Power Game (114 page)

Only in late October did Reagan gather his top advisers to review the Iceland summit, and then his proposal came under sharp fire from officials who saw important disadvantages in Reagan’s ten-year zero-BM proposal. Weinberger, one policymaker told me, was furious at being blindsided and bawled out Perle for giving the Pentagon’s blessing without consulting Weinberger. The Defense secretary told other officials he did not like the ten-year zero-BM ban, though in keeping with his policy of not openly disagreeing with a presidential decision, he did not oppose it when Reagan met with his top advisers on October 27 around the table in the White House Situation Room. The main dissenter was Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
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Shultz defended Reagan’s proposal and urged that it be put forward in the Geneva talks. The public, Shultz said, would like getting rid of ballistics missiles, and Allied conventional forces could be built up in Europe. The president agreed, saying, “Yes, there is good support for this kind of arms control.”

But when Crowe’s turn came, the tone changed. Normally, the admiral spoke extemporaneously. But he considered the step he was about to take so grave that he had prepared his position in writing. As he read it, the room fell quiet.

Eliminating ballistics missiles is good in theory, the nation’s number one military man told the president, but we’re not sure we can do this in ten years. There are pitfalls, Crowe said, such as Soviet conventional superiority in Europe, as well as the enormous cost of changing American strategic force structure and building up conventional forces in Europe. A new American air-defense system would be needed to cope with new Soviet bombers. The American strategic bomber force would have to be expanded greatly. American nuclear submarine forces would have to be shifted from ballistics missiles to cruise missiles. Much more would be spent on cruise-missile development. In addition, the cutbacks in ballistics missiles would have to be very carefully phased to insure that Moscow did not gain advantage at any stage.

“You are talking about a really dramatic change in the military forces of both countries in ten years,” Crowe told the president. “We didn’t develop our current ballistics missile force in ten years. We didn’t develop the strategy and our current posture quickly. It evolved.”

Given congressional resistance to rising Pentagon budgets, Crowe was skeptical of getting enough money for the new weaponry.

“We can’t do what we have to do in ten years,” Crowe declared.

Crowe was also worried about Soviet cheating—a far more serious problem with zero BM than with existing arsenals. Now, with each side possessing ten thousand warheads, hiding one hundred ballistics missiles made only a modest difference. But when each side is supposed to have none, one hundred hidden missiles is an enormous threat.

Crowe read four pages of objections. Finally, he told the president somberly, “As your chief military adviser, I don’t advise you to submit this proposal.”

The Arms Control Agency’s Ken Adelman added his dissent to Crowe’s. The ten-year zero-BM plan was unwise, he said, because it would be too expensive and politically unpalatable to replace the current deterrent forces with a new weapons buildup.

“There is no way that the most massive arms-control agreement in history is going to be accompanied by the most massive military buildup in peacetime,” Adelman asserted. “The two things don’t go together in people’s minds.”

Plus, he said, Soviet cruise missiles on submarines would threaten our bomber forces and sneak in under SDI.

Poindexter cut Adelman off sharply.

“Ken, that’s out of place,” he chided Adelman roughly. “The president’s already decided to ban ballistics missiles in ten years’ time.”

“Well,” said Adelman, turning to Reagan, “if you don’t want to walk back from what we did at Reykjavík, then at least don’t emphasize it any more. Concentrate on fifty-percent cuts in offensive arsenals over five years. What we are doing, Mr. President, is setting ourselves up for a political fall. We’re overpromising.”
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The arguments clearly jolted Shultz, for he backtracked from his Reykjavík formula in mid-November, proposing that some ICBMs be retained. This country, he said, needed “insurance policies to hedge against cheating” by Moscow, requiring “an agreed-upon retention of a small nuclear ballistic missile force.”
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Prime Minister Thatcher voiced European concerns about zero BM to Reagan and got the White House to issue a communiqué on November 15; significantly, on arms objectives, it omitted the ten-year zero-BM proposal. Over time, zero BM was allowed to languish—a stillborn stepchild of haste.

Instead, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed, in December 1987, to eliminate medium- and short-range nuclear missiles—a much more modest idea, originally broached by Reagan in 1982.

On zero BM, as on SDI and the Iranian affair, vital national policy was made from the top down, bypassing the more careful, thoughtful, and sometimes deadlocked policy game. Normally, policy develops from the bottom up, a range of officials prudently examining the options, winnowing out bad ideas, gauging the consequences of better ones. The president taps every important branch of expertise, giving top policy advisers time to think things through and lay their case before him. But Reagan liked going for Utopian policies with a popular ring—bypassing long internal debate—and then advertising his ideas so widely that they became hard to reverse or revise. Once Reagan proclaimed his programs, they became a touchstone of loyalty, inhibiting internal debate of pros and cons. At times, his decision-making style was more that of a king than of a late-twentieth-century president.

