Reagan and Thatcher
Smith, Geoffrey
man baron." Why look to literature rather than to politics to explain him? Because the shrinking of Cuba's power base to Fidel's immediate family gives him a dynastic role that is...
...a quagmire...
...Challenged in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy understood it "as mainly a political rather than a military problem...
...Thatcher would have had very little time for him...
...The successes are Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan...
...His values were shaped by his view of himself as an underdog, a guy who had had to labor long and hard to get respect...
...Into Mr...
...Stripped of his moralistic fervor, Timerman is revealed as simply a man at loose ends...
...This impressive new book gives us several clues...
...Ever since the Grand Alliance of FDR and Churchill, image-builders on both sides of the Atlantic have tried to portray each President and Prime Minister as personal friends...
...The author is surely right in saying that had Reagan, with his poor grasp of details, been a British politician, Mrs...
...This was as much a splendid photo-opportunity for the press as it was a nightmare for the security people...
...The relationship developed so felicitously precisely because distance lent enchantment to the already slightly idealized view each had of the other...
...Barber had chatted with Carter and was dazzled...
...It's an excusable misjudgment, and it's one of the few things I'd argue with in this provocative yet fair-minded book...
...Where Reagan is anecdotal, easygoing, and genuinely humorous, Mrs...
...W. Norton/285 pp...
...Shogan concludes that Kennedy's "sexual athleticism" didn't interfere with his presidential duties or cloud his judgment during the missile crisis...
...The sheer length of time they had in power together—she was Prime Minister throughout his years in the White House—allowed favors to be granted and called back again over time...
...On February 29, 1986, two top British foreign policy officials, Sir Antony Acland and Sir Percy Cradock, met Admiral Poindexter in Washington and discussed the arms-forhostages deal...
...Unfortunately this is not forthcoming, so shall I supply one example from the time of the Reagans' first visit to Windsor Castle in June 1982...
...He thus preserved for some time to come FDR's Grand Coalition," Shogan writes...
...This proved difficult at first: Jimmy Carter was far closer to Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan (whose vacillation in the face of England's "winter of discontent" in 1978 mirrored Carter's own vacillation at America's economic "malaise") than he was to Mrs...
...But instead of following this sensitive appreciation with some tough analysis, Timerman veers off into a study of cultural and literary clashes...
...He admits that "no one believes it is possible for Cuba, via the armed forces and its security organs, to be a distributor of Colombian drugs without the Castro brothers' participation in the operation...
...The Second World War molded her generation, and in the Cold War Anglo-American cooperation proved of paramount importance...
...ward Heath bucked the trend, finding himself unable to get along on any sort of personal terms with Richard Nixon...
...It was when Reagan was left alone with his instincts, when he was denouncing the Evil Empire and threatening to bomb Russia in five minutes that he was at his best...
...Shogan wrote before the air and land war against Iraq crowned Bush's foreign policy with a shimmering triumph...
...It is now known that MI5, Britain's equivalent of the CIA, bugged the hotel room in which Robert McFarlane and Oliver North met the Iranian arms dealer Ghorbanifar in December 1985...
...Shogan rates each according to his three-part scheme, and then shows how they held up in a moment of crisis...
...As in so many things until the advent of the poll tax, her instincts were correct...
...One must wade through piles of Timerman's rhetoric: his lifelong identification with revolution, his clashes with American anti-Castro forces, his debates with the Cuban organizers of the trip...
...How could anyone have guessed that Bush would perform so marvelously...
...Thatcher is analytical, polemical, and would not recognize a joke if it were to walk up to her and hand her a red box...
...Let's deal with the successes first...
...It was decided that the Queen and President would go riding together in the Park...
...He was a pragmatist in ideology, a rationalist in values, and self-determined in character...
...Anyway, according to Barber's scheme for analyzing Presidents, Carter was destined for greatness...
...Okay, these are very broad categories, especially in Shogan's hands...
...Geoffrey Smith, a veteran Times of London journalist and longtime Washington habitue, has written a fascinating and highly readable account of the most genuinely close partnership in the history of the Special Relationship: his two protagonists meet, win the respect of one another, and finally effect the geopolitical equivalent of falling in love...
...In her very British way, Mrs...
...Nixon, says Shogan, attempted to polarize the nation, and succeeded...
...This sort of "even-handedness," in which dictators and democrats are seen as equivalent while left-socialists like Timerman parade their virtues, ends in Advice such as "Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly" not only gives an insight into how intimate Margaret Thatcher and George Bush became during the Gulf Phony War, but also confirms our perception of the former premier as congenitally unwobbly...
...Thatcher's decision to allow American bombers to attack Tripoli from British soil was a clear quid pro quo for the help certain Anglophiles in the Pentagon—such as Caspar Weinberger and John Lehman—had afforded the British during the Falklands War...
...Churchill professed to worship Roosevelt, "this thrice-chosen leader of the greatest democracy on earth," because the survival of his country depended on it...
