The Presidency by Hugh Sidey: The Joys of Waging Peace

The Presidency

If we are lucky, the President will become a peace addict. Those who watched the applause sweep over Ronald Reagan after last week’s speech on nuclear arms reduction thought they detected a new glint in his eye. He had received a needed fix. Peace is fun. Peace is box office. Peace diverts critics. Peace is good for you.

Most Presidents do not fully understand the exhilaration in waging peace until at last they try it. Take Richard Nixon, who found that playing global diplomat was a fine way for a politician to turn almost magically into a statesman. He got a Viet Nam ceasefire, made friends with mainland China, and signed an arms limitation agreement with the Soviets, all within a year. In a life of fighting one damn thing after another, he never had such a good time.

John Kennedy came to office as a macho warrior. “We shall bear any burden, oppose any foe,” he warned Moscow in his Inaugural Address. One night at Hickory Hill Bobby Kennedy summoned a friend into a quiet corner. With his blood rising, he confided that the Cuban exile force would hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs in a few days. Bobby could already hear the bands and taste the glory.

Lessons were learned from the Cuban invasion failure, the Berlin Wall and a meeting with a scornful Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Kennedy discovered that both private joy and public acclaim were to be found in working for a nuclear test ban treaty, which was signed with the Soviets in 1963. A few weeks before his death, J.F.K. roamed the country polishing up a speech on the treaty as a pre-1964 campaign maneuver. The folks loved it.

There were drama and adventure in Lyndon Johnson’s flights through Asia.

He was the swashbuckler in khaki, jetting secretly into Viet Nam, summoning his commanders, sending off the bombers, riding silently past the lines of lean young men fresh out of foxholes. But it was a melancholy experience, not at all like the movies. Speeding back to the U.S. after his Viet Nam visit, Johnson was a deeply troubled man. He had found out that war is no fun.

Ask Jerry Ford what he liked best: tramping through the snow with Henry Kissinger in Vladivostok to work out a SALT agreement or sending the Marines after the Mayaguez? Ten to one for peace. And Jimmy Carter will never come closer to heaven in this life than when he flew back from Camp David to announce that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat had accepted his peace accords.

Reagan knows that true peace in this age must rest on America’s economic and military strength, and he is working to shore up both. There has been some careless war talk by the President’s men and maybe a little too much saber rattling in the Caribbean and the Middle East. Yet even that has had some beneficial side effects. The President seems to have knocked the Soviets off balance a bit. If the history of the past 25 years tells us anything it is that when the Soviets are a little scared they complain bitterly and constantly in public. Beware a silent bear, as before the Cuban missile crisis or the invasion of Afghanistan.

Reagan appears to the world just a bit mad. That reputation, calculated or not, can serve him well because his proposal for nuclear missile reduction comes as both surprise and relief. The prospect of his anger if the offer is summarily rejected may inspire the Soviets to give the idea more attention than usual.

Get peace going and the ceremonies get dandier, the bands play louder, the crowds get happier and bigger, the champagne flows faster, the Gallups rise higher. That is Ronald Reagan’s kind of world.