by Nancy Gibbs
Reagan named Haig as secretary of state a few weeks later.
Nixon would bombard Reagan over the next six years with letters and telegrams, offering foreign policy tips, intelligence gleaned on overseas trips, and occasional political predictions. He sent many short notes of encouragement, usually after big speeches, and a stream of welcome-home notes after overseas trips. He offered suggestions, historical artifacts, personal recollections (usually self-serving), and countless pieces of advice about everything from minor political stagecraft to grand geo-strategy. The substance of all these messages, good as some of the advice was, mattered less than the mere fact of it. Nixon had lots of advice for Reagan; he offered it freely, and even if Reagan didn’t always take it (though much of the evidence suggests that he did), Nixon for the first time felt like he was being heard.
He was no longer persona non grata. On the eve of the 1982 midterms, Nixon wrote Reagan to buck him up, urging him to overhaul his political team before Christmas. “Shaking up a team at midterm is not a sign of weakness,” he counseled. “Done the right way, it increases your status at home and abroad as a strong leader who will not tolerate ineffectiveness let alone disloyalty or dishonesty. I speak from experience. Some charged me with being too tough on subordinates . . . in retrospect, had I been tough, I might have avoided some of the problems that plagued me at the last.” When Reagan struggled to find his footing in the early days of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal, Nixon was there with a list of steps to take quickly. “After Christmas you might consider making several changes in order to strengthen your team for the last two years.” Three days later, Nixon wrote again, this time playing nurse. “Your continued good health is the free world’s greatest asset. Do whatever the doctor advises you and don’t delay treatment even a day because of concern about the PR effect.”
How the Club Became a Weapon
But if there was one topic that dominated the two men’s correspondence, it was how to manage the U.S.-Soviet relationship, and Nixon’s tone in these letters is that of a nervous coach who still longed to be on the field himself. One gets the sense that Nixon may have praised Reagan on all sorts of matters that he didn’t much care about in order to win the president’s ear on U.S.-Soviet affairs. At the very least, Nixon paid Reagan the courtesy of candor when it came to the USSR; the tone of these letters is different, more emphatic, almost unvarnished when compared to his other notes. You can almost hear Nixon straining not to lecture. And yet, at the end of one such note in February 1983, Nixon is careful to acknowledge who is in the chair. “As usual, these thoughts are not for the record or for history but for your private consideration. Whatever you finally decide I will of course support.”
Mikhail Gorbachev’s emergence as Communist party general secretary tested this promise. Gorbachev began to rattle and then reform an ossified Soviet system. His changes at first were minor, mostly in how the Communist Party chose its leaders. But as he moved to make broader economic reforms in the USSR, he turned his attention to the most sacred of Soviet cows: shrinking Moscow’s military spending and the strategic nuclear forces at its core. American Sovietologists disagreed for months about how seriously to take Gorbachev’s vision or whether he would be allowed by Kremlin hard-liners to advance it or even remain in power. If the West were to take Gorbachev at his word, it could have vast implications for America’s place in the world, prospects for freedom around the globe, and its own defense industrial base. Nixon, the aging Red hunter, was a skeptic from the start. While Reagan would come to believe that the new Soviet leader was a real if imperfect departure from the past, Nixon was still too much of an unalloyed Cold Warrior to see it. Nixon worked behind the scenes and often in public to undermine Gorbachev’s reformist image, warning that no matter how appealing and friendly Gorbachev may seem, he was nonetheless a classic Soviet apparatchik. “Anyone who reaches the top in the Soviet Hierarchy,” Nixon wrote in a New York Times op-ed in September 1985, “is bound to be a dedicated Communist and a strong, ruthless leader who supports the policy of extending Soviet domination into the non-communist world.” Nixon published the column two months before Reagan and Gorbachev would meet for the first time in Geneva. Nixon expanded on his worries in an eleven-page article in Foreign Affairs that fall. Summits for summits’ sake, he argued, are silly. “This is a long struggle with no end in sight,” Nixon wrote. “Gorbachev, at 54, is a man who does not need to be in a hurry. He may live long enough to deal with as many as five American presidents.”
