Massie served other purposes as well. Reagan occasionally used her trips to the Soviet Union for back-channel diplomacy. The histories and memoirs of Soviet-American relations during the Reagan years, such as the books by Matlock and Secretary of State George Shultz, give short shrift to Massie. However, the declassified files of the Reagan administration show that at a couple of junctures, she played a more significant role than these histories described: she carried messages back and forth to Moscow concerning the timing, circumstances, and conditions of Reagan’s summits with Gorbachev. Her interlocutors in Moscow included an official from the KGB. Eventually, Massie’s direct access to Reagan became so threatening to others in the U.S. government that they campaigned against her, warning in secret memos that the KGB might somehow be using her to influence the president.
The Suzanne Massie saga offers a lens to examine Ronald Reagan’s own ideas, instincts, and inclinations concerning the Soviet Union. In evaluating the Reagan administration and in particular its policies toward the Soviet Union, it is sometimes hard to distinguish which elements are distinctly Reagan’s and which represent merely his approval of what others were doing. Some parts of Reagan’s arms-control diplomacy, for example, were largely the work of foreign-policy advisers such as Shultz, who had been carefully nudging Reagan since 1983 to try to seek some agreements with Moscow. Reagan’s political advisers and friends also influenced him on Soviet policy—above all, Nancy Reagan, who years later admitted, “Yes, I did push Ronnie a little” into negotiations with Gorbachev.7 Yet Reagan’s continuing use of Massie was his own doing. He chose to meet with her and listen to her, from among all the scholars and experts available to him; and so it is worth exploring where she came from, what she represented, and what ideas about the Soviet Union made her of interest to Reagan.
Reagan’s contacts with Massie are also significant because they illuminate how the president’s outlook on the Soviet Union changed during his later years in the White House. In 1984, when Massie was introduced to Reagan, a national security adviser (McFarlane) was attempting to use her to moderate the president’s hawkish inclinations. In contrast, three years later another national security adviser (Carlucci) sought to restrict Massie’s access to Reagan because of concerns that Reagan had become too dovish toward the Soviet Union. Throughout this period, Massie herself remained a constant; she continued to say the same things about Russia and its people. But the president’s ideas about the Soviet Union changed considerably. Massie didn’t cause this shift, but through her continuing trips to the White House, one can trace Reagan’s gradual evolution.
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BANNED FROM THE LAND OF THE FIREBIRD
If Ronald Reagan was immediately taken with Suzanne Massie, it was because her life story seemed like the stuff of the B movies to which he had devoted much of his Hollywood career. It contained elements of tragedy and hope, of adversity and overweening ambition. Massie’s ideas about Russia—intensely romantic, spiritual, even mystical in nature—grew out of the extraordinary circumstances of her own life, especially the shattering experience of having a hemophiliac son.
Massie’s mother, a Swiss woman named Suzanne Nobs, had lived in Russia as a teenager during the final years of Czar Nicholas. She was visiting a Russian family in 1914 when World War I broke out. Trapped inside the country, she stayed there for several years, through the upheavals of the Russian Revolution, before finally managing to flee. She later married a Swiss diplomat, Maurice Rohrbach, who was assigned to the United States. Massie, the eldest of three daughters, was born in New York City, but the family lived for most of her childhood in Philadelphia, where her father was serving as the Swiss consul general. Her mother taught Suzanne to love Russian ballet and introduced her to Russian friends.
After graduating from Vassar, Massie was one of five women from colleges across the nation chosen by Time Inc. as a trainee. She went on to work as a researcher at Time magazine (a job reserved exclusively for women) and as a cub reporter for Life. Following the custom of the 1950s, she shelved her budding career when she got married. Her husband, Robert Massie, a former Rhodes Scholar and U.S. Navy intelligence officer, became a magazine writer, first for Collier’s and then for Newsweek. Struggling for money, the couple moved from a furnished room on the Lower West Side of Manhattan into a cramped apartment in Westchester County, where their first son, Robert, was born. Five months later, their suburban routines were upended: Suzanne noticed bruises on her son’s body, and a toe prick from a lab test would not stop bleeding. The inevitable diagnosis: hemophilia. The Massies entered into a life of recurrent medical crises and unending fear of injury, of begging for blood donations and battling with doctors and hospitals.1
After several years, Suzanne Massie looked for something that would enable her to escape her son’s illness for a few hours at a time. “To keep my mind intact, to keep from turning around in my cage like a panic-stricken animal, I had to do something hard, something mentally challenging,” she later wrote. She decided to study Russian. Her mother had gotten to know the language in the midst of the Russian Revolution, in a milieu akin to that in Doctor Zhivago; by contrast, the setting for Suzanne Massie’s study of Russian could not have been more mundane. She enrolled in the adult education program at White Plains High School, which was offering language courses for eight dollars a semester. On the first night of class, a woman named Svetlana told her, “Suzanne, you have a Russian soul.” Massie took those words to heart .2
Meanwhile, Robert Massie had moved to another magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. For years he had been proposing to various magazines an article about hemophilia. Finally, the Post bought the idea. Along with a general article about hemophilia, Robert Massie also submitted a brief sidebar called “The Most Famous Hemophiliac,” about the Russian czar Nicholas; his wife, Alexandra; their hemophiliac son, Alexis; and their faith healer, Gregory Rasputin. The Post killed this second piece for lack of space, but Suzanne Massie encouraged Robert to turn the story into a book that would narrate Russian history and at the same time tell the world about hemophilia, their son’s disease. Robert Massie spent several years in the New York Public Library; Suzanne served as his researcher and editor. The book, published in 1967, was Nicholas and Alexandra; it became a best seller and eventually, a Hollywood movie.3
After the book was published, the Massies traveled for the first time to the Soviet Union. The impact on Suzanne Massie was profound. She identified the travails of the Russian people with her own plight. She later wrote: