Reagan: The Life (57 page)

Reagan again tried to talk the Argentines away from the brink. “
Spent half an hour on the phone with President Galtieri,” he wrote in his diary. “He sounded a little panicky and repeated several times they want a peaceful settlement.” But Galtieri wouldn’t remove his troops from the islands, and he wouldn’t retreat from his claim of Argentine sovereignty.

Thatcher remained as adamant as before. “
It was not Britain who broke the peace but Argentina,” she wrote to the president. “Any suggestion that conflict can be avoided by a device that leaves the aggressor in occupation is surely gravely misguided. The implication for other potential areas of tension and for small countries everywhere would be of extreme seriousness. The fundamental principles for which the free world stands would be shattered.”

Reagan agreed, though he declined to speak as forcefully as Thatcher. He concluded that there was little he could do. “
As of noon things looked hopeless,” he wrote on April 17. He increasingly blamed the Argentines as the days passed. “
The shooting could start,” he wrote on April 23. “It would be a war mainly because an Argentine general-president (result of a coup) needed to lift his sagging political fortunes.”

The shooting did start a week later. The British task force reached the vicinity of the Falklands at the end of April. On May 1, British aircraft bombed the airport at Port Stanley to deprive the Argentines of its use. On May 2 a British submarine sank the Argentine light cruiser
General Belgrano
, with the loss of more than three hundred officers and crew.

The sinking eliminated any hope for a diplomatic solution. Britain smelled victory; the Argentines sought revenge or at least a salvaging of honor. They got some of both two days later when an air-launched Argentine missile blasted the British destroyer
Sheffield
, killing a score of British sailors and setting fires that ravaged and eventually sank the ship.

R
EAGAN WAS COMPELLED
to respond to the outbreak of fighting. He called no news conference but let himself be drawn into an exchange with reporters who shouted questions as he departed the White House for a brief trip out of Washington. “
Mr. President, was the British attack on the Falklands expected?” one reporter asked. Another demanded, “What are we going to do about the Falklands attack?” A third yelled, “Mr. Presi
dent, did you have any advance warning at all that this attack by the British was coming this morning, or was it a complete surprise?”

Reagan’s aides groaned at these drive-by video shootings, believing they caught the president off guard. Sometimes they did. But they also gave Reagan a chance to choose the questions he wanted to answer. The others blew away in the draft from the helicopter blades.

In this case he answered the third question. “Complete surprise,” he said. This wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough for the moment. Neither Reagan nor Haig had asked to be apprised of the details of British planning, and the president hadn’t been informed as to when the British assault was going to occur. Yet he was fairly certain it was going to happen, given Thatcher’s obvious resolve.

Reporters soon tested the president’s accuracy. They learned that the British planes involved in the initial bombing had taken off from
Ascension Island in the Atlantic, where the United States operated an air base under a World War II–era lease from the British. The administration had debated whether to allow the British strike to originate there. Jeane Kirkpatrick argued against giving permission, saying it would antagonize Argentina and jeopardize hemispheric solidarity. Bobby Ray Inman, the deputy director of the CIA, sitting in for
William Casey, responded sharply. “
It was the only time I ever lost my temper in a meeting with the president,” Inman recalled later. He branded hemispheric solidarity a “myth” and reminded the group that Britain had stood by the United States “since the War of 1812.” Reagan accepted Inman’s argument, and the British got the use of Ascension.

But this left Reagan with some explaining to do. “
Mr. President, how could you have been surprised about the attack if they took off from Ascension Island while we control the air traffic?” a reporter asked at the next opportunity.

“Simply because there was no report of it to us,” Reagan replied.

“Are they using our airstrips on Ascension Island to bomb the Falklands?”

“There is a joint-use base there.”

“If there’s a joint-use base, then how could we have been surprised?”

“Well, I’ve never told the British when
we
took some plane off from there.”

The bombings and the battle at sea were clearly preparation for a British landing in the Falklands. Reagan feared that they might also presage an extension of the fighting to the Argentine mainland.
Brazil’s president
was visiting Washington; he told Reagan that his diplomats had learned that the British were preparing to attack military bases in continental Argentina. “
Our intelligence community confirmed that preparations for such attacks were under way,” Reagan recalled. He phoned Thatcher and warned her against widening the war. She refused to rule it out with Reagan at this point, though she had no intention of taking on more than she had committed to. “
Whether or not such attacks would have made any military sense,” she wrote later, “we saw from the beginning that they would cause too much political damage to our position to be anything but counterproductive.”

Reagan tried to postpone or prevent the collision of ground forces. He called Thatcher again. “
I talked to Margaret but don’t think I persuaded her against further action,” he noted on May 13. Nor were the Argentines willing to back down. “
Hundreds have been killed,” Galtieri told
Vernon Walters, whom Reagan had sent in a last-ditch effort to forestall further fighting. “What can I tell my people they have gained by their sacrifices?”

On May 21 the British went ashore, triggering a series of pitched battles. Reagan called Thatcher yet again. He spoke of a settlement by which Britain would stop short of total victory and the Argentine government would not fall. Thatcher was in no mood for compromise. “
The prime minister is adamant,” Reagan wrote. “She feels the loss of life so far can only be justified if they win.”

She also felt that Reagan was on her side, despite his diplomatic efforts. The Pentagon quietly increased its assistance to Britain, supplying Sidewinder missiles and the matting for a temporary airstrip, among other items. The president himself endorsed the British position in a conversation with Thatcher in early June. He and she had separately traveled to Paris for a meeting of the
Group of Seven, the major economic powers. They spent an hour together at the American embassy discussing South Atlantic affairs. “
The Prime Minister said that she had opened the discussion by thanking President Reagan warmly for the material help which the United States had extended to us,” the British account of the meeting recorded. “She regretted, but understood, that she could not make public the very valuable assistance which the Americans had given.” She reiterated her determination to carry the conflict through to the end. Yet she hoped the effects of a British victory would not destabilize South America. “The Prime Minister had made it plain that she was not interested in humiliating Argentina nor was she at war with the mainland. No one was more anxious for an armistice than she.”

