James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

After Geneva, Gorbachev had balked at setting a date for a Washington summit. This time, it was the Soviets’ turn to seek concessions in advance, in the same way as the United States had done during Reagan’s early years in the White House. Gorbachev didn’t want to travel to Washington until the two sides had first settled on specific agreements on arms control that could be signed while he was there.

The Reagan-Gorbachev meeting at Reykjavik in October 1986 is now considered the most significant and tumultuous of all the sessions between the two leaders, because it was there that they suddenly began to discuss the possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons and missiles. Yet at the time, Reykjavik wasn’t even characterized as a full-blown summit; it was, rather, a hastily arranged business meeting whose purpose was merely to lay the groundwork for a summit in Washington. The meeting is “in no sense [a] substitute or surrogate for a summit,” one National Security Council official wrote in a memo preparing for the meeting. Indeed, Reagan’s desire for a Washington summit quickly became one part of the intense bargaining at Reykjavik.

“By the way, could we talk about the date for your visit? Are you going to give your suggestions, or should I name a date?” Reagan asked the Soviet leader during the opening morning of their talks there. Gorbachev avoided answering the question. “I will complete my thought,” he said, returning to a discussion of arms control. 12

Reykjavik had ended in disarray, and by early 1987 there was still no date for the Washington summit, even though such an event had been under discussion for nearly two years. Gorbachev was still eager to complete one or more arms-control agreements before he agreed to visit.

By the early months of 1987, Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were becoming increasingly impatient for a Gorbachev visit. Iran-Contra had shattered the president’s popularity and threatened the collapse of his presidency. With the Democrats in control of Congress, Reagan had little hope of winning approval for any significant initiatives in domestic policy. One way of counteracting the devastating impact of Iran-Contra was to deliver ringing speeches, such as the one at the Berlin Wall. Yet the Reagans were also eager for something more tangible, some foreign-policy achievements that would extend beyond the realm of rhetoric. High-profile meetings with Gorbachev would serve this purpose.

Nancy Reagan had emerged alongside her husband as a strong and determined proponent of a summit with Gorbachev in the United States. Mrs. Reagan had been influential since the start of the administration. Inside the White House, Reagan referred to his wife as “Mommy,” a nickname that let others know of her weighty but ambiguous role. World leaders paid unusually close attention to Nancy Reagan, scrutinizing her attitudes and her views. “Mrs. Reagan had a big problem with us Germans—she obviously harbored great suspicions because of the Nazis,” reflected former West German chancellor Helmut Kohl two decades later. Kohl ascribed Nancy Reagan’s suspicion of Germans to the influence of her Jewish friends in Hollywood (an implausible notion, since Ronald Reagan, whom Kohl found to be congenial to Germans, had the same Hollywood friends as his wife). 13

Even during Reagan’s first years in the White House, Nancy Reagan had made clear her desire for improved relations with the Soviet Union. “From the very beginning, she wanted him to be the ‘president of peace,’” said Jack Matlock, the career diplomat and Soviet specialist who served as the Soviet specialist on Reagan’s National Security Council and later as Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow. 14

In early 1982, as tensions between Washington and Moscow were nearing their peak, Nancy Reagan made a point of telling Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador, that she would like to visit the Soviet Union, according to Dobrynin’s subsequent account. Amid the Reagan administration’s ceaseless factional disputes over Soviet policy, the first lady was from the outset one of the doves. “Nancy Reagan was troubled by her husband’s reputation as a primitive cold warrior,” wrote Richard Pipes, the Harvard professor who served as Reagan’s adviser on Soviet affairs in the early years of the administration. Another of Reagan’s more hawkish aides, Thomas C. Reed, complained that “once in the White House, Nancy preferred the comforts of détente to the conflicts of Soviet collapse.” 15

Mrs. Reagan made no attempt to hide what she thought. “With the world so dangerous, I felt it was ridiculous for these two heavily armed superpowers to be sitting there and not talking to each other,” she wrote in her own memoir. “I encouraged Ronnie to meet with Gorbachev as soon as possible, especially when I realized that some people in the administration did not favor any real talks.” 16

Nancy Reagan’s power was sometimes exaggerated. On many of the subjects that came before the president, she didn’t voice any opinions at all, if indeed she had any. Even when she did seek to exert influence, she did not always get her way. In private, Reagan could often be stubborn, obstinately refusing to be swayed by his wife or aides. “At times, even Mrs. Reagan lost,” said Kuhn. 17In particular, foreign leaders found that once they succeeded in winning Ronald Reagan’s loyalty, he would disregard his wife’s advice.

In 1985, both Nancy Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz vehemently opposed Reagan’s planned visit to the German World War II cemetery at Bitburg. The issue was resolved in a phone call between Kohl in Bonn and Reagan at the White House. Kohl suspected that Nancy Reagan was listening in on the call. The West German chancellor said he was not willing to call off the event at Bitburg. If the American president wanted to cancel on his own because of the intense controversy it had engendered, so be it, Kohl said; but he, as chancellor, would not yield. After a long pause, Reagan had replied, “All right, Helmut, I’m coming.” 18

Over the course of Reagan’s career, his wife had developed a fairly specific role for herself. “She was the personnel director,” explained Stuart Spencer, the political consultant who served as a frequent adviser to Reagan from the 1960s through the 1980s. “She didn’t have anything to do with policy. She’d say something every now and then, and he’d look at her and say, ‘Hey, Mommy, that’s my role.’ She’d shut up. But when it came to who is the chief of staff, who is the political director, who is the press secretary, she had input, because he didn’t like personnel decisions…. Over the years, she developed—she knew who fit best with her husband. She knew what his weaknesses were and his strengths.” 19

After Reagan became president, Nancy Reagan had assumed another job as well, a traditional one for the first lady. She was in charge of the ceremonial side of the White House: the social occasions and state dinners. It was a task she particularly relished; she sought from the outset to restore a sense of grandeur (and opulence) to White House occasions.

In early 1987, these two roles—chief of personnel and director of White House pageantry—combined to give Nancy Reagan more power than she had ever had before. At the beginning of the year, she had personally intervened to persuade her husband to fire Donald Regan as his White House chief of staff and replace him with Howard Baker. On the new White House staff, no one needed to be reminded of the risks of incurring the displeasure of the first lady. When Mrs. Reagan inquired about the possibility of a summit with Gorbachev in Washington, her words carried even more weight than they would have three years earlier.

Together, Ronald and Nancy Reagan became so persistent about a new summit that their efforts began to annoy Secretary of State George Shultz. During Reagan’s first term, Shultz had been among the administration officials seeking to persuade the president to begin meeting with Soviet leaders, but Reagan had not yet been ready to do so. Now, the positions of the president and secretary of state were reversed. In late May 1987, Shultz later recalled: “[National Security Adviser] Frank Carlucci called. The president and Nancy, he told me, were talking about having Gorbachev come to the United States and visit their ranch at Thanksgiving. ‘Oh, stop,’ I said. ‘Let the summit idea alone; quit pressing.’” 20