342 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
that if he had been involved in the talks, he would not have settled for
as little as Reagan. Shultz did not conceal his irritation on ABC
News.^23 Reagan’s old friend William F. Buckley shared Kissinger’s
doubts. In January 1987 he wrote that Reagan’s words sounded as if
they had come out of Pravda and Izvestiya: ‘What Mr Reagan refuses
to dwell on is that men and women who by no means believe war is
inevitable, believe that the INF treaty weakens the West’s deterrent
posture.’^24 On 5 May, when Buckley’s National Review raised an alarm
about national security, Reagan remonstrated that he had definitely
not gone soft on the USSR. He wrote that he still regarded it as an
evil empire; he also made the less than accurate claim that he had
told Gorbachëv at Reykjavik that if Soviet leaders failed to agree on
re ducing stockpiles of nuclear weaponry, they would restart an arms
race they could not win. He made clear his commitment to ‘a redress-
ing of the conventional-weapon imbalance’.^25
This did not deflect Buckley from publishing a critical article by
Nixon and Kissinger in the same month.^26 It was months before he
accepted the President’s assurances, and he continued to accentuate
the probability that Congress would remove adequate funding for the
Strategic Defense Initiative after Reagan had left office. He sympa-
thized with those West European powers which looked on American
ballistic missiles as the crucial deterrent against Soviet military black-
mail; and he noted that he had plenty of American conservative
friends on his side of the argument.^27
Reagan took note of the unease that was made manifest after the
December 1987 Washington summit. Buckley raised objections about
Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Mozambique and Angola: ‘If Gorbachev is
indeed going to turn his back on the faith of his fathers, God bless
him. The point is that it has not happened.’^28 George Will went as far
as comparing Reagan to Neville Chamberlain: ‘There was similar dis-
agreement – majority euphoria, minority dismay – in Britain when a
summit, at Munich, supposedly domesticated Hitler.’^29 Reagan could
see that if he wished to continue his search with Gorbachëv for peace,
he had to dispel the doubts that were being expressed. He also had to
promote more people to office who would help Shultz and the State
Department. He could not afford to let anyone rampage around as
Weinberger had done. They had served their purpose in intimidating
the Politburo. Without Weinberger, Gorbachëv might have refused to
alter his bargaining posture as he eventually did in March 1987. But