Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (13 page)

Reagan himself remained adamant about the size of the danger averted: “Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn’t. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony, being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. We got there just in time.” This statement became a Spice Island touchstone for other White House officials: “It appears we got there just in time to prevent a tragedy.”

After about ten days of postgame back-and-forth, O’Neill and the other skeptics on both sides of the congressional aisle were beating what one of them admitted was “a strategic retreat.” Reagan had bested them. He knew he still had that old Fum-Poo flair, and that if he could get the American public behind him, he could roll Tip O’Neill and Congress on just about any issue he wished. The night of his Grenada speech, Reagan had noted in his diary, with obvious pleasure, that he’d “hit a few nerves.… ABC News polled 250 people before the speech, the majority were against us. They polled the same right after
the speech & there had been a complete turnaround. 1000s of phone calls & wires from all over the country flooded us, more than on any speech or issue since we’ve been here—10 to 1 in our favor.” Not for nothing was Ronald Reagan known as the Great Communicator. The country’s overall approval ratings for the Grenada invasion soared to nearly 90 percent. And however much Congress disagreed, they knew that there wasn’t much margin in arguing the merits of the case against the invasion when more than eight in ten Americans were for it. “Public opinion is what’s behind things,” Democratic congressman Robert Torricelli told reporters. “I hardly get a call in my office about Grenada where people don’t mention the Iranian hostage situation. So people feel their frustration relieved and members of Congress sense that.”

What was the connection between the Iranian hostage situation and Grenada? None, exactly. But if the people were erasing a bad memory and replacing it with a better one, who was to argue? The point was, as Ronald Reagan would say at his next State of the Union address: “America is back—standing tall.”

THE THING TO DO IN NICARAGUA SEEMED SO GLARINGLY OBVIOUS
to President Reagan that it almost didn’t need explaining (“It seems to me that the issue was so plain,” he was still saying years later. “We were talking about preventing the presence of a Soviet satellite in the Americas!”). “The Sandinista rule is a Communist reign of terror,” he implored in a May 1984 address to the nation. “If the Soviet Union can aid and abet subversion in our hemisphere, then the United States has a legal right and a moral duty to help resist it.”

But the more he explained it, the more clear it became that he would not be able to move the public to his way of thinking; on this one question, the nation would not dance to his tune. It didn’t matter how hard the president beat the drum about the frightening prospect of a Central American country being sucked into the sphere of Soviet influence. (Remember, we got there just in time in Grenada! Might not be so lucky in Managua.) Didn’t matter how hard the president beat the drum about the need to forestall what he described in his diary as “another Cuba on the American mainland.” Didn’t matter how adoringly he extolled the virtues of the brave Nicaraguan resistance. (“They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help,” he’d offered. “They are
the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them.”) Didn’t matter what he said, it seemed to him, he could not get traction on the issue.

“Dick Wirthlin’s poll figures were interesting & holding up well—except for the Nicaragua issue,” Reagan wrote in his diary in the spring of 1985. “We have to do a job of education with the people—they just don’t understand.” It was a failure he stewed over again and again in that diary: “Our communications on Nicaragua have been a failure, 90% of the people know it is a communist country but almost as many don’t want us to give the [anti-Communists] $14 million for weapons. I have to believe it is the old Vietnam syndrome.” After meetings with members of Congress on Nicaragua, Reagan wrote, “The meetings went well & I think I answered some of their worries. It’s apparent though that the lack of support on the part of the people due to the drum beat of propaganda ‘a la Vietnam’ is influencing some of them.”

When Reagan wrote about the “Vietnam syndrome,” what he meant was that the American body politic suffered from a real pathology. He was sure that his failure to rally the country on Nicaragua, that all the impediments he found to making war on the Commies in Central America (or even to doing just a little energetic saber rattling)—the public’s disinclination to call up our troops to fight on foreign soil, the press asking questions about it, Congress asserting its power to stop war or limit it—were symptoms of this dread disease.

“In the last ten years,” Reagan complained at one press conference near the end of his first term, “the Congress has imposed about 150 restrictions on the President’s power in international diplomacy. And I think that the Constitution made it pretty plain way back in the beginning as to how diplomacy was to
be conducted. And I just don’t think that a committee of 535 individuals, no matter how well intentioned, can offer what is needed in actions of this kind or where there’s a necessity. Do you know that prior to the Vietnamese War, while this country had four declared wars, Presidents of this country had found it necessary to use military forces 125 times in our history?”

But the “Vietnamese War” didn’t break anything. America’s structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something’s gone wrong. It’s not a bug in the system. It
is
the system. It’s the way the founders set us up—to ensure our continuing national health. Every Congress is meddlesome, disinclined toward war, and obstructive of a president’s desire for it—on purpose. On Nicaragua, Congress was doing its constitutional duty, and what the founders expected.

In the run-up to the 1984 election, Congress had stayed late and built a big wall the president could not easily scale where his Nicaragua policy was concerned. After being
told
and not
asked
about the Grenada invasion, Tip O’Neill was not going to be gone around on this one. The lesson of Grenada (and Lebanon) for Speaker O’Neill was that passivity didn’t pay. Against a president who seemed bent on war, Congress needed to vigorously (and sometimes preemptively) assert its own authority.

