Hers was a multifront campaign, and, over the years, she did not always get her way. Nancy was not a fan of her husband’s far-fetched scheme to build a space-based missile defense system, which became a major sticking point in US-Soviet relations. Skeptics mocked the Strategic Defense Initiative as “Star Wars,” but Ronnie pushed it nonetheless. She was also unsettled by the Cold War proxy battles that were being waged around the globe. Chief among them in the 1980s was the drive to realign Central America. Nancy wanted to see a diplomatic solution, not a military one, to the bloody strife between Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government and the rebel forces known as contras, whom the Reagan administration staunchly backed.
When Nancy invited George P. Shultz and his wife over for dinner that snowy night halfway through Ronnie’s first term, the secretary of state sensed he had found a powerful partner in a first lady who shared his determination to alter the course that Ronnie’s more hard-line advisers had set. Shultz picked up on other things as well. One was that Ronnie himself was feeling frustrated. The president was a self-assured negotiator, going back to his days as head of the Screen Actors Guild. He was anxious to use those same skills in a bigger, more significant way. But Ronnie was hemmed in by some of those around him: by the White House’s national security staff under William Clark, by Defense Secretary Weinberger, by William Casey at the Central Intelligence Agency. And, not least, the president was hamstrung by decades of his own harsh rhetoric. Ronnie despised everything about Communism, which he saw as irredeemably antithetical to freedom, to God’s will, to human potential, to rational economic principles. His views had been shaped in Hollywood during the battles over Communist influence, real and imagined, that roiled the movie industry in the years after World War II.
Ronnie also thought that his recent predecessors had failed to fully account for a broader, darker worldview on the part of the Soviets. Starting with Nixon, Washington had followed a strategy known as détente, a French word that means easing tension. Americans had celebrated trade deals, arms negotiations, and high-profile diplomatic visits as harbingers of a Cold War thaw. But none of these gestures deterred the Soviets from moving into Angola in 1975 or from deploying a new generation of nuclear missiles aimed at Europe. The last hopes for détente disappeared when Moscow sent thirty thousand troops into Afghanistan in 1979.
In an exchange with reporters during the first days of his presidency, Ronnie declared that efforts to draw Moscow into a new kind of relationship had thus far been “a one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its own aims.… The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that, and that is amoral, not immoral, and we operate on a different set of standards. I think when you do business with them, even at a détente, you keep that in mind.”
Yet as the Reagan administration pushed forward on the massive US military buildup that the president had promised in his 1980 campaign, there had been signs from the start that Ronnie was looking for an opening to begin a dialogue with the Soviets on his own terms. His calculation behind expanding the nation’s armed forces—correct, as it would turn out—was that by forcing Moscow to pour money into its own defense, he could squeeze the already creaky Soviet economy to the breaking point. That in turn would make its leaders more willing to come to the bargaining table on America’s terms.
What few people could see in Ronnie’s militant words and policies was that he was also an idealist. A believer in the biblical prophecy of Armageddon, Ronnie had never bought into the rationale of each side maintaining a stockpile of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. He abhorred the long-standing doctrine known as “mutually assured destruction.” The president thought the only sensible—and morally sound—goal was the complete elimination of bombs and missiles that could wipe millions of people off the face of the earth. As Cannon wrote: “He had a sense of the world as it would be and as it might be, not merely of the way it was. Reagan wanted a world without nuclear weapons, and a world without walls and iron curtains. He was, in this respect, a man for the age.”
Even as the president toughened his anti-Moscow language, he was telling his advisers to seek opportunities for engagement. “Reagan in the first term kept saying to his foreign-policy team, ‘Let me know when the Soviets are ready to have a constructive dialogue,’ ” said James Kuhn, an advance man who later became the president’s personal assistant. “He kept saying that over and over again, but nothing was happening. Nancy knew that this had to start to unfold, that he had to engage the Soviets, and she worked on Reagan a lot privately.”
One of Ronnie’s early acts as president had been to offer a gesture of conciliation by lifting the grain embargo that Jimmy Carter imposed on the Soviet Union as punishment for its 1979 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Many on the Right had argued that this was “caving in,” but in Ronnie’s view, it was a pragmatic calculation: the loss of grain sales was hurting American farmers more than it was affecting the Soviet food supply. In the opening months of his first term, Ronnie also made a more personal overture. It came in the spring of 1981, shortly after the assassination attempt. Perhaps facing his own mortality instilled an urgency in the new president; a sense that he had no time to wait for an opening. As he began his recuperation, Ronnie composed a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, his counterpart in Moscow.
The US president asked: “Is it possible that we have let ideology, political and economic philosophy, and governmental policies to keep us from considering the very real, everyday problems of the people we represent?” He recalled an encounter between the two of them in June 1973, when Ronnie was still the governor of California and Brezhnev was visiting President Nixon at his oceanfront estate in San Clemente.
Ronnie had told the Soviet leader then that the aspirations of millions were riding on whether dialogue was possible between their two countries:
You took my hand in both of yours and assured me that you were aware of that and that you were dedicated with all your heart and mind to fulfilling those hopes and dreams.
