About the Author
First posted to Moscow in 1961, career diplomat JACK F. MATLOCK, JR., was America’s man on the scene for most of the Cold War. A scholar of Russian history and culture, Matlock was President Reagan’s choice for the crucial post of ambassador to the Soviet Union. He is the author of Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Matlock now divides his time between Princeton, New Jersey, and his wife’s farm in Booneville, Tennessee.
From The Washington Post
Ronald Reagan's death and funeral prompted a flood of commentary on the historical contributions of our 40th president, particularly on his role -- real or imagined -- as "the man who defeated communism," in the words of the British magazine the Economist. Much of this commentary was blather, so Jack Matlock's serious effort to sort out Reagan's role in the historic superpower diplomacy of his second term is timely. Matlock's publisher recognized as much by rushing his book to market two months ahead of the original publication schedule.Matlock was Reagan's ambassador to Moscow in the crucial years of the late 1980s when the Cold War effectively came to an end. Before that, he served as the Soviet expert on Reagan's National Security Council staff; as fate would have it, his colleagues were secretly conducting the Iran-Contra fiasco at the very time Matlock was trying to help Reagan get a conversation going with Soviet leaders in Moscow. A fluent Russian speaker who served four tours of duty in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, Matlock represented a rare asset for the American foreign service. He actually had the opportunity to exploit his training and experience in two critically important posts at critically important moments. For once, our man on the spot was the best man available for the job.
Matlock retired from the foreign service at the end of his last Moscow tour. In 1995 he produced an estimable account of the collapse of the Soviet world, Autopsy on an Empire. His new book, Reagan and Gorbachev, covers some of the same ground but is more personal, and more focused on the key players.
Autopsy on an Empire was the first comprehensive history of the amazing events from 1987 to 1991, and remains the best book of its kind. Reagan and Gorbachev is neither first nor best in describing the diplomacy between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1985 through 1988. That distinction belongs to George Shultz's compelling memoir, Turmoil and Triumph, published nearly a dozen years ago. Shultz's account of the events Matlock describes is more detailed, more vivid, more compelling, more literary than Matlock's new volume.
But Matlock makes a contribution by drawing on material unavailable to Shultz, including the memoirs of many other participants. The most important of these may be the remarkable account by Anatoly Chernayev, Gorbachev's national security adviser. Chernayev kept notes of everything he saw and heard and published many of them in My Six Years With Gorbachev. Matlock has used Chernayev to good effect, using quotations from his notes of Politburo meetings at key junctures that allow us now to see what was going on backstage in Moscow while Gorbachev was transforming his country and the world.
Reagan and Gorbachev is a chronological account that emphasizes the events in which Matlock was personally involved -- events that turn out to be among the most important in those fateful years between 1983 (when he joined the NSC staff) and the end of Reagan's presidency in 1989. By that time, Matlock argues persuasively, the Cold War had effectively ended, though it would be another two years before the Soviet empire disappeared entirely.
On whether or not he single-handedly defeated communism, as the Economist tried to assert so smugly, Matlock renders a much more ambiguous -- and more accurate -- verdict. He is full of admiration for Reagan's resolve, consistency and determination, and especially for his ability to see that the Soviet Union really could change. But he is also quite candid about the president's limitations, though he generously does not dwell on dysfunctional behavior throughout the Reagan administration -- the grudges among his Cabinet members, the sideshow of Iran-Contra, the president's uneven attention to pressing matters -- that often impinged on the diplomacy Matlock was trying to help conduct. Matlock recognizes the critical parts played in this great drama by the two foreign ministers, Shultz and Eduard Shevardnadze. Emphatically, he gives appropriate credit to the key actor: "It was Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush, who ended communist rule in the Soviet Union." And he writes that Reagan never had the goal of breaking up the Soviet empire.
For all that, Matlock has written what might be called an America-centric book, one that in my view gives too much credit to the United States in shaping the events that ended the Cold War. He writes that it was Gorbachev's fervent desire to reduce the cost of the arms race that made him a reformer. When Reagan made it clear to him that the price for arms control agreements with the United States would be Soviet respect for human rights at home and the end of Soviet imperialism abroad, Matlock contends, Gorbachev decided to make fundamental reforms inside the U.S.S.R. Matlock considers the 1986 summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, the key event. Failure to reach a dramatic arms control agreement then persuaded Gorbachev "that he had to begin reforms at home if he was going to end the arms race with the United States."
This argument does not do justice to the historical record. In a speech given in 1984, two years before Reykjavik and five months before he was elected General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Gorbachev set out his reform agenda with remarkable candor. He called for "profound transformations" of the Soviet economy and political system, including enhanced self-government, or "socialist democracy." He proposed, for the first time, glasnost, or openness, about the problems besetting Soviet society. He called for dismantling the centralized system of controls that so distorted the Soviet economy. He was blunt and, by the standards of that time, amazingly honest. This was a courageous speech, one that told his comrades clearly: If you pick me, I will want to change things. And they picked him anyway, I believe, because they knew they were in desperate trouble -- not just because of the arms race, but because Joseph Stalin's model had failed, and because the Soviet Union was quietly crumbling.
