Three Days in Moscow

by Bret Baier

  The Reagans had arrived at Vnukovo International Airport earlier in the afternoon, to be greeted by Soviet dignitaries and a crowd of US Embassy workers. In an unusual move, Soviet TV covered the arrival live—a nod to Gorbachev’s program of glasnost, literally meaning “openness.” As the Reagans sped toward the Kremlin in the armored Cadillac that had been flown from Washington for their use, groups of Muscovites lined the roadways to watch and wave. As they neared the center of the city, the crowds became larger, and people stood on high-rise balconies to watch. Two blimps, pulling giant Soviet and US flags, circled lazily overhead.

  Reagan was relaxed and rested following a four-day stopover in Helsinki, some five hundred miles away. The American media speculated that the seventy-seven-year-old president needed a break before making what could be the most significant diplomatic trip of his presidency. But one could hardly fault Reagan for the wisdom of that strategy, which allowed him to recover from jet lag (given the eight-hour time difference) before meeting Gorbachev face-to-face on his own turf.

  Arriving at the Grand Kremlin Palace, a structure of breathtaking mass and majesty, the Reagans went inside and walked up a long staircase to the second floor. They entered St. George Hall, a chandeliered marble room the size of a football field, lined with eighteen columns topped with statues featuring Russian military leaders. As they walked down the long red carpet, Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev appeared at the opposite end, coming toward them. They met in the middle—high symbolism—smiling and shaking hands. Raisa presented Nancy with a bouquet of two dozen pink roses.

  At the opening ceremony, Gorbachev gave the couple a warm welcome, and Reagan responded in kind. The two men pointedly traded proverbs. “Mr. President,” Gorbachev said, “you and Mrs. Reagan are here on your first visit to the Soviet Union, a country which you have so often mentioned in your public statements. Aware of your interest in Russian proverbs, let me add another one to your collection: ‘It is better to see once than to hear a hundred times.’ ”

  When it was his turn to speak, Reagan, who had practiced the pronunciation of a Russian proverb on the plane, said, “In the past, Mr. General Secretary, you’ve taken note of my liking for Russian proverbs. And so as not to disappoint anyone on this visit, I thought I would mention a literary saying from your past, another example of your people’s succinct wisdom. Rodilsya, ne toropilsya. It was born, it wasn’t rushed.” Gorbachev smiled, seeming to approve. It was a moment of mutual understanding.

  After the ceremony, Reagan and Gorbachev met privately for a time while Raisa took Nancy on a tour. The two women had never had a warm relationship. Nancy disliked Raisa’s imperiousness and penchant for lecturing her on the benefits of communism. She’d made a point of studying up on Russian culture and the Soviet Union before the visit, hoping to hold her own. The eagle-eyed press was always on the lookout for the slightest sign of a chill between the two women, and this trip was no different. Leading up to the visit, many articles were published speculating on the “wives’ summit.” A cartoon by Phoenix Gazette cartoonist Len “Boro” Borozinski depicted Nancy and Raisa arm wrestling while their husbands happily pumped hands.

  As they strolled through Assumption Cathedral, the oldest church in Moscow, Raisa talked nonstop as Nancy listened with rigid posture and an expressionless face. When she was finally able to get a word in, the first lady asked if the cathedral was used for religious services.

  “Nyet,” Raisa replied curtly.

  “Oh, yes,” Nancy said with a withering tone. “The word ‘nyet,’ that I understand.”

  Coincidentally, their husbands were also talking about religion and human rights. The private meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev had not been on the schedule, and as aides hovered outside, eagerly awaiting a report from the translator, they didn’t know that Reagan had decided to directly raise the issue of religious freedom. Referring to the Jews who wanted to emigrate, he asked Gorbachev, “Did it ever occur to you, on this whole question of human rights, that maybe if these Jews were permitted to worship as they want to, and teach their children the Hebrew language, that maybe they wouldn’t want to leave the Soviet Union?”

