Even during Reagan’s first years in the White House, Nancy Reagan had made clear her desire for improved relations with the Soviet Union. “From the very beginning, she wanted him to be the ‘president of peace,’” said Jack Matlock, the career diplomat and Soviet specialist who served as the Soviet specialist on Reagan’s National Security Council and later as Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow.14
In early 1982, as tensions between Washington and Moscow were nearing their peak, Nancy Reagan made a point of telling Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, that she would like to visit the Soviet Union, according to Dobrynin’s subsequent account. Amid the Reagan administration’s ceaseless factional disputes over Soviet policy, the first lady was from the outset one of the doves. “Nancy Reagan was troubled by her husband’s reputation as a primitive cold warrior,” wrote Richard Pipes, the Harvard professor who served as Reagan’s adviser on Soviet affairs in the early years of the administration. Another of Reagan’s more hawkish aides, Thomas C. Reed, complained that “once in the White House, Nancy preferred the comforts of détente to the conflicts of Soviet collapse.”15
Mrs. Reagan made no attempt to hide what she thought. “With the world so dangerous, I felt it was ridiculous for these two heavily armed superpowers to be sitting there and not talking to each other,” she wrote in her own memoir. “I encouraged Ronnie to meet with Gorbachev as soon as possible, especially when I realized that some people in the administration did not favor any real talks.”16
Nancy Reagan’s power was sometimes exaggerated. On many of the subjects that came before the president, she didn’t voice any opinions at all, if indeed she had any. Even when she did seek to exert influence, she did not always get her way. In private, Reagan could often be stubborn, obstinately refusing to be swayed by his wife or aides. “At times, even Mrs. Reagan lost,” said Kuhn.17 In particular, foreign leaders found that once they succeeded in winning Ronald Reagan’s loyalty, he would disregard his wife’s advice.
In 1985, both Nancy Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz vehemently opposed Reagan’s planned visit to the German World War II cemetery at Bitburg. The issue was resolved in a phone call between Kohl in Bonn and Reagan at the White House. Kohl suspected that Nancy Reagan was listening in on the call. The West German chancellor said he was not willing to call off the event at Bitburg. If the American president wanted to cancel on his own because of the intense controversy it had engendered, so be it, Kohl said; but he, as chancellor, would not yield. After a long pause, Reagan had replied, “All right, Helmut, I’m coming.”18
Over the course of Reagan’s career, his wife had developed a fairly specific role for herself. “She was the personnel director,” explained Stuart Spencer, the political consultant who served as a frequent adviser to Reagan from the 1960s through the 1980s. “She didn’t have anything to do with policy. She’d say something every now and then, and he’d look at her and say, ‘Hey, Mommy, that’s my role.’ She’d shut up. But when it came to who is the chief of staff, who is the political director, who is the press secretary, she had input, because he didn’t like personnel decisions…. Over the years, she developed—she knew who fit best with her husband. She knew what his weaknesses were and his strengths.”19
After Reagan became president, Nancy Reagan had assumed another job as well, a traditional one for the first lady. She was in charge of the ceremonial side of the White House: the social occasions and state dinners. It was a task she particularly relished; she sought from the outset to restore a sense of grandeur (and opulence) to White House occasions.
In early 1987, these two roles—chief of personnel and director of White House pageantry—combined to give Nancy Reagan more power than she had ever had before. At the beginning of the year, she had personally intervened to persuade her husband to fire Donald Regan as his White House chief of staff and replace him with Howard Baker. On the new White House staff, no one needed to be reminded of the risks of incurring the displeasure of the first lady. When Mrs. Reagan inquired about the possibility of a summit with Gorbachev in Washington, her words carried even more weight than they would have three years earlier.
Together, Ronald and Nancy Reagan became so persistent about a new summit that their efforts began to annoy Secretary of State George Shultz. During Reagan’s first term, Shultz had been among the administration officials seeking to persuade the president to begin meeting with Soviet leaders, but Reagan had not yet been ready to do so. Now, the positions of the president and secretary of state were reversed. In late May 1987, Shultz later recalled: “[National Security Adviser] Frank Carlucci called. The president and Nancy, he told me, were talking about having Gorbachev come to the United States and visit their ranch at Thanksgiving. ‘Oh, stop,’ I said. ‘Let the summit idea alone; quit pressing.’”20
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AN ARMS DEAL AND ITS OPPONENTS
Reagan obtained the breakthrough he needed for a Washington summit when Gorbachev made a significant concession on arms control in early 1987.
The two leaders’ turbulent meeting at Reykjavik the previous October had ended without agreement. Gorbachev had called for far-reaching reductions in missiles or nuclear warheads; he had also proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union eliminate their intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Reagan had responded with enthusiasm. It turned out, however, that all of the Soviet leader’s proposals were contingent on American willingness to restrict spending and research for the Strategic Defense Initiative, the president’s new missile-defense program. Reagan refused; Reykjavik came unglued.
On February 28, 1987, Gorbachev suddenly announced that the Soviet Union would drop the condition that a deal banning intermediate-range missiles in Europe would have to be part of a larger package. Instead, Gorbachev said, he was willing to go along with a separate deal on this issue “without delay,” thus abandoning the effort to get Reagan to restrict work on missile defense beforehand. Soviet officials explained that Gorbachev and his aides wanted to finish at least a limited arms-control agreement while Reagan was in office. They did not want to wait another two years for a new American president; Gorbachev needed to ease tensions with the United States more quickly so that he could proceed with his reforms inside the Soviet Union.1
“We start from the assumption that as difficult as it is to conduct business with the United States, we are doomed to it. We have no choice,” Gorbachev had told other Soviet leaders, according to the transcripts of a Politburo meeting two days earlier. “Our main problem is to remove the confrontation. That is the central tenet of our entire foreign policy.”2
Gorbachev’s announcement could not have come at a better time for Reagan. He had just replaced his White House chief of staff and was facing widespread skepticism that he could accomplish anything for the remainder of his term. Reagan had been avoiding the press since the beginning of the Iran-Contra scandal, but he rushed to the White House briefing room to praise Gorbachev’s new offer.
On a visit to Moscow six weeks later, Shultz told Gorbachev that the Reagan administration was ready to move ahead with the treaty banning intermediate-range missiles in Europe. They began talking about the details, and Gorbachev suggested that he could sign the deal on a trip to the United States. Talking to Reagan over a secure phone from Moscow, the secretary of state reported happily on the prospects for a summit. “He talked about fall to the end of the year,” Shultz told Reagan. When Shultz returned to the United States, he flew immediately to the Reagans’ ranch house outside Santa Barbara to tell them firsthand about Moscow.3