Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [7]
As America continued to bring the dead home, there was a profound sense that the country should respond forcefully to the atrocity. In the aftermath of the attack, the most powerful nation in the world did not.†
With no substantive military response in the offing, the only other way the United States could react to the terrorist challenge was through aggressive diplomacy. The President decided that a fresh set of eyes might be useful in the Middle East, and that it would at least demonstrate his and our country’s concern.
Shortly after the Beirut bombing, I received a phone call from Secretary of State George Shultz, who I first had met in 1969 when we served in the Nixon administration, and who had been a friend ever since. Shultz was President Reagan’s second secretary of state, replacing Alexander Haig, another colleague of ours from the Nixon years. A former Marine with a low-key demeanor, Shultz spoke plainly. He said the President needed to appoint a new special envoy to the Middle East to work on the Lebanon crisis and help with the American response to the terrorist attacks. Shultz said they wanted someone who had standing outside of the government. “I’d like you to do it,” he said.
If I agreed, the task would be to support the Lebanese government, to work with our allies on encouraging the Syrians to ratchet down their aggressive behavior, and to signal America’s commitment to the region.
I knew the history of presidential envoys to the Middle East was not a happy one. I had observed the challenges of America’s diplomacy in the region over my years in Congress and my service in the Nixon and Ford administrations, during which a number of experienced foreign policy officials worked in the region with hopes of breakthroughs, generally to return disappointed. I requested and received a leave of absence as CEO of Searle. Then I prepared to go to Washington to meet with President Reagan as he coped with the biggest national security crisis his administration had yet encountered.
Ronald Reagan had been in office for more than two years when he faced the Lebanon crisis. I had come to know him when he was governor of California and I was serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations. I was used to seeing him on television or being with him at more formal events when he had the aura of a movie star. Instead, as I entered the Oval Office on November 3, 1983, he looked quite different. The President welcomed me into the room with horn-rimmed granny glasses perched on his nose and a stack of papers in his hand, which he referenced occasionally while talking.
The caricature often used by Reagan’s critics was that he was good-hearted but not particularly bright—an “amiable dunce,” one said. I had heard the same charge of low candle power made against nearly every Republican president in my adult lifetime, usually by those on the other side who couldn’t imagine how anyone intelligent could possibly disagree with them. In Reagan’s case, as in others, the caricature simply wasn’t true. The President was not a detail-oriented manager, to be sure. He enjoyed telling a humorous anecdote, even during the most serious of meetings. He lacked the hard-charging style so often common among Washington politicians, and his approach took some getting used to. But as I came to know Reagan over the years, it was clear that he had the strong, long-range strategic sense so essential to successful leadership. Now that Reagan’s letters and other writings have been published, it is instructive to see his insightful mind at work.
Some presidents allow themselves to get lost in minutiae. Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, was a famous micromanager. Ronald Reagan didn’t have that problem. He knew where he wanted to lead America, and set the course for his administration around large principles. He left it to others to sort out the details while standing ready to provide course corrections and calibration as necessary. While that didn’t always serve his best interests, for the most part