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One specific bipartisan bow was the appointment of a special envoy to seek a peaceful solution in Central America. This was the brainchild of Maryland Congressman Clarence Long, chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that handles foreign aid. Long and his colleagues, however, were disappointed by Reagan's choice of former Democratic Senator Richard Stone of Florida (see box). They feel Stone is too aligned with the current Administration, for which he has undertaken several diplomatic missions in Central America, and with the deposed right-wing dictatorship of Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia in Guatemala, for which he served as a paid lobbyist. The White House held up the appointment for a day while aides assessed Stone's chances for confirmation by the Senate. Many Democrats felt the issue was irrelevant. "Rather than an envoy, we should have a good policy," said Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. "It's like a used car with a leaky transmission. You won't make it better by hiring a new salesman."
Reagan decided three weeks ago to make a major speech on Central America, initially at the urging of CIA Director William Casey and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. Both argued for a hard-line anti-Soviet address that would cast the region's problems in a stark East-West context. Kirkpatrick wrote an article last month arguing that denying aid to the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan insurgents "would be to make the U.S. the enforcer of [the late Soviet President Leonid] Brezhnev's doctrine of irreversible Communist revolution." In another article, Casey wrote that the problems in Central America reflected the Soviet Union's strategy of using surrogates like Nicaragua to spread its influence in the Third World.
The State Department was also eager for Reagan personally to take responsibility for selling the Administration's policies, but officials there argued that the hardline approach favored by Casey and Kirkpatrick would backfire. "The idea is to calm the opposition down," said one State Department official, "so that we can go ahead with what we're already doing." Reagan agreed. He made clear that he wanted to avoid the bellicose tone he had used in his "evil empire" speech in March. "I do not want a heavily anti-Soviet speech, because people will turn off their TV sets and say, 'There he goes again,' " Reagan told close aides. After receiving several drafts put together by a special team coordinated by the National Security Council, including one submitted later by Kirkpatrick, Reagan toned down much of the language and wrote six pages of additions in longhand. He also rejected a suggestion by Kirkpatrick that he announce a grand Marshall Plan for Latin America to tackle the continent's economic problems. The proposal struck him as unrealistic, since most of the Administration's less ambitious Caribbean Basin Initiative still has not been passed by Congress.