  Gorbachev was briefly taken aback that the president was so quick to bring up such a sensitive topic. But Reagan’s comment foreshadowed a theme he would return to as a core purpose of the visit. He made a point of often bringing up religion. Turning personal, he confided to Gorbachev that there was one thing he had always wanted to do for his son Ron, who was an avowed atheist. He wished to serve him the perfect gourmet dinner, and at the end, after Ron had thoroughly enjoyed the meal, he would ask him if he believed there was a cook. He wondered how his son would answer. Gorbachev replied that the only possible answer was yes.

  Now it was day’s end, and they were back at Spaso House, the residence of the US ambassador, which could be considered a US oasis a mile from the Kremlin—if you didn’t mind that the rooms were probably bugged. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief that the arrival had passed without incident. Until Nancy Reagan gathered everyone together.

  “We thought she was just going to say, ‘It’s great to have you all here on this historic occasion,’ ” press secretary Marlin Fitzwater recalled. “But she announced, ‘The president and I want to go for a walk among the people. We want to talk to Soviet citizens.’ ”

  A hush fell over the room as everyone grasped what she was saying. No preparations had been made for a walk outside. The area she had in mind, a couple hundred yards from Spaso House, called the Arbat, was a pedestrian mall open to artists, vendors, and cafés, crowded with pushcarts selling sack dolls, vegetables, and food. The Arbat was surrounded by large limestone apartment houses, with windows facing the street. It was a security team’s nightmare.

  Ray Shaddick, the seasoned Secret Service detail leader (he’d been with Reagan during the assassination attempt in 1981), told Nancy that they hadn’t coordinated a public stroll with the Moscow police or KGB, perhaps thinking that would settle the matter. Advance man James Hooley added his concerns. But Nancy was insistent. The president had decided that this summit would not be conducted solely in the privacy of conference rooms. He and Nancy planned to be as public as possible. “This was the last act,” Fitzwater said. “He wanted to show freedom of assembly, and he wanted to talk to the Russian people. He talked about that privately all the time, and I think Gorbachev’s attitude towards him was good enough to allow Reagan to think in terms of the Russian people being different from the Russian government—that they cared about the same things we cared about.”

  Nancy asked the Secret Service agents, the advance team, and the president’s advisors to join her in her bedroom to continue the discussion. As they gathered around her bed, she said, “I don’t want to hear any more talk about what you can’t do and who you’ve talked to and what the KGB think and all of that. My question is, Can we do this or not? Yes or no?”

  Everyone turned to look at Shaddick. It was his call.

  Shaddick didn’t say no, which Nancy took as a yes.

  “Fine,” she said. “We go in fifteen minutes.”

  They rushed out of the room to make what arrangements they could.

  The Secret Service called for additional agents to come, and notified the police and KGB. Fitzwater quickly gathered the press pool and instructed them to stay close together, like a flock of ducklings, outside the embassy door so they could fall in line behind the first couple.

  At 6:10 P.M., the Reagans appeared, casually walking down the spiral staircase, and were on their way. They ducked into their limo to ride the mere two hundred feet to the Arbat. It was crowded on that Sunday afternoon, and by the time they departed their vehicle, people were rushing in from every side, cheering and running toward them. The Secret Service and KGB formed a protective ring around the Reagans, but it was bedlam. In the crush of bodies, people were shouting “We can’t see you!” So Reagan climbed onto an open vegetable cart, pulling Nancy up beside him, as the crowd swelled forward.
Reagan didn’t have a microphone, but he shouted to be heard, calling out, “I’m so happy to be here . . . to meet the Russian people . . . to say hello.” His voice was swallowed up by the cheers.

  Above the street, faces appeared at the windows of the buildings, and then bodies began to stream out the doors as people came from their apartments, calling, “Mr. President! Mr. President!”