Reagan picked up this thread. “President Reagan had expressed a keen wish to minimise the loss of life,” the British memo recounted. “He wondered whether persistent bombardment, rather than a frontal assault, might not help to achieve this.” Thatcher explained that bombardment, by lengthening the conflict, might actually increase casualties. Reagan replied that a long conflict would benefit no one. “He was worried about the situation in Argentina. He was not sure that Galtieri would fall, but if he did so it seemed likely that the Air Force commander would take over.” Reagan went on to say that Galtieri was getting what he had brought on himself. “President Reagan volunteered the view that Galtieri had authorised the invasion because he otherwise would have fallen from power within days. Large-scale strikes, sympathetic to the Peronistas, had been envisaged.”

Reagan met with Thatcher again in London a few days later. They spoke in private, each reiterating previous positions. The president then addressed Parliament. He talked broadly of the need for solidarity in the struggle against aggression, focusing on the
Soviet Union and its communist allies and proxies. But he included the conflict in the Falklands as part of the necessary effort to maintain the rule of law. “
On distant islands in the South Atlantic young men are fighting for Britain,” he told his Westminster audience. “And, yes, voices have been raised protesting their sacrifice for lumps of rock and earth so far away. But those young men aren’t fighting for mere real estate. They fight for a cause, for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed.” Borrowing from Thatcher, he added, “If there had been firmer support for that principle some forty-five years ago, perhaps our generation wouldn’t have suffered the bloodletting of World War II.”

The fighting continued until the middle of June, when the Argentine defenders of the Falklands suddenly lost heart and quit. “
The speed with which the end came took all of us by surprise,” Thatcher remembered. But the lesson she drew from the war endured. “We have ceased to be a nation in retreat,” she told her compatriots. “Britain has rekindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before. Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.”

T
HATCHER EMERGED FROM
the Falklands War a hero, and to none more than Reagan. “
She believed absolutely in the moral rightness of what she was doing,” the president remarked. He liked to think of himself as similarly stout in defense of the right, and Thatcher’s victory afforded a reminder that armed morality can indeed win.

Yet there was collateral damage. The collapse of the Galtieri regime just days after the Falklands defeat left the Reagan administration
on the hook for the two thousand contras the Argentine government had been supporting against the Nicaraguan government. Reagan found himself deeper in Central America sooner than he had expected.

More obvious to the world was Reagan’s loss of his secretary of state. Al Haig had always been an awkward fit in the administration. James Baker judged him pretentious. “
He had grandiose ideas,” Baker said. Bob Inman thought he lacked discretion. “
He was a swashbuckler,” Inman recalled. Martin Anderson believed that Haig never understood or appreciated the president’s style of leadership. “
He was somewhat contemptuous of the views of anyone who was not a certified, blue-ribbon foreign policy expert,” Anderson said. Anderson lacked a blue ribbon but was included in preparations for a presidential trip abroad, to Haig’s great annoyance. “He was baffled by Reagan’s insistence on including these foreign policy amateurs in the inner circle of the summit planning,” Anderson said. “The thing that seemed to annoy Haig the most was Reagan’s habit of involving trusted advisers in policy discussions on issues in which they were not expert.” When Anderson appeared at a final briefing before
Reagan’s departure, Haig boiled over. “He straightened up, drew himself together like a small Charles de Gaulle, and bellowed, ‘What the hell are you doing in
my
meeting, Anderson?’ ”

Anderson’s sarcastic response typified the attitude of the Reagan loyalists to Haig. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “anytime I get the chance to brighten your day, I take it.” The Reaganites lost few opportunities to vex Haig. His self-importance struck them not simply as arrogant but as demeaning to Reagan, whom they determined to protect. They kept Haig from seeing the president as often as Haig wanted, leaving him to wonder who was making the decisions. “
To me, the White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship,” he wrote later. “You heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm? Was it Meese, was it Baker, was it someone else? It was impossible to know for sure.” When Haig complained to Richard Allen, the national security adviser replied, “Al, why don’t you just worry about the State Department?” Meese and Baker often spoke for the administration, on foreign policy among other matters; when Haig objected that their words lacked the precision required of diplomacy and suggested they leave that realm to him, they brushed him aside. “Sometimes, after hanging up the phone, I would have the impression that they regarded me as some sort of naïf who did not understand that publicity is the engine of politics,” Haig said.

Haig found himself defending his territory on an almost daily basis. Caspar Weinberger crossed the line most irritatingly. “It is not easy to convince other governments or the public that the minister of defense of a superpower is talking off the top of his head on issues of war and peace,” Haig said. Yet that was the way of Weinberger, who knew budgets but not international affairs. “His tendency to blurt out locker-room opinions in the guise of policy was one that I prayed he might overcome. If God heard, He did not answer in any way understandable to me.”

I
T WAS THE
leaks, however, that drove him crazy. “If I had some difficulty in wrenching opinions from the White House staff when I spoke to them in person, its members conversed with remarkable fluency through the press,” Haig said. He learned in the
Washington Post
that
William Clark’s function at the State Department was not so much to be his deputy as to keep watch for the White House on his presidential ambitions.
The
New York Times
told him that his nickname among Reagan staffers was CINCWORLD—Commander in Chief, World—on account of his grandiose airs. He read direct quotations from his confidential reports to the president and from his remarks at supposedly secret meetings of the National Security Council.