Clark’s bond with Ronnie went back to Sacramento, where he had been chief of staff in the governor’s office. Though he did not have a foreign-policy background, he was smart and talented. A rancher who had passed the California bar exam on his second attempt without having graduated from college or law school, Clark had brought order to Ronnie’s operation in Sacramento during its most chaotic days. Nancy had also tried to recruit him to help out during the 1980 campaign, when she was engineering the firing of campaign manager John Sears and the shake-up that put Ronnie on the path to victory after New Hampshire. Clark initially joined the Reagan administration as deputy secretary of state, put there largely to keep an eye on the volatile Al Haig. When Clark arrived, Haig had told him: “You, Bill, are going to run the building. I’m going to run the world.”
Whatever regard Nancy had for his managerial abilities, the first lady did not believe that Clark was the person to be driving foreign policy. During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Clark had been unable to come up with the names of the prime ministers of Zimbabwe or South Africa, both of which were hot spots at the time. He also admitted that he did not know the definitions of détente or third world. Afterward, Democrat John Glenn of Ohio declared in exasperation that he “had never seen anything like such ignorance of foreign affairs and lack of preparation for a confirmation hearing in my years here in the Senate.” A leading daily newspaper in Amsterdam labeled Clark “a nitwit,” and London’s Daily Mirror opined: “America’s allies in Europe—Europe, Mr. Clark—you must have heard of it—will hope he is never in charge at a time of crisis.”
Once installed in the White House as national security adviser, the deeply conservative Clark clashed with the more pragmatic James Baker and Michael Deaver, though he still had an ally in presidential counselor Ed Meese, who had been an ideological comrade in arms since their Sacramento days. More troubling to Nancy was the fact that Clark, as Deaver once put it, “saw no hope in any policy that relied on trusting the Russians, argued against any attempt to improve that relationship, and did what he could to slow it down.”
Clark’s defenders, who were legion among the other old California hands, say that Nancy’s real beef with the national security adviser was that he was too close to Ronnie, which made him a rival and a counterweight to her own influence over her husband. He and the president frequently went horseback riding together in Washington’s winding Rock Creek Park. When Clark replaced Richard Allen as the White House’s top foreign-policy adviser, he leveraged his personal ties into an arrangement under which he reported directly to Ronnie and had coveted “walk-in privileges” to the Oval Office, which meant he did not have to make an appointment to see the president. “I had never really gotten along with him,” Nancy wrote later of Clark. “He struck me as a user—especially when he traveled around the country claiming he represented Ronnie, which usually wasn’t true. I spoke to Ronnie about him, but Ronnie liked him, so he stayed around longer than I would have liked.”
The national security adviser was pushing hard for a larger US military footprint in Central America. Things boiled over when Clark appeared on the August 8, 1983, cover of Time as the face of the administration’s “Big Stick Approach.” The magazine also took some shots at Shultz in an accompanying article, which noted that there had been a “disappearing act at Foggy Bottom” as “State Department influence continues to wane.” Furious, Nancy called Shultz. She told him she did not believe the national security adviser had Ronnie’s interests at heart and that he should be fired. Shultz, though he no doubt agreed, tried to calm her down, saying Clark was simply in over his head. In fact, Clark’s star turn in the media was a portent of trouble ahead. Clark would later ruefully recall an admonition he had received from Al Haig: “Once you appear in this town on the cover of Time or Newsweek, count your days in the shop.”
Not that he was all that eager to stay. Clark was restless by nature and weary of all the internecine battles. When James Watt’s resignation in early October opened a Cabinet-level vacancy at the Interior Department, Clark jumped at the opportunity to escape the White House.
