Three Days in Moscow
Page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Introduction: Finding Reagan
Prologue: The Walk
Part One: Reagan’s Destiny 1: Dream Maker
2: A Political Evolution
3: The Greatest Stage
4: A Revolution of Ideas
Part Two: Speaking Truth 5: The Trumpet Call
6: Ron and Mikhail
7: Iceland Freeze
8: “Tear Down This Wall!”
Part Three: Three Days in Moscow 9: The True Mission
10: Cry Freedom
11: The Speech
12: Morning in Moscow
Part Four: Dreams for the Future 13: The Fall
14: Without Firing a Shot
The Last Word: 2018
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Ronald Reagan’s Speech at Moscow State University
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Praise for Three Days in Moscow
Also by Bret Baier
Copyright
About the Publisher
Dedication
To my sons, Paul and Daniel, and their generation,
that they might inherit the legacy of
peace that Reagan envisioned
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Finding Reagan
Prologue: The Walk
Part One: Reagan’s Destiny
1: Dream Maker
2: A Political Evolution
3: The Greatest Stage
4: A Revolution of Ideas
Part Two: Speaking Truth
5: The Trumpet Call
6: Ron and Mikhail
7: Iceland Freeze
8: “Tear Down This Wall!”
Part Three: Three Days in Moscow
9: The True Mission
10: Cry Freedom
11: The Speech
12: Morning in Moscow
Part Four: Dreams for the Future
13: The Fall
14: Without Firing a Shot
The Last Word: 2018
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Ronald Reagan’s Speech at Moscow State University
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Praise for Three Days in Moscow
Also by Bret Baier
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Finding Reagan
The long, winding road up to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, is lined with banners picturing US presidents from George Washington to Donald Trump. They flap in the breeze, historical markers and patriotic flags—a reminder that the presidency is not about one man alone. As I exited my car at the top of the hill and walked toward the entrance, the hot sun beating on my back, I passed the tall bronze statue of our fortieth president at the entrance, making sure I touched Reagan’s outstretched hand, which is clearly worn on the palm by the thousands of visitors every day who make the same move—a presidential high five.
That day I was on a mission. With my fantastic coauthor, Catherine Whitney, and amazing researcher, Sydney Soderberg, both of whom I truly loved working with on the Dwight D. Eisenhower book, I was in search of the next focus, the next moment in presidential history that needed reexamination, the next speech that might have changed the world but that very few people at the time or since seemed to grasp the importance of—not to mention the very real prospect that a new generation might be reading about this president in an intimate way, or in any way, for the first time.
It was an equation that seemed to work well with Three Days in January, which focused on President Eisenhower’s farewell address, delivered three days before John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, then bounced back to Eisenhower’s life to show how he arrived at the convictions and the specific messages he expressed in that legendary eighteen-minute farewell speech from the Oval Office.
With Reagan, my interest settled on a speech near the end of his second term in office, in late May 1988, on a momentous trip to Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union. The purpose of that visit was to hold a fourth summit between Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. A lot happened on that now largely forgotten trip, but my attention was especially captured by the speech Reagan gave at Moscow State University.
I made my way back to the library, passed the entrance to the museum, and entered a room with familiar large wooden tables, similar to the setup at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. I pulled up a chair next to the gray cardboard box on the corner of the table. I flipped it open and thumbed through the contents. The folder I pulled out contained several drafts and a printout of the complete speech, along with a transcript of the question-and-answer session with Moscow State University students. I read through it but didn’t truly appreciate the genius of the speech and the Q&A until I heard President Reagan deliver it. Ten steps away, I put on headphones at another table and listened to the address delivered that day. I was struck by the complete absence of rancor—no veiled threats, no chest-thumping, no insults—only a hopeful message directed at young students just starting out. Reagan was funny, optimistic, and warm in a grandfatherly way. He expressed awe at all the wonders that awaited the young students—the one catch being that freedom was a prerequisite. He seemed to relish the moment, which had been a lifetime in the making—from anti-Communist activist to president touring Red Square and speaking to Soviet students.
Most experts believe the fourth summit between Reagan and Gorbachev was essentially just the final turn and dip in a long diplomatic dance over Reagan’s two terms. But looking at the text of the speech that day in Simi Valley, hearing it on audio, and eventually seeing it on video, it seemed to me to be much more than that.
President Reagan spoke to the college students in Moscow under a giant image of Vladimir Lenin, with confidence, optimism, self-assuredness, pride in his country, and knowledge that the Soviet Union’s days were numbered, telling the students at one point, “I want to talk not just of the realities of today but of the possibilities of tomorrow.”
