“What if the first lady had an abortion?” Raisa asked.
Barbara was taken aback and said she didn’t think that was comparable to a mastectomy. She told Raisa that Nancy had been courageous in going public and probably saved many lives by encouraging women to have mammograms. “We arrived at the airport before we could pursue this anymore,” she wrote in her diary.
There would be one last summit between Ronnie and Gorbachev, in May 1988. The president and Nancy traveled to Moscow with a four-day stopover in Helsinki, Finland, to reset the president’s body clock. Nancy made a point not to pack any gowns in her favorite color, red, for fear that she might be sending a message she didn’t intend. As they were driven from the airport, she was delighted to see Moscow streets lined with cheering crowds. The Reagans got a rapturous reception in the Soviet capital, much as the Gorbachevs had the previous year in Washington.
At one point during the trip, reporter Sam Donaldson asked the president whether he still considered the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”
“No,” Ronnie said. “I was talking about another time and another era.”
But when Raisa took Nancy through the Kremlin, the two adversaries picked up right where they had left off. This time the flashpoint was religion. As they walked through the Assumption Cathedral, a fifteenth-century Russian Orthodox church where the czars were coronated, Nancy noted the religious imagery all around and asked whether services were ever held there.
“Nyet,” Raisa replied. The tour ended abruptly.
Nancy had finally found a way to get under Raisa’s skin. A couple of days later, they were to tour Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, where Nancy had specifically requested to see some of its famous icons. Raisa arrived early and gave the assembled media some background on the gallery. When Nancy got there, a reporter asked the American first lady about Raisa’s contention that the pieces had artistic and historic value, but no religious significance.
“I don’t know how you can neglect the religious implications,” Nancy replied. “I mean, they’re there for everybody to see.” She pointed out that one of the icons, the most famous, was called The Trinity. It is a fifteenth-century depiction of three angels who in the Book of Genesis were said to have visited Abraham to inform him that his ninety-year-old wife Sarah would bear a child.
“You realize we arrived on Trinity Sunday,” Nancy told Raisa, who gave no indication that she did.
Religion was a particularly sensitive subject in Washington-Moscow relations at that moment. Ronnie had served notice before the summit that he planned to bring a spotlight to the plight of Soviet Jews, and particularly the “refuseniks” who were not being allowed to emigrate. Nancy proposed they visit the apartment of one of the more well known of those families, the Ziemans, who had applied to leave the Soviet Union eleven years before. Yuri Zieman, the patriarch, lost his job as a scientist when he applied for a visa and was working as a plumber. In the months before the Reagans’ arrival, he came down with a brain ailment that required treatment unavailable in Moscow.
Plans were well under way—a red White House phone had even been installed in their apartment—when the Soviets passed the word to the American delegation that the Ziemans would never be allowed to get out unless the Reagans canceled their visit to the family’s home. The Reagans settled instead for seeing the Ziemans at a reception they hosted for hundreds of dissidents at Spaso House, the US ambassador’s residence.
“Was this a bluff? Nobody could say, but we didn’t want to take any chances. No promises were made, but it was hinted that if we left the Ziemans alone, they would be allowed to leave the country,” Nancy recalled. “Two months later, they were given their visas—but only after Ronnie called the Soviet ambassador and reminded him of the implied agreement.”
On the final night of their trip to Moscow, the Reagans sat with the Gorbachevs in the gilded, red-curtained royal box at the Bolshoi Theatre and saw its world-famous ballet company perform. Then they went to dinner at a dacha. Nancy was exhausted by the time they headed in for the night, but they stopped at Red Square. America’s first couple got out of the car and strolled hand in hand, posing and waving for photographers in front of landmark St. Basil’s Cathedral. “It would have been a shame to go home without seeing it,” Nancy wrote later.
This supposedly spontaneous photo opportunity capped the summit with an image that would leave more of an impression than the news stories, which lamented the fact that it had not produced any tangible new initiatives. But what the summit lacked in substance, it more than made up for with thrilling symbolism. Americans heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” played by the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra. There had been the sight of Ronnie putting his arm around Gorbachev as the two of them had taken their own walk in Red Square. Blimps over the Kremlin dangled the American and Soviet flags.
All of it spoke to the fact that the world was entering a new era. As Ronnie’s presidency reached its final months, his vision was on its way to being achieved. After four decades of Cold War, two leaders had decided to trust each other enough to bring it to an end. However, the Nobel Peace Prize that Nancy had dreamed of for her husband would go to Gorbachev, alone, in 1990.
Nancy saw Raisa only one more time while Ronnie was in office. They were both in New York in December 1988 for a United Nations meeting where Gorbachev was to announce that he was reducing Soviet military forces by a half million troops. By then, George H. W. Bush was the president elect. The two first ladies crossed paths at a luncheon at the home of Marcela Perez de Cuellar, the wife of the UN secretary general. “I will miss you and your husband,” Raisa told Nancy with apparent sincerity. “As for the two of us, it was destiny that put us at the place we were, next to our husbands, to help bring about the relationship that our two countries now have.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
While Ronnie was making progress toward a historic rapprochement with the Soviet Union, storm clouds were building at home. In his final two years as president, he would be hit by his most serious crisis, a scandal that shattered the nation’s trust in his character and threatened his survival in office. Nancy would once again step into her role as his enforcer and guardian. One of her greatest obstacles, as it turned out, was her husband’s obstinacy. But Nancy persisted, convinced that Ronnie had never needed her so badly.
