Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The first lady was strengthened in her conviction that Gorbachev would make a worthy negotiating partner for the president by her astrologer friend Joan Quigley, who had studied the personal horoscopes of the two leaders. The astrologer explained to Nancy Reagan that “Ronnie’s Mercury,” the “planet of ideas and the mind,” was very close to “Gorbie’s Venus,” the “planet of love.” This showed that Gorbachev would “love and embrace the ideas that the American president would bring him.” The celestial chemistry between the two leaders had “breathtaking possibilities,” but it was essential that Reagan jettison the “evil empire attitude” before traveling to Geneva. The precise departure time of Air Force One for Geneva—8:35 a.m. on November 16, 1985—was chosen by Quigley in order to put Gorbachev’s planet “in the ascendant” on her chart, so that he “would be drawn to Ronnie.” 82

In order to reach the point at which he could have a real conversation with Gorbachev, Reagan needed more than just an astrologer. He also had to have a kindred spirit to exorcise his ideological demons, to help him see the Russians as three-dimensional human beings rather than two-dimensional villains. The key figure here was Suzanne Massie, the voluble author of several popular books about Russian history, who had a gift for talking on Reagan’s wavelength. During the course of eighteen unpublicized meetings with the president, she fed him a mixture of street-corner anecdotes, salty jokes, and ancient folk wisdom about Russia that sparked his interest in a vast and contradictory land. Many of Reagan’s favorite Russian aphorisms—including the endlessly repeated Doverai, no proverai (Trust, but verify)—came from Massie.

Massie’s own twenty-year love affair with Russia had been ignited by a family tragedy. Her son, Bobby, was a hemophiliac. In the course of dealing with his illness, she and her husband, Robert Massie, became fascinated by the life of the most famous hemophiliac of all, the tsarevich Aleksis, and the curative powers of the mad monk Rasputin. (The research eventually blossomed into a best-selling book, Nicholas and Alexandra , by Robert Massie.) When she traveled to Leningrad for the first time in 1967, she felt an immediate kinship with the Russian people. “It was like finding a huge family that belonged to me, but that I had never known existed,” she later wrote. 83She was banned from visiting the Soviet Union for ten years after a search at the Moscow airport turned up an address book filled with Russian names and phone numbers. By the time she got back, in September 1983, in the middle of the KAL crisis, she was alarmed to discover that communication between the two superpowers had virtually broken down. Convinced that someone had to correct the demonic views that each side held about the other, she badgered the White House for a meeting with Reagan.

“Do Soviet leaders really believe in their ideology?” was Reagan’s first question when they finally got together.

“I can’t answer that,” Massie replied. “All I can tell you is what Russians say about their leaders. They call them the Big Bottoms. They think the only thing their leaders are interested in is their chairs, their positions. Ideology is unimportant.” 84

Talking to the president, Massie found, was rather like talking to her curmudgeonly great-uncle. He had certain idées fixes about Russia that he had picked up from friends in California who knew very little about the place. But he had a sense of humor about himself, was eager to learn more about the country he had already labeled the “focus of evil in the modern world,” and had no problems with his ego. For a man with the reputation of being the “great communicator,” he was enigmatic. It was difficult to read what was going on in his mind. He seemed to relax when the bureaucrats left the room. During their one-on-one sessions Massie tried to give the president a sense of the variety and diversity of Russia. She told him what it was like to live in a communal apartment, what people talked about while standing in line, what Russians were like as people. She also sought to bolster his confidence in negotiating with Gorbachev, who was already being built up in the American press as some kind of superman.

“You are stronger than he is in every way,” she told the president before he left for Geneva. “You have a lot of experience; you are older and wiser; you are secure in the hearts of your countrymen.” Russians, she added, were basically “ungovernable.” “If you were president of that country, you really would be in trouble.”

RONALD REAGAN TOOK the biblical prophecy of Armageddon seriously. When he read references in the Book of Revelations to a star that would fall from heaven, poisoning everything in its path, he thought of the effects of nuclear war. Far from guaranteeing the peace, nuclear weapons were inherently immoral, in Reagan’s view, because they would bring about the end of human civilization. “For the first time ever, everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ,” he had declared in 1971. 85If this was the case, it was obviously the responsibility of the statesman to protect his people from the promised Day of Judgment.

During the 1980 presidential election campaign, Reagan had an experience that strengthened his view that something had to be done to protect the American people from the threat of nuclear annihilation. He was touring the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which has the task of detecting incoming nuclear warheads. An underground city hidden deep in the Cheyenne Mountain, in Colorado, the NORAD command post could serve as the setting for a James Bond movie. Banks of radar detectors and computers keep track of everything from flocks of birds migrating south for the winter to a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile lifting off from the deserts of Kazakhstan. Sophisticated communications devices ensure that the information can be flashed instantaneously to the president, wherever in the world he might be. Watching the flickering consoles and giant screens pinpointing hundreds of Soviet missile sites, Reagan asked the NORAD commander what could be done if the Soviets were to fire a missile at an American city.

“Nothing,” the general replied, in the eerie stillness of his mountain fortress. “We would pick it up right after it was launched, but by the time the officials of the city could be alerted that a nuclear bomb would hit them, there would be only ten or fifteen minutes left. That’s all we can do. We can’t stop it.”

The answer stunned Reagan. He found it difficult to believe, much less accept, that the United States had no defense against Soviet missiles. As he flew back home to Los Angeles, he confided his astonishment to an aide. “We have spent all that money and have all that equipment, and there is nothing we can do to prevent a nuclear missile from hitting us.” 86

Reagan’s shock at American vulnerability to a nuclear attack blossomed into the launching of a top-priority program to intercept and destroy incoming Soviet missiles. In a televised address from the Oval Office on March 23, 1983—just two weeks after the “evil empire” speech—he outlined his vision of how to avoid a nuclear Armageddon. He appealed to scientists who had spent half a century developing nuclear weapons “to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” 87The doctrine of mutually assured destruction—MAD for short—would be superseded by a new Fortress America doctrine. This time, however, America would be protected not by the ocean but by an invisible, space-based shield. The official name for the program was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a phrase designed to emphasize its peaceful intent. But the technologies involved—lasers, particle beams, and kinetic energy weapons—seemed so fantastic that journalists were soon referring to Reagan’s plan as “Star Wars,” after the blockbuster science-fiction film.