Right Time, Right Place by Richard Brookhiser

Author:Richard Brookhiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books

EVERY SECOND TERM of a reelected president has been worse than his first (Lincoln, McKinley—shot; Nixon—resigned; Wilson—stroke; Madison—enemies burn the White House . . . the list goes on). Reagan’s troubles began three months after his reinauguration, when it turned out that a planned visit to West Germany would take him to a military cemetery in Bitburg containing the graves of dozens of SS men. Reagan’s advance man had scouted the site in winter, when the graves were covered with snow, and hadn’t noticed. Reagan decided to tough it out as a favor to an ally, but the purity of his antitotalitarian credentials was smirched.

In October 1986 he met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader in years who did not have one foot in the grave. Reagan struck us as perilously willing to barter away America’s nuclear deterrent, for the sake of an arms deal. Only his insistence on keeping missile defense wrecked the summit, and averted some grand disaster.

The next month, the storm hit, when the world learned that the administration had been secretly selling arms to Iran, and using the profits to supply arms to antileftist rebels in Nicaragua. Reagan’s defense against the charge that he was a lawbreaker was that he was clueless—an argument made easier by the fact that Col. Oliver North, the National Security Council aide who managed the money switching, was in orbit around a private sun.

Conservatives reacted to these events with varying degrees of panic. Our recent migration to Washington had made us all jumpier. Tidal waves of emotion originating there would batter National Review , before vanishing without a trace. One directors’ dinner was consumed by the urgency of replacing Donald Regan, the president’s chief of staff, whom everyone in Washington had decided was incompetent, with someone better. Regan gave way to Howard Baker, and nothing important changed.

National Review inveighed against the Reykjavik summit before it happened, publishing among our attacks a critical piece coauthored by Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. These two, who had supped with the devil many a time, now said that Reagan, uniquely, was bringing too short a spoon. Bill Rusher, scornful of what he took to be their hypocrisy, submitted a counterattack, calling Nixon and Kissinger “dime-store Machiavellis.” Bill Buckley told him they were not dime-store anything, and that Rusher’s piece was not fit for publication in National Review. Rusher removed the epithet, and we ran his riposte in slightly milder form.

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