Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (34 page)

In late 1983, Reagan also ordered deployment of American intermediate-range and Pershing II cruise missiles, a new generation of arms, to augment NATO nuclear weapons in Western Europe, where they were expected to counter Soviet SS-20 missiles. In so doing he had to face down huge and anguished outcries, many of them from intrepid women’s groups, from advocates of a “nuclear freeze” in NATO nations. A widely publicized letter from Catholic bishops called for nuclear disarmament.
The Day After,
a television special in 1984 that vividly showed the effects of an imagined nuclear attack on the United States, attracted an estimated audience of 75 million Americans. Fears of nuclear catastrophe had seldom seemed more pervasive.

Though Reagan, who foresaw Armageddon if nuclear weapons proliferated, may have sympathized with the long-range goals of activists such as these, he remained deaf to criticisms of his anti-Communist policies. When pro-Communist forces staged a bloody coup that overthrew the government of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983 and were discovered to be using Cuban workers to construct a 10,000-foot-long airfield runway, he concluded that the Soviets and Castro were establishing a Communist beachhead on the island. Branding the new leaders as a “brutal gang of leftist thugs,” he sent some 5,000 elite troops to restore order, protect American residents (notably 800 or so medical students), and overthrow the leftists. In two days of fighting, American forces killed forty-five Grenadians and fifty-nine Cubans. A total of nineteen Americans were killed and 115 wounded. A large cache of arms—sufficient to supply 10,000 soldiers—was seized, along with coastal patrol boats and armored vehicles.
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Most of these moves alarmed liberal and partisan critics. Like Reagan, they opposed Communism, but unlike him, they believed that the Cold War had become a more or less permanent and manageable state of affairs. The president’s fierce, undiplomatic rhetoric, they said, was amateurish and dangerous. His invasion of Grenada, they added, was a ploy to divert popular attention from the horrific event that had shaken the nation two days earlier: the death of 241 United States marines in Beirut when the truck bomb fashioned by terrorists had blown up their barracks.

This last accusation was hard to prove. Plans for an invasion to oust the rebel Grenadian regime and protect the medical students were under way before the disaster in Lebanon and might have been acted upon in any event. Reagan, moreover, genuinely feared the creation of a new Communist outpost in the Caribbean. Remembering the taking in 1979 of American hostages in Iran, he was determined that it not be repeated in Grenada. For these reasons, he sent in the troops—the only time during his eight years in office that he engaged American soldiers in fighting abroad. Still, it seemed to many people that Reagan’s invasion of Grenada was a politically inspired overreaction.

Foes of the president also charged that his hard-line foreign and military policies were stimulating warlike fantasies at home. In 1982,
First Blood
, a violent film starring Sylvester Stallone as a vengeful Green Beret who had survived the Vietnam War, drew large and enthusiastic audiences.
Red Dawn
, released in 1984, featured Russian invaders overrunning the United States in World War III. Tom Clancy’s book
The Hunt for Red October
appeared in the same year, followed in 1986 by
Red Storm Rising
. These were among Clancy’s many best-selling books that highlighted the evil deviousness of Communist enemies.
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The president, however, adhered to his course: In his struggle against Communism, as in many other things, he was dead sure of himself. Immediately following the successful invasion of Grenada, Reagan delivered a politically well received televised address, in which he wove the downing of the Korean Air Lines jet, Beirut, and Grenada into a patriotic indictment of terrorist, Soviet, and Communist iniquity. He said nothing about the badly flawed decision-making process that in August 1982 had led him to place the marines as peacekeepers in war-torn Lebanon.

