Shultz maintains that it was principally Ronald Reagan who engineered the victory, rising above the duplicities and mistakes of his advisers. He admits that Reagan had a poor grasp of detail and sometimes an even weaker grip on the truth. But in Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (1, 184 pages. Scribner’s. $30), he argues that Reagan’s stubborn adherence to principle, flexibility in negotiation and willingness to back diplomacy with military power brought Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev around. It’s not entirely convincing: the failures of the Soviet system did more to end the cold war than Reagan’s maneuvers. And in Shultz’s telling, Reagan and company often acted like a gang that couldn’t shoot straight–except when aiming at their own feet.
“Turmoil and Triumph” is a painstaking catalog of diplomatic nuts and bolts, and Shultz describes heated disagreements over almost everything. He and his colleagues fought about arms control and the Middle East, about Nicaragua and El Salvador, about how to handle terrorism and how to invade Grenada. Shultz repeatedly threatened to quit. That he served out the president’s term is a tribute to Shultz’s tenacity and Reagan’s amiability.
Now, in this book, Shultz is settling scores. Weinberger, he says, wanted to build up American military power but never risk it on the battlefield-frequently offering “the counsel of no action at all.” He portrays Casey as a man “not to be trusted,” especially because of his role in the arms-for-hostages swap with Iran and in waging an unscrupulous secret war against communism in Central America. Shultz was more inclined to negotiate there, and the enigmatic Casey once admonished him: “George, don’t be a pilgrim.” When Shultz asked what that meant, Casey replied, “An early settler.”
The man most obviously hurt by Shultz’s revelations is George Bush. An excerpt published three months ago left little doubt that Bush lied when he claimed he was “not in the loop” on Iran-contra. The book describes a meeting in early 1986, attended by Bush, at which Shultz and Weinberger, in a rare show of unity, argued strongly against the exchange of arms for hostages. When Bush later claimed he had known nothing about the debate, Weinberger complained to Shultz: “He was on the other side. It’s on the record. Why did he say that?”
Ever a gentleman, Shultz did not publish his memoirs until after Bush had lost the election and pardoned Weinberger. But the real villain here-though Shultz did not intend him to be-is Reagan. The clear implication of Shultz’s account is that Reagan also lied about Iran-contra-to himself, as well as the American people. He kept denying he had traded arms for hostages when his administration deliberately did exactly that. “He could rearrange facts to make a good story better, and he could allow himself at times to be deceived, sometimes almost knowingly,” Shultz writes. “Sometimes President Reagan simply did not seem to care that much about facts and details.” It was precisely that inattention that made it possible for Shultz’s bureaucratic rivals to run amok.
