, or what he was trying to accomplish. And that failure resulted in some missed opportunities -- most notably at Reykjavik.
I guess this is just a long way of saying, Reagan seems to have been awfully sincere about eliminating nuclear weapons, but I still would have voted for Mondale.
FDR received 61% of the vote in 1936. You mentioned Wilkie - are you thinking of 1940?
April 30, 2008 6:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
In retrospect, of course, it is hard to imagine that a significant fraction of the population would have rather seen George McClellan [as opposed to Lincoln] or Wendell Wilkie [as opposed to FDR] in the Oval Office.
Boy, you've never been to the South, have you?
April 30, 2008 6:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, yes, 1940. I was definitely thinking of the third term.
Sorry, long day.
April 30, 2008 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who really started the myth of Reagan ending the Cold War was Yale historion John Gaddis. Gaddis states that it was Reagan's arm build up in the eighties that made Gorbachev concede to the West. But new research by scholars such as Melvyn Leffler, Vladislav Zubok, and Archie Brown have demonstrated that Reagan's arms build up actually strengthened the hands of the hardliners in the Kremlin and if someone other than Gorbachev acheived power than the Cold War would have gone on indefinitely or turned into a hot war. Tony Judt in his new book Reappraisals has an chapter that is highly John Gaddis's view of history. However if G.W. Bush and not Reagan was president, he would have probably not even talked to Gorbachev.
April 30, 2008 10:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was in the Soviet Union in late winter of 1983. Andropov was in power at the time. I attended several student events.
My overwhelming impression of what people (not tour group leaders) tried to get across to us in conversation was to give Americans the message that they should please not attack the Soviet Union because it was about to fall apart on its own. They were very serious and very frightened about this, because they had seen the hardening of the lines over the past years.
These were people who were at the events to parrot the party line, and my impression was that it was risky to discuss something that was so not on the list of talking points. I have never forgotten this intro to the intricate relationship between propaganda, evidence and "truth." I was a pretty dim-bulb college student at the time, I made the trip mostly because I knew it would make a good story later and I heard that champagne and vodka were cheap. To walk away from the trip with a story that didn't begin with "I was so drunk that...." was pretty remarkable.
When we went home and told our stories, we were met with derision and cold-war lectures.
My point is that it seems hard to believe that the Reagan admin did not know what a shambles the SU was at the time. I have always wondered if they did know, and if the weapons build-up was at least partly an expensive exercise in grandiosity at the expense of an enemy incapable of retaliating in any meaningful way.
Gorbachev, not Reagan, has always stood out in my mind as the hero of the story that played out over the next few years, and it has always bugged me that Reagan has been billed as the guy who won the cold war when it really ended because Gorbachov was the person who finally had the courage to say publicly that the SU had lost it.
Sorry for the long, entirely anecdotal story. I hope it bolsters John Henninger's (Zubok/Brown/Leffler) point that if Gorbachev had not come to power, things might have gone differently.
May 1, 2008 11:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
An excellent post. The Reagan worship is out of hand.
I don't think Reagan is completely devoid of credit; his main contribution to the end of the Cold War was listening to Margaret Thatcher rather than his advisers. Maggie announced to the world a year before Chernenko croaked, with a facial expression that was simultaneously smug and upbeat, that Gorby was "someone we can do business with." She pushed the summit agenda with every ounce of her forceable personality; Reagan's advisers tried to sabotage it.
While Gorby was the driving force behind the end of the Cold War, Reykjavik might have succeeded had Maggie been there to handbag some of the yahoos who formed the Gipper's "brain" trust. However, she simply had to operate in a more third person manner, working Reagan over the phone and visiting Moscow. Then Gorby, with the political sophistication of the slickest machine mayor in America, used the Mathias Rust airplane in Red Square incident as an opportunity to fire all the Soviet military brass who were opposing force reductions.
That's about how I see it. The biggest remaining question I have is if Cap Weinberger's "retirement" in 1987 opened up another opportunity for arms reduction. Reagan did, after all, have a way of removing the biggest lunatics from the asylum (e.g. Haig, Kirkpatrick, Watt) as opposed to giving them medals of freedom like Dubya.
May 2, 2008 9:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
First off, I voted for Mondale, so I'm a little prejudiced. As for this hero thing about Reagan, all I can say is that he was just another very plain intellect who was this affable guy everybody likes; kinda like right now. NOBODY comes down with a sudden case of alzheimer's. The early signs were there and talked about during the '84 campaign; the actual disease was not mentioned. Teflon; remember?
I remember back in the 70s predicting the demise of the SU based on information I could glean on industrial production and stories of people I met and read about. Something wrong with a country that has a viable space program, but has factories that output twenty tractors in a year. And tractors are another way of saying "food". Anybody that was interested in delving in beyond the politics of the day and into the lives of soviet citizens could have reached the same conclusion. I find the study you cite quite credible.
May 1, 2008 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wendell Wilkie was awesome!
May 1, 2008 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
In the mid-80:ies I, too, did a couple of journeys through Poland, Jugoslavia and Hungary. From home, Poland and East Germany were just across the Baltic, and it was both adventurous and inexpensive. Others went to Eastern Asia, I went to Eastern Europe. In retrospect, I wish I had visited Russia more, but the fall of the Soviet Union came as a surprise also for me, and all I'd done before the implosion was spending a day each in Moscow and Minsk.
My ideal was moving around on my own, which by then was not much of a problem, trying to mix with "ordinary people" to get a glimpse of their conditions of life. Since I speak no Russian, the lingua franca east of the Iron Curtain, I mostly learned to know people who spoke German. (There were still plenty of them, although most born before 1940.)
