PETER HUESSEY: WHEN RONALD REAGAN SPOKE PEOPLE LISTENED
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/american-leadership-when-reagan-spoke-people-listened?f=puball
In celebrating the 50th anniversary of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, [see The Future Creates the Present: Martin Luther King’s Gift to America”] most of the commentary was about the promise of his ministry and the reality of life for Black people here in America and the need for the latter to approach the former. Left largely unsaid was the nature of Dr. King’s leadership, particularly his ability to change the nation and with it our future.
Americans today of all political stripes are very much in search of leadership. I believe they thirst for someone to tell it to them straight, lay out the options and take them into a future most of us can embrace. They want to believe in America’s future again. It may be such leaders come along all too infrequently and we are therefore stuck where we are. But I do not believe we have to accept what we have.
What is leadership then? Our recent history contains lessons for us.
Max Kampelman, a Democratic Washington lawyer long close to former Vice President Humphrey, a key negotiator of the follow up agreement to the Helsinki Accords, and destined to be a negotiator of nuclear arms reduction agreements with the Soviets during the Reagan administration, (and a major supporter of SDI and missile defense), said at the time to me as we listened to the President’s speech: “Reagan just changed history with that speech.”
Years later, having been proven correct, Kampelman would more fully explain what he had meant. In a 1991 speech to the American Bar Association, at which he was given the Bar’s highest award, he noted: “With those twelve words, Reagan announced to the Soviets that he had no illusions about what they were about, and he wanted their allies and friends to know this. He also was sending a message to the refuseniks, the camp inmates, and the dissidents. He was with them. And America was with them. And the free world was with them.”
Just as Martin Luther King years earlier had said that America could not exist both free and unfree, so Reagan was saying the free world could not coexist with the world of totalitarian communism, because the world of communism headed by the USSR had as its very objective the destruction of the free world. Kampelman explained: “You can’t believe that totalitarian communism could exist peacefully in a world of sovereign democratic nations founded on the idea that God-given rights were the foundation of civil society. And America had begun to fool itself that you could really believe this”
Needless to say, the reaction to the President’s 1983 speech by the dominant major media, within the academic community and among Washington talking heads was instant and widely condemnatory. They said Reagan was provoking the Soviets; trade, arms control and détente would all be in jeopardy. They said we could not appeal to those living in poverty and under dictatorship with a simple and ignorant appeal to anti-communism.
Now remember that Reagan did not say that Russia was the focus of evil in the modern world. In fact, in his address years later to students at Moscow University, he went out of his way to praise Russian history and culture. Few know that the Tsar in Russia had adopted many of the socially beneficial policies of Germany’s Bismarck, and that Russia boasted a standard of living in 1917 that surpassed that of France and Germany.
The Russian people, said Reagan, wanted a say in their history and future. This collective passion of all people was in Russia tragically hijacked by Lenin and his band of communist thieves, thugs, and murderers. Three quarters of a century later, after over 100 million people had died at the hands of communism, the Soviet Union and its Marxist-Leninist terror was finally buried on the ash heap of history, as Reagan predicted it would be.
Reagan’s speech to the Evangelical conference was not an off the cuff comment. It was carefully crafted and spoken on purpose. In both word and deed, the message he was sending to Moscow and its friends was clear-we aim to take you down. The speech was serious. So were his actions. He caused a complete redirection of America’s security policy by calling us to a very different future that perpetual “détente” with those intent upon destroying us. That was the secret of his successful leadership.
In 1981, for example, Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. They belonged to the only union that had endorsed Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. The Soviet archives reveal the Politburo was stunned that Reagan would fire the very union members-and the only union– that had endorsed him. They knew, said one document, “He meant business”.
During this period, I would meet a member of the Chinese government controlled press who had attended my Hill seminars. We had lunch periodically at Washington area Chinese restaurants—he certainly knew the authentic ones. His first question was invariably the same. “What is the US position on Taiwan?” My answer was always the same. “Taiwan is a sovereign nation which we have pledged to protect from aggression according to our constitutional processes”.
After these “pleasantries”, we would talk about other things. On one day, however, my friend expressed great surprise. He said “You are arming the Afghan Northern Alliance guerillas; supporting a democratic resistance in Nicaragua; deploying medium range ballistic missiles in Europe; proposing real, major reductions in nuclear weapons while engaging in a major military modernization campaign; and pushing a revolutionary free trade zone throughout North America. Reagan was really serious, wasn’t he?”
I replied: “If there is a fight between civilization and barbarism, don’t you think it’s something to be serious about?”
The “reporter” had been arrested during the Great Cultural Revolution and sent to a concentration camp. Divided from his family then, his children and wife were even now back in China, for “safekeeping” he told me. For days on end, stretching into years, he and his fellow political prisoners dug huge open pits with their bare hands, only to then be told to fill the pits up again. They were fed only scraps during these “education seminars” as they were called. They could not use the toilet. They were beaten, whipped, and left to work in heat reaching 120 degrees and cold below freezing. Ironically, he was allowed to smoke. I never saw my friend without a panda cigarette with smoke swirling about face. [You could smoke in DC restaurants then].
