It had been arranged in advance that Nancy would host Raisa on the opening day in Geneva and the Soviet first lady would return the invitation on the second. This would be the first such summit of superpower spouses since glamorous young Jacqueline Kennedy and grandmotherly Nina Petrovna Khrushchev, wife of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier from 1958 to 1964, lunched at a Vienna summit in 1961, drawing a crowd outside of a thousand people.
Nancy had become more confident as a figure on the international stage in her own right. She had hosted other first ladies at the United Nations, met privately with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican to discuss worldwide drug abuse, and flown to Mexico City with disaster aid after a deadly September 1985 earthquake. To prepare for her meeting with Raisa, Nancy read novels and history books about Russia, scoured news reports, and watched videotapes of the Gorbachevs’ earlier visits to London and Paris. Meanwhile, diplomats at the Soviet embassy in Washington assembled reports on Nancy, which they provided to Raisa.
In Moscow, Raisa was seen as a new kind of first lady. Traditionally, Kremlin wives were so invisible that ordinary Soviet citizens had no idea of their occupations, how many children they had, or sometimes even what their first names were. Not so with Raisa, a brilliant academic who was fashion conscious and outspoken with her own views. Before her husband became the leader of the country, she accompanied him on overseas trips; when they visited London in 1984, Raisa had created a sensation by wearing gold lamé sandals with chain straps. The month before the Geneva summit, Raisa had appeared in the audience at designer Pierre Cardin’s show in Paris. France’s press gave Raisa mixed reviews. Her hairdo was deemed too puffy and the heels of her shoes too high, but her bright tweed suit with a long skirt and velvet collar was judged to be right in style. She was deemed elegant, but not chic.
Raisa, like Nancy, was known as her husband’s closest adviser. They had one daughter, and theirs too was a marriage of mutual adoration, although they were far more reserved than the Reagans about expressing it. Also like Nancy, she was scorned by many in her own country as arrogant and ostentatious. So there might have seemed at least a possibility that they would have enough in common to hit it off.
Instead, the two women felt an instant loathing for each other. Their chilly rivalry became a juicy subplot for the media covering the four meetings that Ronnie and Gorbachev held. At that first tea in Geneva, Raisa hadn’t liked the chair in which she was seated, so she snapped her fingers for her KGB bodyguards to find her another. She didn’t like that one either, so she snapped and summoned them once again. “I couldn’t believe it,” Nancy recalled later. “I had met first ladies, princesses, and queens, but I had never seen anybody act this way. I’m still not sure whether she wanted to make a point with me or was just trying out her new position. Or perhaps she was nervous or uncomfortable.”
Nancy was not insensitive to the fact that Raisa faced a kind of scrutiny that she could only begin to imagine. She noticed, for instance, that when the Gorbachevs returned to Moscow, he got off the plane by himself from the front, while Raisa exited discreetly through the back. “Still, her conversational style made me bristle,” Nancy wrote in her memoir. “When I came to tea at the Soviet mission, the hall was decorated with children’s paintings, and Raisa insisted that I look at each one while she described the meaning behind it. I felt condescended to, and I wanted to say, ‘Enough. You don’t have to tell me what a missile is. I get the message!’ ”
Nancy also tired of Raisa’s lectures on the glories of Leninism and the failings of the US system. When Nancy tried to bring up her own work against drug abuse, Raisa shut down the conversation by declaring there was no such problem in the Soviet Union. Nor was Nancy fooled when Raisa claimed that the enormous spread that had been laid out for their second meeting—blinis with caviar, cabbage rolls, pie, cookies, chocolates—was typical Soviet fare. “If that was an ordinary housewife’s tea,” Nancy observed, “then I’m Catherine the Great.”
Nonetheless, Nancy was thrilled at how things went in Geneva. The summit was a success and a turning point. Upon landing back at Andrews Air Force Base, Ronnie headed straight to the Capitol, where he delivered a twenty-minute address to Congress. It was three in the morning on his body clock, and he sounded a bit hoarse. Though the talks had not produced a “meeting of the minds,” he declared triumphantly that they had opened the way for “a new realism” in US-Soviet relations.
