There is No Alternative (43 page)

“That's right, exactly,” agrees Nigel Lawson. “He had all these warm, lovable qualities which she lacked.” There is something poignant about this image of Margaret Thatcher, wishing she could be loved as Reagan was loved, and knowing she simply wasn't lovable.

In Lawson's memoirs, he remarks that Thatcher found George Bush—the elder one—a less inspiring figure than Reagan, and as a result, when Bush was elected, simply transferred her affections wholesale to Gorbachev. Lawson seems to be hinting at a compulsion, in Thatcher's makeup, to look up to at least
one
man, a need that clearly could not be satisfied within her own political circle, given that she was
primus inter pares.
If you are inclined to look at people through a certain prism, you might wonder, reading this, if Thatcher felt the need to have in her life a father figure. Given Thatcher's well-known veneration of her father, it wouldn't be a surprise. Was she perhaps reprising in her relationships with Reagan and Gorbachev a familiar family role?

When I ask Lawson about this, he replies that his psychological interpretation is slightly different. “I think,” he says, “that people who are in positions of power come very easily, after a time, to value power more highly than anything else. And when they encounter someone who has even more power than they have, they are in awe of it. And I think that was the question with Reagan—though she was very happy to criticize him when she thought he was getting things wrong. But nevertheless, she was to some extent in awe of him.” If she found it easy to admire Gorbachev, Lawson believes, it was because “at that time, nobody fully realized the extent of the fundamental weakness of the Soviet Union.”

Perhaps. There is no doubt that whatever its psychological roots, Thatcher's love for Reagan was very real and very deep. Charles Powell was present at all of Thatcher's meetings with Reagan. “It was interesting, because of course they adored each other, and they thought very similarly, but their styles could hardly have been more different. I mean, he was a chairman, presiding loftily over world affairs, while also sort of greeting Miss Multiple Sclerosis from Kansas. She was the chief operating officer, deeply immersed in details of policy, and sometimes, there was just the two of them there—just, you know, a hanger-on like me in the background—and she was rather going on, as one might say, and you could see his eyes sort of straining to the clock on the wall, you know, counting the minutes to lunch, when he could decently say,
Maggie—Margaret, let's go and have a drink, and have lunch,
and she would be going into the finer details of the anti-ballistic missile treaty. It was a curious sort of dialogue, though she had
huge
respect for him. She was very respectful of American presidents. She was not at all an informal person, she called him ‘Mr. President' 99 percent of the time, very rarely relapsed into ‘Ron,' even in very private settings—”

“And did he call her—”

“He always called her ‘Margaret.'”

By the time Reagan died, in 2004, Thatcher was already very ill. She was not strong enough to speak at the funeral. She instead sent a prerecorded eulogy to be played at the National Cathedral in Washington. It is a sad thing to watch. Her diminishment is palpable. There is no doubt of the depth of her grief. The voice of this once-indomitable woman is weak; her eyes are bleak and watery. She gasps for breath between phrases.

Recalling the attempt on Reagan's life, she remembers that he had told a priest, after his recovery, that “Whatever time I've got left now belongs to the Big Fella Upstairs.” The words “Big Fella” could scarcely sound less natural coming from her mouth. Her attempt to pay tribute by mastering this casual Americanism is touchingly awkward, like an elderly tourist struggling earnestly to order a meal with a Berlitz phrase book.

“For the final years of his life,” Thatcher concludes in her funeral oration, “Ronnie's mind was clouded by illness. That cloud has now lifted. He is himself again—more himself than at any time on this earth. For we may be sure that the Big Fellow Upstairs never forgets those who remember Him.” She cannot quite bring herself to refer to God as “the Big Fella” a second time. It is obvious that she is aware that her own mind, too, is clouded by illness. The words “we may be sure” seem especially to pain her. She was a woman who was once unsure of nothing. It is clearly no longer so.

In 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met again, in Reykjavik. Gorbachev proposed the complete elimination of nuclear weapons in exchange for Reagan's abandonment of the Strategic Defense Initiative. To the horror of many of his advisors, Reagan said no.

I would have been one of the horrified, but I would have been wrong. We now know, from both Soviet officials and the Soviet archives, that Reagan's insistence upon pursuing SDI prompted
panic in the Kremlin, leading to an expensive increase in Soviet military spending and accelerating the economic collapse of the Soviet Union.