Chief of Staff Jim Baker was briefly considered as a possibility to move into the national security adviser’s post, which would have been Nancy’s preference, as well as Shultz’s. Clark, upon hearing of his planned replacement, rallied his fellow conservatives—including Pentagon Secretary Weinberger, CIA Director Casey, and Meese—to put a stop to it. The right flank considered Baker too moderate for the job and also knew he was a frequent source of leaks to his friends in the press. Their choice for the post was Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the truculent UN ambassador, whom Shultz would not have accepted. Ronnie decided not to risk inflaming the tensions of his deeply divided national security team and wrote in his diary on October 14, 1983: “Jim Baker wants to take the NSC post. I was willing but then found great division & resistance in certain quarters. I finally decided that to ignore this & go ahead anyway would leave me with a permanent problem.”
The following Monday, Ronnie announced that his new national security adviser would be Robert C. (“Bud”) McFarlane, who had been Clark’s deputy. McFarlane had been the second choice of both factions and represented a compromise candidate. “My decision not to appoint Jim Baker as national security advisor, I suppose, was a turning point for my administration, although I had no idea at the time how significant it would be,” Ronnie wrote later. McFarlane would become a key player in the Iran-contra scandal.
Not quite a year later, longtime Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko visited Washington, and Shultz arranged for him to have a working lunch with Ronnie and the administration’s senior foreign-policy team. The meeting on September 28, 1984, marked the first time a Soviet official of such high rank had been publicly received at the Reagan White House. Gromyko, who had dealt with nine presidents and fourteen secretaries of state, was known as a tough, unbending negotiator who took exacting measure of his adversaries and always arrived prepared.
Shultz decided it would be a good idea for the foreign minister to meet the first lady and orchestrated a way for it to happen, supposedly impromptu, at a prelunch reception in the Red Room.
“Nancy, here’s what happens,” Shultz told her. “He comes to the Oval Office. We have a meeting, and we all walk down the hallway to the mansion. That’s your home. There’s some stand-around time, and then there’s a working lunch. How about being there in the stand-around time? You’re the hostess. It would be a nice thing.” Her presence at the reception surprised and delighted the foreign minister. “When Gromyko gets there, he’s no fool; he sees Nancy, and he goes right over to her, engages her in conversation,” Shultz said.
The flirtatious first lady turned on the charm, captivating the dour man known as “Grim Grom” and “Mr. Nyet.” As the reception was winding up, Gromyko casually took a glass of cranberry juice from a waiter’s tray, lifted it in a toast, and asked Nancy why it had been so hard to get Ronnie to the bargaining table.
“Does your husband believe in peace?” he said.
“Yes, of course,” she replied, bristling slightly.
“Then whisper ‘peace’ in your husband’s ear every night,” Gromyko told her.
“I will, and I’ll also whisper it in your ear,” Nancy said. She put her hands on the foreign minister’s shoulders, pulled him close, and said softly: “Peace.”
Gromyko would tell that story many times over the years. He took it as an assurance, from the most reliable of authorities, that Ronnie was indeed serious about turning a new page in US-Soviet relations. More than three decades later, Shultz still chuckled as he recounted that moment to me: “I said, ‘Nancy, you just won the Cold War.’ ” Not too long after that, the Soviet news agency Tass began covering Nancy’s public appearances.
On Thanksgiving Day, Washington and Moscow announced that their chief diplomats would meet in January in Geneva. They were to set the terms upon which they could move forward on negot
iations aimed at reaching “mutually acceptable agreements on the whole range of questions concerning nuclear and outer space arms.” A Soviet spokesman cautioned the Washington Post that this agreement to talk should not be seen as the dawn of a new age of détente, but rather as “a small crack in the East-West ice.” Still, Shultz was jubilant. “That basic policy of strength, realism, and readiness to negotiate had paid off,” he wrote later. “Now the work would begin.”
Once the preliminaries were done, more substantive talks were to get under way on March 12, 1985. At four in the morning the day before, National Security Adviser McFarlane awakened Ronnie with a phone call. Soviet president Konstantin Chernenko had died—the third elderly Soviet leader to do so in less than two and a half years. Chernenko had hoped to make his mark in foreign policy by reversing his predecessors’ confrontational stance toward the United States but had held power for only 390 days, during which he had been seriously ill.