The people of the world still share that hope. Indeed, the peoples of the world, despite differences in racial or ethnic origin, have very much in common. They want the dignity of having some control over their individual destiny. They want to work at the craft or trade of their own choosing and to be fairly rewarded. They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves. Government exists for their convenience, not the other way around.
If they are incapable, as some would have us believe, of self-government, then where in the world do we find people who are capable of governing others?
Mr. President, should we not be concerned with eliminating the obstacles which prevent our people from achieving these simple goals? And isn’t it possible some of those obstacles are born of government aims and goals which have little to do with the real needs and wants of our people?
That 1981 letter, initially written in his own hand on six pages of a yellow legal pad, contained no policy specifics beyond Ronnie’s decision to lift the grain embargo. But it revealed what had long been in his heart. He passed it around at a meeting in the White House Treaty Room with his senior advisers on Monday, April 13. This was one of their first working sessions since he had been shot. The president wore his bathrobe and pajamas. Among those in attendance were Vice President Bush; the White House management troika of Baker, Deaver, and Meese; Secretary of State Al Haig; and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. “I don’t know if you fellows will think it’s a good idea,” Ronnie said uncertainly, “but why don’t you read it and get back to me?”
Most in the room were unsettled at the tone of the letter. It sounded naive and romantic. Worse, it seemed a direct contradiction of Ronnie’s tough public rhetoric and the administration’s militant posture toward Moscow. Haig told Ronnie that if a president was going to send a missive to the Kremlin, the pros
at the State Department should be the ones to draft it. A few days later, when that same group reconvened, the secretary of state handed the president a shorter, rewritten version—one that Deaver described later as “something the State Department might have written twenty years ago. Typical bureaucratese.”
“Well, I guess you fellows know best,” Ronnie said. “You’re the experts…”
Deaver interrupted: “Mr. President, nobody elected anybody in the State Department or the National Security Council. Those guys have been screwing up for a quarter of a century. If you think that’s a letter that ought to be sent to Brezhnev, don’t let anyone change it. Why don’t you just send it?”
Ronnie turned to Haig and said, “Send it the way I wrote it.”
The reply that came back from the Kremlin a few weeks later was icy and perfunctory, most likely written by an apparatchik there. The truth was, there would not be much of a chance to achieve a relationship with Brezhnev, who was in ill health and would be dead within nineteen months. His successor, Yuri Andropov, would serve only fifteen months before dying himself. The next leader to fill the job, Konstantin Chernenko, would have an even shorter tenure before succumbing to a combination of illnesses in March 1985. “They never would announce the death of anybody,” Weinberger recalled later. “Their radio stations would suddenly switch to classical music. Whenever Radio Moscow switched to classical music, some other leader had gone. That was the only word you got.”
Ronnie’s mantra of “peace through strength” was dismissed on the Left—and sometimes on the Right—as a contradiction. But Nancy discerned the history-shattering path that Ronnie might be able to blaze, and she was skeptical that the more conventionally hawkish figures on his national security team were truly committed to his longer-term goals. She became especially disturbed when Ronnie made a speech in March 1983 to an evangelical audience in Florida in which he branded the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” The phrase, crafted by speechwriter Anthony Dolan, set off a firestorm. In Moscow, the Soviet news agency Tass said the “evil empire” label represented “bellicose hysteria” grounded in “pathological hatred.” The Kremlin’s mouthpiece declared that the Reagan administration “can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”
Ronnie was unapologetic, writing later in his memoir: “Frankly, I think it worked, even though some people—including Nancy—tried persuading me to lower the temperature of my rhetoric. I told Nancy I had a reason for saying those things: I wanted the Russians to know I understood their system and what it stood for.”
A few days after the speech, political strategist Stu Spencer joined the first couple for dinner at the White House. Nancy was still berating Ronnie for having used such intemperate words. Spencer and Nancy were of like mind on the subject of Ronnie’s posture toward the Soviet Union. The two of them were both worried about internal polling showing that even Americans who had a generally favorable view of the president feared that he might move the country closer to war—a concern that could jeopardize his reelection prospects in 1984.
Ronnie, having had enough of his wife’s tirade about the “evil empire” speech, turned to Spencer: “What do you think, Stu?”
Spencer tried to be tactful.
“You’re right,” he began, “they’re an evil empire—but that was a pretty tough statement to make—”
“Okay, thanks, Stu,” Ronnie replied, cutting him off before he gave Nancy any more fodder. “What’s for dessert?”