This new barrier erected by Congress—the Boland Amendment—was no garden-variety, cut-off-some-funding restriction but rather an explicit legislative move to block the president from doing exactly what he wanted to do, to stop him from doing what he was
already
doing: conducting a secret, CIA-funded, CIA-run war fought by a CIA-created, CIA-led army of local insurgents to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The Reagan administration had been training those insurgents—called Contras—in Honduras, as well as running attacks on Nicaraguan military patrols, on fuel tanks at Nicaraguan
ports, and even on the airport in Managua. When a secret CIA-led operation to mine Nicaraguan harbors became public in the spring of 1984, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Barry Goldwater, blew up. Goldwater was as much of an anti-Communist badass as anyone in the Senate, but the fact that what Reagan was doing was anti-Communist didn’t trump that what Reagan was doing seemed to Goldwater anti-American. The Reagan team had been legally obligated to inform Goldwater, the Senate Intelligence chairman, that these covert missions were happening, and they’d been violating that law, among others. “The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don’t know what the hell he is doing?” Senator Goldwater wrote to the director of Central Intelligence, William Casey. “Lebanon, yes, we all know that he sent troops over there. But mine the harbors in Nicaragua? This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war. For the life of me, I don’t see how we are going to explain it.”

Senior senators muscled Director Casey into making a pilgrimage to Capitol Hill to apologize to a closed session of the
entire
Senate Intelligence Committee. The full Senate voted 84–12 to condemn the mining; even staunch anti-Communist Republicans stood up to be counted. The message was clear: no president was vested with this kind of power. That summer, both houses of Congress debated the merits of Reagan’s secret war in Nicaragua, and that fall, the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate voted to put the brakes on it.

“During fiscal year 1985,” read the Boland Amendment of October 12, 1984, “no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which would have
the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any action, group, organization, movement or individual.” The amendment was written in purposefully broad language (“any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities,” “purpose or … effect of supporting,” “directly or indirectly,” “military or paramilitary”) to make sure the Reagan team could not evade congressional will. “There are no exceptions to the prohibition” was how the amendment’s author explained it.

And yet in a separate provision of the amendment, Congress gave Reagan a way to try to win back the funding for his secret war; they invited the president to make his case for his Nicaraguan operation. To them. Maintaining their constitutional prerogative as the arbiter of war, they
asked
the administration, in effect, to
ask them;
to submit to Congress the evidence that Nicaragua was exporting Communist revolution to other Central American countries, to make a formal and specific dollar request of Congress for US support of Contra military or paramilitary operations, to justify the need and the amount, and to explain in full the goal of this effort.

When asked years later about congressional requests for this sort of information, Reagan explained them as a clever political maneuver by Tip O’Neill and his soft-on-Communism liberal chums in Congress: “Well, frankly,” Reagan said, “I just believe it was part of the constant effort of the Congress to discredit those who wanted to support the Contras.”

Actually, it was a wide-open invitation for Reagan to make his case to Congress about why they, too, should support the Contras. But Reagan refused to see it that way. The president’s nearly unprecedented electoral romp in 1984—Reagan had won forty-nine of fifty states and 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale’s paltry thirteen—hardened his conviction that Congress
shouldn’t be sticking its nose into his business (like into Nicaragua, for instance).

His commitment to act in Nicaragua despite Congress was both procedural and substantive. He could not have been more certain that he was on the right side of history. “The Contras,” Reagan liked to say, “wanted to have what we had in our own country, and that was [that] the result of the revolution would be democracy.” In March 1986 he told a group of elected officials at the White House, “So I guess in a way [the Nicaraguan rebels] are counterrevolutionary, and God bless them for being that way. And I guess that makes them Contras, and so it makes me a Contra too.” To a president who saw not only George Washington as a Contra, but saw
himself
as a Contra too, the Congress and the American people being opposed to helping those freedom fighters was simply a nuisance to be got around, not a real impediment to action.

By the time he embarked on his second term, Ronald Reagan had moved well beyond the built-in resentment and disdain presidents have for members of the Senate or the House or the press. (Which one of
them
had received
fifty million votes
?) Somewhere along the way, Reagan had taken the remarkable posture that even just public debate on issues of war and peace was detrimental to our national security. Reagan had said it plain in the days after he’d grudgingly pulled US military troops from the misbegotten mission he had ordered in Lebanon: “When you’re engaged in this kind of a diplomatic attempt and you have forces there, and there is an effort made to oust them, a debate as public as was conducted here, raging, with the Congress demanding, ‘Oh, bring our men home, take them away.’ All this can do is stimulate the terrorists and urge them on to further attacks because they see a possibility of success in getting the force out, which is keeping them from having their way. It
should be understood by everyone in government that once this is committed, you have rendered [our military] ineffective when you conduct that kind of a debate in public.”

In other words, according to Reagan, having a spirited argument about where, when, and why to put United States soldiers in harm’s way (as well as how long to keep them there) and forcing a president to engage in a real argument about the wisdom of his foreign policy initiatives, to make his case in public, was akin to giving aid and comfort to the enemy—to Communists and terrorists.