Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  If these transitions were difficult for the head of state, they presented a different challenge to us broadcasters. If one of these leaders died in the middle of the night, we had to scramble to go live on the Today show. Unfortunately, we were in Santa Barbara when we got the word about Andropov. I’d been out to dinner, and had consumed more than my share of wine. When I got back to my room around midnight, there was a call from the news desk at Today about a rumor circulating that the Soviet leader had passed away, based on the observations of Washington Post Moscow bureau chief Dusko Doder that official Soviet radio had switched to funeral music. The people at the Today show wanted to know if I could confirm the rumor. Desperately I tried to locate Larry Speakes, who was AWOL.

  When I finally got someone at the National Security Council, I was able to confirm the story. Incredibly, the American embassy in Moscow was caught completely unaware. I went on the Today show at 4 a.m. West Coast time, but not enough time had elapsed for me to be completely sober. John Palmer was anchoring in New York. I barely got through my report, and it taught me an important lesson about the risks of letting your hair down on the White House beat—something I never did again.

  Chernenko died in March 1985—after serving for only one year—and was replaced by a young man by Soviet standards: fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev. It’s difficult to convey how electrifying the change was to the White House, and to all of us covering foreign policy. After years of Cold War threats from a series of colorless Kremlin apparatchiks, Gorbachev was an entirely new kind of Soviet leader: more open intellectually, and curious about the West. He was interested in ideas on economic reform that, once fully formulated, would become known as Perestroika. Margaret Thatcher was the first European leader to meet him, and validated him for the West. “I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together,” she said. By the time Gorbachev took over, Ronald Reagan was himself rethinking the possibility of arms control and détente. He was also almost religious in his fervor about eliminating the need for nuclear weapons by creating a perfect defense against them. As a result of the influence of scientist Edward Teller and others, he was convinced that missile defense, pejoratively referred to by critics as Star Wars, could somehow protect America from a Soviet first strike with an invisible shield.

  It had never been tested. In fact, at that point, it hadn’t even been invented. But the fact that Reagan was willing to invest in the systems scared the Soviets and helped get them to the bargaining table. One of the great, unintended consequences of Reagan’s missile defense plan was that it made the Soviets feel more vulnerable and willing to negotiate. They also spent so much money trying to compete with the phantom American technology, it helped bankrupt their system, accelerating its collapse. The administration’s foreign policy team was still bitterly divided over whether to negotiate with the Soviets, but George Shultz and the State Department diplomats eager for arms reductions had a secret weapon of their own: Nancy Reagan.

  Long before her husband, the first lady believed that there had to be a way out of the arms race. Whether she accomplished it through pillow talk or not, she weighed in against Pentagon hard-liners like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and helped get Reagan to a summit with Gorbachev in 1985. Not that Weinberger was without resources. He leaked a hard-line memo to the press just as the president was heading to Geneva, a last attempt to subvert the negotiations. And now there was another player on the arms control front, one with no experience in either diplomacy or nuclear weapons—the new chief of staff, former treasury secretary Donald Regan.

  Donald Regan was colorful and profane. He had a healthy ego, but as the former head of Merrill Lynch had more of a salesman’s knowledge of Wall Street than a deep knowledge of economics. But typically, when Reagan was first forming his administration, he appointed Regan treasury secretary without having even met or interviewed him. It was enough that he was the choice of the kitchen cabinet of California advisors in charge of the presidential transition.

  Realizing that James Baker was weary from the stress of four years running the White House, Don Regan had cleverly proposed a job swap at the beginning of the second term, and Baker became treasury secretary. Incredibly, the two officials presented it to the boss as a fait accompli. As long as “the boys” said it would work, the chief executive saw no reason to question their suitability for their new assignments. With perfect timing and an innate sense for avoiding political disaster, Baker left the White House and became an extraordinarily good treasury secretary. But his departure left the president with a chief of staff who had little experience in politics, and less in foreign policy.

  Taking over the White House, Regan was more authoritarian than Baker had been. Baker came from an old and privileged Houston family, but never affected a sense of pride or entitlement. Regan was different. Unlike the rest of the senior White House staff, he had made a lot of money and felt that made him the president’s equal rather than just a staff man, a subordinate. He tried to cement their relationship by sharing an endless collection of jokes, which he told with flair and great Irish wit. When he ventured into foreign policy, his wit ran out.

  In the first Reagan term, more experienced cabinet officers like Secretary of State George Shultz had had to fix Regan’s mistakes at Treasury more than once. During the first economic summit Reagan hosted, held in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1983, Shultz and Regan were constantly at odds, and at the end even held separate competing news conferences. Shultz had to reassert his ground over and over again, as the Treasury Department meddled in areas where foreign and economic policies overlapped.

  Only a few months after Regan took over, he faced his first controversy—one that put him on the wrong side of the first lady. Mrs. Reagan was far more attuned to how events would play with the public than either her husband or his chief of staff. She was the first to realize that her husband’s plan to visit a Nazi cemetery in Germany in the spring of 1985 was going to elicit a storm of criticism.

