Reagan: The Life (80 page)

I
N
J
ANUARY
1986, Americans watched as the space shuttle
Challenger
lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Since the dawn of the space age,
NASA’s launches had drawn large audiences, with tens of thousands watching on the ground and millions on television. The crowds never tired of the spectacle of mighty rockets sending brave men and recently women into orbit, and with each launch American pride received a boost.

On this day the flight proceeded well for the first minute. The launch vehicle rapidly gained speed and altitude; cameras strained to follow it as it rose into the distance. Viewers on the ground regained their hearing from the engines’ roar; watchers on television turned to their daily routines. But the attention of all was suddenly wrenched back when the mission experienced a catastrophic malfunction. A critical seal failed, allowing hot gases from one of the rocket engines to escape their normal exhaust route. This triggered a series of events that resulted in the breakup of the vehicle, which disintegrated amid several plumes of smoke and steam. All seven members of the crew were killed.

Reagan had been in the Oval Office preparing to brief the television network news anchors on his State of the Union address, scheduled for delivery that evening.
John Poindexter, the recently appointed national security adviser, and George Bush came in and told him what had happened. They went into the study and watched the replay on television. “
It was just a very traumatic experience,” Reagan said later.

He went ahead and met with the anchors. They talked not about the State of the Union but about the
Challenger
tragedy. “It’s a horrible thing,”
Reagan said. “I can’t rid myself of the thought of the sacrifice of the families of the people on board. I’m sure all of America is more than saddened.”

One of the reporters asked if the president took comfort in knowing that the American
space program had suffered fewer deaths than the Soviet program.

“We all have pride in that,” he responded. “But it doesn’t lessen our grief.”

One of the crew was a schoolteacher,
Christa McAuliffe, who had been chosen and specially trained for the mission. Her presence had prompted NASA to provide special coverage of the launch to public schools. A reporter asked Reagan what he would say to the children who had been watching.

“Pioneers have always given their lives on the frontier,” he reflected. “The problem is that it’s more of a shock to all as we see it happening, not just hear about something miles away. But we must make it clear”—to the children—“that life goes on.”

Reagan thought of the McAuliffe family. “I can’t put out of my mind her husband and children,” he said. “The others knew they were in a hazardous occupation.” But she was different, and so was her family. “Your heart goes out to them.”

H
E DECIDED TO
postpone the State of the Union address. Instead, he spoke to the American people about the terrible event the nation had witnessed and suffered. “
Today is a day for mourning and remembering,” he said. “Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle
Challenger
. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.” The country had lost another astronaut crew nineteen years earlier. “But we’ve never lost an astronaut in flight; we’ve never had a tragedy like this.”

He read the honor roll of the deceased. He commiserated with their families. “We’re thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, ‘Give me a challenge, and I’ll meet it with joy.’ They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.”

He spoke to the schoolchildren. “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen,” he said. To the children and
their parents and the rest of his audience, he added, “It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The
Challenger
crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”

He almost spoiled the mood with a swipe at the Soviet Union. “We don’t hide our space program,” he said. “We don’t keep secrets and cover things up.” America was different. “We do it all up front and in public. That’s the way freedom is, and we wouldn’t change it for a minute.”

His short speech was nearly over. Some in his audience caught the reference to
“High Flight,” a favorite poem among aviators, but others simply appreciated the lyricism of the closing lines: “The crew of the space shuttle
Challenger
honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey, and waved goodbye, and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’ ”

S
PEECHWRITER
P
EGGY
N
OONAN
, the principal drafter of Reagan’s speech, watched with proprietary interest. “
When the president finished, he looked lost,” she recalled. “I knew: He didn’t like what he was given.”

Reagan thought the speech had been a bust. “I just had this feeling that I’d failed,” he told Noonan. But he blamed himself. “I thought that I’d done badly and I hadn’t done justice,” he said.

