Review | An insider’s view of Ronald Reagan’s dysfunctional foreign policy team

Philip Taubman’s “In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz” adds a surprising new dimension to the Reagan saga. Through the eyes of Shultz, the secretary of state, Taubman portrays the Reagan administration as swamped and nearly paralyzed by disorganization and infighting. Cabinet members and White House aides were constantly at each other’s throats. This will come as no surprise to students of the Reagan presidency, but Taubman, a longtime reporter and editor at the New York Times, introduces a new and highly credible source.

On becoming secretary of state in July 1982, Shultz selected as his executive secretary a veteran diplomat, Raymond Seitz, who had served at embassies in Canada, Kenya, Zaire and Britain, and in senior staff posts at Foggy Bottom. Seitz was “a shrewd student of foreign policy making” with “a fine feel for the flow of power in Washington,” Taubman says, and “once installed in a small office immediately adjacent to Shultz’s, Seitz started keeping detailed notes of daily developments and meetings, beginning a confidential chronicle of Shultz’s work.” Eventually it turned into “a full-scale journal filled with unvarnished accounts of successes and setbacks.”

Seitz’s journal, from 1982 to 1984, provides stark, contemporaneous evidence of the administration’s dysfunction. In one of the first crises he faced, an Israeli escalation in Lebanon in August 1982, United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick went behind Shultz’s back to the White House for a key decision. Seitz recalls seeing Shultz as he “stared wearily out the window for a long time as it dawned on him” what she had done.

Shultz constantly felt distant from Reagan. “The problem is I don’t know exactly what Reagan thinks,” he told Seitz. Another time, in early 1983, Seitz noted, “This is all very confusing — what’s the real Ronald Reagan?” When Shultz finally secured a meeting with the president to discuss Soviet policy on March 10, 1983, he found the room packed with people he didn’t know. Shultz looked at one man and said, “For example, sir, I don’t even know who you are.” It was Richard Pipes, the hawkish Harvard University historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, who was then running Soviet policy on the National Security Council staff. The meeting was a “fiasco,” Taubman says.

Shultz told Seitz at one point: “There is a management crisis in foreign affairs here. . . . It’s the worst organization I’ve ever seen.” In 1983, other administration officials persuaded Reagan to approve a plan to escalate pressure on the leftist government of Nicaragua. Shultz was not told. “The end run staggered, humiliated and infuriated Shultz,” Taubman says. When Reagan decided to send a personal, handwritten letter to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, Shultz was not informed. Then Shultz discovered that his recommendations for personnel were being undermined. Seitz recorded a furious Shultz calling the White House personnel director, John Herrington: “I consider this intolerable. . . . Apparently there has been a meeting with the president that I didn’t even know about. . . . I didn’t even get to have a say. That’s what really gets to me!” Shultz was not informed that Robert C. McFarlane, then deputy national security adviser, made a trip to the Middle East in July 1983. “There is utter confusion everywhere,” Seitz noted. “Apparently there has been a disastrous failure in coordination and discipline.”

Shultz, however, was a devoted team player. In February 1983, he clashed with national security adviser William P. Clark, an old Reagan hand, but instead of asserting himself, he worried about upsetting White House staff operations. Shultz told Seitz one evening, “A president needs his staff.” Taubman says that Shultz “seemed seized by good governance practices and a surprising degree of timidity.”

Shultz was “not in the loop” of planning for Reagan’s March 23, 1983, speech announcing research on a space-based missile defense plan, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). When he learned of it just days before the announcement, he tried to dissuade Reagan, and failed. Shultz then “reversed course” and enthusiastically backed the program, Taubman reports. He privately told Seitz that Reagan’s ideas about eliminating nuclear weapons were a “pipe dream,” but soon thereafter he demanded that State Department subordinates support SDI because “we work for the president of the United States.” Shultz pondered resigning more than once but never did, although he felt deflated. “There isn’t any joy in anything these days,” he told Seitz in 1984. “Doesn’t anything good happen? I’m sick of it.”

Reagan was reelected in a landslide in 1984. Behind the scenes, his leading Cabinet members were at loggerheads. The most serious collisions were between Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger over Soviet policy. Weinberger, an architect of the military buildup and strategy of confrontation during Reagan’s first term, remained intransigent and distrustful of the Kremlin. Shultz, a pragmatist and problem-solver, urged Reagan to pivot to negotiation in his second term. To calm the waters, Reagan agreed to a weekly lunch at the White House. The first one, on Dec. 1, 1984, quickly fell apart. “Cap was impossible,” Shultz complained. “When I spoke, he half closed his eyes. Nothing was accomplished.”

In March 1985, Gorbachev became Soviet leader. He set out to save the Soviet Union from the punishing drain of the Cold War arms race and to open up its calcified, dysfunctional economic and political systems. He became the partner Reagan needed. The pace of negotiation picked up with summits in Geneva; Reykjavik, Iceland; Washington; Moscow; and New York. Shultz was more in the driver’s seat than previously, although the infighting persisted. At a critical moment during the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, as Reagan and Gorbachev stood on the threshold of an agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons, Shultz provided the needed push, saying to them both: “Then let’s do it.” Although the summit collapsed over Reagan’s refusal to give up SDI, it laid the groundwork for future arms-control deals. By the end of his presidency, Reagan had negotiated a treaty with Gorbachev to get rid of an entire class of nuclear-armed intermediate-range missiles in Europe, and he’d gone to Moscow, walking in Red Square and declaring that the Cold War was over.

Reagan’s foreign policy machinery was ramshackle, improvised and at war with itself. One wonders upon reading this account how his subordinates managed to get anything done at all, much less attempt to engineer the end of the Cold War. Taubman’s use of the Seitz material provides valuable new insight into the Reagan years, and he gives Shultz credit for holding things together. “Absent Shultz’s patience and resilience, it seems unlikely that Reagan could ever have overcome the chaotic conflict within his national security team,” he writes.

But the other indispensable figure was Gorbachev. Without him, Reagan would have ended his presidency with little more than a sheaf of anti-communist speeches. Shultz played a prominent role in helping Reagan get results, but it was Gorbachev, first and foremost, who was key to ending the Cold War, struggling in vain to reform and save a doddering, decaying superpower.

David E. Hoffman is a member of The Washington Post’s editorial board and the author, most recently, of “Give Me Liberty: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and his Daring Quest for a Free Cuba.”

In the Nation’s Service

The Life and Times of George P. Shultz