Abstract
At 12:22 a.m., Washington time, on Sunday, October 23, a suicide bomber crashed an explosive-filled truck into the US marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 marines. In Augusta, Reagan was woken up early, 2:27 a.m., for the second successive day by McFarlane to be told: “We’ve had a terrible attack on the marines with a substantial loss of life.”1 It was the start of a long and arduous day for Reagan; he later remembered it as the “saddest day of my presidency, perhaps the saddest day of my life.”2 Reagan met with McFarlane and Shultz for two hours before making the two-hour flight Washington.
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Notes
Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 443. At that moment the number of known fatalities was 46. Don Oberdorfer, “Reagan Sought to End Cuban ‘Intervention,’” Washington Post, November 6, 1983, A21.
Duane Clarridge, with Digby Diehl, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997), 254.
Ralph Kinney Bennett, “Grenada: Anatomy of a ‘Go’ Decision,” Reader’s Digest, February 1984, 75. Reagan reportedly also reasoned, “We cannot let an act of terrorism determine whether we aid or assist our allies in the region. If we do that, who will ever trust us again?” Ed Magnuson, Douglas Brew, Bernard Diederich, and William McWhirter, “D-Day in Grenada.” Time, November 7, 1983, 20.
Peter Fraser, “A Revolutionary Governor-General? The Grenada Crisis of 1983,” in Constitutional Heads and Political Crises: Commonwealth Episodes, 1945–85, ed. Donald Low (London: Macmillan, 1988), 154.
Geoffrey Bourne, “Revolution, Intervention and Nutrition: What Happened in Grenada,” Nutrition Today (January/February 1985): 22.
William Gilmore, The Grenada Intervention: Analysis and Documentation (London: Mansell, 1984), 93–94.
Joseph Metcalf, “Decision Making and the Grenada Rescue Operation,” in Ambiguity and Command: Organizational Perspectives on Military Decision Making, ed. James March, Roger Weissinger-Baylon, and Pauline Ryan (London: Pitman, 1988), 283. Present at the meeting were Metcalf, McDonald, deputy commander of JTF 120 Major General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the 82nd Airborne forces Major General Edward Trobaugh, commander of the Special Operations forces Major General Richard Scholtes, the JCS’s deputy director for plans and policy Commodore Jack Darby, and Craig Johnstone from the State Department. In a highly unusual arrangement State had sent Darby and Johnstone to ensure that the military did not find a reason to delay the operation.
Peter Bourne, “Was the U.S. Invasion Necessary?” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1983, section 4, 1.
Constantine Menges, Inside the National Security Council: The True Story of the Making and Unmaking of Reagan’s Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 83.
Reynold Burrowes, Revolution and Rescue in Grenada: An Account of the U.S.- Caribbean Intervention (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 134.
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© 2007 Gary Williams
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Williams, G. (2007). Planning an Intervention. In: US-Grenada Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609952_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609952_8
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