...The key to Truman's character was his understanding of his own shortcomings and his ability to be honest with himself," adds Shogan...
...Too true...
...Shogan suggests Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic that if a President is badly deficient in one of the three elements of the presidency, he's likely to run into serious trouble...
...Similarly, the Reagan cabinet was left in no doubt as to the extent to which Margaret Thatcher's blind-eye-turning and linguistic sophistry helped them weather the Iran-contra storm...
...The author is probably correct when he perceives Mrs...
...It is this readiness of the British to take people at their word which causes endless difficulties in the European Community...
...A s a judge of Presidents, Bob Shogan has the same problem as James David Barber: bad timing...
...Thatcher had fairly detailed knowledge of what Poindexter, North, and the others were up to some twelve months in advance...
...What Timerman likes to call the "Jewish element" in journalism—irony and skepticism—is here merely ambiguity and confusion...
...The duds are Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter...
...With Bush, Shogan errs on the negative side...
...But this counts for little compared to "the scant credibility of the United States government in its accusations against Cuba—often verging, no doubt, on paranoia or on state terrorism tactics...
...The colossal ego of this minor political actor (Timerman) is so overwhelming that the analysis of the colossal ego of a major political figure (Castro) is lost...
...missiles in lbrkey that were supposedly going to come out anyway...
...Thatcher...
...In coping with the post-Cold War world, Bush "appeared driven by short-term, narrow considerations rather than any total overview...
...She actually believed in REAGAN AND THATCHER Geoffrey Smith/W...
...Barber, a political science professor at Duke, came out with The Presidential Character just as Jimmy Carter was becoming President...
...For those who—whatever the reason—can only hear or trust such a voice, this can be a useful book...
...W e are reminded how easy it has been for terrorists to influence the foreign policy of the world's number-one superpower simply by kidnapping her citizens...
...The problem continues to be the limitations imposed by the impenetrable glass dome on Cubans' lives, their energies, their innermost human nature...
...Thatcher, like a virgin at a toga party, actually stuck to her principles while all about her were divesting themselves of theirs as quickly as possible...
...I was no fan of detente or of pandering to Mao...
...If so, she has overlooked her denunciation of the United States's invasion of the Commonwealth island of Grenada in 1983...
...Tacobo Timerman's extended essay J on Cuba is best viewed as a sightseeing footnote to Geyer's work...
...But, just before the entire account begins to sound like the ramblings of some gossipy old spook, the reader is brought up sharply by a fact...
...Smith's normally forthright narrative creep the weasel-words "probably," "perhaps," and "apparently...
...The incident showed Reagan being typically Reagan and Thatcher quintessentially Thatcher...
...Whoops...
...T he essay on Nixon is the best in the I book...
...maybe a cloud passed over Durham...
...Only the reflexively anti-American EdAndrew Roberts is the author of The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson...
...Still, the scheme works well enough as a tool for revealing the roots of success or failure in the White House...
...That's putting it mildly...
...Yuman certainly had an ideology: a bare-knuckles Cold War liberalism...
...In fact, he had no ideology, which meant he was adrift...
...But he has a useful method for measuring and explaining presidential performance...
...Kennedy gets better marks from Shogan than I'd have given him...
...Because the shrinking of Cuba's power base to Fidel's immediate family gives him a dynastic role that is near-archaic, and would be more easily understood by students of Elizabethan tragedy than by State Department policy-makers...
...Smith is historian enough not to attempt to depict the Reagan=Thatcher affair as unique...
...Kennedy got the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and averted military conflict, giving up only U.S...
...Sometimes the attempt reflected genuine chumminess, as in that between Macmillan and Eisenhower, forged in the shared experiences of the War in the Mediterranean...
...I'd have judged Truman by his leadership in saving Europe with the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, and NATO...
...Thatcher's ideology explains the respect she expressed for Reagan's gubernatorial achievements in California when they met in 1975 and again in 1978...
...He sees Fidel's successes during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years as due to both American naivete and Castro's keen perception that the United States's power at the time was subtly limited by its preoccupation with domestic problems...
...I certainly didn't...
...His ideology wasn't...
...Shogan, though, says the election of 1948 was the telling challenge, and Truman met it with courage and resourcefulness...
...She was obviously genuinely shocked when she caught the man she trusted negotiating with hostage-takers and behaving in a way one has come to expect only of the French...
...The rest of us should be happy and proud that they were so...
...Timerman even envisions Castro being wounded by his not having set up an interview...
...It is said that Mrs...
...He satisfied practically no one, and failed as a leader...
...Finally (on page 45) we get to the core of his concerns: Cuba's problem goes deeper than the deterioration of world economic conditions or the fact that Cuba is in the Caribbean and not on the Black Sea...
...There's no way Shogan could have known this would happen, right...
...His "evidence" comes from a 1988 report by the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies—hardly a haven for moderates...
...At Reykjavik, his call for a non-nuclear world was an example not of hopeless optimism, nor even of cynicism, but merely of the Great Communicator trying it on...
