"He won the Cold War," Margaret Thatcher said in a video shown at Ronald Reagan's funeral, "not only without firing a shot, but also by inviting enemies out of their fortress and turning them into friends."
In Peace through Strength: How Reagan's Military Buildup Won the Cold War, Roger Zakheim presents a well-considered, extensively researched, and readable account of what might be—should be—called "the Reagan Miracle."
Zakheim brings a largely inside-Washington—and mostly inside the Pentagon and National Security Council—perspective to the telling of this epic tale. It was a project to which he came particularly well prepared. Son of a senior Reagan and George W. Bush Pentagon appointee, Zakheim grew up in the international security world. For the past decade he has served as director of the Ronald Reagan Institute, the Washington, D.C., arm of the Simi Valley, California-based, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He cofounded the Reagan National Defense Forum, ranked among the top annual security conferences in the world.
He begins his story in the Nixon and Carter years and focuses mostly on the period in which Reagan pulled together his 1980 presidential campaign. With the shadow of the Vietnam war still hanging over a dispirited U.S security establishment, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, working with Henry Kissinger, had adopted a go-along-get-along but still hard-nosed approach to the Soviet Union: "détente," a managed peace between the great nuclear powers.
Carter went further. He vetoed one new or enhanced U.S. weapon system after another, most prominently the B-1B bomber and the Nimitz-class (nuclear-powered) aircraft carriers.
In response and well prior to announcing his 1980 candidacy, Reagan frequently criticized Carter's reliance on decades-old systems like the B-52 bomber, as examples of a retreating defense. Developed and first flown during the Truman years, as candidate Reagan repeatedly told his audiences, B-52s were older than many men who flew them. Keeping the planes in service was no alternative to the new B-1B. "We are infinitely less capable than we were 10 years ago," Reagan told his radio and event audiences.
As Zakheim points out, there were solid reasons to conclude that a less capable military was part of Carter's agenda. A 1977 report from Carter's Office of Management and Budget argued that, as Zakheim reports, well-armed American forces "encouraged U.S. intervention in far off lands like Vietnam and therefore were nothing but trouble."
Zakheim develops this portrait of the Carter security world through the first third of his volume. Titled "The Campaign," the pre-Reagan survey takes readers on a worthwhile journey. For from our distance in time and events, it is hard to comprehend the urgency and strategic brilliance of the Reagan build-up without clarity on the policies that preceded it.
The Cold War was never all that cold, of course. Within its span, in addition to Korea and Vietnam, the United States committed resources to numerous smaller and typically inconclusive conflicts. Then, too, it stood on humiliating sidelines during the Soviets' suppression of uprisings in every major Eastern European vassal state and repeated attempts via proxy to achieve domination throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Some of these occurred during Carter's presidency, some before it. But Reagan came to office with a totally different approach to this muddling through. As he told Richard Allen, his principal national security aide in the pre-presidential years, "My theory of the Cold War is we win and they lose."
After an extended but necessary setting of the too-often-forgotten pre-Reagen stage, Zakheim raises the curtain in the Reagan presidency and its rebuilding of the nation's depleted and decayed military establishment.
He starts with early palace intrigue: Who would be Reagan's secretary of defense? We go with him through the many candidates and many supporters involved in the selection. In the end, though, Reagan tapped someone unanticipated among the cognoscente and barely mentioned in the corners where inside knowledge is passed in whispers. Reagan knew his own mind: Caspar Weinberger.
Director of finance in California governor Reagan's cabinet, Weinberger subsequently chaired President Nixon's Federal Trade Commission, headed Nixon's Office of Management and Budget, and later served as his secretary of health, education and welfare. A former representative in the California legislature, Weinberger was, like Reagan, a World War II Army veteran who mustered out with rank of captain.
What followed was the largest peacetime buildout of the U.S. military in history. The nature of the buildout differed from branch to branch.
Army: As the service with the greatest manpower needs, the Army prioritized increasing volume and quality of recruitment. In the post-Vietnam era, Army enlistment, retention, and quality of recruits had dropped significantly.
Under Reagan-Weinberger, Army standards tightened and pay grew significantly. Meanwhile, opportunities were introduced to acquire and broaden skills transferable to civilian employment. Enlistments shot up. The quality of recruits soared.
Air Force: For the Air Force, the top Reagan-Weinberger priorities were missile acquisition and deployment. Particular attention went to the massive MX intercontinental missile. A single MX could deliver 10 warheads to 10 precise locations throughout the Soviet Union. Equal if not greater attention was given to the Pershing II, intermediate missiles to be based in Europe.
Both systems were key to Reagan's goal of negotiating a mutual standdown of missilery between NATO and the Soviets. To the MX and the Pershing, he added the development of what he called the Strategic Defense Initiative. He sought to make obsolete the later Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, a goal ultimately realized in the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (1991).
Navy: Zakheim explains that when Reagan took office, "The naval strategy of the Soviet Union had grown in size, capability, and reach just as the U.S. Navy was declining after Vietnam." He adds, "The Soviets had a fleet of 1,700 ships that, according to [Secretary of the Navy John] Lehman by 1980 … were engaging in a 'massive worldwide exercise' that reached into the Western Hemisphere." The goal was to build the U.S. Navy into a fleet of 600 ships, of which 15 would be aircraft carriers.
By the beginning of Reagan's second term, one once seemingly fanciful goal after another was becoming reality. At home, the U.S. economy was booming. Abroad, the Soviet Union was looking wobbly and on its fourth general secretary in four years. The rejuvenated American military inspired respect among both allies and adversaries.
Marking this transformation, Zakheim devotes particular attention to a globally televised speech Reagan delivered on D-Day 1984. From a precipice overlooking the landing beaches in Normandy, the president spoke before veterans of the Ranger unit that had climbed the cliff on that longest day and driven back Nazi occupiers.
Zakheim rightly credits the speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. But immersed as he is in policymaking, he misses that this speech was part of an arch of speeches that together reveal larger dimensions of Reagan's peace-through-strength strategy.
The first was his address to the U.K. Parliament on June 8, 1982. Writing key sections himself, Reagan turned a Trotsky phrase on its head predicting that freedom and democracy would leave communism on the "ash heap of history."
The second was to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8 the next year. It labeled the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire." Written by coauthor of the speech to Parliament and now legendary Reagan chief speechwriter Tony Dolan, it branded the Soviet Union with a clarity from which it never escaped.
Noonan's "These are the boys" masterpiece reminded the people and leaders of Europe of the solidarity among World War II allies, of the world that solidarity produced, and of the continuing urgency of solidarity still.
The president delivered the fourth speech in Berlin on June 12, 1987. By Peter Robinson, it transformed the once unthinkable into a prospect widely anticipated, calling on General Secretary Gorbachev to "Tear Down This Wall."
On May 31, 1988, in a speech by Joshua Gilder at Moscow State University, Reagan extended to young Russians a vision of the thrilling future for them and their country that Russia becoming a "normal nation" could mean.
Later that year, on December 16, a month before leaving office, at the University of Virginia, in a speech by John Podhoretz, the president combined the hard facts of U.S. military ability and rising hopes for the Cold War to end—as peacefully it did, on Christmas Day three years later.
Roger Zakheim has penetrated the realpolitik of the Reagan Miracle—a miracle equally of the human heart.
Peace Through Strength: How Reagan's Military Build-up Won the Cold War
by Roger Zakheim
Regnery History, 472 pp., $40
Clark S. Judge is a former speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush.
