Despite a growing international movement to topple apartheid in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan maintained a close alliance with a South African government that was showing no signs of serious reform. And the Reagan administration demonized opponents of apartheid, most notably the African National Congress, as dangerous and pro-communist. Reagan even vetoed a bill to impose sanctions on South Africa, only to be overruled by Congress. 

On a trip to the United States after winning the Nobel Prize in 1984, Bishop Desmond Tutu memorably declared that Reagan’s policy was ”immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” Reagan’s record on South Africa was also marked by at least one embarrassing gaffe, when he told a radio interviewer in 1985: “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country — the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated — that has all been eliminated.” Of course, that was simply not true, and Reagan later walked the statement back. 

To learn more about  Reagan’s policy on South Africa, I spoke with David Schmitz, a historian at Whitman College who has written widely on U.S. foreign policy. His new book is a biography of Brent Scowcroft. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Where did things stand between the U.S. and South Africa when Reagan entered office in 1981?

Carter had imposed sanctions and restrictions on South Africa and also had publicly criticized the South African government many times. Reagan went back to supporting the government, and he did it under the guise of the policy of “constructive engagement.” This policy had been worked out by Chester Crocker, later a Reagan State Department official, who wrote about it in Foreign Affairs in 1980.

Can you define that term, constructive engagement?

The idea of constructive engagement was that there were moderates in the South African government and so you wanted to encourage them. And if you constructively engaged with them, they would promote gradual change, political reform and so on. But to just oppose the government would make it intransigent and that would create greater polarization, and that was a situation that only extremists would benefit from. The Reagan administration saw the African National Congress (ANC) as a dangerous, pro-communist movement. So the notion of constructive engagement was gradual reform. It was also linked to Reagan supporting the Sullivan principles as a proper way to bring about change.

What were the Sullivan principles?

They were an idea promoted by an American religious leader, Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister in Philadelphia. What he said was that, if corporations agree to certain standards of fair employment in South Africa, they shouldn’t be subjected to protests or divestiture. At that time there were a lot of protests in the United States demanding that universities and corporations divest from South Africa. Sullivan argued that these principles would be part of a middle ground between two extremes that would allow for change and betterment of the conditions of blacks in South Africa. Reagan seized upon that. Constructive engagement was presented as a middle ground between apartheid forever and those that wanted immediate change — which Reagan and Crocker argued would lead to chaos that the Soviets would take advantage of.

So what did that policy mean on the ground? Were the two governments close?

Yes, the Reagan administration worked very closely with [South African Prime Minister] P.W. Botha. He came to Washington and there were meetings in Europe as well. Reagan gave a lot of public support to the South African government, portraying Botha as a moderate who was willing to start political reforms and would stay on the side of the United States and help us block Soviet influence in southern Africa.

How did that square with what was actually going on in South Africa?

Nothing was going on. The reforms were cosmetic at best. Sullivan would eventually say in 1987 that it didn’t work. The crackdown of 1986 and the reimposition of martial law just made a total lie out of the notion that there were moderates in the Afrikaner government.