THE REAGANAUTS 35Harvard’s professor of Russian history Richard Pipes, challenged the
CIA’s assumption that Soviet economic decline prevented Moscow
from matching American military capacity.^2 Pipes himself thought it
hardly worth the effort to talk to the Kremlin leadership. Any treaty on
strategic weapons limitation, in his opinion, would simply enable
Brezhnev and the Politburo to put off the day of final crisis. American
policy should be centred upon ‘the nature of the Soviet regime’. Until
such time as the leaders of the USSR instituted a radical reform of the
internal system of power, America could achieve nothing with them in
international relations. Pipes warned that Soviet leaders might decide
that war with America was preferable to the dismantling of commu-
nism. Reform was consequently far from being inevitable. Team B’s
argument’s impressed Reagan, who put Pipes in charge of the Soviet
and East European desk on his National Security Council. Pipes con-
sented to work for the administration for only the first half of the
presidential term since he was reluctant to forfeit his tenured Harvard
post.^3 National Security Adviser Richard Allen admired his ‘war-like
proclivities’ and welcomed him on these terms.^4
When entering the White House, Reagan was drawing on the sup-
port of groups that sprang up to oppose any ill-considered concessions
to the USSR in the arms talks. The best organized association was the
Committee on the Present Danger. Among its leading figures were
David Packard of the Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lane Kirkland of the
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organiza-
tions. Another was Reagan’s foreign policy adviser Richard Allen. They
highlighted what they saw as a military imbalance between America
and the USSR. They claimed that America was being gulled by the
Kremlin. Parallel to the Committee on the Present Danger were a
number of organizations such as the Madison Group and the Heritage
Foundation. Reagan drew his officials abundantly from such groups.
No one he appointed was soft on communism. Just once, Paul Nitze
- the chief American negotiator at the arms talks at Geneva – let out
the idea that the Americans wanted to get to a situation where they
could ‘live and let live’ with the USSR. This was too much for Wa l l
Street Journal conservative commentator Irving Kristol, who asked
what was going on inside the administration.^5
The best-known of Reagan’s appointees was Alexander Haig.
Though Caspar Weinberger, William Casey and George Shultz were
considered, it was Haig who became Secretary of State. Haig had
been President Nixon’s chief of staff who had gone on to head NATO