Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended - Hardcover

Matlock, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679463232 ISBN 13: 9780679463238

Publisher: Random House, 2004

Synopsis

In Reagan and Gorbachev, Jack F. Matlock, Jr., gives an eyewitness account of how the Cold War ended, with humankind declared the winner. As Reagan’s principal adviser on Soviet and European affairs, and later as the U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Matlock lived history: He was the point person for Reagan’s evolving policy of conciliation toward the Soviet Union. Working from his own papers, recent interviews with major figures, and archival sources both here and abroad, Matlock offers an insider’s perspective on a diplomatic campaign far more sophisticated than previously thought, led by two men of surpassing vision.
Matlock details how, from the start of his term, Reagan privately pursued improved U.S.—U.S.S.R. relations, while rebuilding America’s military and fighting will in order to confront the Soviet Union while providing bargaining chips. When Gorbachev assumed leadership, however, Reagan and his advisers found a potential partner in the enterprise of peace. At first the two leaders sparred, agreeing on little. Gradually a form of trust emerged, with Gorbachev taking politically risky steps that bore long-term benefits, like the agreement to abolish intermediate-range nuclear missiles and the agreement to abolish intermediate-range nuclear missiles and the U.S.S.R.’s significant unilateral troop reductions in 1988.

Through his recollections and unparalleled access to the best and latest sources, Matlock describes Reagan’s and Gorbachev’s initial views of each other. We learn how the two prepared for their meetings; we discover that Reagan occasionally wrote to Gorbachev in his own hand, both to personalize the correspondence and to prevent nit-picking by hard-liners in his administration. We also see how the two men were pushed closer together by the unlikeliest characters (Senator Ted Kennedy and François Mitterrand among them) and by the two leaders’ remarkable foreign ministers, George Shultz and Eduard Shevardnadze.

The end of the Cold War is a key event in modern history, one that demanded bold individuals and decisive action. Both epic and intimate, Reagan and Gorbachev will be the standard reference, a work that is critical to our understanding of the present and the past.

About this title

About the Author

First posted to Moscow in 1961, career diplomat JACK F. MATLOCK, JR., was America’s man on the scene for most of the Cold War. A scholar of Russian history and culture, Matlock was President Reagan’s choice for the crucial post of ambassador to the Soviet Union. He is the author of Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Matlock now divides his time between Princeton, New Jersey, and his wife’s farm in Booneville, Tennessee.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

1981-82

REAGAN’S CHALLENGE

And I have to believe that our greatest goal must be peace.

—Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1981

I’ve always recognized that ultimately there’s got to be a settlement, a solution.

—Ronald Reagan, December 23, 1981

[A] Soviet leadership devoted to improving its people’s lives, rather than expanding its armed conquests, will find a sympathetic partner in the West.

—Ronald Reagan, May 9, 1982

Readers may suspect that the dates of the quotations set forth above are mistaken. After all, doesn’t everyone know that President Reagan spent his first term bashing the Soviet Union and showed an interest in serious negotiations only in his second term? Such is the myth that has developed of late.

The dates are correct. All of the remarks quoted were made during the first eighteen months of Reagan’s first administration. And they were not exceptional. These thoughts were present or clearly implied in virtually everything Reagan and his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said about relations with the Soviet Union from the outset of their terms in office.

Of course, these were not the only thoughts they expressed. Other statements, particularly when taken out of context, gave rise to the distorted impression that came to prevail in American and foreign opinion. Let us look carefully at what President Reagan said and how he said it.

During his first press conference as president, on January 29, 1981, Reagan stated that he was in favor of negotiating to achieve “an actual reduction in the numbers of nuclear weapons” on a basis that would be verifiable. He also declared that during any negotiation one had to take into account “other things that are going on,” and for that reason he believed in “linkage.”

A journalist asked what he thought of “the long-range intentions of the Soviet Union” and whether “the Kremlin is bent on world domination that might lead to a continuation of the cold war” or whether “under other circumstances détente is possible.” Addressing this convoluted question, Reagan replied that “so far détente has been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” and that as far as Soviet intentions are concerned, their leaders have consistently said that “their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state.”

Then he went on to add: “Now, as long as they do that and as long as they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards, I think when you do business with them, even at a détente, you keep that in mind.”

Press and television reporters repeated his words about lying and cheating as if they were the heart of his approach.* Only an extraordinarily attentive reader would have grasped that Reagan referred to lying and cheating not as a personal moral defect of the Soviet leaders but as a feature of the philosophy they held. When asked about the remark subsequently, he denied that he was “castigating” the Soviet leaders “for lack of character,” and explained, “It’s just that they don’t think like we do.”