SDI “played a powerful psychological role,” claims KGB general Nikolai Leonov. “SDI was a very successful blackmail,” agrees Gennady Gerasimov, the Soviet foreign ministry's spokesman during this period: “The Soviet economy couldn't endure such competition.”
²²⁴
According to Genrikh Trofimenko, a high-ranking official of the Brezhnev era, “Ninety-nine percent of the Russian people believe that [America] won the Cold War because of your president's insistence on SDI.”
²²⁵

Thatcher was immensely relieved by the failure of the talks, not because she was profoundly committed to keeping SDI, but because she thought the offer to give up all the nukes was madness. She was in favor of a gradual reduction of nuclear weapons, but their immediate wholesale elimination? Had Reagan lost his mind? It would have “left the Soviets confronting western Europe with a huge superiority of conventional forces, chemical weapons and short-range missiles.”
²²⁶

Reagan was well aware of Thatcher's views on this score; she had visited him in Washington the month prior and told him precisely this, in no uncertain terms. “I regarded the
quid pro quo
for my strong public support of the President as being the right to be direct with him and members of his Administration in private,” she said of this meeting.
²²⁷
As Bernard Ingham says, “She believed in being a candid friend, and when Mrs. Thatcher is candid, she can be
really
candid.”

Reagan famously hesitated after turning down Gorbachev's offer. He passed a note to George Shultz asking, “Am I wrong?”
Shultz whispered, “No, you're right.”
²²⁸
It is clear from memoirs of the meeting that Reagan's concern, above all, was to protect SDI, which he saw as the best hope given to mankind of eliminating forever the threat of nuclear war. But I have to imagine that somewhere in his calculations, too, was the thought that the last thing he wanted to do, upon leaving that meeting, was phone up Margaret Thatcher and explain to her that he had given away the store.

Peter Walker, who takes credit for winning the miners' strike, also takes credit for the success of Thatcher's visit, in March 1987, to the Soviet Union—and again, he may well be right to stress his role. “Listen,” he tells me, “the reputation she had of never listening was wrong.” He had seen the brief the Foreign Office prepared for the prime minister before her trip. “It said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev is a hard-line Communist who tries to convince his people that he's not.' So I phoned up and said, ‘Would you ask Margaret if I could see her before she goes to Moscow?' And I went 'round, and I said, ‘Margaret, I've read this brief, and it's totally wrong.' And I then took her through quotations from him over five years, all following the same argument, and I said, ‘This man thinks the system
won't work.
And he wants to change it. The Foreign Office brief prepared for you is totally wrong.'

“And she didn't say, you know, ‘I hate the Foreign Office, how right you are.' She said, ‘Well, thank you very much, it is very interesting to read all this before I go.' And when she came back on Sunday, from her three-day visit to him, which had been recorded in the press as an enormous success—they really got on well—she phoned me from Chequers at my house in Worcestershire, and said, ‘Peter, thank goodness you briefed me on this man. I like him,
we got on well, you're absolutely right. Foreign Office, they always get it wrong.'”

Perhaps this is the way it happened. In her memoirs, Thatcher does not refer to Walker's counsel. But it is certainly true that Thatcher's visit to the Soviet Union was a triumph, another pivotal point in the history of the Cold War. Again, Charles Powell recalls the details. “We had this famous meeting in the Kremlin, which—with one break when she had a lunch engagement—went on for thirteen hours, and I was the only other person present—”

“
Thirteen hours?
”

“Yes. A day of meetings which lasted a total of thirteen hours with him, yeah. And I spent my whole night dictating my notes of it to a secretary in the soundproof cellar at the British Embassy—”

“Do you remember any of the dialogue?”

“She launched into a coruscating attack on the record of the Soviet Union, at home, abroad, its failures and so on, what it needed to do to bring itself into the civilized nations. And he actually responded in similar fashion. I mean, he talked about social inequalities in Britain, and the miseries of the miners, and Northern Ireland and all the other problems we had. And it was a real irony—we reached a stage where I was thinking of packing up my briefcase, thinking we were going to get slung out of the Kremlin, we wouldn't even survive, so we might as well have a statement ready for how we were going to explain to the press that she'd been virtually expelled from the Soviet Union—”

“Were you really thinking that, or are you exaggerating now for effect?”

“Well, I'm exaggerating now a bit for effect, but it really was to the point where I thought, you know, that this was going to end in disaster, this meeting.”

“At what point were you thinking that, exactly?”

“Well, quite early on, because it started like that. But Gorbachev himself was very good at breaking the tension, and after about a sort of hour and a bit of this, he sort of suddenly, you know, broke into smiles, and sort of relaxed the tension, and
moved on to something else, and after another couple hours again it sort of built up, it was rather like British weather, really.”

“You don't remember what he said that had everyone smiling, do you?”

“I can't, I'm afraid.”

Too bad.

There were only six people in the room: Thatcher, Gorbachev, Gorbachev's foreign minister, Powell, and the two interpreters. The large delegations of advisors and ministers that had assembled for the meeting were kept waiting outside all day. “They just wanted to talk alone. They had the same instinct, that actually the best thing was to talk to each other without delegations. That was characteristic of her diplomacy—she hated having the Foreign Office involved.”