  There were suddenly thousands of people on the Arbat, and there was a sense of quickly growing danger, of things spiraling out of control. “This is either going to be the greatest performance in history, or it’s going to be a disaster,” Fitzwater thought. “Somebody’s going to get hurt.”

  At that point, the KGB agents started to panic. They were not used to crowd control issues in Moscow, where the population mostly kept in line or out of sight when the KGB was around. While Reagan was shouting from the cart, “This is an example of free assembly!,” the KGB was seeing it as a grave threat to the established order. As the crowds pushed forward, Secret Service agents pulled the Reagans down from the cart, shouting “Get down! We’re going back to the house!” They set off, with the crowd rushing after them, including the press pool, with the indomitable sixty-seven-year-old Helen Thomas in the lead.

  Then the KGB agents, whose stony brutality was well known to the citizens, began randomly attacking people in the crowd. Fitzwater and Deputy Chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein were pushed outside the president’s cordon. Duberstein got hit on the head with a billy club. Several reporters were knocked down by security agents, one was punched in the face, another was slammed into a concrete trash receptacle, still another was bear-hugged and almost choked by his camera strap. But still the crowd came forward toward the Reagans, only to be roughly beaten back by the agents.

  One of the KGB men grabbed Helen Thomas, who stumbled and cried out. Nancy saw it and stepped back, shouting “She’s with us!” and pulled Helen from his grip. “Come on, Helen,” the first lady cried, hanging on to the dazed reporter. She held on to her all the way to the door. “You owe me one,” she said, before releasing the tempest-tossed Helen back to the press pool.

  The group entered Spaso House, everyone feeling the aftershock, thinking of how close they’d come to a crisis. “Just a couple more shoves and pushes, and it would have been a disaster,” Fitzwater said.

  Nancy turned to him. “Well, Marlin, what do you think?” she asked.

  They all stared at him, waiting for the press secretary’s verdict on the incident. “Well,” he replied, “we just lost the last best chance of getting rid of Helen Thomas.” That broke the ice.

  The Reagans didn’t seem at all ruffled. In fact, they looked quite pleased and even exhilarated by the experience. Forget the KGB’s reaction; the main event for them had been the wonderful outpouring of love from the Russian people and the photo op that was created by the incident. It was a form of payback for Gorbachev’s clever move while in the States six months earlier. Driving through Washington on his way to the White House, Gorbachev had spontaneously hopped out of his vehicle on Connecticut Avenue to greet lunchtime crowds and was mobbed by wildly cheering Americans crying, “We love you!” It was a major PR coup, and now the Reagans had done the same in Moscow.

  “It was clearly an effort by the president to duplicate what Gorbachev had done when he stopped on Connecticut Avenue,” said Chris Wallace, who was a young reporter covering the Moscow trip for NBC. “It was his way of saying ‘If you’re going to charm my citizens, I can do the same to you.’ ”

  But one-upmanship wasn’t Reagan’s only motivation. In the early hours of his Moscow trip, he was laying the groundwork for a more profound endeavor. Although the continuation of arms control negotiations was the stated agenda, his aim was more cinematic—an effort to touch Russians at their core, their very humanity. What did all people have in common? Greater than the fear of war or the pride of supremacy were the basic human values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And although those values were central to the American creed, that did not mean they were owned exclusively by Americans. Like struggling plants straining toward the light, the Soviet people, too, desired those life-affirming benefits.

  In the midst of those desires, it was a sobering reality that the arms race was a constant threat. Early in their relationship, Reagan had told Gorbachev, “We represent two countries that could initiate another world war. Or, we could make sure that there would not be another world war.” It had been that way since the beginning of the nuclear age, but Reagan hoped that Gorbachev would be a more honest broker than his predecessors. Now they would meet in their fourth summit, having wrestled mightily with the questions of war and peace, but also with identity. What were these two great nations going to be in the future? Reagan wanted to take a step out into the unknown and make a personal appeal, to open a window for the people of Russia—to tell them right to their faces, “Look! The world is changing; there’s a choice before you. Choose freedom.”