  The White House advance team for the trip, including Mike Deaver, had visited the Bitburg cemetery during the winter, when the incriminating headstones were blanketed in snow. That was their explanation for not knowing that the elaborate ceremony they were arranging to honor victims of World War II was going instead to memorialize SS soldiers who had been part of the Gestapo.

  After the controversy exploded, Reagan dug in his heels, refusing to cancel the event to prevent further embarrassment for his host, German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Making the situation worse was Reagan’s earlier refusal to visit a concentration camp on the trip. Defending his plan, Reagan said, “I think that there’s nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis…They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

  There was an outcry from Jewish leaders, who said the president’s statement about the poor SS men was a perversion of history. A White House official told us that Reagan had read a sympathetic treatment of the SS men in a 1973 Reader’s Digest magazine. Many of the stories that got him in trouble over the years came from popular magazines, not history. The issue came to a boil when, three weeks before his trip to Germany, Reagan was to award Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel the Congressional Gold Medal. After agonizing over whether even to accept the award, Wiesel decided to go ahead with it but use the White House event to make his own point.

  Looking up at Reagan in the Roosevelt Room, Wiesel, with his painful history all but mapped on his deeply lined face, pleaded with the president to change his mind. “May I, Mr. President, if it is possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS…the issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them.”

  Reagan appeared stricken, momentarily silenced by the
power of Wiesel’s argument and the emotion of his expression. The White House had in fact dispatched aides to try to silence Wiesel, or get him to modulate his disagreement with Reagan. Instead, Wiesel became a symbol for all Holocaust survivors, standing up to power and speaking truth.

  To try to quiet the critics, the White House added a stop at a concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, and in the long run Reagan’s visit may have had an unintended diplomatic payoff. It avoided a rupture with Kohl, a crucial ally. Four years later, when Germany was at the center of critical decisions surrounding the end of the Cold War, the close Reagan/Kohl friendship became a major factor.

  But the decision to go to Bitburg was one of the early stumbles for the new chief of staff, Donald Regan. The first lady let it be known that had Jim Baker still been on the watch, the mistake would never have been made in the first place.

  Almost immediately after moving across the street from Treasury, the new chief of staff tried to establish himself on the world stage. His most dramatic opportunity was the president’s first summit with a Soviet leader, an event the foreign policy team had been working toward for years.

  Arriving in Geneva that November of 1985, Regan immediately propelled himself into the limelight. While Secretary of State Shultz and National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane focused on the arms control agenda, and Mike Deaver choreographed the public encounters between the two Cold Warriors, all Regan seemed to care about was projecting his own importance at the summit. At his direction, the ceremonial group photo of the leaders’ first meeting with their foreign policy teams showed only three people: the two leaders and Don Regan, with no other advisors in view. In almost Soviet fashion, on Regan’s orders, all the others present, including the secretary of state and the national security advisor, had been cropped out of the picture, erased as nonpersons.

  In fact, even before they arrived in Geneva, Regan had caused an international stir when he told a writer for The Washington Post, Donnie Radcliffe, that women didn’t care about the nuclear arms race because “They’re not…going to understand throw weights or what is happening in Afghanistan or what is happening in human rights.” Technically, throw weight, an arms control term, is the amount of lift needed to propel a missile and its warhead. To Don Regan, these were clearly male concerns. The next day, a Post editorial suggested that Mr. Regan stop worrying.

  “Women are clever,” said the Post with the stiletto wit of its peerless editorial page editor, Meg Greenfield. “They’ve mastered vacuum cleaners and washing machines, and some can even figure out the family phone bills.” Her editorial suggested that the former Wall Street salesman had had so much coaching in preparation for the summit that he was becoming known as “the Eliza Doolittle of arms control.” No sooner had we arrived in Geneva than Sam Donaldson of ABC saw an opportunity to embarrass Regan at the first photo opportunity between the two Cold War leaders.

  As Regan watched, his face becoming more and more flushed, Sam asked Gorbachev and Reagan whether they agreed with the chief of staff that nuclear arms treaties were not of concern to women. Clearly unaware of the original story, Reagan seemed mystified. Gorbachev, seeing an opening even if he didn’t understand the context, jumped in: “Both men and women in the United States and the Soviet Union, all over the world, are interested in having peace for themselves and being sure that peace would be kept stable and lasting for the future….” Much to the annoyance of the president’s political and foreign policy advisors, round one went to the Soviet leader, thanks to Don Regan.

  By the time Regan returned to Washington, he had already been widely criticized for his handling of the summit, but still agreed to do a live interview with me on the Today show. He wanted to talk about the details of the arms control negotiations that had taken place in Geneva. Having covered the issue intensively since Ronald Reagan had been in office, I knew that Regan had no idea what he was talking about. After giving him a chance to extol the summit’s many accomplishments, at the end of the interview I leaned over and asked, “Mr. Regan, what is throw weight?”