I was not at all surprised when the arguments of the Peace Movement of Western Europe were echoed by for instance a Polish teacher or a Yugoslavian physician. Those organisations were by many, including me, believed to be a fifth column serving the interests of the Soviet Union, so why shouldn't the same message be popular in the East? The experience of the 20th century wars had been at least as terrible in Central and Eastern Europe as it had been in the West, and the fear for becomming the target of the mutual eradication was a lot more real on the European continent than, for instance, in the United States.
Yes, I agree with Erica above, that it seemed hard to believe that the West didn't realize what a shambles the land behind the Iron Curtain was at the time, but there are a few things I would like to add.
My impression at the time was rather that the recovery after the war had been a lot stronger in Western Europe than in Central and Eastern Europe, and I made naive conclusions about wise American post-war policies and unwise Soviet policies, the latter including suffocating reparations demands on Finland, Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia. The damages on infrastructure during the war had also been a lot worse on Germany's eastern front than in the West, and the damages on the societies were aggravated by moved borders and transfer of populations during the first peace years.
It was also factual, and obvious, that the armed forces were economically prioritized in the WP-countries, and it could easily be believed that yet another reason why the civilian society didn't work very well was to find in huge military spendings - a belief that turned out to be wrong.
People I met indicated that the belief in the Socialist Gospel was on the return, and that the Communist parties were about to become demoralized. And it was by then obvious that Capitalism had its advantages with regards to efficient flow and distributions of raw materials, products and working forces. And that not only for someone who, like me, believed in the Free Market. Anyone in the East who had had contacts with the West realized that Capitalist corporations were more efficient, and that the workers' free choise to find employment, and for the employers to hire and fire, were superior to the authoritarian system in the Socialist countries.
The centripetal forces, a.k.a. Nationalism, was an obvious and growing weakness for all of the Socialist countries in Europe, as well as for the WP itself. When people feared, or hoped, that the Soviet Union and other countries were about to fall apart on their own, I didn't interpret that in economical but rather in nationalist terms. Many people in Poland and Hungary honestly hoped for the Soviet dominance to become history sooner rather than later.
But for an ordinary traveller like me, there were no signs of worsening conditions for average people. Although people were generally poor, seen with Western European eyes, they had food, housing, clothes and health care. If compared with the situation in Greece, Spain and Portugal one could conclude that poverty did not seem worse in Central Europe.
It can rightfully be questioned how come the CIA didn't see the Soviet implosion was comming, but there were others who independently made the same mistake:
As no other Western nation, the Finns had close trade and political contacts with the Soviet Union. It is worth to note that the fall of the Soviet Union came as much as a surprise for Finland as for any NATO member.
May 2, 2008 6:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Another important point. The US never got the extent to which Europe feared nuclear war. Growing up in the UK, I was very much a part of this. Especially during Maggie T's first term. there was a strong sense among the young that we were a sitting target. Callaghan and Thatcher both strongly supported the intermediate nuclear forces build-up with Pershing and Cruise; in Callaghan's case it triggered a revolt in the Labour Party that led to the party's "two defense policies" debacle of 1983, and the unilateral nuclear disarmament commitment of 1987. It really was not until 1988 that the temperature dropped -- I think the success of the INF treaty blindsided everyone. We were still deep in the Cold War mentality even in 1987 -- one side convinced we were going to be incinerated if we held on to nukes, and the other convinced we were going to be incinerated if we gave them up.
May 2, 2008 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
This seems true--in the US the nuclear war discussion seemed like a faraway thing; once you got to Europe and especially in the SU it was a clear fear.
And Guest Observer's observation that recovery after WWII happened in the West but not the East is also true; crossing the border between Austria and Hungary was a pretty clear lesson there. Certainly everything in Hungary seemed to have ground to a halt after the Soviet entry of 1956. (It's also true that life in Portugal was pretty darn simple as well, although you didn't get the same impression of stagnation in Portugal at all.)
I have a question about
May 3, 2008 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
This would really merit a thread of its own.
And more competent comments.
My guess is that there are many factors at play, one being that the European continent is a lot more densely populated than North America, and that the cultural (and linguistic) borders make it impossible to just "move to another town" when you've fucked up, which to me is one of the most significant differences between the attitudes of ordinary people in the U.S. and in Western Europe.
Americans, as I've learned to know them, are comparably much more oriented towards their family by blood, and less towards the turf and the people that make up their village, town, province or nation. So when the woods and waters dies outside of one's town, the European does not have any other town to move on to, but considers it a fight for the future life of their kind that one is morally obliged to take up. And people in other places do identify with the struggle.
This is only one aspect.
Much more could surely be written, from both this and other angles.
May 9, 2008 7:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Whoa, that blockquote didn't turn out the way I expected. Hope the post still reads ok.
May 3, 2008 10:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
But it has to be remembered that the Soviet Union and its client states for obvious reasons were considered a very real threat by quite a few others in Western Europe, and people who like me primarily feared the illiberal aspects of Communism, did often consider "Peace Activists" to be naïve (although hopefully unintentional) servants of a dangerous threatening power.
Other activists were surely intentional supporters of the Soviet Union, seeing Western imperialism as the chief threat (globally rather than regionally) and the Soviet Union primarily as a victim of bad circumstances.
I lived a time in Germany during the debate on deployment of middle-range missiles together with a woman who was very upset by the issue. It's no question that this and similar issues basically followed left-right rifts in the different European nations, but on the other hand, it has to be remembered that a real fear for the next war was shared across all political shades.
In one way, one may say that this debate was much more significant for the political center and center-right in West Germany and The Netherlands, since for the first time since WWII, people seriously questioned whether America was considering their allies' interests, or were merely using their allies just like we long had argued that the Soviet Union used its WP-clients.
May 9, 2008 5:45 AM | Reply | Permalink