The View from the Street Corner

By Otto Friedrich

Americans feel anxiety, but little antagonism toward the Soviets

When Ronald Reagan won the presidency by a landslide, he seemed to have a national mandate backing his repeated calls for stronger U.S. defenses and a forceful response to any Soviet challenge. But how solid is that support three years later?

To help answer this question, TIME commissioned a special poll by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Inc. The results indicate that a great many Americans have reservations about the Reagan Administration's policies toward the Soviet Union. Although most of them approve of the President's assertive use of U.S. power, 60% say they worry a lot about "the possibility of nuclear war." To expand on the poll, TIME correspondents and stringers in 28 U.S. cities questioned a random sampling of people--not experts, just ordinary people--to see what lay behind their views and how those views had changed during the past year.

One of the most striking findings in these street-corner interviews is the relative rarity of any sharp hostility toward the U.S.S.R., and particularly toward the Soviet people. There is wariness and anxiety in the land, considerably more so than a year ago, but very little of the antagonism that marked the height of the cold war in the early 1950s. The Soviets were widely regarded then as a belligerent, ruthless and implacable enemy; Americans today seem more inclined to emphasize the similarities between the two nations and to blame their conflicts largely on misunderstandings.

There are still many people (some surveys put the total at about 20%) who share Reagan's hostility toward what he has called "the evil empire." "I think we're at war, without shooting each other directly," says Dan Wolf, 56, a sales executive in Atlanta. "I think they've been planning military moves against us for years." Sara Henderson, 39, who owns a flower store in Boulder, Colo., agrees: "Their pattern of aggression ever since World War II has been very deliberate, and planned thoroughly and thoughtfully."

Hammond Chaffetz, 76, an antitrust lawyer in Chicago, has been suspicious even longer, going back to New Deal days. Says he: "We could never trust the Russians then, and we cannot now. They have newer equipment than ours and the strongest conventional forces in the world today. If we gave up competing with them and let them have the balance of power, Europe would immediately give up on us."

The history of European conflicts strikes other people very differently. Little Rock's W.J. Wiser, 66, a retired executive of the U.S. Department of Labor, recalls when Moscow and Washington were allies. "I was in World War II, and had it not been for the Soviet Union, we would be doing the goose step and shouting 'Sieg Heil!' They have been invaded; we have not. They don't like our attitude of shoving our military in their backyard. They are protecting their interests, just as we would do."

Quite apart from World War II, many Americans share Wisor's view of the Soviet Union not as an ideologically fanatic opponent but as an equal counterpart to the U.S. "We're both hostile to each other, and they're just as right as we are," says Robert Mulligan, 20, an electrician in Palisades Park, N.J. Agrees Dorothy Bender, 63, who heads the senior citizens' club in Huntington Woods, Mich.: "I don't think they do any more to us than we do to them. They're a power, and they want to let people know they're a power and not to mess with them." Judy Henning, 45, an executive in Los Angeles, puts it another way: "The Russians are as frightened of us as we are of them."

Most Americans make a clear distinction between the Soviet rulers and their citizens. "I don't think the Russian people are any different from Americans," says Jill Breslow, 21, a senior at Brandeis University. Despite their sympathy, however, most Americans also regard the people of the Soviet Union as misled, misinformed and essentially helpless. Toward the Kremlin, on the other hand, they feel some anger and considerable anxiety, and both feelings have been increasing for a variety of reasons. Many cite the shooting down of the Korean airliner in September; others speak of the Middle East or Poland or the arms race; some, like Harry Lockenour, 46, an autoworker at the General Motors plant in Pontiac, Mich., just say, "I think they're getting more aggressive all the time."

"They do more to make us feel threatened because of their doctrine that they must conquer the earth," says Richard Hammer, 49, a utility-company executive in Suffern, N.Y. "Up until lately, I didn't think about it too much, but with the U.S. Pershing missiles being sent to Europe, and the Soviet walkout in the arms talks, I've become more afraid about what could happen. I think we made a mistake with the Pershing missiles. [The Soviets] can deploy more missiles too. I'm wary now."

"I can't say I'm afraid of them," says Leo Rasmussen, 42, mayor of Nome, Alaska. "But angry? Yeah. I'm more angry than I was a year ago. Especially after the Korean airliner incident." Deedee Corradini, 39, who has a master's degree in psychology and runs a consulting firm in Salt Lake City, is well aware that "the more you fear, the more hostile you become," but the destruction of the Korean jet changed her views too. "I used to think the Soviets weren't as bad as they had been painted," she says, "but the airliner attack has made me more suspicious of their intentions." Maureen Morrison, 22, who works as a security guard in Cambridge, Mass., says of the incident, "I used to think they were just being made out to be the bad guys, but now I'm beginning to think they are bad."

The fears that Americans have about Moscow often appear to be part of a general anxiety about leadership on both sides of the confrontation, about a situation that seems beyond anyone's control. Alice Gagnard, 26, a professor of journalism at Marquette University, cites the downing of the Korean plane as an example of Soviet misjudgment and overreaction, but also as evidence of a wider problem. "Their threat has been on my mind more since we changed Administrations and since they changed leaders," she says. "We both have contingency plans against each other, and our level of preparedness has taken us beyond the question of a freeze. It's now a matter of being in the same room of explosives with all those matches:"

Karrie Olson, 26, a clothing store executive in Seattle, feels that the Soviets have become more menacing, and, she says, "I am frightened that as time goes on, as they acquire more and more power, someone--not necessarily the Soviets, but someone--might blow up the world. But when I think about who it might actually be that would start a nuclear war, it's just kind of a blur in my mind."

Most Americans speak of the Soviets as people they have never seen, except as figures occasionally spotted on television, but a good many are trying to remedy that state of mutual isolation. Some members of the United Church of Christ, for example, invited the Soviets to send a group of visitors on a tour of New England. Last April came a newspaper editor, a Russian Orthodox bishop, a scientist and six others, who stayed in rural homes and ate pot-luck dinners. "It was the first time many of these people had ever done anything like this," says Elizabeth Gardner, who helped organize the tour and whose husband Clint was finishing an exchange visit to the Soviet Union in December. "It proved to a lot of people that the Soviets are human beings with human concerns, just like us," she says. "I think Americans tend to forget that."

"I've lived in both countries, and both remind me of people looking at the undersides of cars--seeing only the bad side," says Dr. James Muller, who was one of the first Americans to study medicine at a Soviet university, and who is now trying to arrange for at least 30 doctors from each nation to visit the other side's hospitals next June. "That is not to say that the Soviet Union is all good. It isn't. No one is. But there is some good, and our objectives, to some degree, are the same. We should concentrate on that."

Despite their anxiety, Americans seem to remain convinced that the ultimate nightmare will never occur. Partly this is a belief that the Soviets are not strong enough to attack, that deterrence works. Bailey Thompson, 34, editorial-page editor of the Shreveport (La.) Journal, recently returned from a three-week trip through the Soviet Union, and suspects that "they are changing their strategy in Western Europe, and may be contemplating a nonnuclear blitzkrieg." But he adds: "Right now, I don't see any possibility of overt action against the West." Michael Fitch, 36, an electrician from Waterford, Mich., puts it simply: "We have our missiles and they have theirs."

Partly, though, the belief that the unthinkable will remain unthinkable is a matter less of strategic judgment than of inherent optimism, or perhaps simply faith. Tom Allan, 36, is a program-control supervisor for Raytheon in Portsmouth, R.I. Much of Raytheon's work is military, but Allan refuses to believe that nuclear war is possible. "I think the people of the world will prevent it," he says, "the everyday people, the bulk of the populace of the world. I don't think anyone really wants to have a head-to-head confrontation that might result in something that could annihilate the entire world."

--By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Robert Carney/New York and Benjamin W. Cate/Los Angeles, with other bureaus

With reporting by Robert Carney/New York, Benjamin W. Cate/Los Angeles