  “Sometimes the best act is the final act,” Reagan had told reporters as he boarded Air Force One for Moscow. That’s the way he saw this trip. He had just three days to make his appeal and forge an opening; three days to let the Russian people take a personal measure of the possibilities of democracy, which was mostly an ideological abstraction, if not an abhorrent philosophy, to them. He had been preparing for this moment for most of his life, and he had to make it count.

  Part One

  Reagan’s Destiny

  Chapter 1

  Dream Maker

  Ronald Reagan often told a story about his childhood that captures a key aspect of his unique appeal. As the drum major for the YMCA boys’ band in Dixon, Illinois, a position he had secured because he didn’t play a musical instrument, he was out front during a small-town parade for Decoration Day, marching behind the marshal, who was on his horse. At one point the marshal turned his mount around and rode back to check on the line of marchers. “I kept marching down the street,” Reagan wrote, “pumping my baton up and down, in the direction I thought we were supposed to go. But after a few minutes, I noticed the music behind me was growing fainter and fainter.” Turning, he found that he was marching alone. Unbeknown to Reagan, the marshal had returned to the front of the band and directed them to turn a corner. “It wasn’t the last time, incidentally, that people have said I sometimes march to a different drummer,” Reagan observed.

  Reagan was an enigma in the political world, a complex person who defied labels. He could be called a sociable loner, a man of amiable warmth who was most content in his own company. “I’ve always said that Ronald Reagan would make a superb hermit,” Lyn Nofziger, an early aide and confidant, said. “He really didn’t need anybody . . . he was not a typical gregarious politician.”

  This paradox of his personality has fascinated pundits and historians for decades. The search to know the real Reagan has thwarted his closest friends and allies, presidential historians, and even sometimes his beloved wife, Nancy, who wrote that he built a wall around himself that even she sometimes felt: “He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.”

  The journalist Robert Draper referred to his “sunny aloofness,” capturing a certain remoteness that Reagan himself acknowledged. “I’ve never had trouble making friends,” he explained, “but I’ve been inclined to hold back a little of myself, reserving it for myself.”

  He was a handsome actor—in the style of Robert Taylor, his agent suggested—who never quite clicked as a romantic leading man on the big screen, yet as a politician he was idolized. He was sentimental and loving, penning long letters to strangers, yet his own children often felt rebuffed by him. He was mocked by his critics for being an empty suit, yet he was a careful, studious chief executive—a voracious reader and talented writer who often left his speechwriters in awe. He was surrounded by loyal advisors, some of whom stayed with him throughout his political life, yet he had few if any real friends apart from Nancy. He projected a wel
coming demeanor, yet on the inside he was tough as nails. Martin Anderson, a policy advisor, once depicted him as “warmly ruthless.” He revitalized the conservative movement, achieved bold economic goals, and set the stage for the end of the Cold War, yet he was habitually underestimated. He did march to a different drummer, yet he captured the imagination of the nation and the world and counted as allies the most substantive political figures of his era. In her eulogy to him, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher spoke of his special nature: “In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself.”

  He has been likened to Franklin D. Roosevelt in his gift for communication, especially the way he could reach out across the airwaves and impart a vision and sense of purpose to the American people. He shared with Eisenhower a hardscrabble childhood, a human touch, and a restrained ego. Like Ike, he despised pretention and was skeptical of praise. He might grimace were he alive today to observe the almost religious reverence with which he is regarded in Republican circles. Adulation embarrassed him, and he couldn’t tolerate people being obsequious in his presence. A small plaque on his Oval Office desk read, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can do it if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”

  In his early life, Reagan wasn’t a person of grand ambitions. He wrote that he would have been happy to spend his life as a sports announcer. He was drawn to politics through passion and ideas, and he was as surprised as anyone when they connected with the public. “I thought I married an actor,” Nancy wrote in her memoir. “I honestly never expected that Ronald Reagan would go into politics.”