...Shogan raises the matter of Kennedy's sexual promiscuity, which clashed so obviously with the self-control he showed in other aspects of his life...
...In fact, the most interesting chapters of Smith's book are those dealing with Iran-contra...
...How often did she have to give the same advice to Bush's predecessor...
...For, although Reagan exudes an old-world gallantry towards women, which Mrs...
...By 1979, Margaret Thatcher had realized that if her country was to matter a jot on the world stage, she would have to get on well with whoever was President of the United States...
...21.95 Fred Barnes THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 37...
...THE RIDDLE OF POWER: PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP FROM TRUMAN TO BUSH Robert Shogan/Dutton/352 pp...
...Although the point is not raised by Smith, there is reason to believe that she privately supported Reagan's attack, but such was the outrage of establishment figures, including the Queen herself, at the United States's attacking a country of the British Commonwealth that the Prime Minister thought discretion the better part of Atlanticist valor...
...We also see how Mrs...
...Shogan says Nixon's achievement was to thwart the antiwar movement and gradually (rather than precipitously) withdraw from Vietnam, while pursuing diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China...
...He cites Carter, a man whose personal values and character were adequate...
...Doing all this at once was a deft trick...
...It is Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ernest Hemingway who seem to attract most of his energies...
...Shogan doesn't offer a final verdict on Bush...
...Thatcher likes and which sends feminists berserk, their personalities are very different...
...It was Macmillan who made the supremely patronizing remark about Britain becoming Greece to America's Rome...
...What an appalling tactical error Saddam Hussein made when he released his "guests" last Christmas...
...Thatcher now calls Reagan's Reykjavik call for a non-nuclear world "the only real divergence we ever had...
...Equally, Heath felt he could snub Nixon because he saw Britain's destiny elsewhere, and possibly even perceived advantages in downplaying British Atlanticism to his European audience...
...Despite Timerman's polemical animus towards "United States aggression," the book does offer glimpses into Castro's Cuba...
...Yeah, sure...
...He sees three controlling elements of presidential power: ideology, values, character...
...For example, he describes LBJ's thirst for consensus as an ideology...
...It "contravened the qualities of moralism and idealism that he purported to represent...
...Although the Reykjavik pronouncement, which on any logical reading turned forty years of NATO policy on its head, sent Mrs...
...I submit his list of post-FDR Presidents who've achieved at least some success and those who haven't...
...That's a stretch...
...T he harsh logic of national interest 1 has always underlain these public-relations games...
...Shogan, the top political reporter of the Los Angeles Times, is willing to ignore the liberal conventional wisdom...
...22.95 Andrew Roberts 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 America's putative no-deals-with-terrorists policy...
...When the Queen saw the plan to have up to a dozen security men riding on either side of them she remarked testily, "I'm going out for a ride with a friend, we're not trying to rustle up a posse...
...Far more than any personal chemistry (let alone the sexual frisson some commentators have tried to spot), it was this political soundness that attracted her to him...
...He'll be free to revise his preliminary assessment later, when Bush's term is finished—or not revise it...
...But in hindsight, Nixon gave up little and got the country over the hump at a time when it (or at least its opinion elite) had lost its nerve...
...Sometimes it was one-sided: Harold Wilson perceived Lyndon Johnson's wary disdain as genuine esteem...
...Thatcher into paroxysms, all she ought to have done was just laugh it off as one giant sound-bite...
...In foreign affairs, he says, George Bush's prospects are "dubious...
...Thatcher made the mistake of taking him seriously...
...Thatcher's instinctive pro-Americanism as lying deep in her youth...
...No, Shogan hasn't entirely solved the riddle of why some Presidents do well and others fail...
...I can't explain that...
...Luque's history of the Machado and Batista dictatorships and the pre-rule years of Fidel and Che covers familiar territory, but in a lively way...
...Timerman's elevation of himself to the role of counterweight to the "rightist views" of Armando Valladares (an unpardonable slander against the man who exposed Cuba's prison system) is sheer conceit...
...He gives a superb overview of the role personal friendships have played since 1941 in Anglo-American relations...
...There, the French, Italian, and Belgian trade ministers blithely promise one thing, do the opposite, and leave their British counterpart nonplussed, bewildered, and blamed for holding up progress...
...Castro does that to critics: he makes the world of socialism uninhabitable for Westerners, but also manages to convince them that there is no way out of it...
...At other times the propagandists relied on a spurious avuncularity, as in Macmillan's dealings with Kennedy...
...She was undoubtedly relieved when a believer in self-reliance, economic discipline, cultural traditions, and pugnacious nationalism was elected in 1980...
...The blurb-writer at Bodley Head, the book's British publisher, promised us new information from Smith as to what the Queen thought of Ronald Reagan...
...Timerman downplays Cuba's economic failures, reserving his polemics for "CIA marionettes...
Vol. 24 • June 1991 • No. 6
