The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

Ronnie had told the Soviet leader then that the aspirations of millions were riding on whether dialogue was possible between their two countries:

You took my hand in both of yours and assured me that you were aware of that and that you were dedicated with all your heart and mind to fulfilling those hopes and dreams.

The people of the world still share that hope. Indeed, the peoples of the world, despite differences in racial or ethnic origin, have very much in common. They want the dignity of having some control over their individual destiny. They want to work at the craft or trade of their own choosing and to be fairly rewarded. They want to raise their families in peace without harming anyone or suffering harm themselves. Government exists for their convenience, not the other way around.

If they are incapable, as some would have us believe, of self-government, then where in the world do we find people who are capable of governing others?

Mr. President, should we not be concerned with eliminating the obstacles which prevent our people from achieving these simple goals? And isn’t it possible some of those obstacles are born of government aims and goals which have little to do with the real needs and wants of our people?

That 1981 letter, initially written in his own hand on six pages of a yellow legal pad, contained no policy specifics beyond Ronnie’s decision to lift the grain embargo. But it revealed what had long been in his heart. He passed it around at a meeting in the White House Treaty Room with his senior advisers on Monday, April 13. This was one of their first working sessions since he had been shot. The president wore his bathrobe and pajamas. Among those in attendance were Vice President Bush; the White House management troika of Baker, Deaver, and Meese; Secretary of State Al Haig; and National Security Adviser Richard Allen. “I don’t know if you fellows will think it’s a good idea,” Ronnie said uncertainly, “but why don’t you read it and get back to me?”

Most in the room were unsettled at the tone of the letter. It sounded naive and romantic. Worse, it seemed a direct contradiction of Ronnie’s tough public rhetoric and the administration’s militant posture toward Moscow. Haig told Ronnie that if a president was going to send a missive to the Kremlin, the pros at the State Department should be the ones to draft it. A few days later, when that same group reconvened, the secretary of state handed the president a shorter, rewritten version—one that Deaver described later as “something the State Department might have written twenty years ago. Typical bureaucratese.”

“Well, I guess you fellows know best,” Ronnie said. “You’re the experts…”

Deaver interrupted: “Mr. President, nobody elected anybody in the State Department or the National Security Council. Those guys have been screwing up for a quarter of a century. If you think that’s a letter that ought to be sent to Brezhnev, don’t let anyone change it. Why don’t you just send it?”

Ronnie turned to Haig and said, “Send it the way I wrote it.”

The reply that came back from the Kremlin a few weeks later was icy and perfunctory, most likely written by an apparatchik there. The truth was, there would not be much of a chance to achieve a relationship with Brezhnev, who was in ill health and would be dead within nineteen months. His successor, Yuri Andropov, would serve only fifteen months before dying himself. The next leader to fill the job, Konstantin Chernenko, would have an even shorter tenure before succumbing to a combination of illnesses in March 1985. “They never would announce the death of anybody,” Weinberger recalled later. “Their radio stations would suddenly switch to classical music. