James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

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?” 4Shrewd 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

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. 7Yet 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.

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.