Nixon was practically telling Reagan that the club needed him to be firm.
And there is a lot of evidence that Reagan was listening. In late 1985, just before he was set to fly to Geneva to meet Gorbachev, Reagan recorded in his diary, “Dick had a hell of a good idea on the arms negotiations. . . . His suggestion is that we state what we have agreed on, that we will continue negotiating on the other points and as a token of our resolve to achieve results, we each take 100 missiles out of the silos and store them for a set time. If we can’t come to reduction agreement, we put them back in the silos.”
Reagan’s first meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva that fall had produced little beyond the requisite communiqué and good pictures, but provided a basis for a second meeting a year later. By the spring of 1986, Nixon had decided to take the measure of Gorbachev himself and scheduled a six-day, “private, fact finding” trip to Moscow. Some of Reagan’s aides—who by now were engaged in an almost daily skirmishing with one another about how seriously to take Gorbachev—were skeptical of Nixon’s mission and voiced their objections. But Reagan opted to let Nixon go, in part because he assumed that Nixon would also be granted time with Gorbachev. Nixon and Reagan spoke by phone for fifteen minutes before takeoff; the more eyes and ears on his counterpart, Reagan felt, the better.
Nixon arrived in Moscow on July 12, 1986. Once again, he was in his element, quietly working as a one-man back channel between the White House and the Kremlin. Just as he had predicted to Reagan, Nixon got to spend more than two hours with Andrei Gromyko, president of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, two hours with longtime Soviet envoy to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin, and an hour and forty-five minutes with Gorbachev himself. A week later, Nixon sent Reagan a remarkably detailed, twenty-six-page memo about his trip with advice ranging from the gastronomic to the strategic. Should a trip to Moscow ever be planned, he wrote, “Get ready to eat plenty of tomatoes, cucumbers, caviar and sturgeon. They still serve them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Incidentally, Gorbachev may not be able to change Soviet foreign policy but he has made one significant change on the domestic front. This was the first time in six trips to Moscow I was never served even a drop of vodka!”
The memo made clear that Nixon played multiple roles during his trip—and relished his own performance. He gathered intelligence, noting who in Gorbachev’s circle was up and who was down; he took it upon himself to explain Reagan to the Soviets and then, in great detail, reported back to Reagan on how the men in the Kremlin viewed the U.S. president. Nixon played the advocate too, urging the Soviets to cut an arms deal with Reagan rather than wait for a more moderate successor, who, he shrewdly explained, would have a much harder time shepherding any treaty through the U.S. Senate. He toggled back and forth between hard-nosed Cold Warrior and avuncular American. “I had known President Reagan for 30 years,” he recalled telling the Russians. Reagan, he said, “was a man of very strong convictions but that he was a reasonable man and if he could be convinced that an agreement was in our interests, he would make one. But I also emphasized that he did not need an agreement for his own political purposes because he would leave office with very high popularity even if he made no agreement with the Soviets.”
But then Nixon added, “However, I expressed my personal belief that [Reagan’s] major foreign policy goal in his second term was to reduce tensions between the Soviet Union and the US, negotiate the first nuclear arms reductions agreement in history and leave his successor a new, less confrontational relat
ionship which could survive long after he left office.”
Nixon was not running a rogue operation, but the former president was operating with enormous latitude in both capitals. And it is easy to imagine how much Nixon loved being back in the mix, simultaneously applying both grease and pressure at all the universal joints. At one point, Dobrynin asked Nixon for ideas to move the stalled arms talks along and Nixon complied, making a few proposals, including the idea of putting one-hundred-odd missiles into “escrow” as a confidence-building measure until a final deal could be done. Nixon did not tell the Russians he had already discussed the idea with Reagan; instead, he reminded them on several occasions that he was speaking only as a private citizen and had “no way of knowing what the reaction of US negotiators” might be. The Russians then asked Nixon to put those ideas on paper so that they could be translated and given to Gorbachev. Nixon agreed.