Reagan’s audience took a different view. Perhaps sorrow and decorum stilled critical voices. But the response was strongly positive, and it grew overwhelmingly so. Before long, Reagan’s
Challenger
eulogy was being cited as one of the best speeches he or any other president had ever given.

O
NE OF THE
secrets of Reagan’s success as president was his ability to concentrate on the most important issues, leaving lesser matters for subordinates to handle. By 1986 his agenda in foreign affairs was focused on a single item:
arms control with the Soviet Union. He hoped for an agreement on intermediate-range missiles, preferably his zero option, and for at least a start on cuts in long-range missiles and bombers. He continued to insist that any such agreements come without constraining SDI.

Yet he found himself compelled to deal with foreign policy issues having nothing to do with arms control. For more than a decade Washington had eyed
Libya’s mercurial leader,
Muammar Qaddafi, with deepening distrust. A 1974 arms deal with Moscow had marked Libya as a Soviet surrogate in the eyes of those, like Reagan, who were inclined to see Kremlin mischief in the nonaligned world. Qaddafi’s rhetorical and apparently logistical support for terrorist activities in the Middle East and elsewhere pushed him further beyond the pale.

Reagan decided, shortly after becoming president, to teach Qaddafi a lesson. Vaguely implicating Qaddafi in a murder in Chicago, he summarily shut the Libyan embassy in Washington, and in response to Qaddafi’s assertion of Libyan authority over the
Gulf of Sidra, the president ordered the U.S. Sixth Fleet into the gulf. “
He’s a madman,” Reagan wrote to himself. “He has been harassing our planes out over international waters and it’s time to show the other nations there—Egypt, Morocco, et al.—that there is a different management here.”

Qaddafi challenged the American presence in the Gulf of Sidra,
sending fighter planes against the task force. The aircraft carrier
Nimitz
scrambled some of its F-14s to meet the Libyans; when the latter fired on the American jets, they fired back and shot down two of the Libyan planes.

The incident evoked comment in the American media, not least because Reagan’s aides didn’t inform him immediately of what had happened. The president waved aside the criticism. “
There’s been a lot of talk and the press has been very concerned because six hours went by before they awoke me at 4:30 in the morning to tell me about it,” he said to reporters. “And there’s a very good answer to that. Why? If our planes were shot down, yes, they’d wake me right away. If the other fellow’s were shot down, why wake me up?”

Qaddafi responded with bluster and what American intelligence considered credible threats to kill Reagan. “
It’s a strange feeling to find there is a ‘contract’ out on yourself,” Reagan observed. The threats gained additional credibility in October 1981 when Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, a bitter opponent of Qaddafi, was assassinated. Reagan privately asserted, working from intelligence reports, that Qaddafi had readied a celebration of Sadat’s death ahead of the news. “
In other words, he knew it was going to happen.”

The threat against Reagan seemed to grow more specific. In November the
Secret Service got wind of a possible attack at the
National Press Club in Washington, where Reagan was giving a speech. Reagan donned a bulletproof vest and gave the speech, and nothing happened. New reports at Thanksgiving suggested that a band of assassins had crossed into the United States from Canada. The Secret Service was sufficiently alarmed that it vetoed a scheduled appearance by Reagan at Arlington National Cemetery.

The president convened the National Security Council to consider retaliation against Qaddafi. William Casey recommended laying out publicly the evidence of Libya’s involvement in terrorist activities, starting with a Qaddafi plot to assassinate the American ambassador to Egypt in 1977.

Reagan was skeptical, saying the American media would never believe the administration, regardless of how much evidence it provided.

Casey pressed the issue, suggesting the release of a map showing terrorist training camps in Libya, with the caption “
Terror is Libya’s second largest industry” (after oil).

Reagan remained reluctant. Nearly two thousand Americans resided
in Libya; most were connected to the oil industry. Reagan was as sensitive as ever to the possible taking of more American hostages, and he feared that any strong action might prompt Qaddafi to seize some of the Americans.