In so doing, he had hoped to succeed in resolving Arab-Israeli hostilities in the Middle East. Weinberger and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, had opposed such a move, warning that the ill-protected marines would stand precariously between Israeli troops under the direction of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Syrian forces, and fighters loyal to Hezbollah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Reagan also had nothing to report about his subsequent decision not to retaliate militarily against the enemies who had pulled off the attack.
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It might not have mattered to his popularity if he had spoken about such matters: After Grenada, many Americans were in so euphoric a mood that they seemed unwilling to criticize Reagan, who had posed as the fearless defender of United States interests, for having exposed the marines to danger and for having done nothing of substance to punish the killers of 241 of them. Having suffered since the 1960s through a number of international humiliations, of which the bloodshed in Beirut was only the most recent, they rejoiced that the United States had triumphed in Grenada. During the 1984 presidential campaign, the invasion of that tiny island was celebrated as an example of Reagan’s resoluteness against the red tide of Communism.
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B
ETWEEN 1982 AND 1984
, and throughout Reagan’s second term, tensions in the Middle East deeply engaged his administration. Reagan was especially anxious about the plight in Lebanon of American hostages, which Hezbollah terrorists—perhaps emboldened by the reluctance of the United States to retaliate for the bombing in Beirut—began seizing in February 1984. While Iran, still under the sway of Ayatollah Khomeini, was believed to be the major force behind Hezbollah, other nations in the area were also guilty of terrorism. One, the president concluded, was Libya. After a bombing by Libyans killed two American soldiers in a West Berlin disco in April 1986, Reagan froze Libyan assets and ordered heavy retaliatory air raids aimed at the nation’s strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi. The attacks killed scores of civilians. Among those killed was a two-year-old adopted daughter of Qaddafi.

Reagan’s anguished concern for the hostages proved to be a key to what became known after November 1986 as the Iran-contra scandal, which among other things revealed the many flaws that plagued his style of management. The scandal nearly wrecked his administration.

The origins of the scandal lay in Central America. In July 1979, Nicaraguan rebels—so-called Sandinistas—forced Anastasio Somoza, the brutal, American-backed dictator of the country, into exile. During the next eighteen months their leader, Daniel Ortega, made efforts to promote social and economic reforms. But the Sandinistas were also oppressive, hauling Somoza-era officials before kangaroo courts. Moving closer to Moscow, the Sandinistas offered military assistance to Marxist rebels fighting against the pro-American government of nearby El Salvador. In the last days of his administration, Carter sent military personnel to aid the El Salvadorean government and cut off United States assistance to Nicaragua. Beginning in 1981, Reagan dispatched further economic and military aid to the El Salvadorian government as well as CIA-arranged covert assistance to Nicaraguan forces—the contras—that were forming to fight against the Sandinistas. Then and later, the secret aid forced the Sandinistas to focus on military needs, thereby inhibiting progress toward social and economic reform.
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In 1982, by which time word had leaked out about Reagan’s aid to the contras, the House passed an amendment, sponsored by Democratic congressman Edward Boland of Massachusetts, which prohibited the CIA and the Department of Defense from using funds to overthrow the Sandinistas. The Boland Amendment, as it was called, revealed the continuing presence of a powerful source of political division in late twentieth-century American politics: tension between Congress and the executive over presidential war-making authority. The amendment passed the House 411 to o and was signed by the president. The administration, however, ignored the amendment and increasingly used the National Security Council (NSC) as the conduit for deliveries of covert aid. Robert “Bud” McFarlane, NSC director, and Marine Lt. Col. Oliver “Ollie” North, a gung-ho staff assistant who worked with him, oversaw the process.

In 1984, McFarlane and North secured secret aid for the contras from the Saudi government—assistance that rose to $2 million a month in 1985. When they told the president about the Saudi assistance, he was pleased and told them to keep it quiet. The NSC also enlisted private arms brokers and Manuel Noriega, the drug-trafficking dictator of Panama, in aid of their cause. In addition, the administration secretly mined Nicaraguan harbors. Learning in 1984 of the mining, which CIA director William Casey lied about in testimony on the Hill, many in Congress were outraged. Conservative senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona whipped off a note to Casey, saying, “This is no way to run a railroad. I am pissed.”
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In an effort to stop these activities, the House passed a second Boland Amendment in October 1984. It barred even non-military American support for the contras. North and others, however, knew that Reagan was eager to do all he could to help the contras in order to avert the spread of Communism in Central America. So encouraged, McFarlane and North assured themselves that the amendment did not apply to actions of the NSC, which continued its machinations. In mid-1985, Reagan proclaimed that the contras were the “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,” and in March 1986, he went on television to deliver what critics called his “red tide” speech. The Soviets, Cubans, and “other elements of international terrorism,” he exclaimed, were directing vast Communist activities in Central America that would ultimately undermine Mexico and threaten the United States.