Whenever Reagan or some other president makes policy unilaterally, it delights his partisans and temporarily gives the president his way. But no leader can end-run the system for long. After Reykjavík, Reagan’s zero-BM proposals simply withered. On SDI, the ultimate political verdict awaits the next presidency. On the
contra
war and the Iranian operation, Reagan’s efforts to impose his policy by stealth—using Saudi money to finance the
contras
, and the NSC staff to avoid Congress—
ran aground. Not only did Congress chastise the president, but it stymied his new efforts to renew military aid.

No foreign policy is possible to sustain without a broad political partnership. The backdoor, end-run foreign policy game cuts against the grain of democracy, because it requires more deceit and subterfuge than our political system will tolerate—especially when covert policy directly contradicts the stated public policy.

“We cannot advance United States interest if public officials who testify before the Congress resort to legalism’s and word games, claim ignorance about things they either know about or should know about, and at critical points tell the Congress things that are not true,” declared Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Committee investigating the Iran-
contra
affair. “The Congress cannot play its constitutional role if it cannot trust the testimony of representatives of the president as truthful and fully informed. The president cannot sustain his policy, if he tries to carry that policy out secretly and his representatives mislead the Congress and the American people.”
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Significantly, an understanding echo came from a chastened member of Reagan’s inner circle, former National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane. With hindsight, McFarlane explained why it had been a disastrous mistake to rely on a covert operation in Nicaragua—especially since President Reagan saw Central America as a vital arena for checking Soviet influence.

“If we had such a large strategic stake, it was clearly unwise to rely on covert activity as the core of our policy,” said McFarlane. “First, you can never achieve a sufficient level of resources through a covert policy to cope with a determined effort backed by the Soviet Union. The Congress views covert actions—properly, in my opinion—as an instrument to be used with great selectivity, as an adjunct of policy, not as its foundation, and surely not as a vehicle for waging war with a Soviet proxy.

“The other reason … is that you cannot get popular and congressional support for such a policy,” McFarlane said. “If you decide to engage in conflict with a Soviet client in whom the Russians are prepared to make a substantial investment, you must have the American people and the U.S. Congress solidly behind you. Yet it is virtually impossible, almost as a matter of definition, to rally the public behind a policy you cannot even talk about.”
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PART IV
Governing: Why It Doesn’t Work Better

Governing: Why It Doesn’t Work Better

The temptation in the world beyond the beltway is to blame the failures of government on the self-serving tactics of the games politicians play in Washington, without considering larger flaws in our political system.

Clearly, the collusion of the power networks in the Pentagon Iron Triangle, the tribal warfare of baronial bureaucracies, the pull of PAC money, or the imperatives of the constant campaign often frustrate sensible and coherent policy-making.

But there are more fundamental obstacles to effective governing in the election system and in the ticket-splitting habits of modern American voters. Any president is severely handicapped when he faces a Congress controlled by his political opposition. And yet partisan divided government has become the rule for Republican presidents, because Democrats have an incumbency lock on the House of Representatives.

Beyond that, the zigzags and deadlocks of Washington reflect the ambivalence of the electorate and the lack of a clear majority party since the breakup of the old New Deal coalition. At the presidential level, there is a mismatch between the talents needed for campaigning and the skills needed for governing. Political amateurism in the White House is one product of a primary system that rewards anti-Washington showmanship more than it does a proven capacity to forge the coalitions necessary to govern.

Reforms exist for dealing with structural maladies. But they stand little chance of enactment, unless there is a national calamity that makes them imperative. Even then, improvement lies mainly in the hands of voters—voters more alert to the impact their actions have, on how our government works.

As Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, it was fashionable for political commentators to cite the litany of five flawed presidencies. Five leaders had been driven from office before their time: John Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon Johnson hounded into retirement by the nation’s trauma over Vietnam; Richard Nixon forced to resign because of Watergate and other abuses of power; Gerald Ford, the appointed president, doomed by his pardoning of Nixon; and Jimmy Carter, humiliated by Iran and rejected by the voters. Five political tragedies that dramatized the crumbling authority of the presidency.

But focusing on the personal misfortunes of our presidents misses the structural maladies in our system. As we have seen, any president is less powerful than his TV image suggests. Power floats away from the White House; other players in the power game steal the leadership role from time to time. In Congress, the earthquake of the early 1970s shook the old power structure. Television helped spawn a new political culture and a new breed of politician, irreverent toward the old power barons, impatient with the old channels of power. The independence
of this new generation, combined with new ways of financing campaigns, fueled the explosion of special interest politics. All these centrifugal forces loosened the cohesion of political parties in the 1970s and tore at the fabric of the old system.