Falling Short

The speech went through half a dozen drafts. Twice that many hands tinkered with it, inserting paragraphs here, deleting phrases there. Anecdotes were added, then dropped. Republican Senators trooped into the Oval Office to ! argue that it should be toughened; others telephoned White House aides to have it weakened. A committee of competing factions swapped sentences and traded adjectives. On the day the address was to be given, a former aide to George Shultz was called in to verify whether some marginal notes were from the hand of the Secretary of State; they were not and thus were ignored. The haggling over President Reagan's long-awaited speech on U.S. policy toward South Africa reflected the deep uncertainty that exists on that issue even within the Administration. Many White House aides thought it was politically self-destructive and ought not be given at all. At one point a decision was made to cancel it. In the end, though, it had one particularly firm and powerful advocate inside the White House: Ronald Reagan, who had never given a major address on South Africa in his 6 1/2 years as President, wanted to set the record straight.

His 25-minute speech, given not in the glare of prime time but to at afternoon gathering of foreign-policy groups, offered nothing new in the way of putting pressure on the intransigent Afrikaner-led South African government. Although it was meant to calm the debate over sanctions, it brought the issue to such a head that by week's end Reagan's aides were scurrying to hint that his policy could change. The Senate, led by rebellious Republicans, proceeded to draw up a bill to apply further sanctions. Desmond Tutu, the Anglican Archbishop-elect of South Africa, called the speech "nauseating" and added that "the West, for my part, can go to hell." As New York Times Columnist James Reston put it, "Reagan tried unsuccessfully to persuade the extremists on both sides and lost the moderates in the process."

Although billed as the culmination of a two-month "reassessment" of U.S. policy, the speech was actually a reassertion of the President's policy of constructive engagement, a call for continuing efforts to persuade rather than pressure Pretoria to abandon apartheid and speed efforts to prepare for power sharing with South Africa's black majority. By turns defiant and defensive, Reagan seesawed between condemnations of apartheid as "morally wrong and politically unacceptable" and qualified praise of South African leaders for bringing about "dramatic change." He denounced the "Soviet-armed guerrillas of the African National Congress," the banned but influential black political party led by Oliver Tambo and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela.

The President argued against what he called the "emotional clamor for punitive sanctions." Such a "historic act of folly," he insisted, would wreck the economies of neighboring African nations, undermine the forces for reform in South Africa and endanger America's strategic interests. "Victims of an economic boycott of South Africa would be the very people we seek to help," he said. "We need not a Western withdrawal but deeper involvement by the Western business community, as agents of change and progress and growth."