A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (156 page)

Critics of Reagan’s administration cite the Iran-contra affair as the central reason why the Gipper’s last four years were not as productive as his first term. Much more damaging, however, was the shift in control of the Senate, combined with a host of cabinet-level resignations, defections, and even a death (Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldridge in a rodeo accident). Many of Reagan’s key insiders left to take advantage of their temporary fame and marketability. Ultimately, however, Reagan realized that he had only enough time and energy left to see to fruition a couple of his most important agenda items, and at the top of the list was the demise of the Soviet Union.

By 1986, rumblings within the Soviet empire were a concern to the Kremlin. Dissidents had appeared with increasing frequency in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and other corners of the USSR. Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Soviet troops continued to be pinned down in Afghanistan, and air losses there to the Stinger missiles (supplied by the Reagan administration) had accelerated. This prompted Gorbachev to issue an order that marked the first significant fissure in the Soviet empire’s wall: he ordered the withdrawal of 8,000 troops from Afghanistan. It was the first time during the cold war that the Soviets had been stopped by a native population.

Reagan kept the pressure on. Visiting the Berlin Wall in 1987 in one of history’s most memorable moments, he demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Ironically, a brief setback in market capitalism helped to tear down that wall. The Dow Jones dropped 508 points on October 19, 1987, in the worst decline since Black Tuesday in 1929. Much of the drop had to do with market perceptions that foreign loans, especially to communist countries, would not be repaid. Major banks turned off the credit spigots, and money flowing into Eastern Europe dried up. Anger over the false promises of communism boiled over in May 1988, when Hungary removed its single-party government and began to roll up its section of the Iron Curtain. Gorbachev, stung by Afghanistan, did not react. Poland followed.

On election day in the United States, November 4, 1988—when Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush was winning his own landslide—a million people marched in East Berlin. Five days later, the crowds took picks and axes to the Berlin Wall, destroying it and signaling the beginning of the end of the cold war. “It’s morning in America,” Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign theme had proclaimed, and when the Gipper turned over the reins of power to Bush in January 1989, it was morning throughout much of the world. Ronald Reagan was in no small degree responsible for that dawn.

Win One for the Gipper

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hen the Soviet Union abruptly fell apart in 1991, the nemesis that had opposed the United States in the cold war for almost fifty years vanished overnight. Communism’s demise stunned observers across the ideological spectrum, instantly changing the focus of American domestic politics. Republicans, who had championed a strong, well-funded military, suddenly found themselves without a major issue, and Democrats, who had complained that the military-industrial complex siphoned off resources from needed social programs, no longer had an excuse for failing to solve domestic problems. Moreover, Republicans found that some of their voting base—engineers and defense-sector workers—had suffered an economic recession caused by the very success of Reagan’s policies. Without the issue of Soviet communism to sharpen political choices, a move to the middle by both parties was natural, although not necessarily beneficial.

Standing before the exuberant GOP convention in 1988, Reagan urged the delegates to support his successor, Vice President George H. W. Bush, the party’s nominee. “Go out there and win one for the Gipper,” Reagan enjoined the Republican faithful. And although he would not officially leave office until January 1989, Reagan cordially and politely stepped off the stage he had held for eight years in order to turn the limelight on Bush. Five years later, in a poignant letter to the nation, Reagan announced he had Alzheimer’s disease. His quick wit faded, as did his health, until his death in 2004.

George Herbert Walker Bush came from a political family that many associated with privilege, even though his own money had come from hard work in the oil business. His father, Prescott Bush, had been a U.S. senator, and although the younger Bush had not held as many elective offices as a Walter Mondale or a Richard Nixon, he had been in and around Washington for long periods in his life. A fighter pilot who had seen combat in World War II, he returned to civilian life to make a fortune in petroleum, so he knew how the free market worked. He had served as ambassador, congressman, and, after the Nixon debacles, CIA director, restoring some of the confidence in that agency.

