James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

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:

The contact I felt was deep and immediate. Hemophilia had been preparing me for ten years for these meetings. They knew the terror of the knock on the door, the telephone in the night, the anguished knowledge that in one awful moment a life might be shattered. The causes were different, but the psychological result was the same. We shared the reflexes of people who live with fear. I knew what it was to feel suffocated, to be unable to travel, unable to determine my career, to live in isolation from the rest of the world. 4

Over the next few years, Suzanne Massie returned to Russia again and again: eight trips in little more than four years. She interviewed Russian writers for a book called The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets From Leningrad ; one of the subjects of the book was a dissident writer named Josef Brodsky, eventually the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Then, as Massie was preparing to make her ninth visit in 1972, Soviet authorities denied her request for a visa, without explanation. She had apparently become too close to the Russian dissident community. Massie was suddenly cut off from the country and culture that had become the focus of her life. The hunt for a visa brought Massie to Washington. She began to cultivate political friends and allies who might persuade or pressure Soviet authorities to change their minds. She spoke with Senator Henry Jackson, the leading opponent of the Nixon administration’s détente with the Soviet Union. Jackson had just introduced what was known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment, a provision that denied trade benefits to the Soviet Union until authorities opened the way for Jewish emigration. Massie encouraged Jackson’s efforts, hoping that while finding a way to get Jews out of the Soviet Union, the senator might also find a way to get her back in. During the following decade, while continuing to talk with Jackson, Massie also cultivated several other members of the Senate: Bill Cohen of Maine, John Heinz of Pennsylvania, Sam Nunn of Georgia, Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee, Ted Stevens of Alaska. Massie was so thoroughly obsessed with returning to the Soviet Union that, failing to obtain a visa, she twice signed up for tourist cruises on ships that stopped briefly in Leningrad. 5

She spent the late 1970s writing Land of the Firebird , which would later attract the attention of Ronald Reagan. It was a history of Russian culture before the Soviet era, narrated in a romanticized way. “It is the darker side of Russia’s history which has most often been emphasized, not only in the Soviet Union, but also in the West,” she wrote in the introduction to the book, published in 1980. “As a result of this lopsided concentration, the picture of old Russia that has emerged is too often a stereotype, lacking in depth and accuracy…. These manifestations of beauty which old Russia produced so brilliantly, permeated by the spiritual qualities of the Russian people, are perhaps what we most need to rediscover now, to offset the coldness and impersonality of an increasingly heartless, technological and materialistic modern world.” The relentlessly negative review in the New York Times went out of its way to recommend, as an alternative, James Billington’s book The Icon and the Ax . 6

During the 1970s and early 1980s, Massie also developed ties to the American military services. She was invited to lecture about Russian culture at the United States Military Academy at West Point and went on to appear at military institutions such as the Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. She found that she got along much more easily with American military officials than with scholars or diplomats. When she had approached the State Department for help in obtaining a Soviet visa, the Soviet desk officer, Jack Matlock, had seemed to brush her off, saying that her persistent requests were inappropriate. But the men in uniform had more time for her; they provided a receptive audience for her thoughts about Russian life and history. Her network of friends and contacts in the military included Andrew J. Goodpaster, the former NATO commander who became superintendent at West Point; William E. Odom, a West Point professor who eventually became head of the National Security Agency; and Tyrus W. Cobb, another West Point professor who later served on the National Security Council staff.

When Cobb was invited to the Soviet Union on a formal military exchange program, he asked Massie for seven signed copies of her book for Soviet officials, and Massie, still pursuing her quest for a visa, was happy to comply. One of the recipients sent back word that she should get in touch with a Soviet embassy official in Washington. Massie began courting him, much as she had pursued American officials. When Yuri Andropov, the longtime leader of the KGB, rose to become the Communist Party leader in 1982, Massie’s Soviet contact in Washington asked her to inscribe a copy of Land of the Firebirds for Andropov. She did, cautiously signing the book “with hope for the future of the great Russian land”—words that deliberately avoided any mention of the Soviet Union or government.