Kati Marton (45 page)

ABOVE ALL,
it was Nancy’s instinct for her husband’s legacy that led her to nudge Ronnie away from his evil-empire posture toward a role as a man of peace. But in part it was also the lure of the new culture she aspired to join. “Nancy had a tropism toward high society,” Peggy Noonan noted. “She liked to rock at the best parties.” And Washington was different from Orange County. No longer surrounded by self-made millionaires who spent poolside lunches talking about “welfare queens,” the insecure little girl still aspired to be at the peak of the society she happened to
inhabit. A keen observer, she was always learning. Before she was introduced to Beverly Hills decorator Ted Graber, a velveteen-framed photograph of John Wayne graced the Reagans’ mantelpiece in a decor friends characterized as early Holiday Inn. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Nancy’s great icon, who had little to learn from decorators, archly commented to a friend, “Can you imagine, Nancy Reagan’s first call when she got to the White House was to her
decorator?”

The social and political arbiters of Washington society are the handful of socialites who run the salons of Georgetown and the select ambassadors, senators, editors, anchors and columnists who grace their tables. As she set out to carve a place for herself among the capital’s aristocracy, Nancy was exposed to a worldview different from the confines of both Hollywood and southern California Republicans. Less an ideologue than an opportunist, she bristled when her husband was described as one of those “jump-off-the-cliff-wrapped-in-the-flag” Republicans. With skill and intelligence, she cultivated the friendship of Katharine Graham, who, as publisher of the
Washington Post
and
Newsweek,
was both a social and media doyenne. “I liked Nancy,” Graham said, “and I thought she was getting a raw deal from the press” (meaning, among others, her own publications, with whose coverage Graham did not interfere). Nancy was soon a member ex officio of the capital’s most rarefied social circle. Being
inside
suited her need for social acceptance and served her husband’s needs. It was a lesson Rosalynn Carter and Hillary Clinton never fully grasped.

In fact, other than her marriage, her social position was the one thing Nancy was zealous about. There was room for only one hostess in the Reagan administration. Nancy was determined to keep Barbara Bush, a popular figure in the capital, in her place. Drawing up the guest list for a state dinner honoring Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Nancy deliberately left off Vice President and Mrs. Bush. When an aide cautioned against such a blatant breach of protocol, Nancy tartly replied, “Just watch me.”

Her husband’s evolution was proceeding, too. Nancy’s urgings and his recent brush with death worked their transforming power on him. The handwritten letter to Brezhnev was only the first step. For some time, given Brezhnev’s failing health and the short tenures of his two
immediate successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, there was nobody to negotiate with in the Kremlin. But in 1985, a vigorous new Soviet leader presented himself as a negotiating partner. “There was something likable about [Mikhail] Gorbachev,” Reagan noted. “There was warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most senior Soviet officials I’d met until then.”

It was not personal chemistry alone that turned the crusading ideologue into the peacemaker. One of Reagan’s core beliefs was an almost mystical faith in America, its indomitable strength, its essential civilizing role in the world. “The bureaucrats were telling him, We have to figure out ways to coexist with the Soviets,” Deaver noted. “Reagan said, No, we don’t.” He thought he could bring the Soviets to their knees by out-spending them. He would build up to build down. “He felt that if an American president faced down the Soviets, they would fold like a cheap suit,” Peggy Noonan recalled. So before he “faced down” the Soviets, Reagan pushed through the largest peacetime military spending budget. He initiated Star Wars, as the Strategic Defense Initiative was soon dubbed. For a man who saw his role as a sort of national lifeguard, SDI was more than a bargaining chip. Like lower taxes and less government, the shield against nuclear missiles was something Reagan could
visualize,
something that struck him as quite real.

While her husband had an almost mystical belief in the power of SDI, for the pragmatic Nancy it was a means to get the Soviets to the table. “Nancy believed this was her husband’s destiny: a man of his age who had lived through two World Wars would be the one to break the deadlock of the Cold War,” Deaver said. “It was the only thing she really got into as an issue. She worked with me and [Secretary of State] George Shultz and George Bush. ‘Don’t let the bureaucrats get in the way,’ she would say. She was afraid they would block the back channels she and the president were working.” She had already cleared out one man she saw as a roadblock. In October 1983 she prevailed on her husband to replace the hard-line National Security Council adviser William Clark with the former Kissinger staffer Bud McFarlane. The new man at the NSC shared Nancy’s view that Reagan had to evolve from cold warrior to peacemaker.

Once she got Clark out of the way, Nancy used back-channel diplomacy
to reposition her husband. When she heard that Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko was scheduled for a working White House lunch on September 28, 1984, she called Shultz and asked if she could join the secretary of state and the president. “I had a lot of talk with Nancy about the Gromyko visit [to Washington],” Shultz remembered, “and we arranged a role for her. I said that we were coming to her home for lunch, and I thought it would be most appropriate if she greeted Gromyko on his arrival and stayed until the reception was over.” The signal sent by the unexpected appearance of the first lady was not lost on the veteran Soviet leader. Gromyko seized the opportunity. “Does your husband believe in peace?” he asked Nancy. Yes, of course, she replied. “Then whisper ‘peace’ in your husband’s ear every night,” Gromyko urged. “I will,” she agreed, “and I’ll also whisper it in your ear.” Then, leaning in, she softly whispered, “Peace.” In such small and seemingly insignificant ways did the ice between two superpowers begin to melt.

