The Turn
Oberdorfer, Don
Check out these quotes, then I'll tell why they're so important: Ronald Reagan had "a very broad strategy for dealing with the Soviets." It was simple: "Build up U.S. military power and then...
...He's no run-information out of other officials, including numerous Soviets...
...It proved to be, Oberdorfer says, "a catalyst for a critical assessment in Moscow of the place of military power in the security of the Soviet state...
...Oberdorfer found out why...
...Nonetheless, Reagan "later found SDI useful in dealings with the Soviet Union...
...The result is a highly readable and utterly persuasive tale of why the Cold War came to end the way it did...
...Reagan's role was minimal, but Mikhail Gorbachev's was enormous...
...A footnote, at most...
...military power and then negotiate from a position of strength...
...His confidence and the confidence he instilled in the American people," his desire for negotiations, and his abhorrence of nuclear weapons "all played a major part in what took place...
...Idraw three conclusions from The Turn that Oberdorfer doesn't state explicitly...
...He drafted his own talking points for his 1984 meeting at the White House with Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and later for the Geneva summit with Gorbachev...
...When Gromyko returned, Reagan went...
...The conventional view is still dominant, but maybe it won't be for long...
...Best I could tell, Oberdorfer got these from Americans bearing transcripts...
...They then rejoined their aides...
...The first is that the fellow doing the revising is Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post...
...But he also pumped loads of Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...The relationship warmed, largely on American terms, because "Reagan wanted it to happen...
...The book gushes with verbatim accounts not only of meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev, but also of sessions involving lesser lights...
...He has so much information to convey that he's never tempted to wing it...
...Instead, as Oberdorfer reveals, while the President was under sharp attack in the pre-Gorbachev era for not negotiating with the Soviets, he was actually scheming to begin talks at the soonest appropriate time...
...Reagan asked Gromyko if he needed to go to the john...
...He thought Reagan was playing a role like an actor...
...Oberdorfer treats him as a serious figure with a coherent plan for dealing with the Soviets, a plan that worked...
...In face-to-face talks, Reagan was adept at broad generalities, weak on specifics...
...don't mean to give the wrong impression: The Turn isn't a pro-Reagan polemic...
...I'm dubious of Soviet sources, but Oberdorfer doesn't rely on them for important judgments...
...Oberdorfer cites glitches in Reagan's personal diplomacy, and he gives at least as much credit to Gorbachev...
...The third conclusion is that Reagan's insistence on moving ahead with SDI had a salutary effect both on arms negotiations and on Soviet thinking...
...official except Reagan...
...That's the price for having a source so critically placed—an acceptable price, I'd say...
...A security aide had watched the two through a secret peephole...
...Oberdorfer is explicit on one key matter...
...At Geneva, Gorbachev tried to bargain SDI out of existence...
...This causes him to overrate Shultz as a global mover and shaker, and ignore practically every other major U.S...
...Such candor is unusual for a Washington journalist...
...On the one hand, as it seemed to me, he was interested in the idea of universal nuclear disarmament, on the other hand sticking to the idea of such a funny toy as SDI...
...When the summit broke up over that issue, reporters wrote that U.S.-Soviet relations had reached a stalemate that only a Reagan reversal on SDI could break...
...At the Washington summit in 1987, it was Gorbachev who backed down, agreeing to disagree on SDI while moving ahead on other issues...
...A second conclusion is that Reagan's firmness during negotiations paid off...
...One is that the Soviets, after initial misgivings, found Reagan to be a capable, credible, tough, and honorable figure with whom to do business...
...In his famous Orlando speech to evangelical Christians in March 1983, Reagan didn't only say that the Soviet Union was "an evil empire...
...He could be seen from a different angle as a human being and as a politician...
...That view casts Reagan as a lucky dope stumbling onto the world stage at the critical juncture when Communism was fading and the Soviet Empire starting to come apart...
...Not bad...
...The chief agent of positive change—indeed, Time's Man of the Decade—was Gorbachev, who will loom large in history...
...Reagan was supposed to make an arms control point when, after aides left, he was alone with Gromyko...
...The Reykjavik summit wasn't the disaster it was cracked up to be, but "a turning point in the relations between the two countries . . . a success of major importance...
...In The Turn he points out where he went wrong in newspaper stories about U.S.-Soviet relations...
...He also said: "I believe that Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose THE TURN: FROM THE COLD WAR TO A NEW ERA THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION, 1983-1990 Don Oberdorfer Poseidon Press/514 pages/$25 reviewed by FRED BARNES of-the-mill Washington scribbler...
...Oberdorfer was helped tremendously by George Shultz, Reagan's secretary of state for six-and-a-half years...
...Oberdorfer cites the impressions of Aleksandr Yakovlev, an influential Gorbachev adviser who was "as skeptical of Reagan at the end of the Geneva summit [in 1985] as he had been at the beginning...
...Oberdorfer says, correctly, that Reagan adopted SDI "out of longstanding and strong convictions rather than any considerations of strategy...
...But what's important is that Reagan gets some credit...
...Sounds a bit like the conservative take on Reagan, doesn't it...
...The American Spectator January 1992 67 last pages even now are being written...
...Wrong...
...He was skilled at express-ing empathy, and it sometimes got in the way of substance...
...When others didn't recognize that Communism was crumbling (me, for instance), Reagan did...
...Not quite...
...Strange as it may seem, we won the Cold War anyway...
...The second factor is the plethora of new facts, anecdotes, explanations, and insights in The Turn...
...For the revisionist view will be impossible to ignore on two counts...
...At Reykjavik the following year, Yakovlev changed his mind...
...Gorbachev made another futile pass at SDI at the Reykjavik summit in 1986...
...The contrast with the conventional, ideologically driven view of Reagan couldn't be more striking...
...He failed, in the opinion of Shultz, when "confronted with the unyielding depth of Reagan's conviction...
...It seemed to me he wasn't acting," he later told Oberdorfer...
...Reagan wasn't blinded by his anti-Communism, as his political opponents charged...
...Beginning in late 1983, Reagan "made a crucial contribution" to improving relations with a weakened Soviet Union...
...Development of the Strategic Defense Initiative was a critical part of the strategy, frightening the Kremlin at "the prospect of being forced into an expensive high-technology race with the United States that it could not afford and probably could not win...
...Today we know he was right...
...By upping the ante with SDI, Reagan forced Gorbachev into concession after concession...
...It set Reagan and Gorbachev on the path of nuclear arms reductions (with SDI kept alive) and political accommodation (with the Soviets promising to pull out of Afghanistan and cut off military aid to the Sandinistas...
...He was practically alone in making that argument in 1983...
...American officials were surprised when Soviet officials later said Gromyko had told them nothing about the point...
...I've been dazzled for years by Oberdorfer's skill as a reporter, his fairness, and his willingness to go where his reporting takes him, even when doing so means clashing with the Beltway Zeitgeist...
...What we have here is the new revisionist assessment of Reagan...
...I saw his internal hesitation, his battling back and forth in his mind what to do...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
