An excerpt from “Hard Line” appeared on the open page of The New York Times last week, taking us back to the early ’80s, when Perle, then an assistant secretary of defense, jousted with another ambitious young operator, Richard Burt, an assistant secretary of state. They were known in Washington as “the two Richards.” Ideologically and tactically, they served as point men for their respective bosses, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz, who disagreed frequently on how to handle the Soviet Union. Perle came across as a hard-liner, reflexively suspicious of arms control or any other deals with Moscow. Burt was cast as a pragmatic diplomat, seeking accommodation with the Kremlin. They fought a legendary bureaucratic war, with position papers and news leaks as their principal ammunition. Each man’s objective was to win the inattentive mind of Ronald Reagan.
Perle’s version of the Reagan family feud conjures up a turning-point summit conference in Helsinki in 1986. It’s the spit and image of a real summit held in Reykjavik that year, when Reagan nearly stumbled into sweeping concessions on nuclear arms. Characters representing Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are onstage, along with a Kremlin mole who feeds secrets to the Americans. But the real protagonists are fictionalized versions of Perle and Burt. Michael Waterman (Perle) is a compulsive worker; he is chronically late and neglectful of his family, but a gifted cook and a hero to his staff-not unlike the author. Dan Bennet (Burt) is snide and WASPish, snobbishly rude to his underlings and better dressed than the man upon whom he is modeled. He is determined to reach agreements with Moscow at any cost. As the fictional summit nears its conclusion, Bennet tries to conceal vital information from the president, while Waterman struggles to save the West from the threat of total nuclear disarmament.
The subtext of the novel is an argument over who won the cold war. According to Perle, it was the free-spending hard-liners in the Pentagon, not the accommodating Bennets, who brought Moscow to its knees. Burt, now a consultant in Washington, has the sense not to argue with fiction. He says the novel shows that " it’s not as easy to write one of these books as people think." In real life, Burt became ambassador to West Germany in 1985, bringing the war of the two Richards to an end a year before the Reykjavik summit. He remembers Perle as “an unsurpassed political operator” and says that when he himself came to Washington, he was “naive,” a characterization sure to evoke chuckles from his friends. Burt says that if the book is made into a movie, his part should be played by Kevin Costner. But “Hard Line” is not likely to reach the screen. This version of Washington will never play in Hollywood.
