James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Soon after Will’s columns about the Daniloff case were published, he received a call from the president. “George, I’m not enjoying reading you as much as I used to,” Reagan said. Will replied that “I’m not enjoying watching you as much as I used to.” Reagan invited him to the White House for a talk, at which he urged the columnist to consider what was happening on the ground in the Soviet Union. Things are really changing over there, Reagan told him; life is opening up. For example, Reagan said, some of these people going into churches in Russia aren’t old babushkas, but young people. In saying this, Reagan was passing along the views of Soviet life he had obtained from Massie.

Indeed, in the fall of 1986, one press account briefly identified Massie as having contributed to Reagan’s changing views of the Soviet Union: In early October, perhaps spurred on by Will’s columns and other criticisms of the way he had handled the Daniloff case, Time magazine did a story titled, “Has Reagan Gone Soft?” It said that Reagan “has come to view the Russians no longer as cardboard-cutout Communists, but as human beings in a multidimensional society, with a history that goes back beyond the 1917 Revolution.” The article went on to report that Suzanne Massie was a writer “with whom Reagan developed a particular rapport.” 11

Reagan’s advisers sometimes joked to one another that he had an actor’s memory: Once Reagan got something into his head, they said, it was hard to get it out. When the president sat down with Gorbachev in Reykjavik in mid-October, he had memorized a new line. It was the Russian proverb that Suzanne Massie had taught him: Doveryai no proveryai (“Trust but verify”). He used this phrase on the opening morning of the Reykjavik summit and then repeated it so often over the following two years, both in public speeches and in private meetings, that at one summit, Gorbachev grumbled, “You say that every time.” In practical terms, the line didn’t mean much. But it did convey an attitudinal shift at the Reagan White House, a willingness to try to do business with Gorbachev and to explore, however warily, the possibility of agreements with him. 12

It is easy to imagine this series of events in the fall of 1986 coming out differently. At this point, Reagan could well have gone along with those who favored taking a tough stance with Gorbachev. Not only conservative columnists but some advisers within his own administration were urging him to do just that. As a matter of principle, the president would have been on reasonable ground. The detention of Daniloff represented an obvious attempt by Soviet authorities to respond to Zakharov’s arrest by taking a hostage who could be used for a trade. Reagan might have rejected any deal concerning Daniloff and instead taken the position that the American correspondent should be released and sent home without any negotiations. Moreover, Reagan could have spurned Gorbachev’s request in the midst of this crisis for a sudden, quick meeting in Reykjavik.

What would the result have been? Of course one can never know for sure. But it is worth keeping in mind the political dynamics in Moscow in 1986. Gorbachev’s own power as Soviet leader rested upon the same institutions as that of his predecessors: the Communist Party, the KGB, and the Soviet military. At the same time, Gorbachev was also beginning to try to reform the Soviet political system. Over the long run, those two aspects of Gorbachev’s leadership turned out to be fundamentally incompatible with each other. Gorbachev didn’t know that, however, and in 1986, after just a year in office, he was only starting the process of political change.

By deciding to deal with Gorbachev at this critical juncture, Reagan was giving the Soviet leader the time and leeway he needed to move forward with his domestic reforms. Gorbachev was able to show the “power ministries” in Moscow—above all, the KGB and the military—that as Soviet leader, he could handle the Americans and could win compromises from Reagan. This, in turn, strengthened Gorbachev in Moscow as he launched his domestic reforms. Those changes turned out to be irreversible; five years later, when the KGB organized a hard-liners’ coup against Gorbachev, they failed, because it was too late to return to the pre-Gorbachev era. But in 1986, the changes were not entrenched; indeed, they had barely begun. He told his closest aides in one meeting early that year that “here at the top, we’re better informed. We see more clearly than anyone that drastic change is necessary.” Yet Gorbachev was at that point too inhibited by traditional Soviet ideology and by commitments to his old friends and allies to bring about any such drastic change. 13

If Reagan had spurned Gorbachev in the fall of 1986, it would have weakened Gorbachev’s hand, particularly in dealing with the KGB and Soviet military. They would have had greater power to resist his reforms, both at home and abroad; the traditionalists in Moscow could have argued that the Soviet Union still confronted an unyielding, unchanging threat from its American adversary. It is hard to imagine Gorbachev’s persuading the Soviet military to stand by and permit peaceful democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 if Soviet-American relations had remained tense and adversarial for the previous three years.

Was Reagan, in the summer and fall of 1986, following an explicit, conscious strategy of giving Gorbachev time to dismantle the Soviet system? Of course not. Gorbachev himself didn’t know at this stage where his domestic reforms were headed. But Reagan had gotten a sense of Gorbachev’s style and his personality during their first meeting in Geneva, and he was also getting reports of the changes unfolding in Soviet society from Massie and others.

It is worth noting how the views of Reagan and Shultz contrasted with what the CIA’s Soviet specialists were saying about Gorbachev at the time. In a memo in early 1986, Robert Gates, the CIA’s leading Soviet analyst and soon to become its deputy director, argued that “all we have seen since Gorbachev took over leads us to believe that on fundamental objectives and policies he so far remains generally as inflexible as his predecessors.” 14

The interpretation of Gorbachev that underlay Reagan’s policies during this period was essentially the one that Massie had conveyed: that Gorbachev was seeking to move the Soviet Union in new directions and should not be pushed too hard, because he was under pressure from hard-liners who wanted to stymie his reforms. This view may have been slightly too simplistic, because Gorbachev wasn’t completely separate from those hard-liners in the Communist Party, KGB, and military; he had been brought into office by them and maintained extensive ties to them. Yet the Reagan outlook, shared by Shultz, proved to be more accurate than that of the CIA or of American conservatives who were portraying Gorbachev as just another Soviet leader, merely a creature of the usual forces in the Soviet apparatus. Reagan was acting on instinct, and at this important moment, his instincts turned out to be right.

Her frequent visits to the White House eventually caught up with Suzanne Massie. She made the mistake, as did so many others in dealing with Ronald Reagan, of overplaying her hand and overestimating the depth of his friendship. At the beginning of 1987, Massie suffered two serious setbacks. First, she tried and failed to turn her informal role as adviser and message carrier into an official, high-level government job. Second, the officials on a reconstituted National Security Council mounted a campaign against her, insinuating that she might be a conduit or dupe for attempts by the KGB to influence Reagan.