James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Massie never regained the influence she had wielded with Ronald Reagan during the period from 1984 to 1986, when the president’s views of the Soviet Union were changing. She was an outsider, not a diplomat; she had failed in her campaign to become Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow; and after the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan’s newly constituted National Security Council harbored a healthy mistrust of informal go-betweens and message carriers. When Anatoly Dobrynin had sent a message directly to Reagan through Massie in early 1988, the president and his aides decided not to respond. Massie asked to be included in the delegation for Reagan’s visit to Moscow, but the president rejected her request (along with similar appeals from other more prominent Americans such as Armand Hammer and Paul Laxalt). 18

To the end of Reagan’s term, Massie was still permitted to visit the president several times a year, but she could no longer succeed, as she had before, in bypassing his aides and advisers. In the summer of 1988, after setting up a lunch in the White House residence with the president and Nancy Reagan, she sent Reagan a private handwritten note. “I very much hope that we will be alone, just the three of us, to talk as openly and informally as we have on past occasions in that setting,” she said. Instead, Colin Powell and Kenneth Duberstein, then the national security adviser and White House chief of staff, joined the lunch and monitored the conversation. By this juncture, Reagan, having visited the Soviet Union himself, had concluded that Massie had little new to say. The lunch was “strange,” he recorded in his diary. Massie had usually imparted inside information or insights, but this time, what Massie offered was “almost like a travelogue.” 19

As an ex-president in St. Petersburg in 1990, Reagan was more content to get a travelogue. Massie gave the Reagans a tour of the Pavlovsk Palace outside St. Petersburg; it was Massie’s books about Russian culture and about St. Petersburg that had first brought her to Reagan’s attention six years earlier. Reagan went to church services, laid flowers at the graves of Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky, and praised the movement toward political liberalization in the Soviet Union.

During this trip, Reagan also went out of his way to lend a hand to Gorbachev, supporting his efforts to prevent a breakup of the Soviet Union. Delivering a speech in Moscow, Reagan warned that the fifteen Soviet republics should not let their eagerness for independence go too far. “Differences can be resolved in ways that are fair to all, but reason must prevail over passion if there is to be a climate conducive to the settlement of disagreements,” Reagan said. (When Reagan’s successor George H. W. Bush offered similar views during a visit to Ukraine the following year, critics in the United States denounced what they called the Chicken Kiev speech. What Reagan had said was not strikingly different.) 20

During Reagan’s 1990 trip, Massie noticed one thing that seemed unusual. Nancy Reagan was holding tightly her husband’s hand, never letting him walk too far away. 21

Reagan’s old friends began to notice the changes in the early 1990s. In the summer of 1991, Richard Allen, Ed Meese, and Martin Anderson—three of Reagan’s earliest conservative supporters, each of whom had known him since the 1960s-walked up to Reagan at the Bohemian Grove in California. “He was startled,” recalled Allen. “I could see he had no idea who we were.” 22

Reagan’s aides insisted until 1994 that everything was fine. Early that year, Reagan flew to the East Coast, and when he arrived in New York, he seemed “a slight bit out of sync,” recalled Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., who was then serving as chief of staff in charge of Reagan’s office and his activities as a former president. “It just seemed like he was having a really bad case of jet lag.” From New York, Reagan flew to the nation’s capital to deliver the keynote speech at a black-tie Republican fund-raising event, cast as a celebration of Reagan’s eighty-third birthday. In the Washington hotel, Ryan noticed that Reagan seemed still more disoriented. At the ceremonies, with luminaries such as Margaret Thatcher looking on, Reagan started his speech at a painstakingly slow pace, one word at a time. Something is wrong, Ryan thought. Finally, Reagan noticed the TelePrompTer and proceeded to read his speech without further difficulties. 23

Reagan had been secretly flying once a year to the Mayo Clinic for an extensive two-day checkup. During the late summer of 1994, the doctors there said they had discovered memory loss that went beyond that of normal aging. The clinic dispatched a doctor to Los Angeles to spend a few days with Reagan and observe him. The doctor concluded that Reagan had Alzheimer’s disease.

Reagan’s staff aides thought about keeping the disease secret; they might have said only that the former president had decided to do no more public appearances and had retired to his ranch. Yet several of the Reagans’ other medical problems—the president’s colon cancer, his use of a hearing aid, his wife’s mastectomy—had been made public. In several instances, Ronald or Nancy Reagan had received letters from ordinary people who had gone for testing or who were otherwise grateful for the public discussion of the medical problems. The Reagans decided to disclose the Alzheimer’s disease as well. On November 5, 1994, Reagan’s office in Los Angeles released a handwritten letter to the American people, saying that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” he said.

Gradually, Reagan’s presidency and the last years of the Cold War faded away. At one point, George Shultz paid a visit to the Reagan home. While he was there, the former president got up, went outside, and approached one of his Secret Service aides. “Now, who is that man in there?” the former president quietly asked, referring to his former secretary of state. “I know he’s very important, but I don’t know his name.” 24

Nancy Reagan was sitting on the mostly empty patio of the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles, one of her favorite haunts, wearing a light-green suit, her eyes shaded with sunglasses. She was endeavoring to answer a writer’s questions about her husband. It was a quiet, pleasant midweek afternoon, June 29, 2005.

She had recently visited Washington for the first time since her husband’s death more than a year earlier. While visiting the White House as a guest of George W. Bush, she had suddenly been confronted with the new atmosphere since she had lived there two decades earlier. In the middle of the day, as she was watching a television news show, Secret Service agents suddenly rushed in and, overcoming her attempts to ignore them, swept her away to the secure bunker deep underneath the White House.

The reason, it turned out, was that a small Cessna plane had flown off course from rural Pennsylvania into restricted air space over Washington. Air force F-16s were scrambled to intercept the plane and came close to shooting it down before the plane, run by a confused pilot, finally turned away. The incident was a reminder of how the White House was more edgy from day to day after the events of September 11, 2001, than it had been at the peak of the Cold War. The Soviet Union had vastly more firepower than any terrorist group, but was also considerably more predictable. In fact, during the eight years in which she lived in the White House, Nancy Reagan had never once seen the bunker beneath it—and had not even known of its existence. “Maybe they showed it to Ronnie,” she mused. 1

By 2005, Mrs. Reagan, not surprisingly, had few new stories she was willing to tell. In talking about her husband’s second term and the final years of the Cold War, she returned to the familiar ground she had trod many times before. She dwelled on the episodes in which she had played a central role, such as the firing of White House chief of staff Donald Regan in early 1987 and her continuing feuds with Mikhail Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa. She offered characterizations of her husband that fit with the reigning images. “He was absolutely without guile, Ronnie,” Nancy Reagan asserted. “He just assumed that other people were that way too.”