* * *
While there had been a rotating cast of leaders in Moscow, Nancy was keeping a close eye on the big changes that were simultaneously going on within Ronnie’s foreign-policy team. Richard Allen was replaced as national security adviser by another hard-liner, William Clark, in early 1982. Clark in turn laid the groundwork for Haig’s ouster as secretary of state less than six months later. That led to the welcome arrival of Shultz, who took over the State Department in June. Shultz’s deliberative, understated manner was often described as “Buddha-like.” But his demeanor was a misleading clue to his inner nature. He was a marine who served in the Pacific during World War II and had a Princeton University tiger tattooed on his butt. A canny infighter, Shultz would stay at the helm of the State Department for the remaining six and a half years of Ronnie’s presidency, becoming the longest-serving secretary there since Dean Rusk’s tenure under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Nancy and Shultz saw eye to eye on their distaste for some of the president’s advisers. They knew that many of the top officials in the administration privately held a low regard for Ronnie’s intellect. “In truth, Ronald Reagan knew far more about the big picture and the matters of salient importance than most people—perhaps especially some of his immediate staff—gave him credit for or appreciated,” Shultz wrote in his massive, score-settling memoir Turmoil and Triumph. “He had blind spots and a tendency to avoid tedious detail. But the job of those around him was to protect him from those weaknesses and to build on his strengths. Some of them did just the opposite.”
When Nancy invited the Shultzes over for that private dinner in early 1983, Brezhnev had just died, and Washington was still trying to figure out what to make of the latest changes in leadership at the Kremlin. Shultz, though relatively new in his own job, had already begun a quiet dialogue with Anatoly Dobrynin, the savvy and charming veteran diplomat who had been Moscow’s ambassador to the United States since 1962. Ronnie had personally authorized Shultz’s discussions with Dobrynin, over the objections of some in the White House. But the new secretary of state had been reluctant to move toward ironing out the real substantive differences between the two nations, because he felt he did not have a solid sense of where the president stood. This was precisely what Nancy wanted Shultz to begin to understand that evening. Ronnie was more willing to press forward in developing relations with the Communist world—even travel there—than the secretary of state had previously believed.
“I will be meeting with Dobrynin again late Tuesday afternoon,” Shultz told Ronnie. “What would you think about my bringing Dobrynin over to the White House for a private chat?”
“Great,” the president replied, adding, “We have to keep this secret. I don’t intend to engage in a detailed exchange with Dobrynin, but I do intend to tell him that if Andropov is willing to do business, so am I.”
Early Monday morning, Shultz got a call from Bill Clark. The national security adviser was livid at what he saw as an end run by Shultz and thought that allowing the president to sit down with the Soviet ambassador was a mistake. But Ronnie insisted he wanted to do it, and Deaver made arrangements to send a White House car to the State Department garage to pick up Shultz and Dobrynin. Their meeting in the living room of the family quarters lasted two hours, during which the three men talked about arms control, the potential for a long-term deal on grain that the Soviets wanted, and recent developments in Poland and Afghanistan.
Ronnie also pressed the ambassador on human rights—particularly the plight of two families of Pentecostal Christians who had taken refuge in the US embassy in Moscow after being denied the right to leave a country where they faced persecution and arrest. At that point, the “Siberian Seven” had been living in the embassy basement for nearly five years, in one cramped room with only two beds. Ronnie told the Soviet ambassador: “If you can do something about the Pentecostals or another human rights issue, we will simply be delighted and will not embarrass you by undue publicity, by claims of credit for ourselves or by ‘crowing.’ ” As the ambassador and secretary of state left the meeting with Ronnie, Dobrynin told Shultz that he would see if anything could be done about this “special subject.” A few months later, the Pentecostal families were granted safe conduct out of the embassy and ultimately allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Ronnie made good on his promise not to boast.
“Nancy was very much involved,” Shultz told me. She understood, he added, that this delicate initial trust-building exercise involvi
ng the Pentecostal families “sent a message to the Soviets that you can deal with this man because he keeps his word. It made an impression on them that you can work a deal with these people, and they’ll carry through on it. In an odd way, it was a little something that happened as the result of Nancy’s phone call. ‘Come over and have supper with us.’ ”
On June 5, 1983, George and Helena “Obie” Shultz reciprocated Nancy’s invitation and had the Reagans over to their house in Bethesda. Their neighbors lined the street to wave and cheer as the presidential motorcade pulled up. Over dinner, the two couples celebrated a successful G-7 summit that Ronnie had recently hosted in Williamsburg, Virginia. “I learned something else of interest that evening: the president was uneasy with Bill Clark, and Nancy had no time for him at all,” Shultz wrote later.
That the national security adviser was on thin ice with the president was an important bit of internal intelligence for Shultz. At the time, the general perception was that Clark’s star was on the rise, much to the dismay of both Shultz and Nancy. In the media, he, not Shultz, was portrayed as the administration’s most important player when it came to international affairs. “Unlike his predecessors in the national security post, Mr. Clark is a self-proclaimed foreign-policy novice who makes no television appearances, gives few speeches and fewer interviews, writes no learned papers, and expresses no original foreign-policy concepts,” the New York Times wrote of Clark in August 1983. “Yet he has become the most influential foreign-policy figure in the Reagan administration. Eighteen months ago, when he assumed his job after a year’s stint as deputy secretary of state, he was reluctant to assert his conservative views. Now, he is the president’s chief instrument for guaranteeing that his administration takes a hard-line approach to Communism and Soviet influence in the world.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 48
