By Patricia H. Kushlis
James Mann’s The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (Viking, 2009) was almost as engaging as a Tony Hillerman thriller: it was an easy read and the cast of characters far better known.
I knew the book had received excellent initial reviews. I decided to read it, however, because it covered a period when I was not closely following or working on US-Soviet relations and I wanted to see how Mann presented those extraordinary years and the people involved. I was also curious as to whether he agreed with the prevailing conventional right-wing mantra that claims that Reagan brought about the downfall of the Soviet Union through an unprecedented build-up of arms to which the Soviets couldn’t compete.
Or if Mann didn’t agree, why not.
Although Mann portrays Reagan more sympathetically than I would have, he totally demolishes the arms-build up tall tale. Instead, Mann argues that Reagan’s decision to break with his party realists’ conventional wisdom that Gorbachev represented nothing fundamentally new was a far more accurate assessment of what really happened and that that decision helped alter the playing field and usher in the fall of the Soviet Union in August 1991.
Where I question Mann’s argument is when he writes that had Reagan not engaged Gorbachev and allowed him space to make the major reforms that ultimately failed, the Soviet Union would have struggled along for the foreseeable future. Presumably under the Communist hard liners.
Frankly, I doubt it.
It seems to me that there were just too many centrifugal forces at play that spelled the empire’s doom sooner rather than later - ranging from the Afghanistan invasion to the declining world price in oil and gas upon which the country’s economy rested. These problems were compounded by the USSR’s increasingly restless nationalities, the geriatric Communist Party leadership and its sclerotic decision-making process. The question was when the break-up would come – not whether. Although I readily admit that hindsight is always easier than foresight and that, in fact, very few specialists on the Soviet Union either in Europe or the US had predicted it.
Mann argues that economics, ideology and rhetoric turned out to be the pivotal factors in ending the Cold War not the iron law of geopolitical inevitability as espoused by Nixon, Kissinger and Scowcroft who were Reagan’s most vociferous critics when he changed policy direction.
Mann pointed out that Reagan’s gut instincts combined with out-of-channels information he received from a little known woman named Suzanne Massie, the author of The Firebird, about the religious revival that was happening in the Soviet Union at the time, the tenacity of the Russian culture plus the increasing hardships of life there, made him reject the advice of his party’s most experienced foreign affairs gurus and strike out in new directions.
Mann makes sure that this major theme comes through loud and clear: and he restates it at various intervals so if you missed it the first time, there are lots of other chances to catch it again.
In a sense, Massie provided long time anti-Communist crusader Reagan – who did not visit the Soviet Union until spring 1988 – with a different and more humane view of the country and its people than he was getting from high level foreign affairs experts.
Massie is an engaging story teller and perhaps Reagan needed to hear her personal accounts. She also has had a long time interest in and connections with Russia and especially Russian history and culture.
Why didn't the information filter up the bureaucracy?
But why the basic information Massie provided Reagan hadn’t filtered up the bureaucracy and over to the White House and to Reagan himself, however, is beyond me. Mann doesn’t raise that question and it’s an important one.
Was this a failure of the Reagan administration, its distrust of American government officials in general and something about Reagan’s personal decision-making style or was - and is - it a generic problem endemic to the office of the American presidency?
It wasn’t as if the US hadn’t had an Embassy in Moscow or a Consulate in Leningrad with fluent Russian speakers with eyes, ears and excellent connections among the Russian intelligentsia at the time. It also wasn’t as if we hadn’t had research scholars, journalists and business people living in the country during that period even though the formal US-USSR Cultural Agreement had lapsed. If I remember correctly, the numbers of scholars had decreased substantially from the years I was exchanges officer there but the programs themselves had not stopped. Besides, all the major US newspapers, periodicals and television corporations maintained bureaus with some of their best reporters in Moscow.
Prelude of things to come
Regardless, Mann chose to focus on a unique period which has been overshadowed by the momentous events in the years that followed. And he chose to focus on a Reagan success story rather than Iran Contra which almost did his presidency in. But did Reagan, in the end, place too much stock in his personal relationship with Gorbachev? What if, for example, the hardliners had succeeded? Mann seems to suggest that had that happened, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed as it did – but why not? And how much longer could it have continued down the path of “70 years to nowhere?”
As I said at the beginning, I decided to read this book because I wanted to fill in gaps in my own knowledge of the period. Instead, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan has raised as many questions as those it has answered.