“Ronnie’s got to have his chance to do his stuff,” Nancy instructed chief of staff Jim Baker. “Work this out so Ronnie gets a chance to sit down with Gorbachev,” she urged, knowing better than anyone the power of Ronnie’s “stuff.” “George Shultz couldn’t believe he had Nancy in his corner,” Deaver noted.

On a bitter cold Geneva morning in November 1985, the hatless, coatless, smiling seventy-four-year-old American president grabbed the hand of the fifty-four-year-old Soviet in heavy overcoat, muffler and fedora, and led him inside. Without having uttered a single word, Nancy and Ronnie had the image they wanted beamed around the globe and into the history books. Nancy had chosen the perfect location for the historic Soviet-American facedown—a cozy lakeside cottage with a roaring fire was the ideal setting for Reagan’s style of homespun diplomacy.

He did not try to dazzle the Soviet with his grasp of missile-to-missile ratios, as Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter surely would have. He made Gorbachev feel as if the two of them had been friends for years. Reagan bonded instantly with the Communist leader. He compared the story of his humble origins to Gorbachev’s and, with his uncanny ability to connect intimately with strangers, told him, “We [are] possibly the only two men in the world who might be able to bring peace to the world.” Their
meeting, scheduled for twenty minutes, lasted more than an hour and a quarter. Thanks in some measure to Nancy, the chemistry between the two men was so good that they agreed then and there to meet again in Moscow and in Washington.

Nancy also played a big part in staging the Reagans’ triumphant 1988 Moscow summit. Fierce competitiveness was part of what drove her. Gorbachev had been mobbed when he strolled down Connecticut Avenue during his Washington visit in December 1987. Nancy wanted the same image of her man when he was in Moscow. “Nancy and I talked extensively about how her husband could be pictured interacting with the Russian people,” Reagan aide Kenneth Duberstein remembered. “She liked the idea of a stroll down the famous pedestrian street in Moscow, the Arbat. But the Secret Service said no, it wasn’t safe. But she was firm that this was the way for Ronnie to connect with the Russian people. They should touch and feel him. He was better with people than anything and he needed to be inspired by that sort of contact.”

The Secret Service continued to veto the idea. They had an agreement with the KGB that they would give an hour’s warning before the presidential party made a move. But Nancy was equally determined to provide Ronnie his essential plunge into the Russian crowd. So when the presidential limousine arrived at the Arbat, the Reagans unexpectedly stepped out. Startled Moscow strollers closed in on the big, cheery American and his chic wife. The KGB closed in just as fast, trying to scatter the crowd. That night, CNN and the networks carried the shot Nancy had choreographed for her husband: the leader of the Free World ignoring the KGB and reaching out to touch the Soviet people.

BY 1985,
however, the man who always attached himself to causes, not people, seemed nearly oblivious to the fact that his friends had left the White House. Chief of staff Baker had bizarrely switched jobs with Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, and Ed Meese had become attorney general. The Reagans’ most intimate ally, Mike Deaver, left to set up his own public relations firm in Washington. “If by some miracle,” Nancy later noted, “I could take back one decision in Ronnie’s presidency, it would
be his agreement in January 1985 that Jim Baker and Donald Regan should switch jobs …. Of the four people who had been closest to Ronnie during his first term … I was the only one left.”

One month after the October 1986 Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev, the Reagans were reminded that this was no longer the same White House that they had run like a family franchise. Suddenly, Reagan’s cavalier management style, his near total dependence on his staff, his almost chemical inability to make hard choices, all exploded. Iran-Contra, the most serious crisis of the Reagan presidency, was borne of the sort of man Reagan was: trusting, vague and dangerously passive. Reagan’s detachment enabled members of his staff to abuse their power and withhold information from him.

For fifteen months, the White House had been the nerve center of a conspiracy spanning several countries and three continents. It appeared that the commander in chief, or those using his name, was making deals with Iran, the country Reagan had recently described as “Murder Inc.” The first lady was caught completely by surprise. McFarlane and an NSC staffer named Oliver North had been secretly trading arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held by Shiite Muslim terrorists in Lebanon. North, a gung-ho marine with a limited attachment to the truth, was a fantasist who thought he was doing his president’s bidding in other ways as well. Reagan had compared the Nicaraguan Contras to the Founding Fathers. That seemed enough for North to hatch his conspiracy to funnel profits from the Iranian arms deal to the guerrillas. “Ronald Reagan was a big-picture guy,” Deaver noted, “so he would leave a lot of this stuff to others. I was always careful that Oliver North did not ever get left alone with Reagan in the Oval Office when I was there. North was bad news: bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, power-hungry and ambitious.”

Iran-Contra again revealed the indispensable role Nancy played in the Reagan political partnership. For the first time, Reagan could not rely on his wife to protect his flank. Nancy had been out of the loop, sidelined by a new and insensitive chief of staff who saw her as a meddlesome wife, instead of a powerful, potential ally. “I don’t think Don Regan understood the dynamics of the marriage,” Deaver explained. “If you didn’t understand that, you didn’t have any business being there.”
Rather than win her trust, Regan set out to bar her from the West Wing. It turned out to be the grossest miscalculation of the presidency and ultimately of Regan himself.