But Reagan could not get the American hostages in Lebanon out of his mind. Though he publicly declared that the United States would never deal with terrorists—we “make no concessions; we make no deals,” he said in June 1985—he encouraged McFarlane and Admiral John Poindexter, McFarlane’s successor in late 1985, to embark on secret arms sales to Iran, which was eager to secure aid in its ongoing war with Iraq. These sales were arranged by an exiled Iranian businessman and, in order to cover America’s involvement, funneled through Israel. McFarlane and Poindexter hoped that the aid, which contravened an arms and trade embargo on Iran, would go to “moderates” within the country, who would tilt the nation in a more pro-Western direction, counter Soviet pressure in the Middle East, and facilitate release of American hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon. There were seven such hostages when the United States started the sales.
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Shultz and Weinberger, hearing of these plans, were appalled. When Powell, then a military aide to Weinberger at the Pentagon, showed his boss a top-secret NSC memo on the sales, Weinberger scribbled on it: “This is almost too absurd to comment on. . . . The assumption here is 1) that Iran is about to fall & 2) we can deal with that on a rational basis—It’s like asking Quadhaffi to Washington for a cozy chat.”
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But McFarlane and Poindexter, with Reagan’s approval, managed to exclude Shultz and Weinberger from the loop of policy making concerned with the issue. Meanwhile, North secretly arranged for profits from the sales of arms to Iran to go to the contras in Nicaragua. Shultz and Weinberger continued to oppose the arms sales, which by 1986 had evolved into a direct arms-for-hostages swap, but they understood that Reagan was desperately anxious to secure release of the hostages, and they were unable to stem the momentum of the deals.

As Shultz, Weinberger, and other opponents had predicted, the arms sales did not advance the influence of “moderates” in Iran. Khomeini and his followers remained firmly in power until his death in 1989. Nor did the sales succeed in relieving Reagan’s concern about the hostages. The captors, recognizing that the United States was essentially offering bribes, knew that by seizing more people they would further strengthen their bargaining power. Though a few hostages were released in 1985 and 1986, others were taken. One hostage, Beirut CIA section chief William Buckley, died of medical neglect in June 1985, whereupon his captors displayed his corpse on television. Terry Anderson, Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut, who was seized by Hezbollah in March 1985, was not released until December 1991.
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All these elaborate and devious arrangements literally crashed in October 1986, when an American cargo plane carrying arms to the contras was shot down over Nicaragua. The crash killed three Americans, but one was captured. By early November, newspapers and magazines in Iran and Lebanon were reporting the essence of the Iran-contra story. Shultz and Vice President Bush, remembering how Nixon’s cover-up had ruined him, urged Reagan to admit that the United States had been trading arms for hostages. The president, however, insisted that his administration had dealt with Iranian middlemen, not with terrorists. In mid-November, he proclaimed that his administration “did not, repeat, did not trade arms or anything else for hostages.”

Shultz then went to the White House and told the president that he, Reagan, had been misled. Reagan, however, still did not admit that there was a problem. “I didn’t shake him one bit,” Shultz told an aide.
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The president did assign his counselor, Ed Meese, to look into the situation. Poindexter, present when the president asked Meese to investigate, alerted North, who quickly started shredding documents. When Meese reported back to the president on November 24 that North had in fact turned over profits from arms sales to the contras, Reagan’s face turned pasty white, as if this were the first time he had become fully aware of the diversion. Poindexter confirmed that the diversions had been made and came to the Oval Office to resign. Reagan accepted his resignation and asked no questions.