The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink by William Inboden

Author:William Inboden [Inboden, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

VIII

Sometime on the evening of March 10, Konstantin Chernenko breathed his last. A four a.m. phone call from McFarlane woke Reagan with the news that yet another Soviet premier had died. Reagan told his diary, “My mind turned to whether I should attend the funeral. My gut instinct said no.” Once again he would send Bush instead. This was not from lack of hope over a new start with the Soviets. A state funeral in Moscow, with its congeries of world leaders and lugubrious Soviet ceremonies, was not the right occasion to seek it.[50]

Now in the fifth year of his presidency, Reagan had yet to meet a Soviet counterpart. He would quip that he wanted to but “they kept dying on me.”[51] The third Kremlin leader to expire in less than three years symbolized the decay of the entire Soviet edifice.

Within hours of Chernenko’s death, Moscow announced his successor as general secretary of the Communist Party—the USSR’s supreme position, since the party reigned over the state. To the surprise of almost no one, it was Mikhail Gorbachev. Having just turned fifty-four a week earlier, Gorbachev would be the first Soviet leader of the postwar generation. The Politburo realized that its festering structural rot could not be cured by another geriatric ideologue in the mold of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Even the pertinacious Gromyko backed Gorbachev.

Reagan hoped that Gorbachev would be the Kremlin reformer that since 1981 he had been waiting for—and pressuring the Soviet system to produce. While Gorbachev’s accession stemmed primarily from larger dynamics within the Soviet system—as well as his vision and shrewd maneuvering—Reagan’s policies also played a role. Even one of Gorbachev’s own advisors admitted his selection resulted in part from “internal domestic pressures and Reagan’s rigid position,” leading to Kremlin fears of “falling behind” the United States.[52]

Gorbachev in turn sensed that his most important international relationship would be with Reagan. On his first day in office, he directed his aide Alexander Yakovlev to assess the American president. “Reagan is trying persistently to capture the initiative in international affairs,” Yakovlev observed. “He would like to solve a number of problems in the context of [his] dream about a ‘great peace-maker president.’ ”[53] Ironically, this Kremlin analysis perceived Reagan more accurately than did much of the American media and academia, still stuck on portraying him as a simpleminded warmonger.

But the White House could not yet tell who Gorbachev was, or would be. Reagan received conflicting assessments from his own team. The day after the Kremlin announced Gorbachev as its new leader, NSC staff member John Lenczowski wrote a memo for Reagan expressing doubt that “the generational change in the Soviet leadership will mean significant changes in Soviet policy.” His was not a lone voice; Deputy National Security Advisor John Poindexter added in black marker, “Everyone agrees with this analysis,” and NSC Soviet specialists Steve Sestanovich and Ty Cobb co-signed it.[54]

Bush had a different take. On board Air Force Two, returning from the Moscow funeral, the vice president dictated a cable to Reagan with his impression of Gorbachev.

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