Matlock barely mentions Gorbachev's early efforts at reform. His simplified version of the history -- that Gorbachev capitulated to American demands that he respect human rights and get out of Afghanistan in order to achieve arms control agreements -- just isn't plausible. Gorbachev had powerful reasons for seeking reforms that went far beyond human rights and withdrawal from Afghanistan: He wanted to rescue his country from impending disaster. As later events demonstrated, his concerns were well placed.
Matlock also offers a limited, and therefore, I think, misleading description of Soviet-American relations before Reagan came to office. He reports Reagan's view that "U.S. defenses had been allowed to deteriorate during the 1970s, and that this condition had left the United States vulnerable." But the United States steadily strengthened its nuclear arsenal during the '70s, emphatically so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and had a formidable force of land-based and submarine-based intercontinental missiles and bombers that, the Pentagon rightly insisted, assured us of the capacity to survive any Soviet attack and destroy the Soviet Union in reply. This was "deterrence." It worked for nearly half a century, until it was no longer needed.
As Lou Cannon reports in his masterful biography of the president, "Reagan did not know enough about nuclear weapons systems to formulate a policy to accomplish his objectives," which were to reduce the level of nuclear arms. For example, Cannon writes, Reagan didn't realize that U.S. submarines and bombers carried nuclear weapons.
Matlock implies that Reagan's expensive defense buildup significantly changed the equation between the United States and the Soviet Union, but he doesn't try to prove that point, and I don't think he could. In fact, every president from Truman to Carter had embraced a policy of containing Soviet ambitions and deterring nuclear war. Each of them strengthened U.S. nuclear forces, and American military technology was always superior.
What changed when Reagan was president was the Soviet view of the utility of the arms race. Under Gorbachev, the Russians finally recognized that the contest was futile. The Reagan buildup and the U.S. flirtation with a strategic defense initiative -- an expensive dalliance that continues to this day -- emphasized the futility but did not fundamentally alter the balance of terror. Gorbachev did that.
Another frustration in Matlock's argument is his limited appreciation of domestic American politics, which barely appears in these pages. Cannon makes clear that many key Republicans (beginning with Nancy Reagan) worried that the president's ferocious anti-Soviet rhetoric and arms build-up in his first term might undermine his chances for reelection. In 1984, preparing to run for a second term, Reagan began to pay much more attention to trying to negotiate with Moscow. What role did an impending election play in shaping Reagan's diplomatic initiatives? Matlock sees none.
But politics is not Matlock's game. He acknowledges, for example, that when the Iran-Contra scandal broke, he was baffled as to why selling arms to Iran and sending the proceeds to Nicaragua's contras (to whom Congress had banned government aid) was "such a big deal." Like many fine diplomats before him -- George F. Kennan is a good example -- Matlock is bewildered by the vagaries of America's political process.
Diplomacy is his game, and students of that art form will learn a good deal from this book. Together with Shultz's memoir, Reagan and Gorbachev memorializes a time of triumph for American diplomacy, and a joint Soviet-American victory over half a century of costly, ultimately counterproductive rivalry.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I
1981-82
REAGAN’S CHALLENGE
And I have to believe that our greatest goal must be peace.
—Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1981
I’ve always recognized that ultimately there’s got to be a settlement, a solution.
—Ronald Reagan, December 23, 1981
[A] Soviet leadership devoted to improving its people’s lives, rather than expanding its armed conquests, will find a sympathetic partner in the West.
—Ronald Reagan, May 9, 1982
Readers may suspect that the dates of the quotations set forth above are mistaken. After all, doesn’t everyone know that President Reagan spent his first term bashing the Soviet Union and showed an interest in serious negotiations only in his second term? Such is the myth that has developed of late.
The dates are correct. All of the remarks quoted were made during the first eighteen months of Reagan’s first administration. And they were not exceptional. These thoughts were present or clearly implied in virtually everything Reagan and his first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, said about relations with the Soviet Union from the outset of their terms in office.
Of course, these were not the only thoughts they expressed. Other statements, particularly when taken out of context, gave rise to the distorted impression that came to prevail in American and foreign opinion. Let us look carefully at what President Reagan said and how he said it.
During his first press conference as president, on January 29, 1981, Reagan stated that he was in favor of negotiating to achieve “an actual reduction in the numbers of nuclear weapons” on a basis that would be verifiable. He also declared that during any negotiation one had to take into account “other things that are going on,” and for that reason he believed in “linkage.”
A journalist asked what he thought of “the long-range intentions of the Soviet Union” and whether “the Kremlin is bent on world domination that might lead to a continuation of the cold war” or whether “under other circumstances détente is possible.” Addressing this convoluted question, Reagan replied that “so far détente has been a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims,” and that as far as Soviet intentions are concerned, their leaders have consistently said that “their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state.”
Then he went on to add: “Now, as long as they do that and as long as they, at the same time, have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is moral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards, I think when you do business with them, even at a détente, you keep that in mind.”