And then, in the heart of Communist thought—the capital of communism—President Reagan delivered these words about freedom, not in a threatening or scolding way but in a “shining city on a hill,” hopeful manner:
Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream—to follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters. Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.
The speech can still evoke a thrill. It was an audacious challenge by a US president to a Soviet citizenry rocked by economic crisis and international conflicts. The speech sounded to many listeners like a siren call, an invitation to follow a different dream.
Looking at the words of the speech and then hearing and seeing them delivered was powerful for me. I was intrigued to learn how a relentless enemy of communism had helped orchestrate such a dramatic finale to an adversary he’d once called the “Evil Empire,” without firing a shot.
What was in his character and temperament that allowed him to collaborate with Gorbachev in a strategy of “peace through strength”? How did he stand firm on an opposing set of principles and still negotiate? He found a way. What is the measure of a man who could so completely capture the imagination of both the nation and the world?
UNLIKE THE EISENHOWER PRESIDENCY, which was before my time, I did have some sense of President Reagan’s two terms in office growing up. And it so happened I was in the Rose Garden with President Reagan just months before the Moscow summit.
I’m forty-seven, and in the fall of 1987, I was a senior in high school and the student council president at Marist School in Atlanta. With that position came the honor of representing Marist in Washington, DC, to accept a national excellence award on behalf of the school. So I traveled with Marist headmaster Father Joel Konzen to Washington for a ceremony at the White House.
I distinctly remember being struck by awe walking into the Rose Garden for the event—the sun shining, the White House gleaming, the garden manicured, the chairs lined up, the podium positioned. I can still see the White House press corps crowding into the back of the Rose Garden, a mass of television cameras, photographers, and reporters with notebooks milling around, waiting for the president to arrive.
President Reagan walked out of the Oval Office with his education secretary, William Bennett. Both men talked about the importance of education and of supporting schools that were succeeding, taking time to name and praise the schools being recognized for excellence that day, their student and faculty leaders all in attendance. When he was finished, Reagan started to walk back to the Oval Office, and ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson yelled out a question: “Mr. President, what is your reaction to the Bork nomination possibly dying in committee?” (Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s nomination was on the rocks at the time, and it was the story of the day in Washington.) Reagan ignored the reporter’s shouting at first but then turned and said, “Over my dead body,” before going inside. The next day, Bork’s nomination was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 9–5 vote. But Bork didn’t back down and the administration didn’t pull the nomination, despite quickly dwindling political support. Two weeks later, the full Senate voted against Bork’s confirmation 58–42. It was big news.
But in the mind of a seventeen-year-old student council president, it was irritating, obnoxious, and just plain rude of those reporters to interrupt our education excellence ceremony. I was so disturbed by it that I went back to Marist and penned an opinion editorial in the school newspaper, the Marist Blue & Gold. I was the sports editor of the paper, but the indignity in the Rose Garden had forced me to put on my news hat and to weigh in (so I thought at the time). This is part of what I wrote in an op-ed entitled “Press Needs Etiquette”:
The press has to respect others around them. They had no right to come into that ceremony and be obnoxious by yelling questions at the President as he walked away. I understand that they do need some way “to get the stories,” but I think that respect has a lot to do with it also.
The president did not walk into the Rose Garden on October 5 to deliver a press conference; he walked in there to deliver a speech to schools of excellence, and tell them to keep up the good work. The press gets plenty of time as it is without using someone else’s.
Fast-forward exactly twenty years, and as chief White House correspondent for Fox News, an older Bret Baier was back in the Rose Garden yelling questions at then president George W. Bush as he walked away from the podium. Older and wiser, I understood more fully that such questions, uncomfortable as they may be, are the bedrock of our free press. Fast-forward ten years from there, and as Fox News chief political anchor and host of Special Report with Bret Baier, I now regularly invite then education secretary and now radio talk show host Bill Bennett on the Special Report panel to talk about the stories of the day. Bennett often lists the ways in which the White House press corps seems to have it out for President Donald Trump. From that October 5, 1987, Rose Garden event at the White House to now, it all comes full circle.
Which brings me back to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. In early 2017, I went there during my Three Days in January book tour to deliver a speech about President and General Eisenhower, telling a packed house stories of a humble leader who had never forgotten his small-town roots in Abilene, Kansas. At a homecoming speech in 1945, General Eisenhower said, “The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene.” A few years later, he became president. Running for a second term, shortly before Election Day 1956, President Eisenhower took questions from viewers in a made-for-TV event called “The People Ask the President.” Ike again harkened back, as he often did, to Abilene, saying, “I belong to a family of boys who were raised in meager circumstances in central Kansas, and every one of us earned our way as we went along, and it never occurred to us that we were poor, but we were.”
