Suzanne Massie began to serve as Reagan’s window on the Soviet Union. She described the country and the Russian people to the president in terms that he understood and found useful. Reagan was perennially on the lookout for stories, anecdotes, and proverbs about subjects he would have to address in public. With respect to the Soviet Union, he didn’t want to have to keep making up fictitious Ivans and Anyas; he preferred to talk about people and details taken (selectively) from real life. Reagan needed this material not just for his speeches and press conferences but for his private meetings too. As Scowcroft and countless other visitors had discovered, Reagan’s almost compulsive habit of telling stories served the purposes of avoiding confrontation, overcoming bureaucratic disputes, and steering clear of the finer points of policy, in which Reagan often was not well versed. His aides talked to Reagan about throw weights, SLCMS (submarine-launched cruise missiles), and CFE (conventional forces in Europe). For Reagan, such briefings were necessary, but not sufficient. He was a political leader who needed to be able to justify his policies in public, and he was looking for new ways to think about and talk about the Soviet Union on his own terms. For this purpose he reached out, past his advisers, to Massie.
In early 1984, Massie was anything but an imposing figure. She had separated from her husband and was living in a friend’s apartment in New York City. She was also virtually penniless. She could barely afford the cost of a train ticket from New York to Washington. McFarlane’s National Security Council had agreed to pay the costs for her trip to Moscow, but she was required to put the expenses on her credit card and then struggled with the paperwork to obtain repayment. She was as improbable an emissary as could be imagined for conversations between the world’s two superpowers.
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HUNGER FOR RELIGION
Less than a month after their first meeting, Reagan sent a note to Massie that provides an indication of how the president was viewing events in the Soviet Union and why Massie had attracted his interest. During the intervening time, on February 9, 1984, the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov had died. Reagan’s letter to Massie—drafted in his own handwriting, retyped by his staff, and sent on February 15—opened by alluding to the “great change” in Moscow. “I dare to hope there might be a better chance for communication with the new leadership,” Reagan said. Then the president got to his larger point: “Watching scenes of the (Andropov) funeral on TV, I wondered what thoughts people must have at such a time when their belief in no God or immortality is faced with death. Like you, I continue to believe that the hunger for religion may yet be a major factor in bringing about a change in the present situation.”1
Reagan had been talking and writing about religion in Eastern Europe, and its potential for bringing about political change, since the early days of his presidency. He had paid careful attention to the extraordinary impact of Pope John Paul II’s trip to Poland in 1979. “I have had a feeling, particularly in view of the Pope’s visit to Poland, that religion might very well turn out to be the Soviets’ Achilles’ heel,” wrote Reagan in one letter a few months after he came to the White House.2
Throughout his career, Reagan was always more attuned to religious themes than his political aides or foreign-policy advisers. “He believed in Armageddon, a very nervous subject with me,” recalled his longtime political adviser Stuart Spencer. “I argued with him about it, not that I’m an expert on Biblical stuff, but I’d just say, ‘That’s kind of scary to be talking about.’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, but it’s going to happen.’” In dealing with the Soviet Union, Reagan continued throughout his presidency to raise questions about religion and churches. Colin Powell, who served as the last of Reagan’s national security advisers, said he and other officials had to warn Reagan from time to time about overemphasizing religion in his dealing with the Soviets.3
Suzanne Massie was in a position both to encourage Reagan’s own instincts on the subject and to supply the anecdotes he craved. Religion had been an essential component of Massie’s own interest in the Soviet Union. “In Russia, I saw religion alive; beleaguered, tormented, but alive,” Massie had written after her first visit in 1967. “In a state where great cathedrals have been turned into obscene ‘anti-religious’ museums, where God has officially been declared dead, this was a sublime example of His enduring strength in the hearts of men.” She had studied the history of the Russian Orthodox Church for her book Land of the Firebird. “The church has always represented the aspirations of the Russian people and provided them with inspiration and strength in the darkest hours of their history,” Massie asserted in a speech at an Orthodox seminary in 1981. “There have been no darker days than those of the past 60 years.”4
In establishing her relationship with Reagan, Massie seems from the start to have relied heavily on their joint interest in religion. Her initial letter to Reagan, a thank-you note she wrote after their meeting in January 1984, said of the Soviet Union: “The most inspiring and hopeful aspect is the great renaissance of spirituality, particularly among the young.” A few weeks later, Massie sent the president and his wife copies of Land of the Firebird and her two other books, with a cover note that said: “It is said that God writes straight with crooked lines.”5
Along with her interest in religion, Massie regularly advanced one other related theme: the idea that Reagan should draw a clear distinction between the Soviet Union and the Russian people. Massie was both an anti-Communist and a Russophile: she was antipathetic toward the Soviet regime and also deeply sentimental, if not mystical, about the Russian “soul.” The snippets of ordinary life inside the Soviet Union that she offered to Reagan during their meetings conveyed a sense of the distance between the Russian people and their Communist Party leaders. She reported to Reagan that people in Leningrad and Moscow talked of Russians as we or us, but referred to the Soviets as they or them. “Quietly, but unmistakably, every day in every way, the Russians are beginning to look and act more like Russians,” she said in one speech.6
Massie’s way of looking at the Soviet Union had obvious appeal to Reagan, because it seemed to fit with the distinction he often made when talking about the United States: ordinary people (whom Reagan portrayed as humble but wise) versus the government (which was inherently remote and malign). Nevertheless, in some respects Massie’s portrayal also seemed to contradict some of the images of the Soviet Union that had been advanced throughout the years by American conservatives, including Reagan himself. She argued that the Soviet Union was not a monolith and that day-to-day life went on there outside the control of the authorities.