The former president came away from his 105-minute session with Gorbachev more impressed than he had been going in; still he found him to be “charismatic,” but also a “crude and vulgar man,” “more skillful, more subtle” than Leonid Brezhnev but less “rash” and “irresponsible” than Nikita Khrushchev. “He is the most affable of all the Soviet leaders I have met,” Nixon wrote Reagan, “but at the same time without question the most formidable because his goals are the same as theirs and he will be more effective in attempting to achieve them.”
Nixon was wrong about this, of course—Gorbachev would emerge as a clear break from his predecessors. But he was right about one thing: the value of the club as an instrument of American power. And it was that power that Nixon made sure Gorbachev understood. He reminded him that an arms deal before 1988 would “ensure that Reagan would strongly support his successor’s efforts to carry out the Reagan initiatives.” And he warned: “Failure to reach agreement while President Reagan is in office might run the risk of developing a situation where President Reagan might become a powerful critic of his successor’s Soviet American initiatives.” In other words, a current former president was warning the Soviets about the potential opposition of a future former president. Don’t mess with the club, Nixon advised.
Coming from Nixon, this was not an idle threat. And in his memo to Reagan, Nixon added, “I don’t believe anything I said during the conversation had a greater impact on him than this statement.”
Nixon’s relations with Reagan and the White House cooled after Reagan flew to Reykjavík in October 1986 and, in a spasm of wishful thinking, proposed to Gorbachev that the United States and the USSR abolish all their nuclear weapons. Nixon, who had long worried about Reagan’s judgment, found the idea alarming, maybe even reckless. And though that idea fizzled in Iceland, Reagan was determined to move forward on arms control, even by small steps, in his final two years in office. His chief target was a proposal by his secretary of state, George Shultz, to reduce intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe.
For some Republicans, Reagan’s second-term push for arms reduction may have seemed like a head-snap: Reagan made his name as an anticommunist crusader and had broken with Nixon and his détente wing of the GOP because it had been too accommodating to Moscow. But it was nearly as strange that Nixon, who had made his own march from fevered anticommunist to dispassionate arms controller over twenty-five years, did not approve of the bilateral route that Reagan was now traveling. And Nixon was complaining about Reagan’s approach to anyone who would listen.
On April 28, 1987, Nixon was summoned to the White House for reprogramming. He arrived by helicopter; National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci and chief of staff Howard Baker greeted the former president on the South Lawn and the three men slipped inside and proceeded upstairs to the residence. Careful White House advance work meant that Nixon’s arrival through the White House back door went unseen by the several dozen reporters who worked there.
Nixon arrived after spending the previous seventy-two hours driving the White House crazy. First, on Sunday, April 26, Nixon had published a syndicated op-ed column with Kissinger that suggested that Reagan was being seduced by Gorbachev into a shared but perilous vision of a nuclear-free world. In the New York Times the next morning, former Nixon speechwriter William Safire added his tart voice to the realists’ chorus: “Who’d a thunk it: a dozen years after the death of détente, after a decade of Reaganaut criticism about a ‘fatally flawed’ pair of SALT treaties, comes now Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger—together again—to warn that the Reagan administration may be going soft on the Russians. . . . Who’s right: the out of office former detenteniks turned neo-hardliners or the in office former hardliners turned neodetenteniks?” (Safire’s call: Nixon was right.)
And just that morning, in case anyone had missed either of those columns, Time had published an interview with Nixon in which the former president again tried to knock some sense into Reagan’s head. “Nuclear weapons aren’t going to be abolished,” he warned, “and they’re not going to be uninvented.”
Never mind that Reagan had laid aside his dream of a nuclear-free world and was merely trying to shrink the number of atomic weapons in Europe. Nixon was determined to play the antagonist—and it would not be the last time. Perhaps as a result, Baker and Carlucci had modest goals for the meeting: they hoped to convince Nixon to back their proposed reductions for medium-range missiles in Europe. And if Nixon wouldn’t agree to that, could he just pipe down?
