James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

McFarlane gave his assent. He liked the idea of introducing Massie to the president. He felt that she could help Reagan to develop a better feel for people and ordinary life inside the Soviet Union. He had discovered that the president was uncomfortable dealing with conceptual matters such as arms control and balance-of-power diplomacy, and that Reagan always found issues more appealing if they were cast in human terms. Massie was the perfect vehicle for McFarlane’s goal of bringing the Soviet Union alive to Reagan, so that he would begin to see America’s Cold War adversary as more than an abstraction.

The meeting was set for January 17, 1984, the morning after Reagan’s “Ivan and Anya” speech. The president had talked in that same address about the need to search for “concrete actions that we both can take to reduce the risk of U.S.-Soviet confrontation.” Seated in the Oval Office with Reagan and his advisers, Massie asked what she should say while she was in Moscow. Could she tell Soviet officials that she had met with the president and that his newly announced effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union was more than just an election-year ploy? Could she say that if Reagan won reelection in November, his approach of seeking to avoid confrontation would continue to guide Soviet policy during his second term? Reagan said she could.

As McFarlane had hoped, Massie also began describing the situation inside the Soviet Union. She was lively: she told Russian jokes; she recounted in an animated way her arguments with Soviet officials about American policy; she spoke of the hardship of the Russian people, their economic desperation and their capacity for suffering. She also talked about subjects Reagan’s foreign-policy advisers rarely mentioned, such as the quest for spiritual values inside the Soviet Union. Reagan paid close attention. The session, held just after Reagan’s regular morning national-security briefing, lasted not more than half an hour. But Reagan was intrigued. He invited her to come back.

Reagan was seventy-two years old. It is worth recalling that at this point, three years into his presidency, he had had remarkably little contact with the Soviet Union, its leaders, or its people. He was by now interested in trying to ease tensions with Moscow and to reduce or eliminate the dangers of nuclear weapons, but he had little in the way of personal experience to guide him. He had never traveled to the Soviet Union. He had met a Soviet leader only once in his life, while he was governor, at the party President Richard Nixon gave in California during Leonid Brezhnev’s visit to the United States. In early 1983, after taking over from Alexander Haig as secretary of state, Shultz recalled, “It finally dawned on me that President Reagan had never had a real conversation with a top Communist leader, and that he wanted to have one.” Shultz had arranged a White House meeting in which Reagan talked for the first time with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, and the session had gone well. Nevertheless, Reagan’s ideas about the Soviet Union and its leaders had been formed four decades earlier, during the anti-Communist battles in Hollywood in the 1940s, and his early impressions lingered. A couple of years later, when Dobrynin was leaving his job as ambassador to return to Moscow, Reagan expressed astonishment that such a polished, urbane diplomat could represent the evil empire. “Is he really a communist?” Reagan asked. 5

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.

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