Bush suffered from lingering distrust by conservatives because of his 1980 primary campaign against the clearly more conservative Reagan, during which the Texan had called Reagan’s supply-side theories “voodoo economics.”
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He was the last of the Teddy Roosevelt Progressive Republicans, although he lacked their righteous fervor. In contrast to the Democrats, however, Bush refused to abandon foreign affairs to serendipity. Unfortunately, he saw the economy in static terms, disdaining the benefits of tax cuts. Still, after eight years of defending Reagan’s successful policies and seeing their benefits, he had no choice in 1988 but to run on the Reagan record. This proved to be his great mistake: by lashing himself to a mast that he had no real faith in, his convention pledge—“Read My Lips! No New Taxes”—would come back to haunt him. But that was 1990, and in 1988 Bush convinced enough Republicans that he was, indeed, a conservative. To further solidify their support, he chose young Indiana senator Dan Quayle as his running mate. Quayle had a strong promilitary record in the Senate (even though during the campaign questions arose about his serving in the National Guard instead of in the regular army in Vietnam), and he had impeccable bona fides with the Reaganites. Unfortunately, he was painted by the media as a dim bulb, and he contributed to the image with uninspiring and mistake-prone speeches.

Ironically, the real story of the 1988 election was not about what had happened on the winning Republican side, but about the troubling changes that had taken place inside the losing camp and their long-range implications. Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, the liberal governor of Massachusetts, had continued the left-wing tilt of the party. A new rival wing of the party, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), had originated from strategist Al From’s study of the 1984 election disaster, which argued that the party had lost the middle-class vote and needed to move toward the center. Although such a strategy might seem like common sense, it reflected the problems of the Great Society party that had become little more than a collection of special interests—minorities (especially blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and feminists), labor unions, and environmentalists. Internal polling by the DLC, however, showed that the Democratic Party “was losing elections because it embraced a public philosophy that repelled the working-class and middle-class voters.”
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The DLC leadership took some very un-Democratic stands on certain issues, such as favoring free trade and a willingness to examine minor welfare reform. Members like Tennessee senator Al Gore and Arkansas governor Bill Clinton claimed to embrace the new high-tech economy. Michael Dukakis also seemed enthusiastic about the high-tech economy, running on the much-ballyhooed “Massachusetts miracle,” his state’s rebirth of jobs in the computer industry. When From and other DLC founders designed the centrist strategy, they envisioned it as providing a vehicle to the presidency for one man—Al Gore.

The strategy ran into trouble when the self-appointed civil rights spokesman Jesse Jackson announced plans to run as an unabashed liberal, forming the Rainbow Coalition, special interest groups that mainly had victimhood in common. Jackson had two personas. One was when he appeared in the inner cities, instructing kids to stay off drugs and to avoid having illegitimate children. The other Jesse whom most Americans saw was the man who ranted about insufficient government funding for social programs and cavorted with third-world terrorists. Jackson beat Gore in the South, but could not attract the moderate base elsewhere. Jackson’s candidacy unintentionally handed the nomination to Michael Dukakis, who by all measures was nearly as liberal as Jackson.

In the general election, Dukakis actually ran well ahead of Bush early in the campaign, stressing competence over ideology. Then Bush’s strategist, Lee Atwater, zeroed in on Dukakis’s liberal policies in Massachusetts, including a prison furlough program. Contrary to the anti-Bush legends that have since appeared, it was Democratic Senator Gary Hart, in the primaries, who premiered the television ads featuring Willie Horton, an African American criminal who took advantage of his Massachusetts prison furlough to commit a rape. Atwater borrowed Hart’s concept and created a campaign ad featuring Massachusetts as a revolving door for criminals. Despite the fact that all the faces in the ad were white, Democrats complained that the ad was racist. It proved deadly to the Dukakis campaign. The coup de grâce was administered by the diminutive governor himself when, seeking to bolster his image as promilitary, he rode in a tank with only his small helmeted head sticking out of the massive armored vehicle. From then on, Dukakis could not escape editorial cartoons likening him to the cartoon soldier Beetle Bailey. Bush surged into the lead and on election day crushed the Massachusetts governor, grabbing 426 electoral votes, forty states, and more than 53 percent of the vote.

Communism Collapses in Europe

George Bush had differences with his predecessor over economic issues, but when it came to the cold war, he saw things much the same way as Reagan. Bush continued Reagan’s hard-line policies, and no sooner had he taken office than massive anticommunist labor strikes occurred in Poland under the Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa. At the same time, Hungary announced it would roll up its portion of the Iron Curtain. Having just pulled troops out of Afghanistan, Soviet strongman Mikhail Gorbachev had no appetite for sending tanks into Poland. The USSR looked on as the Poles demanded, and won, an agreement to hold free elections in 1990. Czechoslovakia and Romania soon followed; then travel restrictions to West Germany from East Germany were lifted. Berliners responded, in 1989, by smashing the most visible sign of oppression in the world—the Berlin Wall.