They also set the tone for personal relationships. Nancy decided she liked Gorbachev as much as Ronnie did, finding him funny and warm at the dinners they had shared in Geneva. But the frostiness between the two first ladies lingered. About a year later, in October 1986, Ronnie and Gorbachev met again in Reykjavik, Iceland, which was roughly halfway between their two capitals. This “working meeting” was not a full-scale summit. Expectations for significant progress were low, and it had been agreed that wives were not to be invited this time. But a few days before the event, Moscow announced that Raisa would, in fact, be going. This was an aggressive act of first lady one-upsmanship. Nancy agonized over whether to cancel everything on her own packed schedule and show up but felt that Raisa was testing her. She kissed Ronnie good-bye on the South Lawn as he boarded the helicopter for Andrews and settled in to monitor what was happening across the Atlantic.
As she recounted later in her book, the media coverage of the meeting was filled with images of Raisa:
“I followed the Iceland ‘summit’ on television and saw more of Raisa than of Ronnie or Gorbachev. I saw her at a swimming pool with children—the first time I had seen her do anything with children. I also saw her at a school, where she handed out pins of Lenin—which I thought was a bit much. Then, when an interviewer asked her why I wasn’t there, she said, ‘Perhaps she has something else to do. Or maybe she is not feeling well.’ Oh, please!”
That was not the only thing that bothered Nancy about what she saw in the news coverage. Before Ronnie left, Nancy told assistant Jim Kuhn to telephone her once a day on a secure line to tell her how things were going. On the first call, the first lady tore into Kuhn. “What the hell is going on there with the coat?” she demanded. Television had shown Ronnie wearing a ghastly overcoat from his Hollywood days, one that he should have discarded long before. It was drab green with wide, brown fur lapels, and was several sizes too large. Kuhn had seen Ronnie packing it before the trip and had tried to talk him into taking an elegant blue cashmere one instead. “Mr. President, it’s not that cold,” Kuhn argued. “This isn’t Greenland. They’ve got the jet stream.”
But Ronnie had an odd attachment to this particular piece of clothing. He insisted not only on taking it to Reykjavik but also on wearing it for a much-photographed meeting with Iceland’s president. “I want you to get that coat,” Nancy ordered Kuhn. “Get it away from him now and go lose the coat.” Frantic, Kuhn found presidential valet Eddie Serrano and told him: “Get rid of that coat. Don’t ever let him see it again. That’s per the first lady. You know what to do.”
Nancy’s concern over her husband’s clownish outerwear was not just sartorial fussiness on her part. More memorable than any other image from the Geneva summit had been the photos of Ronnie’s first handshake with Gorbachev. The US president wore a business suit in the frosty wind; Gorbachev was bundled up in a dark overcoat and scarf. Ronnie, though twenty years older than his Soviet counterpart, appeared the more vigorous man. Gorbachev picked up on the contrast immediately. As he prepared to reach out to Ronnie with one hand, he snatched the fedora off his head with the other. Kremlin press official Sergei Tarasenko lamented later: “We lost the game during this first movement.” For the remainder of that summit, when the two superpower leaders were to be in situations where cameras were present, Gorbachev would ask in advance: Coats on or coats off?
As Nancy monitored their second meeting from 2,800 miles away, she realized there were other problems more substantive than her husband’s wardrobe. When the two leaders emerged from their final sessio
n at Reykjavik’s reputedly haunted Hofdi House, Nancy could tell from Ronnie’s expression that something had gone wrong. “He looked angry, very angry,” she recalled. “His face was pale, and his teeth were clenched. I had seen that look before, but not often—and certainly not on television. You really have to push Ronnie very far to get that expression.” What she later learned was that he and Gorbachev had made a lot of progress; had even been on the verge of a historic agreement providing for the elimination of most or all nuclear weapons within a decade. But it fell apart when Gorbachev added one more condition: a ten-year ban on development and testing of Ronnie’s cherished concept of a space-based missile defense system. Ronnie felt he had been set up—that Gorbachev had brought him to Iceland for the sole purpose of killing his Strategic Defense Initiative—and refused. “Let’s go, George,” he told Shultz. “We’re leaving.”