In fact, Reagan cited in his first press conference several themes that remained in the bedrock of his policy toward the Soviet Union throughout his eight years in office: arms reduction to equal levels, as deep as the Soviet Union would accept; verification of agreements; linkage of arms control negotiations with Soviet behavior, in particular Soviet use of arms outside its borders; and reciprocity, inasmuch as the Soviet Union had taken advantage of the relaxed atmosphere of the 1970s (“détente”) to its own advantage. Additional themes and many details were added to his “Soviet agenda” over the next three years, but Reagan never altered his commitment to the goals he enunciated on January 29, 1981.

* For example, the New York Times headlined its report on the news conference “President Reagan Assails Soviet Leaders for Reserving Right to ‘Commit Any Crime, to Lie and Cheat.’ ”

A Different Policy

president reagan was convinced that the strategy the United States had followed previously in dealing with the Soviet Union had not been effective. He expressed that judgment repeatedly during his campaigns for the presidency. Once he took office he was determined to do things differently.

The approach he described in his first press conference represented significant departures from President Jimmy Carter’s. In proposing an actual reduction in nuclear weapons, he was implicitly critical of the SALT II treaty that Carter had signed and the “Vladivostok agreement” concluded by President Gerald Ford, both of which would have placed limits on numbers of weapons without requiring a substantial reduction of existing arsenals. The condition that any agreement be verifiable was also intended to contrast Reagan’s approach with Carter’s, since Reagan and his supporters considered the verification provisions of SALT II inadequate.

Reagan’s endorsement of linkage was also the opposite of Carter’s policy, which had explicitly delinked arms control negotiations from other issues. Political reality had relinked the two, however, with the result that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the final blow that prevented Senate ratification of SALT II.*

Reagan’s goal was to shift the U.S. strategy from reacting to challenges and limiting damage to a concerted effort to change Soviet behavior. His approach constituted a direct challenge to the Soviet leadership since it explicitly denied fundamental tenets of Communist ideology and required a Soviet about-face on many issues under negotiation. It was a challenge to think differently about Soviet security, the place of the Soviet Union in the world, and the nature of Soviet society. It altered both the substance of negotiations and the way the dialogue was conducted, but it did not require the Soviet Union to compromise its own security. Soviet claims to the contrary, it never threatened military action against the Soviet Union itself.

* When the SALT II treaty was before the U.S. Senate for ratification in 1979, I was a strong and vocal supporter of it. My support was not solely because, as a foreign service officer on active duty, I was obligated to support the president’s policy. I also judged that SALT II was the best that could be achieved at that time and that it could act as a brake on the arms race and open the door to significant reductions in the future. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 changed my mind. It proved to me that the Soviet leaders were more interested in using force for geopolitical gain than in reducing arms, which ultimately would have made any arms limitation agreement a source of contention rather than a step toward ending the arms race. Furthermore, the reaction of the Senate and the American public demonstrated that separating the arms reduction process from other issues was not politically tenable in the United States.

During his first two years in office, Reagan explained his policies to the

public piecemeal and not always with coherence, but there was an inner consistency: to deter further aggressive behavior by the Soviet Union, to make sure the Soviet leaders could never have the illusion that they could win a war with the United States, and, having ensured against that, to prepare the United States for successful negotiations. He had no secret strategy, but described every element of his policy to the public.

Hindsight allows us to group Reagan’s early policies toward the Soviet Union in a few major tendencies, interrelated but distinct: telling the truth about the Soviet Union, restoring U.S. and allied strength, deterring aggression, and establishing reciprocity.

Setting the Record Straight

reagan was convinced that U.S. presidents had normally refrained from frank criticism of the Soviet Union when they tried to cooperate with it. During World War II he had seen how Hollywood, with encouragement from Washington, had created a picture of a benign “Uncle Joe” Stalin, a personally modest man dedicated to bringing about democracy and social justice to his backward country. In the interest of making Americans feel good about their Soviet ally, moviemakers of the day flagrantly distorted history, as in the film version of Joseph Davies’s Mission to Moscow, which portrays the innocent victims of Stalin’s purge trials as traitors, justly accused of treason.

Wouldn’t it have been better, Reagan asked, if Franklin Roosevelt had been more candid about the nature of the alliance with the Soviet Union? It really had nothing to do with whether the Soviet Union was a democracy or not, but whether cooperation was essential to defeat Hitler. It was, and it could be justified on that basis, without arousing extravagant expectations about the prospects for close postwar collaboration.

Later, other presidents had seemed to ignore the nature of the Soviet system whenever there was an effort to expand cooperation and control the arms race. Too often, he felt, this practice resulted in one-sided agreements that the Soviets exploited to their advantage. Even when balanced agreements were reached, the public was led to expect too much from them, and this could lead to overreaction if expectations were not met. Take the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: didn’t Carter’s zeal to get the SALT II agreement ratified cause him to ignore the signs th...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0679463232
• ISBN 13: 9780679463238
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384