There are many similarities between the thirty-fourth and the fortieth presidents. But one of the deepest was their small-town sensibility. Marlin Fitzwater, President Reagan’s press secretary, who happened to be from Abilene, Kansas, saw this connection between the two men. “Governor and then President Reagan always took the conversation back to Dixon, Illinois, where he grew up,” Fitzwater told me. “I’ve always believed the absolute biggest and most compelling force in Ronald Reagan’s life was the goodness that he saw in the American people, and that is a small-town goodness. People in Abilene and Dixon believe in each other, believe in the country, and basically they just think their friends and neighbors are good people. Reagan thought that to his last day. Presidents Reagan and Eisenhower knew themselves and knew how they felt about America. They were both just decent guys. Shared small-town values.”
And with that connective tissue from the focus of my first book in the “Three Days” presidential series, I’ve found the second: President Ronald Reagan, his speech to students at Moscow State University during the final summit with the Soviets, and how he arrived at that point and those messages throughout his life. Its publication will come on the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow summit, a fitting memorial at a moment in history when we once again face forces of evil on a global scale.
Like Eisenhower, Reagan is a leader we turn to still. Barely a day goes by when someone—a colleague, a viewer, a friend, a person on my social media feed—doesn’t mention Reagan, wondering what he’d have to say about the world we’ve inherited or wishing we had him back. He continues to speak to us as we navigate these uneasy times. He would have preached vigilance. “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” he said in 1961, long before becoming president. “We didn’t pass it on to our children in their bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same.”
—Bret Baier
May 2018
Prologue
The Walk
May 29, 1988
Moscow
Nancy Reagan, looking poised and elegant in a dark gray Oscar de la Renta dress with a white bow-tied collar, gathered the administration staff, advance team, and Secret Service agents in an ornate living room of Spaso House. It was late in the afternoon of the Reagans’ arrival day in Moscow, and they were staying at the historic yellow mansion, home of US ambassador Jack Matlock. The mood of the staff and officials who stood around Nancy was upbeat and expectant, if not a little awestruck. Here were the president of the United States and the first lady on a first-time visit to the heart of the Soviet Union, the place Reagan had once called the “Evil Empire.” As Nancy wrote a decade later in her memoir, “If someone had told me when Ronnie and I were first married that we would eventually travel to Moscow as president and first lady, and would be the honored guests of the Soviet leadership, I would have suggested that he get his head examined.”
The opening of relations was tentative but hopeful, a romance still in a delicate early stage, marred by tension but buttressed by a genuine chemistry between the tw
o principals, Reagan and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. The Reagan visit followed a similar trip to the United States by Gorbachev only six months earlier. During his visit, the American people had showered “Gorby” with goodwill. They found him charming and were buoyed by his growing friendship with the president, never before seen from a Soviet leader. Now it was Reagan’s turn.
Beneath the pomp and glitter, Reagan understood that this wasn’t a ceremonial visit. Despite their personal chemistry, Reagan and Gorbachev were combatants, playing out the endgame of a decades-long battle for the future of civilization. In the final months of his presidency, Reagan intended to show the world that the democratic principles he espoused were the only road to the future. It was a message he thought might be welcomed by the long-suffering citizenry of Moscow, whose daily lives were burdened by matters of survival—standing in long lines for poor-quality products, enduring waiting lists for the most basic housing, suffering chronic shortages of fruit, vegetables, and meat, struggling with outdated technology when it was available at all—and the heavy hand of oppressive paternalism, which told them what to say, where to go, and what to believe.
Whatever noble ideals might have existed in the minds and hearts of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, the Communist system had grown corrupt and unworkable, with a legacy of famine, labor camps for perceived enemies, religious persecution, steady economic decline, and a mad expansionism that was crippling the USSR’s satellite nations and threatening its very existence. Gorbachev shared many of those concerns; they were the impetus for his program of reform called perestroika, which was designed to eliminate corruption and waste and shift the command economy to a more market-based system. But progress was slow, and the sluggish and overbearing state machinery made it impossible to initiate more rapid and widespread changes. The citizens were growing restless.
“People in the Soviet Union used to say, ‘We open the fridge and don’t see perestroika inside,’ ” Daniel Aarão Reis, a professor of contemporary history at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, said of that time. Instead of getting better, things were getting worse. By the time of Reagan’s Moscow visit, Gorbachev’s popularity at home was in decline and he had many establishment enemies. “His growing loneliness reflected his conscious choice to be a reformer determined to forge ahead despite the increasing political risk,” his aide Andrei Grachev wrote. He was desperate and looking for a lifeline from Reagan.