Al Haig, still secretary of state, discounted the likelihood of hostages. “A hostage situation would alarm other Westerners in Libya,” Haig said. Libya required those Westerners to keep the oil flowing. Haig suggested economic sanctions. These might include an embargo on oil imports from Libya, a ban on exports to Libya, and seizure of Libyan assets in the United States.

Donald Regan replied that the seizure of Libyan assets could destabilize American relations with other countries of the Middle East. “The Saudis, for example, may get the wrong idea from U.S. sanctions against Libya,” he said. Regan added that the big oil companies with operations in Libya wouldn’t sit idly while Washington adopted measures that damaged their bottom lines.

Haig answered that the Saudis were among those urging strong action against Qaddafi and that they were prepared to increase their own oil production to offset any losses the United States suffered from a ban on Libyan oil.

Jeane Kirkpatrick reported that international action against Qaddafi, as by the
Organization of African Unity, was unlikely. “Qaddafi has intimidated the leaders of black African states,” Kirkpatrick said. None dared to oppose him.

Reagan interjected, “The United States dares to oppose him.”

But not yet. The meeting ended without a decision. Reagan still worried about the Americans. And he still blamed the media for its distrust of the intelligence the administration shared about Libya. “
The press is beginning to charge that we are making up the Qaddafi threat because we won’t tell them the sources of our information,” he muttered. “I’ve come to the conclusion that they are totally irresponsible and won’t be satisfied (if then) until someone is gunned down by the ‘hit men.’ ”

The
Secret Service took the threat seriously, though. When Reagan and Nancy flew to
Camp David in early December, the Secret Service rerouted their helicopter. Reports indicated that Libyan sympathizers might have secured heat-seeking missiles that could shoot down the aircraft.

N
OTHING CAME OF
these reports, either, leaving the president and his aides to wonder whether Qaddafi was simply engaged in disinformation. Yet they continued to monitor Qaddafi’s behavior and counter his mischief. When Qaddafi lent support to rebels in
Chad and the French government dispatched troops to counter the rebels, Reagan ordered American warplanes and AWACS reconnaissance aircraft to keep an eye on Libyan planes. When Qaddafi was reported to be readying planes to back a coup in
Sudan, Reagan sent AWACS to help prepare the
Egyptian air force to shoot down the Libyan planes.

Tensions with Libya reached a new height in December 1985 when Palestinian gunmen opened fire at the Rome and Vienna airports. Qaddafi praised the attacks, which killed nineteen and wounded more than a hundred, as vengeance for the massacres of
Palestinians at the Lebanese refugee camps three years earlier. American intelligence indicated that Qaddafi’s support went beyond cheerleading to funding and perhaps training.

Reagan decided he’d had enough of Qaddafi. After a long meeting with his national security team, he issued an executive order telling the Americans in Libya to leave the country. He froze Libyan assets in the United States. He directed the Sixth Fleet to increase its presence off Libyan shores. Reagan hoped Qaddafi would get the message, but he was ready to do more. “
If Mr. Q. decides not to push another terrorist act—O.K., we’ve been successful with our implied threat,” Reagan noted. “If on the other hand he takes this for weakness and does loose another one, we will have targets in mind and instantly respond with a h--l of a punch.”

Qaddafi decided to test Reagan’s resolve. Libyan batteries fired surface-to-air missiles at American warplanes in the
Gulf of Sidra, and Libyan missile-armed patrol boats menacingly approached American ships.

Reagan delivered the promised punch. American planes acting on the president’s orders rocketed the missile batteries and sank the boats. “
U.S. forces will continue their current exercises,” Reagan declared in a letter of notification to the speaker of the House and the president pro tem of the Senate. “We will not be deterred by Libyan attacks or threats from exercising our rights on and over the high seas under international law. If Libyan attacks do not cease, we will continue to take the measures necessary in the exercise of our right of self-defense to protect our forces.”