Nixon rode the private elevator to the second floor with Baker and Carlucci and then joined Reagan in his private study, which had served as both LBJ’s and Nixon’s bedroom. It was his second visit to the White House since his resignation thirteen years earlier and his first in the private quarters. Nixon was astonished by how much the place had changed and found the furnishings extravagant compared to those he had known.
The two men had used the residence and its perks differently. Nixon preferred the nearby Lincoln Sitting Room as a smoker: he’d go in, build a fire in the fireplace, and then crank up the air conditioner. Reagan installed a weight room in the White House living quarters and worked out every day. Nixon had the trails at Camp David paved over so that his golf carts could scoot along faster; Reagan had them torn up and taken out so he could use them as horseback-riding trails.
But this was a room that had seen some strange club gatherings before: Nixon told Reagan how he had once sat in that same room in 1966 while Lady Bird had crawled into bed with LBJ. Reagan, trying to ease the tension, offered cocktails, but Nixon declined. Baker, an avid photographer, took pictures. Nixon urged Carlucci to take notes, adding weirdly: “I assume that the place isn’t taped!” Later, even Nixon admitted the mood was awkward; Nancy Reagan was nowhere to be found and Nixon noted the absence of Shultz as well. “I don’t know whether Nancy was in the Residence at the time, but if she was, he did not suggest that she come in and say hello. My guess is that she is probably as teed off as Shultz is.”
Nixon did what he always did in such sessions: he delivered a long opening statement, confessing from the start that he knew Reagan’s aides believed he and Kissinger were trying to “sabotage” the INF deal. Not so, said Nixon; he was just trying to make what looked like an inevitable INF arms pact stronger. Deep down, Nixon felt Reagan was playing a strong hand badly and did not possess the same patient, supple, and sometimes devilish feel for high-stakes negotiation he and Kissinger had in their heyday. He was not ready to trust Reagan on something as important as arms control.
Baker then asked Nixon if he might see a way to get behind the INF deal.
Nixon declined. The best he could do for Reagan, he said, was not to oppose any deal he struck with the Russians. But support it? No way.
“If the agreement was too unbalanced I would simply remain silent,” Nixon told himself later, “since opposing it, when there was no chance of getting it rejected [by the Senate], would be totally irresponsible.”
Nixon found it interesting that Reagan himself had not asked Nixon for his support. “Reagan did not enter into
this dialogue with Baker and I am not sure he was aware that Baker was going to make this proposal. I am quite sure that Shultz had put him up to it. In any event, I did not agree to it.”
Baker returned to the point before the meeting was over and once again Nixon declined to help out.
Nixon was no longer Reagan’s to command.
The session had lasted an hour—a fair amount of time for any president and, apparently, something close to an eternity for Reagan. Nixon came away worried about the president’s focus. He seemed tired, Nixon wrote afterward, “particularly so as the hour drew to a close. He was simply having difficulty concentrating, even though I made the presentation as simple and direct as possible.” Nixon was alarmed that Reagan continued to speak of eliminating all nuclear weapons, as though that was going to happen in his lifetime.
The two men, each in his own way, had come full circle. Forty years after Nixon had helped turn a fledgling union president into a well-known voice on anticommunism, he was now worried that the great, fire-breathing Reagan had gone soft on the reds. But Nixon was completing a revolution of his own. Once again, a former president, having been criticized from the right for being too quick to conduct détente with an enemy, found himself complaining about a successor being too quick to conduct détente with the enemy.
And the veteran, once again, found his onetime protégé wanting. “I must regretfully observe,” Nixon concluded in a four-thousand-word memo to himself on the White House visit, “that Reagan looks far older, more tired, and less vigorous in person than in public. There is no way he can ever be allowed to participate in a private meeting with Gorbachev.”