In picking the Soviet Union’s next leader, the policy-making Central Committee decided to make a generational U-turn. The new general secretary of the Communist Party would be fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Kremlin leadership. Leaders in the West had already identified him as a comer. Nancy encouraged Ronnie to meet with Gorbachev as soon as possible, though some on his national security team opposed it. “Yes,” she acknowledged in her memoir, “I did push Ronnie a little. But he would never have met Gorbachev if he hadn’t wanted to.”
It helped that Margaret Thatcher had sized up the rising Soviet leader favorably the previous year, when Gorbachev had led a parliamentary delegation to London. Thatcher had spoken highly of Gorbachev to Ronnie when she visited Camp David for the first time a few days before Christmas 1984. Gorbachev was no soft touch, but nonetheless a more pragmatic type than Thatcher had encountered before in her dealings with the Kremlin. Unlike others before him, Gorbachev didn’t interrupt when she raised contentious issues, or drone on with lengthy recitations of principles that she had heard many times before. A memorandum summarizing her private meeting with Ronnie at Camp David shows Thatcher confided to Ronnie that Gorbachev was “an unusual Russian in that he was much less constrained, more charming, open to discussion and debate, and did not stick to prepared notes.” Neither she nor Ronnie, however, could have known how soon they would be dealing with him as the leader of his nation.
* * *
Though Gorbachev’s ascension offered the tantalizing possibility that a new era might be dawning in US-Soviet relations, there were bumps along the way to scheduling a summit. Ronnie’s advisers were divided over how ambitious the agenda should be, and there was wrangling between Moscow and Washington about where it should be held. Nancy was relentless in pushing for it to happen as soon as possible, using every opportunity, including social events, to press the case with her husband’s team. “She felt strongly that it was not only in the interest of world peace but the correct move politically,” Deaver recounted. “She would buttonhole George Shultz, Bud McFarlane, and others, to be sure that they were moving toward that goal.” On July 3, 1985, the two governments announced that President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev would meet in Geneva on November 19 and 20.
“Flying over on Air Force One, what I remembered most were the high spirits of the first lady,” Ronnie’s executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, wrote later. “Usually tightly wound, Mrs. Reagan was in the best mood I had ever seen her in: she was relaxed, even joyous.” Ronnie was well prepared, having spent the past six months poring over more than two dozen briefing papers, which covered topics from Russian history and culture, to Soviet objectives and negotiating tactics. For once, Kuhn noticed, the president didn’t express annoyance that he was being loaded down with paperwork and information.
Nancy, as always, stood vigilant against overscheduling her husband. Ronnie arrived in Geneva three days early to ensure that he would be well rested and recovered from jet lag by the time the meetings began. On the plane over, the Reagans had eaten their meals on Swiss time, to speed the adjustment. It had been arranged that they would lodge in splendor at Maison de Saussure, an eighteenth-century stone mansion on twenty acres along Lake Geneva, which was loaned to the Reagans by Aga Khan IV, the fabulously wealthy spiritual leader of a branch of Shia Islam.
The fall weather was chilly and damp. Patches of snow dotted the edge of the lake, and in the distance, the Reagans could see the high peaks of the Alps rising against a slate-gray sky. Neither Ronnie nor Nancy slept well on the night before his first meeting with the new Soviet leader. In his diary, the president wrote: “Lord, I hope I’m ready & not overtrained.”
One thing both he and Nancy wanted was a chance for Ronnie to get to know Gorbachev personally, without teams of diplomats and arms-control experts choreographing their every interaction. Two days before the summit began, the Reagans went to see Villa Fleur d’Eau, a luxurious 120-year-old lakeside chateau five miles outside of Geneva where the first day of meetings was to take place. Ronnie tried out the chair in which he would be sitting, and Nancy, on a whim, sat down in Gorbachev’s. “My, Mr. General Secretary,” the president told her, “you’re much prettier than I expected.”
