How did President Reagan take that event?
He took it with a great deal of grace and style. I remember a speech that Peggy Noonan had written for him. There was another speech later on when the Marine barracks was blown up that Peggy Noonan wrote. It was very articulate. It was very eloquent. That speech … there was a presage of that speech at the ceremony for the employees of the American embassy who had been killed. It was a very touching scene. He did it with great grace. But on the other hand, it steeled the administration and its determination to mount some kind of an effective response to terrorism, and there weren’t any obvious ways of doing it. U.S. military power was obviously limited in what it could do to deter terrorism. There were things they could do to retaliate, to punish, but that wasn’t going to do anything to deter future actions, unless you could so overwhelmingly intimidate a state actor and state sponsor that they would stop doing it. But that clearly was not feasible. So there was a whole program of dis