He answered me: “Yes, you are right. It is indeed American who should be serious”. He added, sadly: “And nobody in China is serious”.
An Indian scholar told me at a 1981 conference when Reagan announced we were going to aid the Afghani guerillas, “You really are serious aren’t you?” And when we decontrolled energy prices in early 1981, the eventual decline in petroleum prices significantly reduced in real terms the Soviet’s hard currency earnings, limiting their ability to finance their campaigns of terrorism and guerilla wars.
At that time, in the spring of 1981, the New York Times excoriated the Administration for decontrolling oil prices, and they seemed vindicated when prices rose slightly by April. By July, however, the price of oil had dropped significantly. Not once did the Times even guess at why Reagan had done what he did.
As detailed in a Winter/Spring 2003 article for the National Intelligencer, the Journal of US Intelligence Studies, “How Reagan Won the Cold War”, decontrolling oil prices was not only designed to help the US economy but to dramatically curtail the foreign exchange hard currency earnings of the Soviet Union. This was but one part of a multi-pronged attack on the Soviet Union which also included “…support for internal disruptions with special emphasis on Poland, promotion of freedom, overload the Soviet economy with a technology-based arms race, stop the flow of western technology to the Soviet bloc, raise the cost of the wars the Soviets are supporting, and as a result demoralize the Soviets and generate pressure for change.”
Reagan traced Libyan money to East German associates and from there to the people that blew up a Berlin nightclub-and with it Americans soldiers. And we got serious about Libya. Even though France would not give us over flight rights even when presented with the damning evidence of both Libyan and East German Stasi involvement, we flew the long way to Libya from bases in England.
During the transition between the Carter and Reagan Administration, some experts on the National Security Council told us the American policy should be to “let” El Salvador, like Nicaragua, “go communist”. Why we asked incredulously? “Well, the FMLN are popular and will win any election. Then we can provide them foreign aid; unlike what we did with Castro, we can learn to live them and help them”. Unserious, these Americans.
The favorite tactic of the FMLN was to use land mines along the farm roads of the country and in the coffee plantations where workers had their limbs, arms and legs, blown away. I remember vividly the hospitals I visited in San Salvador where such injured children lay in row upon row of hospital beds. A spokesman for the FMLN said this was better than killing the children because in this way parents and the extended family would have to care for them full time. This would further limit workers available for the economy. These are the people US professors called followers of “liberation theology”. These are the people for which CISPES, the US based Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, raised money. Deadly serious, these terrorists.
In Salvador, we supported the election and reelection of the Social Democrat Duarte. We helped train and reform the security forces. It took nearly a decade. But with the open and relatively free elections in 1989 of Alfredo Christiani in El Salvador and Mrs. Violetta Chamorro in Nicaragua in 1990 the communist guerilla war and the communist government in these two countries were defeated, respectively. The FMLN were defeated both militarily and politically, and the Sandinistas were finally voted out of office. And that told the Soviets we were serious.
Reagan announced that we would deploy INF missiles in Europe-in England, the Netherlands, in Germany and Italy. In so many words, Pope John Paul II endorsed Reagan’s policy of “Peace Through Strength”. Reagan also announced NATO would eliminate all of these pending deployments if the Soviets eliminated their roughly 1500 SS-20 warheads aimed at the heart of Europe deployed throughout the Warsaw bloc. After the sudden death of Chernenko, the Soviet response to Reagan’s proposal was to walk out of the arms control talks in Geneva.
Reagan won the modernization of our nuclear deterrent, especially the Peacekeeper ICBM, the Trident submarine and D-5 missile, and the B-1 and B-2 bombers. He confounded the Soviets by offering at the same time to reduce our nuclear weapons by 50%, a proposal that successfully led to START I. Reagan and later President H. W. Bush would work to reduce Soviet forces in Europe by two thirds, which eventually led to the 1990 CFE or Conventional Armed Forces in Europe treaty, which said Vaclav Havel, President of Czechoslovakia, codified the end of the Soviet Empire in Europe.
To each of these unprecedented proposals, Mr. Gorbachev at first said no. To nuclear reductions, he called for a nuclear freeze. To the question of conventional forces threatening the inter German border, he called for elimination of the US Navy from Mediterranean and North Atlantic, (Naval Arms Control). If adopted, such a proposal would have made the defense of Europe impossible. To the elimination of SS-20’s in Europe, he built even more. In short, the Soviet Nomenklatura still was trying desperately to sustain communism and the Soviet empire.
But the revolution in military affairs, begun in the late 1970s but brought to full blossom by Reagan, was too much for the Soviets. They had anticipated this back in the late 1970’s when Andropov told Gorbachev-whom he was grooming for eventual placement as General Secretary– they had to gain access to western technology or their military could not keep up. They thus had to freeze the western military in place, while in the meantime they hoped to gain ground with their conventional modernization while using their completed nuclear modernization as a diplomatic trump card.