The Reagans also took a walk around the grounds. About a hundred yards down a hill from the chateau was a charming boathouse that chief of presidential advance William Henkel had spotted earlier. It had a fireplace and a spectacular view of the water. “As soon as we walked into this room, we knew it was the perfect spot,” Nancy recalled. “Here, by the warmth of the fire, they could take a few minutes to begin to know each other as human beings. There were people on our side—and presumably on the other side, too—who didn’t think a private meeting was such a great idea, but I strongly encouraged Ronnie to follow his instincts. We both felt that it was important for these two men to begin building a personal relationship, and that this was far more likely to occur if they had a few minutes alone with just their translators.”
Finally, the opening day of the summit arrived. As Ronnie and Gorbachev shook hands for the first time, the American president took an immediate liking to the Soviet leader. He escorted Gorbachev into a sitting room for what was supposed to be a fifteen-minute conversation while their teams got settled. After forty minutes went by, White House chief of staff Don Regan told Jim Kuhn to go in and break it up. The plenary session was supposed to start.
“It’s their first meeting,” Kuhn protested.
“What about the schedule?” Regan demanded.
“I don’t think it matters,” Kuhn replied. “I think we need to leave them alone.”
As the leaders’ tête-à-tête stretched past the one-hour mark, Regan and National Security Adviser McFarlane became more insistent. They told Kuhn to talk to Shultz. The secretary of state was meeting with his counterpart, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who had recently replaced the obdurate Gromyko. Kuhn interrupted them and asked for advice on whether to cut in on Ronnie and Gorbachev. Shultz, who was often imperious with staff members, became furious and yelled: “If you’re stupid enough to walk into that room and break up the meeting between those two leaders, then you don’t deserve the job you have!”
Kuhn returned to Regan and McFarlane. “Leave the president alone. Nobody goes in,” he said. “The president and the general secretary will end it when they want to end it.”
When Ronnie and Gorbachev finally joined the session, they followed a disappointingly conventional script, talking past each other and restating their countries’ long-standing differences. In the afternoon, the mood got heavy, as the subject turned to arms control. Ronnie argued vigorously in defense of his Strategic Defense Initiative. Gorbachev dismissed it as “emotional. It’s a dream. Who can control it? Who can monitor it? It opens up an arms race in space.”
At that point, Ronnie suggested they take a walk and breathe some of the crisp air outside. Gorbachev was out of his chair before Ronnie could finish his sentence. The two men and their translators strolled ov
er to the boathouse, where the fireplace was going. Only later did Ronnie discover that his aides, in their eagerness to make the setting cheery and welcoming, had set such a rip-roaring blaze that it had accidentally set the mantelpiece aflame. They had to douse it with pitchers of water and start over. Away from the formal discussion, Ronnie delivered the larger message that he wanted Gorbachev to understand: they were two men who had the power to start World War III, but they were also the only two who could bring about peace. The Cold War had to end, and Ronnie was determined to make that happen, one way or the other. “Reagan told Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could never win an all-out arms race with the United States because the United States would always be able to outspend the Soviet Union,” Kuhn said.
As they walked back to the chateau, Ronnie suggested that Gorbachev visit the United States for a second summit the following year. The general secretary agreed, but only if Ronnie would come to a third one in Moscow. “Our people couldn’t believe it when I told them what had happened,” Ronnie wrote later. “Everything was settled for two more summits. They hadn’t dreamed it was possible.” That first meeting in Geneva became known as “the fireside summit.” Though no real progress had been made toward narrowing their differences, the superpower leaders had agreed to keep talking, which, in Ronnie’s view, was the most important thing of all.
* * *
While the men were moving toward peace, their wives were launching what would become a personal Cold War. At the end of that first day of the summit, Nancy returned to Maison de Saussure shortly after her husband did. Ronnie kissed her and asked her how things had gone. Nancy gave him a weak smile and said, “That Raisa Gorbachev is one cold cookie.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 49
