James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

From Leningrad, Massie sent the president a letter wishing him well at the summit and providing a description of the mood of the Russians. “There is a great deal of hope that somehow our relations will get better,” she wrote. “Life is really so hard, there are so many things that need improving, and that is what seems to be uppermost in everyone’s mind.” She enclosed a picture of Leningrad’s Theater Street, including the theater where Nikolai Gogol’s play The Inspector General had opened in 1836. She had guessed that Reagan, as a former actor, might be interested, and he was. He responded with a letter sent through the diplomatic pouch and delivered to Massie by the U.S. consulate in Leningrad . Once again, the letter was drafted in Reagan’s own handwriting:

Dear Suzanne:

Thank you very much for your letter and the picture of ‘Theater Street.’

Believe it or not, I had just read about architect [Carlo] Rossi designing the theater and other buildings. Of course I had read about it in your magnificent book which I’ll have with me in Geneva because I’m only half way through it. Thank you so much for sending it to me. I’m really enjoying it, and it has also helped for the forthcoming meeting.

I hope we can open a few doors and really get on with the business of a world at peace. I’m grateful for your good wishes and your prayers. Again, my heartfelt thanks.

In Geneva, during the second day of meetings with Gorbachev, Reagan gave Secretary of State George Shultz his approval to move ahead with something in writing that the two governments could issue at the end of the summit. (Shultz, carefully deferring to Reagan’s dislike of French words and phrases, decided to stay clear of the word communiqué and termed it an agreed statement instead.) The two leaders settled on their vague, generalized assertion that a nuclear war could not be won and should never be fought—words that echoed some of Reagan’s speeches of the previous two years.

At Geneva and in its aftermath, Reagan seemed to be wondering whether Gorbachev might secretly be a religious believer—a question that was closely linked to his discussions with Massie about the spiritual nature of the Russian people. “Strangely enough in those meetings he twice invoked God’s name,” Reagan wrote in a letter to Elsa Sandstrom, a California Republican activist who had worked on his political campaigns and had sent the president her prayers before the Geneva summit. Responding to another letter writer, Reagan wrote, “He [Gorbachev] has aroused my curiosity—twice in our meetings, he invoked the Lord’s name and once cited a Bible verse.” 15

In reality, Gorbachev was not religious. The Soviet leader’s fleeting allusions to God and the Bible probably represented an effort to tailor his message and arguments in ways that might appeal to Reagan. Whatever the intent of Gorbachev’s words, the Geneva summit represented the beginning of a new trend: throughout the later years of his presidency, Reagan continued to harbor the dream that Gorbachev might be a religious believer. When Gorbachev briefly used the phrase “God bless” at a subsequent summit meeting, Reagan took notice and pointed it out to Colin Powell, then his national security adviser. “I had to tell the president, ‘Don’t see this as an expression of religious faith,’” recalled Powell. ‘It’s almost idiomatic. He’s not ready to get down on his knees for you.’” 16

In 1986, while Reagan was trying to calculate his next steps with Gorbachev, Massie was a frequent presence in the White House, meeting with the president before or after her trips to the Soviet Union. White House records show, for example, that Reagan talked to Massie in the Oval Office for about forty-five minutes on May 20, 1986, with White House chief of staff Donald Regan, National Security Adviser John Poindexter, and Nancy Reagan in attendance. She came back less than three weeks later, on June 6, to lunch alone with the president and first lady on the patio outside the Oval Office. On September 23, she returned for a lunch that lasted an hour and forty minutes in the Oval Office—and once again, the Reagans elected to talk with Massie on their own, without Regan, Poindexter, or any of the Soviet specialists from the National Security Council or State Department. (After the September lunch, Massie had a separate afternoon session with Poindexter.) 1

The president and his wife were at this point weighing the possibilities for further summits with Gorbachev before the end of Reagan’s second term. The Geneva summit had been held on neutral ground. Before leaving, Gorbachev had agreed in principle to the concept of two more summits, first in Washington and then in Moscow. However, the details had not been set. Gorbachev was balking at fixing a date for the next summit, because he wanted assurances in advance that it would produce concrete results, particularly something on arms control.

During these visits to the White House in 1986, Massie offered the president new descriptions of daily life inside the Soviet Union: the shortages of goods, the long lines, and other signs of economic decline and social distress. She also passed along impressions of what ordinary people in the Soviet Union were saying.

By far the most significant event that year was the nuclear accident at Chernobyl on April 25-26. Massie told Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz that ordinary Russians viewed the disaster as confirmation of a biblical prophecy. The Book of Revelations refers to a star called Wormwood, which falls to the earth, poisoning the waters and killing many people. Wormwood is the name for a common herb, and the Ukrainian word for it is chernobyl. This apocalyptic interpretation of the Chernobyl disaster was bound to attract the attention of Reagan, given his occasional references to Armageddon. According to Shultz, Massie also had a more political interpretation: “Chernobyl was of great symbolic importance, she felt: it showed that Soviet science and technology were flawed, that the leadership was lying and out of touch, that the party could not conceal its failures any longer.” Massie was merely passing along what ordinary Russians were saying (and what foreign correspondents were reporting); she was, however, calling attention to these views through her face-to-face meetings with the president and secretary of state. 2

Reagan was using Massie not only for her accounts of Russian street life and conversations, but also for the occasional messages she carried back and forth between Moscow and Washington. The specific mission for which Reagan had first agreed to see Massie in early 1984—to send word to Moscow that he would like to resume talks about a new cultural agreement—had been soon passed back to the professional diplomats. (Eventually, in Geneva, Reagan and Gorbachev reached final agreement on a series of cultural, educational, and scientific exchanges.)

Nevertheless, Massie kept on seeing her Soviet contact Bogdanov during her visits to Moscow. His KGB affiliation did not deter her. She had noticed that many of the people in the Soviet leadership who read books or traveled widely had some connection to the KGB. She believed, furthermore, that the core of Gorbachev’s support in those earlier years was an enlightened group or faction within the KGB. 3

In Moscow, Massie did nothing to dispel the impression that she had personal ties to Reagan and could convey the messages of Soviet officials directly to the Oval Office. For his own part, Bogdanov, her main interlocutor, seems to have suggested to Massie that what he said represented the views of the top Soviet leadership, including Gorbachev himself.