At that point, the Soviet Union itself was starting to unravel. Patriots in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia—the Baltic Republics brutally seized by Joseph Stalin in 1939—broke ties with the Soviet Union, again, with no retribution. Gorbachev, believing his western press clippings, assumed that Soviet citizens would view him the way American and European journalists saw him—as a “man of peace” and “reason” who had come to save the world. Instead, Soviet citizens, given a chance, in December 1991, to vote for the first time since the communists took power in 1917, turned the communists out in consecutive elections once and for all. Subsequently, Boris Yeltsin, the chairman of the Russian parliament, emerged as leader of the anticommunist movement, and shortly thereafter the once-independent republics, like Ukraine, peeled themselves off. Yeltsin presided over the creation of eleven separate republics, joined under the new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which had none of the power, communist ideology, or malicious intent of its predecessor. The U.S. Congress authorized nearly half a billion dollars to assist the republics in becoming stable democracies, but much of the cash disappeared into a cesspool of bribery and Mafia-like operations. Lacking a tradition of either private property or rule of law, Russia would find that a peaceful transition to American-style capitalism would not come instantly.

Ironically, communism almost fell “too fast”: American leaders for decades had supported prodemocracy forces in the Soviet Union, but at the moment of communism’s collapse, Bush and his advisers appeared cautious, almost reticent, to acknowledge that the Soviet dictatorship was gone. They hesitated to recognize many of the newly independent republics.
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The fact is that like most western anticommunists, Bush had not anticipated that the USSR would simply fall apart. He and Reagan had expected change, but the history of failed rebellions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of the communist bloc had convinced them that change would be evolutionary, and slow. For all of Reagan’s insight (much of which had rubbed off on Bush), he did not see the moral abdication of the Soviet leadership coming. Soviet officials had ceased believing in the efficacy of Marxism/Leninism for years, a development characterized by Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff, as the “internal capitulation” of Soviet leadership. The surrender by Soviet elites revealed what Polish dissident Adam Michnik called the “intimate bond [that] exists between force and deception…. Deception becomes a method of self-defense.”
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Boldin described the resulting western triumph as “a total rout of the…USSR and the moral devastation of a once powerful adversary.”
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One author noted, “Just before the breakup of the USSR, the view of that country as a model of the most stable and durable regime in the world had gained wide acceptance among Western Sovietologists…there was not one American political scientist who predicted the collapse of the USSR.”
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Richard Pipes, a Harvard Sovietologist, had done so, but he was nearly alone. Most western intellectuals thought the Soviet government was indestructible, and liberals and conservatives alike had almost universally overrated the Soviet GNP and underrated its arms production.

There is a certain truth to the notion that freedom itself constituted a potent weapon in the demise of Soviet communism. Freedom’s steady buffeting of the communist system was most visible in Berlin, when, during a concert in the mid-1980s by rock star Bruce Springsteen at the Berlin Wall, a scene took place that at one time would have seemed impossible to the party bosses. Springsteen naturally attracted thousands of free West Berliners, but hundreds of communist youths showed up on the other side of the wall to listen. When Springsteen sang “Born in the USA,” there were thousands of ostensibly good socialists singing along, “Born…in the USA, I was…born in the USA.” Soviet spy Vasili Mitrokhin’s smuggled notes revealed that popular music and radio broadcasts from the West produced “unhealthy signs of interest in…pop stars” and led to an “almost surreal…musical subversion” in some cities.
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The KGB estimated that 80 percent of its youth listened to western rock music broadcasts, which “gave young people [in the eyes of the KGB] a distorted idea of Soviet reality, and led to incidents of a treasonable nature.”
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Spy memos warned that rock and roll “has a negative influence on the interest of society, inflames vain ambitions and unjustified demands, and can encourage the emergence of informal…groups with a treasonable tendency.”
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Just as Ike had fought the Soviets of the 1950s with Louis Armstrong, Reagan and Bush ironically benefited from the influences of Madonna and Kiss!