  For what appeared to be fifteen seconds, an eternity in television, he sat silently before he could fumble a response. “Well, uh,” he said, “from the point of view it’s—it’s the amount of actual warheads that come from the, uh, curve of the missile from the time it leaves to the time it actually lands, and how much do you actually drop.”

  Clearly, Regan was out of his element. Even though it was a gotcha question, I wasn’t the least bit sorry. But Regan would make me pay for it later.

  Nancy Reagan clearly did not appreciate Regan’s bumbling performance in Geneva, but she had her own problems with the summit’s public relations. If there was a possibility of détente between the leaders of the two superpowers, the Cold War was becoming a deep freeze between their spouses. At their first meeting, Nancy took an instant dislike to Raisa Gorbachev; the two of them were oil and water. Nancy saw Raisa, who was more ideological than her husband, as hopelessly didactic and humorless. The two women spent more time jockeying for position than communicating. In her 1989 memoir, My Turn, Nancy Reagan said of Raisa Gorbachev, “We were thrust together although we had little in common and had completely different outlooks on the world.” The two first ladies met initially when their husbands were holding their first substantive arms talks. The men were hitting it off. The women’s encounter set a chilly tone for what was to come. The following October, Mrs. Gorbachev only irritated Nancy Reagan further by showing up at the Reykjavik summit in Iceland, after Mrs. Reagan had been told wives were not invited.

  In December 1987, the Gorbachevs came to Washington, and there was even more awkwardness when Raisa appeared more interested in the reporters accompanying the official entourage on a tour of the White House than on her hostess’s commentary. Nancy was smoldering. In his 1988 memoir, For the Record, Regan reported that after Mrs. Gorbachev lectured the president during a dinner given by the Reagans, Nancy exploded, “Who does that dame think she is?” In her own book Mrs. Reagan concluded, “During about a dozen encounters in three different countries, my fundamental impression of Raisa Gorbachev was that she never stopped talking. Or lecturing, to be more accurate.” It was the kind of delicious catfight we in the press loved to cover.

  Still, Nancy knew how to create social settings that would ease some of the tension. I was the broadcast pool reporter, representing the television networks at the state dinner for the Gorbachevs during their Washington visit. As a representative of the proletariat, Gorbachev would not wear black tie, so he came in a business suit, much to the annoyance of Nancy. The Reagans wore formal dress. But they somehow managed to break through the frostiness with the entertainment. Nancy had thoughtfully chosen Van Cliburn, still hugely popular in Moscow even though twenty-nine years had elapsed since his youthful triumph in the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. And after playing the requisite classical pieces, Cliburn charmed the Gorbachevs by performing one of their favorite Russian folk songs, “Moscow Nights.” Glowing, perhaps from the very good red wine, Gorbachev sang along, endearing him to the Reagans—and to many Americans watching on television—as he displayed a sentimental side of a Soviet leader rarely seen in public.

  At their summits, Reagan and Gorbachev began to develop a relationship both personal and historic. Years later, I interviewed Gorbachev and asked him why he thought he could negotiate with Ronald Reagan, the Cold Warrior. Gorbachev said simply, “I liked him.” Historic changes sometimes are the result of great men, sometimes of accidents of timing, sometimes a combination. After Reagan’s death, analysts, and I include myself, were accused of giving him too much credit for ending the Cold War. So did this fervent anti-Communist end the Cold War, or only help hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union? The answer is complicated.

  In his first term, Ronald Reagan had been confrontational, strident, siding more often with his defense secretary, Cap Weinberger, than his diplomats. In fact, at his first news conference as president, he said of the Soviets, “They
reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.” On his first trip to Europe in the summer of 1982, he was widely criticized by the “elites” for a speech he gave at Westminster predicting the collapse of the Soviet empire and heralding “the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism/Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Condoleezza Rice, a young Soviet specialist at the time, recalled that many critics were horrified, commenting, “Oh, my God, how undiplomatic that is.”

  What the critics failed to take into account was the impact Ronald Reagan’s stance was having on the Soviet intelligentsia. As much as they resented Reagan, he also provoked them into reexamining the structure of their society. Still, there were huge philosophical gaps to be overcome. Years later, when NBC interviewed Gorbachev after Reagan died in 2004, the former Soviet leader recalled that when the two men first met, they had to overcome years of mistrust: “After the meeting, I told my team, he’s a real dinosaur, and he said I was a hardheaded Bolshevik.”

  But in Gorbachev Reagan found a pragmatic leader struggling with a collapsing economy and a rising number of dissidents, a man open to ideas on free markets and human rights. And Gorbachev now says that Reagan was a man with the popularity and vision to help open the door for Soviet reforms. During a visit to Moscow in 1988, Reagan addressed the Russian people on television and radio, an unprecedented act. His message was revolutionary: that the status quo was not acceptable, and not only on arms control. He saw the world as black and white, and insisted that human rights were a fundamental value, not a peripheral issue.