The darkness began near the end of 1986. This was a year in which Ronnie counted a host of major domestic achievements, among them a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s tax system and the passage of a major immigration bill he had championed. On September 14 Ronnie held Nancy’s hand as they made a rare joint address from the West Sitting Hall of the residence and called for a “national crusade” against drug abuse. Six weeks later, the president signed into law a tough $1.7 billion anti-narcotics bill. He handed his pen to Nancy as a souvenir. “She started long before the polls began to register our citizens’ concern about drugs,” he said. “She mobilized the American people, and I’m mighty proud of her.”
But the 1986 congressional campaign season was a brutal one for the president’s Party, as midterm elections during a second term tend to be. The stakes for this one were enormous. Hanging in the balance was the survival of the Senate majority that had ridden to Washington on Ronnie’s coattails six years before. The GOP Senate had been his legislative bulwark against the Democratic House on fiscal issues and foreign policy. A fully Democratic Congress would ensure no further progress on the unfinished business of his conservative agenda.
On the final weekend before the election, Ronnie returned to Southern California, where he had launched his political career, and made a stop in Orange County, an epicenter of right-wing activism. The speech he gave to a crowd of 1,200 in a Hilton ballroom was sentimental—almost elegiac.
“I remember coming to Anaheim twenty years ago in my first campaign for governor. Orange County was essential to success. And everything we’ve accomplished since then in Sacramento and, yes, in Washington began with that margin of
victory provided here in Orange County. I delight in telling some people, who don’t understand, outside of the state of California, that Orange County is where the good Republicans go before they die,” he said. “Today you are no less vital to securing the gains that we’ve made and keeping our country moving forward. Your support is indispensable again, so let me ask you this one last time: come Election Day, let’s get out the vote and see to it that our team wins the day.”
During that campaign, Ronnie hit the road as if he himself were on the ballot, though he never would be again. He traveled twenty-four thousand miles, making fifty-four stops in twenty-two states and raised upward of $33 million for GOP candidates. Behind the scenes, Nancy was an architect of the strategy. She attended sessions nearly every afternoon to figure out where a presidential visit might make the biggest difference and when. As one White House aide who was involved told journalists Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus: “She was very concerned about losing the Senate in ’86. That’s the reason he traveled so much, because she was so worried. That kind of decision never would have gone to him. The political staff, the advance staff, and Mrs. Reagan drew up all the plans. But the president played no part in these kinds of things—he just went.”
Ronnie frequently mentioned Nancy’s favorite cause as he campaigned. “I can’t help but see the young people here in the audience, as I did in Reno on Thursday,” he said at a November 3 rally in Las Vegas. “I have a special message to all of you from my roommate. She says when it comes to drugs, please—for yourselves, for your families, for your future, and your country—just say no.”
Though he may have seen the 1986 campaign as a last hurrah, Ronnie’s popularity was not transferable. One poll showed that nearly a third of those who approved of his performance as president voted for Democratic contenders for the Senate. Republicans lost eight seats and, with them, their majority in the chamber. Even before the votes came in, party leaders knew their situation was hopeless.
But the final weekend before the 1986 midterm election brought one bit of welcome news: David Jacobsen, the director of the American University Hospital in Beirut, who had been abducted nearly eighteen months before, was released by his captors, a terrorist group known as Islamic Holy War. Jacobsen was the third hostage to be freed over the previous year. Six other Americans were still being held. White House spokesman Larry Speakes made the announcement, which dropped a cryptic hint of a broader effort: “We have been working through a number of sensitive channels for a long time. Unfortunately, we cannot divulge any of the details of the release, because the lives of other Americans and other Western hostages are still at risk.”
The truth was, Speakes himself was having trouble figuring out what was really happening behind the scenes. He had been led to expect the release of two hostages. John Poindexter, who had replaced Robert McFarlane as national security adviser the previous December, did not provide Speakes with details but suggested that Jacobsen’s release was part of a much larger operation.
* * *
How much bigger began to become clear on Monday morning, November 3, the day before the election. Al-Shiraa, a leftist weekly magazine in Beirut, reported that the United States was secretly selling arms to Iran. The covert deals had been going on for more than a year. They involved tens of millions of dollars’ worth of medium-range Hawk missiles and antitank TOW missiles, shipped through Israel, which in turn provided them to Iran. The transactions violated both the US government’s stated policy against supplying weapons to countries deemed to sponsor terrorism and its specific embargo against the theocracy in Tehran.