Press and television reporters repeated his words about lying and cheating as if they were the heart of his approach.* Only an extraordinarily attentive reader would have grasped that Reagan referred to lying and cheating not as a personal moral defect of the Soviet leaders but as a feature of the philosophy they held. When asked about the remark subsequently, he denied that he was “castigating” the Soviet leaders “for lack of character,” and explained, “It’s just that they don’t think like we do.”
In fact, Reagan cited in his first press conference several themes that remained in the bedrock of his policy toward the Soviet Union throughout his eight years in office: arms reduction to equal levels, as deep as the Soviet Union would accept; verification of agreements; linkage of arms control negotiations with Soviet behavior, in particular Soviet use of arms outside its borders; and reciprocity, inasmuch as the Soviet Union had taken advantage of the relaxed atmosphere of the 1970s (“détente”) to its own advantage. Additional themes and many details were added to his “Soviet agenda” over the next three years, but Reagan never altered his commitment to the goals he enunciated on January 29, 1981.
* For example, the New York Times headlined its report on the news conference “President Reagan Assails Soviet Leaders for Reserving Right to ‘Commit Any Crime, to Lie and Cheat.’ ”
A Different Policy
president reagan was convinced that the strategy the United States had followed previously in dealing with the Soviet Union had not been effective. He expressed that judgment repeatedly during his campaigns for the presidency. Once he took office he was determined to do things differently.
The approach he described in his first press conference represented significant departures from President Jimmy Carter’s. In proposing an actual reduction in nuclear weapons, he was implicitly critical of the SALT II treaty that Carter had signed and the “Vladivostok agreement” concluded by President Gerald Ford, both of which would have placed limits on numbers of weapons without requiring a substantial reduction of existing arsenals. The condition that any agreement be verifiable was also intended to contrast Reagan’s approach with Carter’s, since Reagan and his supporters considered the verification provisions of SALT II inadequate.
Reagan’s endorsement of linkage was also the opposite of Carter’s policy, which had explicitly delinked arms control negotiations from other issues. Political reality had relinked the two, however, with the result that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the final blow that prevented Senate ratification of SALT II.*
Reagan’s goal was to shift the U.S. strategy from reacting to challenges and limiting damage to a concerted effort to change Soviet behavior. His approach constituted a direct challenge to the Soviet leadership since it explicitly denied fundamental tenets of Communist ideology and required a Soviet about-face on many issues under negotiation. It was a challenge to think differently about Soviet security, the place of the Soviet Union in the world, and the nature of Soviet society. It altered both the substance of negotiations and the way the dialogue was conducted, but it did not require the Soviet Union to compromise its own security. Soviet claims to the contrary, it never threatened military action against the Soviet Union itself.
* When the SALT II treaty was before the U.S. Senate for ratification in 1979, I was a strong and vocal supporter of it. My support was not solely because, as a foreign service officer on active duty, I was obligated to support the president’s policy. I also judged that SALT II was the best that could be achieved at that time and that it could act as a brake on the arms race and open the door to significant reductions in the future. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 changed my mind. It proved to me that the Soviet leaders were more interested in using force for geopolitical gain than in reducing arms, which ultimately would have made any arms limitation agreement a source of contention rather than a step toward ending the arms race. Furthermore, the reaction of the Senate and the American public demonstrated that separating the arms reduction process from other issues was not politically tenable in the United States.
During his first two years in office, Reagan explained his policies to the
public piecemeal and not always with coherence, but there was an inner consistency: to deter further aggressive behavior by the Soviet Union, to make sure the Soviet leaders could never have the illusion that they could win a war with the United States, and, having ensured against that, to prepare the United States for successful negotiations. He had no secret strategy, but described every element of his policy to the public.
Hindsight allows us to group Reagan’s early policies toward the Soviet Union in a few major tendencies, interrelated but distinct: telling the truth about the Soviet Union, restoring U.S. and allied strength, deterring aggression, and establishing reciprocity.
Setting the Record Straight
reagan was convinced that U.S. presidents had normally refrained from frank criticism of the Soviet Union when they tried to cooperate with it. During World War II he had seen how Hollywood, with encouragement from Washington, had created a picture of a benign “Uncle Joe” Stalin, a personally modest man dedicated to bringing about democracy and social justice to his backward country. In the interest of making Americans feel good about their Soviet ally, moviemakers of the day flagrantly distorted history, as in the film version of Joseph Davies’s Mission to Moscow, which portrays the innocent victims of Stalin’s purge trials as traitors, justly accused of treason.
Wouldn’t it have been better, Reagan asked, if Franklin Roosevelt had been more candid about the nature of the alliance with the Soviet Union? It really had nothing to do with whether the Soviet Union was a democracy or not, but whether cooperation was essential to defeat Hitler. It was, and it could be justified on that basis, without arousing extravagant expectations about the prospects for close postwar collaboration.
Later, other presidents had seemed to ignore the nature of the Soviet system whenever there was an effort to expand cooperation and control the arms race. Too often, he felt, this practice resulted in one-sided agreements that the Soviets exploited to their advantage. Even when balanced agreements were reached, the public was led to expect too much from them, and this could lead to overreaction if expectations were not met. Take the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: didn’t Carter’s zeal to get the SALT II agreement ratified cause him to ignore the signs th...
