Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster (review)

Martin and Annelise Anderson were both on President Ronald Reagan’s White House staff, Martin as an economic adviser and Annelise as a staff member in the Office of Management and Budget. They, along with Kiron K. Skinner, edited a selection of Reagan’s writings in a previous volume titled Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: The Free Press, 2001). In Reagan’s Secret War they have continued the practice of quoting extensively from Reagan’s private papers (the diary he kept, handwritten letters, and speech drafts) as well as from the records of his meetings with advisers and with Mikhail Gorbachev and other foreign leaders.

I, too, was a member of Reagan’s staff, responsible for European and Soviet affairs on the National Security Council, from May 1983 until December 1986. During that time and subsequently, when I was ambassador to the Soviet Union, I had frequent meetings with the president to discuss his strategy in dealing with the Soviet Union and am familiar with many of the documents quoted in the volume. This book conveys an accurate picture not only of Reagan’s views regarding nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union, but also of the way he reacted to Soviet proposals and to the Soviet leaders with whom he dealt.

That picture differs substantially from the one widely held by the public when Reagan was in office, an image that has persisted in narratives concocted by partisans peddling a suspect agenda. The false narrative holds that Reagan, unlike his predecessors and immediate successor, set out to destroy Communism and to bring down the Soviet Union. The other presidents, it is claimed, aimed only to stabilize relations with the USSR. Proponents of this false narrative conclude, following their own logic, that the United States, as the sole remaining superpower, can change hostile regimes and remake the world in its image by using the same methods Reagan is alleged to have used in his bid to destroy Communism and defeat the Soviet Union: military force and economic coercion.

In fact, although Reagan was a severe critic of Communism as a system and at times predicted its demise—just as Nikita Khrushchev had predicted the demise of capitalism—he aimed his policy not at “regime change” in the Soviet Union, but at negotiation to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons, to curb Soviet military support for insurgencies, and to strengthen protection of human rights. His method was negotiation from strength, but he viewed strength as a prerequisite to successful negotiation, not as an instrument of destruction. His goal was to change Soviet behavior, which he believed was in the true interest of the Soviet Union itself if it wanted to cope with its growing internal problems. In Mikhail Gorbachev he found, after a couple of years of sparring, a partner who came to share the goals he had set.

Even before Reagan became president, he had developed a passionate hatred of nuclear weapons, but was persuaded not to stress this during the campaign lest he offend some of his most fervent supporters. Once president, he set out, often against the advice of both military and civilian advisers, to find a way to achieve substantial reductions in the number of nuclear weapons and to set the world on a path to their total elimination, a goal most others considered utopian, even when Mikhail Gorbachev started proposing it. Reagan’s insistence on continuing research and testing to determine whether an effective missile defense system would be feasible (the Strategic Defense Initiative—SDI) sprang from his conviction that countries would not give up nuclear weapons unless a system was available to defend against their use by a rogue regime.

The widespread use of a false narrative to explain Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet [End Page...