The news coverage was scathing, as were the reactions of US allies. Reports had it that Ronnie had arrived unprepared and was too rigid. “No Deal,” Time’s cover proclaimed. “Star Wars Sinks the Summit.” But opinion outside media and diplomatic circles turned in Ronnie’s favor. A poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS News in mid-October found Americans thought their president had been right to hold the line, and were more optimistic than they had been that the two countries were on the path to a major reduction in nuclear weapons. Ronnie’s refusal to budge on his Strategic Defense Initiative served another purpose: it reinforced for Gorbachev the reality that the Soviet Union, with its ossified economy, would not be able to continue an arms race with the United States.
In June 1987 Ronnie stood a hundred yards from the concrete barrier that had divided East and West Berlin for more than a quarter century and made what was perhaps the most memorable foreign-policy declaration of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Those electrifying words were not just symbolic. Real work that would ultimately help lead to the end of the Cold War—and in its wake, the unification of east and west—was going on at the negotiating table. Ronnie and Gorbachev met again the following December for the Washington summit they had agreed to in Geneva. It is remembered for the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a landmark pact prohibiting land-based cruise or ballistic missiles with ranges between 311 miles and 3,420 miles. For the first time, the two superpowers had agreed to eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons. The INF deal would see the two countries destroy nearly 2,700 of these weapons by its 1991 implementation deadline.
Ronnie’s peacemaking efforts were not sitting well with conservative leaders at home. The Right had embraced his vision in other areas as though it were Scripture. But they did not share his commitment to arms reductions and were losing confidence that he was capable of holding his own in negotiations with Gorbachev. They also feared he had been damaged by the Iran-contra scandal, which at the time had been consuming his administration for six months. Shortly before the summit, influential activist Paul Weyrich told the Washington Post: “Reagan is a weakened president, weakened in spirit as well as in clout and not in a position to make judgments about Gorbachev at this time.”
Ronnie invited fifteen or so disgruntled conservative leaders, including Weyrich, to meet privately with him in the Roosevelt Room. “I’ve got to get them to calm down. I’ve got to make sure they understand where I am on this,” he told Jim Kuhn. The group sat stonily while Ronnie did nearly all of the talking during the session. Afterward, as he and Kuhn were returning to the Oval Office across the hallway, the president asked: “Did you notice how that was at the end, Jim?”
“Yeah,” Kuhn replied. “There was dead silence.”
“I didn’t get any applause. There was no applause from this group,” Ronnie said. “I thought I got through to them, and they are still upset thinking I’m too cozy with the Soviets.”
At the Washington summit, Nancy and Raisa once again created a running story line all their own. After the arrival ceremony, when the men went off for meetings in the West Wing, Nancy hosted Raisa and several administration wives, including Barbara Bush, for coffee in the Green Room. Barbara noted in her diary that Raisa did not offer condolences for the recent death of Nancy’s mother or inquire how she was feeling after her mastectomy the month before. Instead, the Soviet first lady began by getting in a dig, saying people were wondering why Nancy hadn’t come to Iceland. Before Nancy could reply that she had been under the impression that the wives weren’t invited, Raisa interrupted: “You would have liked it. People missed you.”
Raisa then proceeded to lecture the other women on Russian history, contrasting the United States’ experience unfavorably with her own country’s and falsely claiming that there were no homeless people in the Soviet Union, thanks to its twenty-five-year housing program.
Obie Shultz leaned over to Barbara Bush and whispered: “Nancy doesn’t like this conversation.”
“Who would?” Barbara answered.
Finally, after about an hour of listening to Raisa, Nancy said, “I’m afraid that I’m keeping you from your schedule.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Raisa replied.
Several of the women there told Nancy later that they had been shocked at Raisa’s rudeness; Nancy allowed that she was glad others had seen what she had been dealing with. Nor was her overbearing behavior Raisa’s only transgression in Nancy’s eyes. Raisa had taken weeks to respond to Nancy’s offer to provide a tour of the White House later during the summit, though she accepted an invitation to visit Pamela Harriman, a prominent Democratic hostess and fund-raiser. “I was offended,” Nancy said. “In the circle we moved in, you don’t ignore an invitation from the head of state or his wife.”
