Gorbachev’s ascent to the job of Soviet leader brought these underlying differences to the surface. The early characterizations of Gorbachev in the West focused on his appearance and style: telegenic and charismatic, confident and poised. To Nixon, such traits were inherently suspect, and it was only a small logical step for him to begin portraying Gorbachev’s ascent to preeminence as merely a superficial change covering up an underlying continuity. But to Reagan, the career actor, Gorbachev’s public-relations skills were no defect.
As it became clear that the new Soviet leader was pressing for domestic reforms, skeptics such as Nixon and Kissinger at first worried, wrongly, that Gorbachev might be attempting to reassert Soviet military power and an aggressive foreign policy. By contrast, Reagan became ever more eager for a deal with Gorbachev, sensing that the United States could get good terms, and at the same time, give Gorbachev some of the help he needed to keep pushing for domestic reform inside the Soviet Union—a change in the Soviet system that had always interested Reagan more than Nixon.
Nixon and Reagan were contemporaries. They had been, since the 1940s, America’s most prominent and most successful anti-Communist politicians. Yet by the 1980s, they had different perspectives and policy prescriptions. One of them, Nixon, instinctively viewed events in the Soviet Union as a continuation of the past. The other, Reagan, searched for fundamental changes.
PART II
INFORMAL ADVISER
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A NEW FRIEND
In forming his perceptions of the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan had a friend—a well-dressed, attractive, Russian-speaking, fifty-year-old woman whose ideas about what was happening in Moscow and Leningrad made a bigger impression upon the president of the United States than the reporting and analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency. Her name was Suzanne Massie. She was a writer and author, not an established Soviet scholar. She first met the president on January 17, 1984, when National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane brought her into the Oval Office to give Reagan a report on a recent visit to the Soviet Union. They hit it off immediately.1
The setting was hardly intimate. Reagan was flanked by several other senior officials, including McFarlane, Vice President George Bush, and Reagan’s three top White House aides: Michael Deaver, James Baker, and Edwin Meese. Nevertheless, as Massie proceeded to describe the mood in Moscow, she focused directly on the president as though he were the only person in the room. Whatever she did worked. Reagan was by nature so remote and impersonal that even distinguished visitors sometimes left wondering if he knew their names—and yet on this occasion, Reagan forged some sort of bond with Massie. He invited her to return to the White House after her next trip to Moscow, and she came back again and again and again. The records of the president’s appointments show that Massie met Reagan at the White House roughly twenty times during the following years, more often than any Soviet expert or indeed anyone else outside his own immediate subordinates. Sometimes, Reagan was joined in these sessions by top-level officials, such as his national security adviser. Sometimes, the advisers weren’t invited. Asked many years later whether he had taken part in Reagan’s White House meetings with Massie, Donald Regan, the White House chief of staff from 1985 to 1987, replied, “No, that was always private, and usually upstairs in the family quarters.”2
Massie and Reagan began to send each other letters that were mostly about the Soviet Union but occasionally veered toward the personal. “How do you do it, Superman?” Massie asked in a letter in the summer of 1985, after Reagan had returned to the White House from surgery for a polyp in his colon. She sent Reagan little notes on his birthday. Reagan reciprocated. When Massie became a grandmother, the president not only congratulated her but wrote out a separate note addressed to the grandson, Samuel Robert Massie, that began, “Welcome! Your arrival in this exciting and challenging world is a cause for joy far greater than you can know right now….” Reagan’s White House aides began to describe Massie in their memos to one another as a personal favorite of Reagan’s. Asking that some time be set aside for Massie on Reagan’s schedule, one aide wrote to another: “This is important to the President—he likes Suzanne very much.”3
There is no evidence that this was some sort of romantic affair; Massie was no Monica Lewinsky. She was fascinated by the Soviet Union, interested in creating a role for herself, and also exceedingly skilled in making connections to powerful people. Before meeting Reagan, she had succeeded in courting and befriending a series of American military leaders and U.S. senators. She disdained formality and institutional structures, and in this respect above all she had something in common with Reagan himself. Massie’s rival for attention within the Reagan White House—the individual whom she disliked, disparaged, and envied—was not Nancy Reagan. It was Jack Matlock, the National Security Council’s leading Soviet specialist, who personified to Massie the U.S. government bureaucracy that she frequently sought to circumvent. (For his own part, Matlock, who went on to become a distinguished U.S. ambassador to Moscow, saw Massie as a marginal figure, despite her frequent meetings with the president.)
In a 1986 letter that epitomized Massie’s style and approach, she told Reagan: “I have some thoughts about this [the situation in Leningrad] that I would like to share with you informally. Is there anyway [sic] that we could do this alone, or best of all, with Mrs. Reagan, whom I have always wanted to meet?”4 Shrewd in the ways of power, Massie no doubt recognized that Nancy Reagan could be a powerful ally and supporter. Mrs. Reagan did in fact join her husband a couple of times for conversations with Massie, but never developed the same warm relationship with her as the president did.
In an interview for this book, Nancy Reagan looked back with chilly detachment at Massie and the role she played. “She was pushy,” Mrs. Reagan observed tersely. Nancy Reagan made sure, however, that Massie was invited to major ceremonial events, including the 1987 White House state dinner for Mikhail Gorbachev and, many years later, Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Massie was grateful for these invitations. She recognized that everyone considered Nancy Reagan to be a tough operator, but Massie believed this was a role Mrs. Reagan was obliged to play in order to offset her husband’s habitual congeniality and his dislike of confrontation. She compared the situation to a doctor’s office. “You know how always when there’s a wonderful gynecologist, he’s got a nasty nurse?” Massie asked.5
Reagan obtained a series of benefits from his regular contacts with Massie. She was his source of Russian stories and proverbs. It was Massie who introduced to Reagan the Russian proverb he memorized and then repeated again and again, to Mikhail Gorbachev’s considerable annoyance, throughout the summitry and arms-control negotiations of his second term: Doveryai no proveryai (“Trust, but verify”).
Reagan also derived from Massie his impressions of the Russian people and their history, as an entity separate from the Soviet government or Communist Party. When Reagan went to Geneva for his first meeting with Gorbachev, he was carrying Massie’s book Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia. He was reading it so carefully that in one preparatory session devoted to the coming summit, Reagan interrupted Paul Nitze, his chief arms-control negotiator, to say: “I’m in the year 1830 [in Massie’s book]…. What happened to all these small shopkeepers in St. Petersburg in the year 1830 and to all that entrepreneurial talent in Russia? How can it have just disappeared?” Reagan’s reliance upon Firebird was startling, because when Massie’s book had first been published in 1980, a scathing review in the New York Times had dismissed it as “a heavy breathing comic strip” and “a lollipop speaking baby-talk.”6