This was the origin of the nuclear freeze proposal pushed by Brezhnev. Andropov needed time, and just as Lenin had adopted “perestroika” and “glasnost” in the 1920’s, Gorbachev, the apt pupil, was to adopt the same strategy over half a century later. Russia had to buy time with a peace campaign, a public relations shield behind which they could hide their military modernization.
Two years after walking out of the arms control talks in Geneva, the Soviets tried their last gambit in Iceland. Gorbachev proposed that the US and the Soviets would give up all their ballistic missile strategic nuclear weapons, but the price would be for the United States to give up its missile defenses. Reagan said no.
The dominant media and its associated conventional wisdom concluded almost immediately that Reagan had bungled a chance for peace or for major nuclear arms control. But Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, the top Soviet General who committed suicide shortly before the end of the Soviet Union and just after the attempted August 1991 coup, told a meeting of the Politburo shortly after the Iceland summit that the Cold War was over and the Americans and the West had won.
On June 12, 1987, President Reagan called on the Soviets to tear down the Berlin Wall as he spoke before the backdrop of the Brandenburg Gate-“Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The Soviet press agency called it an “openly provocative, war mongering speech”, a view echoed by Professor Douglas Brinkley of Rice University and a history consultant to CBS News, who saw the speech as “disastrous”.
Reagan’s actions stunned the Soviets. It was not just a near complete reversal of the Carter administration policy, but a repudiation of much of the Nixon administration’s position on détente and “peaceful coexistence”.
Gorbachev thought he could out fox Reagan by proposing outlandish military ideas dressed up as balanced arms control. He finally realized after Reykjavik he could not out “peace” Reagan. Subsequently, Moscow agreed to the START I treaty, the 1987 INF treaty eliminating all intermediate range nuclear tipped missiles from Europe and Asia, and eventually the 1990 CFE treaty, the conventional armed forces in Europe, agreements all of Reagan’s opponents said would not ever be concluded, particularly on American terms.
Gorbachev’s initial reading of Reagan was that the American President was uninformed, easily pushed around, and not very solid, according to the General Secretary’s own report to the Kremlin following his initial meeting with Reagan in Geneva in 1985. This view echoed much of the commentary in America’s drive-by media, so Gorbachev must have thought he was on solid ground. Reagan, on the other hand, wrote in his diary within hours of meeting Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985, the Soviet leader “Thinks I am not very smart and he can easily push me around”.
Poland was the central fulcrum where Gorbachev’s peace campaign failed. The Soviets faced a real dilemma in Poland. Here Reagan outfoxed them again, with a great assist from Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II. The Soviets could not send in the tanks to crush the labor union Solidarity, because then all of Europe-the world– would see the real Soviets unmasked. When the general in charge of Poland, Jaruzelski, visited Moscow and pleaded with the Soviets not to invade, his only alternative was to establish martial law and imprison Solidarity and thus preserve the Warsaw Pact. But the Soviets could not invade. And marshal law, imposed December 13, 1981, would someday end. And the US President and the Vatican would keep Solidarity alive in the meantime, despite the apparent Soviet attempt to kill Pope John Paul II, so terrified were they of the prospects of an independent and free Poland.
How did Reagan accomplish this? He sent Ambassador and General Vernon Walters [an American hero] to the Vatican to see Pope John Paul II. And the Pope said that if Soviet tanks invaded Poland, they would have to drive over his body, too. And so Walters pledged US funding through the US to maintain Solidarity in mind, body and soul. Funds for phones, fax machines, strike funds, clothing, food and anything the families and the underground friends of Solidarity needed, with the aid of the Catholic Church in Poland, with the Vatican giving its blessing to the whole enterprise. Is there a lesson here about Iran?
Again, America and her allies had gotten serious. By challenging the American people to change what they were doing today in order to reach that promised future that “City on a Shining Hill” the President often spoke about. Reagan asked America to embrace a future with the Soviet Union thrown “upon the ash heap of history” (a “scandalous idea” wailed the New York Times), and thus embrace a whole new present that rejected détente and peaceful coexistence but challenged the Soviets at every turn. Now only did Reagan change the world in the process, he freed hundreds of millions of people from tyranny. The refuseniks deep in the Soviet gulag heard him and it changed their world.
In short, President Reagan gave us a sense we could direct history and not think of ourselves as victims of it. That is what so many Americans want to believe again. Such a task is not comfortable or easy. So we are left with the questions: Where is the leader that can call us into a new future and in the process change our lives today again for the better? And in so doing help us in that constitutional duty to “provide for the common defense”.
Peter Huessy is President of GeoStrategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland , a defense and national security consulting firm.
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/american-leadership-when-reagan-spoke-people-listened?f=puball#ixzz2eU5mTqra
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