When Raisa finally agreed to be shown through the White House, she insisted that the time be moved from midafternoon to late morning, and said that she could spend no more than one hour there. Afterward, a reporter asked Raisa what she thought of the executive mansion that Nancy had poured so much energy into renovating. Her reply: “It’s an official house. I would say that, humanly speaking, a human being would like to live in a regular house. This is like a museum.”
By this point, the relationship between the two women was beyond the point of repair. Raisa had been imperious in Geneva, had outmaneuvered Nancy by going to Reykjavik, and now had publicly upstaged her on her own turf. “Nancy Reagan didn’t trust anybody to begin with, but you roll her once, you’re history. And Raisa did it at least three times,” presidential assistant Jim Kuhn said. “But she put up with her. What choice did she have?”
As annoying as Nancy found Raisa, she also appreciated how close the Gorbachev partnership was, and appeared to have recognized in them a parallel of her own marriage to Ronnie. The Gorbachevs met as students and were wed in 1953, the year after the Reagans. In an interview that Nancy gave journalist James Mann in 2005, the former first lady said of Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999 at the age of sixty-seven: “She was a very strong woman. You always had the feeling if he ever faltered, she would be right there to prop him up.”
The public and decidedly undiplomatic test of wills in which the two women were engaged worried some who feared its impact on the summit’s success. Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, who was chief of protocol at the State Department, wrote with exasperation in her memoir: “The Nancy-Raisa exchanges were reported ad nauseum by our press. Certainly Mrs. Gorbachev’s manner could be grating, but I kept wishing Nancy would not let it get to her. I wanted her to rise above the provocation, smile sweetly, and look ingenuous with her beautiful brown eyes wide open. I was surprised that a woman as controlled as Nancy Reagan would let herself get rattled, in full color on international TV. I wanted to shout at her, ‘Smile, Nancy! Smile!’
“Part of the problem was that no one dared to tell the First Lady such things.”
Barbara Bush, on the other hand, found the rivalry amusing, and allowed herself a bit of glee in the idea that Nancy might have finally met her match. In her diary, Barbara noted that she had
been impressed by Raisa’s “marvelous” coloring, and that the Soviet first lady’s hair was a softer shade of red than the constant press references to henna would suggest. “She is a lovely looking creature, smaller than the size twelve we are reading about, more a six or an eight,” Barbara wrote. “She is a prettier package than the pictures show. I don’t know how old, but think the paper said fifty-three or fifty-five. That’s funny, for we really don’t know if Nancy Reagan is sixty-five or sixty-seven, and she won’t tell. I guess Raisa won’t tell, either.” Barbara also noticed that as Raisa’s visit progressed, her skirts were getting shorter and shorter to match Nancy’s. She wondered whether a seamstress was working overtime at the Soviet embassy.
There was one event where Nancy would not be outshone: the state dinner. She made sure everything was perfect, though she had to work around the Gorbachevs’ insistence that they be out of there by ten. There was also a surplus of male guests, because the Soviets had brought along so few women to Washington. For entertainment, Nancy booked the renowned pianist Van Cliburn, a Texan who had not played in public for nine years. He had a big following in the Soviet Union going back to 1958, when he won the first Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow at the age of twenty-three. The achievement, coming at the height of the Cold War, also earned Cliburn the only ticker-tape parade that New York City has ever thrown for a classical musician. When the pianist began playing the beloved Russian melody “Moscow Nights” as an encore, the Gorbachevs started singing along, and by the second verse, the entire Soviet delegation had joined in.
After the going-away ceremony on the South Lawn, which took place in a heavy rainstorm, Barbara Bush accompanied Raisa to the airport. At one point, Barbara asked Raisa whether she knew that Nancy had recently undergone a serious operation for cancer. Raisa replied that in her country, something so personal would be considered unmentionable. Barbara averred that in the United States, it would be hard for a first lady to disappear for several weeks without the press knowing about it.
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 50
