Reagan’s Cold War legacy

Epitaphs, as Dr. Johnson said, are not given under oath.

That convention, along with the honorable inclination to speak well or not at all of the dead, accounts for some of the extraordinary outpouring that has occurred in this week following the death of former President Ronald Reagan.

But only some.

Reagan was one of the rare individuals who fully grasped the complex reality of the modern presidency, which demands that the Oval Office’s occupant be not just a chief executive or a commander in chief but also a leader -- which is to say, a master of media. Like Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy before him, Reagan led by communicating optimism and confidence in a way that completely convinced a majority of Americans. There is no need to belabor the anxieties and uncertainties of the current moment to understand why so many now feel nostalgia for the rhetorical morning to which Reagan awakened America.

Commentators differ on how the late president became “the great communicator.” Some argue that his long years in Hollywood and as a corporate pitchman made him “a sincere phony”; others, that he devoutly believed a few simple truths and spoke of them without embarrassment. This is a question that never will be answered. But in the weeks ahead, it would be worth reconsidering the successes and failures of Reagan’s historic presidency with an eye on their relevance to this troubled and fractious time.

One way to begin is to turn to the books on his career. Edmund Morris’ authorized but partly fictionalized biography, “Dutch,” is a thing to be avoided. Lou Cannon’s “President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime” and Bill Boyarsky’s “Ronald Reagan: His Life and Rise to the Presidency” are reliable accounts by shrewd and dispassionate journalistic witnesses. But for those who’ve been through those volumes -- or who are interested in a slightly less conventional take -- there is an unlikely new book that commends itself.

Thomas C. Reed’s “At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War” was published last March and, since then, has gone almost totally unnoticed and unreviewed. It is nevertheless an astonishing and immensely valuable work that deserves to be studied by anybody who believes he knows his nation’s recent history.

Its author is a former secretary of the Air Force and deputy Defense secretary, a onetime designer of thermonuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore lab, a successful entrepreneur and an early and fervent Reagan supporter. In 1981, as the relatively new Reagan administration began to rethink America’s approach to the Cold War, Reed was summoned to the White House to oversee the effort as a special assistant to the president for national security policy. In that capacity, he was a firsthand witness to and participant in the most important event of Reagan’s eight-year presidency: the defeat of the Soviet Union.

(Reed’s book contains much else of considerable value, including an insider’s account of the nuclear weapons program, an unforgettable eyewitness description of a nuclear test and touchingly fair-minded evaluations of his recent contacts with his former Soviet counterparts. Reed, by the way, argues with considerable evidence that many of the latter are heroes of the Cold War.)

In fact, when it comes to drawing verbal portraits of both the Soviet and American Cold War nobility and their courtiers, Reed’s elegant and steely facility brings to mind Hans Holbein. Take this appreciation of the physicist Edward Teller -- a man Reed knew well and admired greatly:

“To his dying day, he probably did not have a clear idea of how the intricate components of U.S. H-bombs really work. Such things were engineering details to him, although most of us designers think of them as mind-boggling physics and materials challenges. I worked for Teller in the 1960s and I thought he was a man of vision; others thought he was nuts.”

Like Reagan, Reed is a conservative of the old school, and he was -- and is -- utterly convinced not only of the justice of America’s cause in the Cold War but also of the necessity of pressing it to a successful conclusion. He recounts how, as he undertook his reconsideration of America’s Cold War strategy for Reagan, he came to understand that the Soviet economy was a complete shambles. Its industrial facilities actually produced products whose value was less than that of the raw materials that entered the factories.

“As the 1980s dawned,” Reed recalls, “graybeards in the West held to their view of the Soviet system as monolithic and stable, lumbering along toward eternal life on the backs of its exploited but complacent serfs. The newcomers to Washington felt differently, but they had a hard time proving their point. But they really did not have to, for one of the newest and most far-sighted of their number was the 70-year-old 40th President of the United States. Ronald Reagan’s willingness to bet against the Soviet economy became clear at a meeting of the National Security Council in March, 1982. While discussing the national security study he had entrusted to my care, the President began to ruminate about new approaches to the Soviet problem.

“ ‘Why can’t we just lean on the Soviets until they go broke?’ ”

According to Reed, the “cabinet-level elders” present said it wouldn’t work. But after a bit more back and forth, Reagan, “with a mere nod of his head, said to me, ‘That’s the direction we’re going to go.’ ”

Similarly, there were collective gasps when Reagan went to Orlando, Fla., on March 8, 1983, and delivered his now famous denunciation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” At a private dinner later that week, according to Reed, Nancy Reagan and Stu Spencer -- Reagan’s longtime political advisor -- objected that “the evil empire language would scare the American people to death. The president waved them both off. ‘It is an evil empire,’ he said. ‘It’s time to shut it down.’ ”

How then-CIA Director William J. Casey and a brilliant NSC staff member named Gus Weiss devised a plan to subvert the Soviets’ industrial espionage effort in the West and used it to further wreck Moscow’s economy is one of the book’s highlights. In one instance, they allowed the Soviets to illicitly obtain a computer program designed to run oil and gas pipelines but planted a virus in it that subsequently destroyed the major natural gas transmission line out of Siberia. “The result,” according to Reed, was picked up by U.S. spy satellites as “the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.”

Part of what lends Reed’s history its credibility is its unsparing balance. He alleges that by the end of Reagan’s first term, his advisors had begun to note his mental “decline.... In 1983, [longtime Reagan intimate] Bill Clark questioned Reagan on the wisdom of a second term. As that second term unfolded, national security advisor John M. Poindexter felt sure Reagan was losing his mental grip.”

Reagan’s longtime advisors from the California days, according to Reed, were cast aside one by one like “old shoes” in Washington, mostly at the first lady’s insistence. “As the Old Shoes now gather in twos and threes,” Reed writes, “some truths become clear. One is that Ronald Reagan had no deep and lasting friend, as most of us would understand that word. He had a few close associates and companions.... But Reagan had no friends with whom he shared complete openness, trust and confidences, as most of us do with a few other human beings. Either Reagan did not need friends because of his rock-solid faith and his self-confidence in his own beliefs, or he could not handle having any.”

The late president, Reed argues, “was not an ambitious man. He had confidence in his personal beliefs, but he was not a zealot, possessed by the need to impose his vision on others.” But Reagan was, in Reed’s appraisal, an intensely competitive man -- and it was his wife’s role to focus that impulse: “Nancy was his wife, his lover, his closest companion, but she was not his friend.... Yet if Reagan was a good president, if he laid the groundwork for ending the Cold War, it could not have happened without Nancy. She provided not only the personal care; she supplied the ambition....”