Reagan’s Passage Is World’s and Ours : Cold War Hurt Both Superpowers; Now It’s Best Left Behind

Thirty-seven years ago this spring, a young actress named Nancy Davis quietly took along her boyfriend and future husband, Ronald Reagan, to a political meeting in Hollywood. The speaker was actress ZaSu Pitts, who was working for Richard Nixon in his Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas. The rhetoric was typical of what was becoming one of the most controversial campaigns in the history of American politics.

“The pink lady,” Pitts said of Douglas, “would allow the communists to take over our land and our homes as well.” Reagan himself was nominally a liberal, already part of an actors’ group that had publicly endorsed Douglas. But he was also a secret informer for the FBI in the hunt for Hollywood subversives, and he now came away from Pitts’ rousing attack more than ever converted to the anti-communist craze. Helen Douglas never learned of his defection in 1950, but soon after the Pitts speech, Ron and Nancy held a discreet fund-raiser for Dick Nixon.

However furtive, the episode was one of those first historic little steps on Ronald Reagan’s path to power. And there is much irony and symbolism that the long winding road is in some measure ending this week in a smiling summit meeting in Moscow, in what former White House aide Edward Rollins calls “the last kick in the Reagan presidency.” At the finish as at the beginning, listening to Mikhail S. Gorbachev as to ZaSu Pitts, Reagan is ever the creature of historical tides. It is important to understand his passage--and ours.

At that Nixon rally nearly four decades ago, Reagan was caught up in the frightening, florid imagery of the postwar world. The United States and the Soviet Union had emerged from their victorious wartime alliance with unprecedented new might and a rivalry that produced in both nations an anxious, belligerent xenophobia and an accompanying domestic security mania.

In America this was done not only because of a tremulous uncertainty in assuming world power, and not only out of fear and disillusion in the Atomic Age and Cold War. In large part, too, we were struggling no less with the legacy of the New Deal, the now liberating, now threatening role of the state in redressing social and economic injustice. For many politicians, of course, the temptation was irresistible to use the foreign and ideological menace, the far-more-imagined-than-real subversive danger, in trying to roll back the liberal achievements of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Egged on by his girlfriend and peers, Reagan among others could not “just say no” to the red-baiting and treasonmongering that became the narcotic of American politics for more than a generation.

Meanwhile, in the wake of a devastating war and in the grip of a devastating inferiority and distrust toward the West, the Soviets responded with their own fearful bellicosity. Dressed in long, shabby overcoats and armed with fat tanks, the red threat seemed to take shape from Budapest to Hanoi, while at home the Soviets recoiled into the entrenched corrupted power of the Communist Party bureaucracy and a fierce, police-state isolation. That is the tortured history against which Gorbachev now writhes, much as we wrestle with our own.

Every postwar summit has been dominated by the images and realities of that rivalry, of those two glowering camps.

Yet now, gradually, ineluctably, all that has changed--and far less as a result of the Administration’s bluster and bloated military budgets, which the Soviets, as always,would match sooner or later. What has really changed is a complex, plural world in which the two bullying rivals are no longer so predominant, in which Vietnamese farmers with black pajamas and AK-47s or Afghan tribesmen with Stinger missiles on their shoulders can humble a great power, in which boundaries and alliances and surplus warheads have much less to do with national security than economic vitality and social cohesion, in which the United States and the Soviet Union must turn away from their old indulgent conflict, with all its vested interests, and look to an insidious and mutual domestic decline that imperils their very greatness as nations.

That is the meaning of Gorbachev’s desperate effort to heal his own sclerotic, debased system, and the common ground, too, between glasnost and the obvious social ferment evident in the 1988 presidential campaign in the United States, in which the pleas of both Democratic and Republican candidates for new vitality and equity can sound strangely like Gorbachev exhorting a party congress. It is no accident, as the Soviets like to say, that Michael S. Dukakis is obviously a man of that new era, running not on foreign bogies or old quarrels but on his record for dynamic domestic management. Or that Vice President George Bush brags about his foreign-policy credentials ranging from the U.S. mission in China to the United Nations.

It would be enough to make ZaSu Pitts speechless. At the Kremlin this week, Reagan will be a long way from that old harangue in Hollywood. Whatever specific agreements they reach, he and Gorbachev will be truly ending the postwar era--a time of fear and ignorance of which we are all well rid.