He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War, and reported the following:
On its ninety-ninth page, Engaging the Evil Empire brings us into a secret meeting. Convened by Ronald Reagan, the president meets with key foreign policy aides at the beginning of 1984 to discuss the future of US-Soviet relations. He has already given the famous “Ivan and Anya” speech of January 16, 1984, publicly committing to “constructive cooperation” with the Soviet Union. Now, the president and his advisers had to figure out how to make that work in practice.Learn more about Engaging the Evil Empire at the Cornell University Pres website.
Two elements shine through. First, a desire in the administration — especially on the part of the president himself — to directly engaging the Soviet leadership, an impulse that leads to the idea of inviting Konstantin Chernenko, leader of the Soviet Union, to attend the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. (This idea ultimately went nowhere, as the Kremlin boycotted the games in a tit-for-tat retaliation for the US boycott of the Moscow games in 1980.) Second, US officials sent signals to their Eastern bloc counterparts to affirm the White House’s sincerity and prevent Reagan’s message from being dismissed as grandstanding. Though these interlocutors were happy to hear it, some within the Reagan administration were not. Here, John Lenczowski of the National Security Council staff, denounces his boss’s apparent softening towards the Soviet Union.
Lenczowski’s dissatisfaction sets up the major argument of this book: Reagan did not change his mind on the Soviet Union, shifting from a policy of confrontation to one of cooperation, rather he had always seen relations with the Soviet Union as being a combination of the two. What changed was the balance between them. During the early 1980s, Reagan and his advisers felt the United States to be lagging behind the Soviet Union, while Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev believed that, for all its economic troubles, Moscow had pulled ahead in the Cold War competition. Just five years later, that situation had inverted. Brezhnev’s successors Iuriĭ Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko tried in vain to arrest Soviet decline while US power only grew. By 1985, a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, knew that he would have to take radical steps to reduce East-West tensions, and Reagan was ready and eager to consolidate US gains diplomatically.
Even though Reagan is famously associated with a strategy of maximum pressure, his desire to engage the Soviet leadership was sincere, and this page lists just a few of those efforts in a short timespan. Chernenko’s rebuffs, more a function of his ill health than a lack of desire — Chernenko in fact longed for the prominent, prestige-conferring summits which had characterized his mentor Brezhnev’s tenure — and yet Reagan persisted.
Random though it may be, applying the Page 99 Test to Engaging the Evil Empire gives a clear insight into some of the key mechanics at play in the book
--Marshal Zeringue
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