Transcript: Chapter 19

Narrator: It was not Reagan the negotiator but Reagan the crusading ideologue who addressed evangelical supporters a few weeks later. Congress was about to vote on the freeze resolution which could jeopardize his deployment of missiles in Europe. And Reagan was about to give his most controversial speech.

Reagan: So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil. Let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

George Will, Columnist: People recoiled in horror. They said, you can't talk this way. Reagan said I'm doing it on purpose because the whole thrust of détente had been to demoralize, D hyphen moralize our foreign policy. Ronald Reagan wanted to remoralize it. Let's tell them that we think they are thugs and that they are a focus of evil in the modern world and let's get the American people back into the Cold War as a moral, I'll say, crusade.

Morris: He saw a lack of freedom. He saw social degradation. He hated what he saw. He at least understood and was courageous enough to articulate to the rest of the world that what there is over there is despicable. It's evil. One of the oldest words in any language -- evil.

Dallek: This was the rhetoric of the 1950s that you cannot have compromise with evil. You cannot have compromise with a Soviet system that is intent upon our destruction. And Reagan is harking back to this early Cold War rhetoric and thinking, you see. And people find it frightening, they find it chilling.

Thomas Watson: The danger we face today warrants laying aside all other matters. Even staying in session day and night if that is required.

Averill Harriman: The dangers are great. And therefore any negotiations that could be started, I'm for.

Senator Tsongas: You're going to be the only administration going back to the '50s that either did not negotiate a treaty with the Soviets or met with them.

Shultz: So be it. I don't think we want to get ourselves in the position where we don't want to be the only administration that didn't make an arms control agreement, and so therefore let's go make one. That's no way to approach it.

Narrator: Early in the morning of September 1, 1983, a Korean airliner strayed into Soviet air space. It was shot down with the loss of 269 lives. Newsweek wrote: "The world witnessed the Soviet Union that Ronald Reagan had always warned against."

Reagan: This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts which guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an act of barbarism, born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and the value of human life and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations.

Narrator: Reagan's rhetoric was tough, but when Weinberger urged him to break off arms talks with the Soviets, he resisted. He sided with Shultz who urged him to remain engaged. In the Kremlin the rhetoric was also harsh. The Soviets compared Reagan to Hitler. Called him mad. The question for Soviet leader Yuri Andropov was how to engage Ronald Reagan.

Morris: The latter months of 1983 when Andropov had to come to terms with the knowledge that he was a dying man, plus the knowledge that Ronald Reagan was a much more formidable adversary than had originally been assumed, that he was not an old stupid ideologue, but that he was actually a very canny and determined warrior, the combination of these two realizations, these two perceptions on Andropov's part, brought about, I believe, the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev to be his successor. Andropov started grooming Gorbachev in 1983 as the only likely Soviet leader who would be able to handle this formidable, adamantine anti-Communist on the other side of the Atlantic.

Narrator: On November 20, 1983, 100 million Americans watched The Day After, a television movie which portrayed the effects of a nuclear war on Lawrence, Kansas. Reagan saw a preview. "It was a scenario," he wrote, "that could lead to the end of civilization as we knew it." The film aired on the eve of the deployment of American missiles in Germany. The inveterate optimist confided: it "left me greatly depressed." But undeterred, Reagan dispatched the missiles to Europe on schedule. Reagan's goal was to negotiate from strength.

Shultz: The deployment of INF missiles in Germany particularly, but Britain and Italy too, showing the strength and cohesion of the NATO alliance was a Cold War turning point. You have to have -- show the strength before you can have effective diplomacy.

George Will: There was a whole generation of people who were always haunted by the prospect that our amiable, undisciplined democracy wouldn't have the staying power, it would just get outlasted. We said well maybe they're just tougher than we are and stupidity armed with discipline will win after all. And that was what at issue in the early 1980s was whether or not democracies would crack. If NATO had decided upon a deployment and had then been unable to follow through on it, the Soviet Union could have had a new burst of confidence, the Atlantic Alliance would have been cracked, and who knows what would have happened. It didn't turn out to be the case in large measure again, because the president was staying the course internationally as well as domestically.

Palazchenko: The present round of the negotiations is discontinued. Without any date set for their resumption.

Narrator: Soviet delegates walked out of the arms control negotiations. For the first time in more than 20 years there were no superpower talks.

Helen Thomas: Senator Byrd says that our relations with Soviet Union have reached the lowest point in 20 years. And six eminent world leaders today said that we are headed for global suicide? What are you going to do about it with this arms race?

Reagan: I don't think we are, and I don't think we're any closer or as close as we might have been in the past to a possible conflict or confrontation that could lead to a nuclear conflagration.

Narrator: Some in the Kremlin also worried about Reagan's intentions.

Tarasenko: First Deputy Foreign Minister Kornienko asked me to come to his office. He showed me a Politburo paper informing us that the United States have plans all prepared and in place for first strike against the Soviet Union with first priority to destroying all command center and structures of the country. And Kornienko asked me to prepare some paper which would send a signal that ah, we know about these plans and we will not be caught unprepared.

Narrator: When Reagan read intelligence reports indicating the Soviets had feared a first strike, he turned to his National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane and said, "Do you suppose they really believe that? I don't see how they would believe that. But it's something to think about." Later that day he worried about Armageddon.

Robert C. McFarlane, National Security Adviser: When he talked about it he would be genuinely anguished and would physically withdraw and lean forward and with quiet passion explain his fear that Armageddon was at hand and that unless he tried to move us away from this incredible nuclear threat of each other, that it could happen in his life time and he was determined to do something about it.

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