As details of the scheme unspooled, the story became even more sensational. McFarlane, though no longer holding any official role in the Reagan administration, had been making secret visits to broker the arms sales. In return, Iran was helping to arrange the release of the Americans held hostage in Lebanon by Iran-linked Shiite Muslim militants. As the news was breaking, top Reagan officials felt like they were being sucked into a recurring nightmare. Hadn’t Jimmy Carter’s presidency been destroyed by a hostage crisis? Was this a Republican president’s turn to be undone by one? Pentagon Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who was visiting Brussels, Belgium, to meet with other defense ministers at NATO headquarters, put his head in his hands and exclaimed: “Not again! Not after Watergate!”
Ronnie insisted that the arms deals were not a ransom payment but rather a diplomatic initiative to open a dialogue with moderates in Tehran. On November 13 he declared: “We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.” His statement, America soon learned, contained a number of false claims. One was that the amount of arms and spare parts sent to Tehran was small enough that “they could easily fit into a single cargo plane.” In fact, the first two shipments alone, in August and September 1985, totaled more than five hundred TOW antitank missiles. Six days later, Ronnie—still shaky on his facts—conducted a disastrous news conference. This time he asserted that Israel had not been involved as an intermediary, though his own chief of staff had already acknowledged that it had. The White House corrected the president in a statement issued minutes after the news conference. Some of Ronnie’s aides began begging him to just admit that the whole arms-for-hostages scheme had been a mistake. Instead, the president grew more stubborn, taking out his wrath, privately and publicly, on the media. In his diary, he wrote that they had become a “lynch mob” and a “circle of sharks.”
Ronnie appointed a special review board to investigate and figure out what exactly had happened, focusing specifically on the workings of his National Security Council. To ensure that the panel’s findings would be credible, he picked elders of both parties. John Tower, a former Republican senator from Texas, would serve as chairman. The other two members would be Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser under Gerald Ford, and Edmund Muskie, the onetime senator from Maine who had been Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state. Ronnie also asked Attorney General Ed Meese, his longest-serving top aide, to conduct an internal investigation of the matter.
Taking another step, one that was overdue, Ronnie attempted to bring more coherence to his fractious foreign-policy team. He put the State Department fully in charge of Iran policy, a victory for George Shultz that quieted growing speculation he might resign to save his own reputation from the stench of the growing scandal. Nancy’s normally warm relationship with Shultz grew strained during this period, to the point where she questioned his loyalty and began contemplating whether one of her closest allies should be ousted.
The Teflon was off the Reagan presidency. A raft of public polls and Ronnie’s internal ones showed that, for the first time, a majority of Americans did not believe he was being truthful. Veteran opinion expert Lou Harris found that Ronnie’s rating on “inspiring confidence in the White House” plummeted 23 points practically overnight, one of the sharpest drops Harris’s survey had ever recorded. Three-quarters of the public flatly rejected the president’s unconvincing claim that there had been no connection between the shipment of arms to Iran and the release of the hostages. “This is particularly damaging to President Reagan, who has inspired people with his character, integrity, and sincerity,” Harris wrote.
It was about to get worse. Much worse. Meese made a shocking discovery as he tried to get to the bottom of things: the profits from the arms sales had been funneled to Nicaraguan rebel forces, known as contras, who were seeking to overthrow Managua’s Socialist Sandinista government. Congress had banned any such assistance to the rebels—or as Ronnie liked to call them, “freedom fighters.” The secret funding from the Iran arms sales was a blatant violation of the law. What no one knew was precisely who had authorized this rogue operation, which had been carried out by a cocksure and devious US Marine lieutenant colonel who worked for the National Security Council. His name was Oliver North.
Ronnie looked ashen when he told Nancy on the afternoon of November 24 that tens of millions of dollars from the arms sales were
missing, and that much of it had apparently been diverted illegally to the contras. After Meese announced his discovery, everyone in the media and on Capitol Hill was soon asking: Who else was in on it? And did the president know? In his diary, Ronnie wrote that he had been in the dark about the channeling of arms sales money to the contras: “North didn’t tell me about this. Worst of all, John Poindexter found out about it & didn’t tell me. This may call for resignations.”
Both Poindexter and North were soon out. As North made his exit, he and his secretary, Fawn Hall, carried out an epic paper-shredding operation in his office on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building. When the machine jammed, Hall sneaked documents off the grounds by stuffing them into her boots and blouse. Whatever credit Ronnie might have gotten for giving North the axe was lost in an angry interview he gave a few days later to Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey. The president lauded the forty-three-year-old marine lieutenant colonel as “a national hero.”
Nancy took a far different measure of North than her husband did. The national security aide fabricated claims about his closeness with the president. It would later come out that he had told the Iranians of meeting alone with Ronnie and taking a long walk with him in the woods at Camp David; in fact, North had never set foot at the presidential retreat, and had not so much as been in a room with Ronnie where there were fewer than a half dozen others present. The only time Ronnie spoke to North on the telephone was when he fired him on November 25. Nancy also bristled at the way North swaggered on television, reveling in his newfound celebrity status. Watching one of his breezy interviews outside his home during the early days of the scandal, the first lady heard North make a lame joke about the much-discussed possibility that he might be granted immunity from prosecution for any testimony he might give.
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 51
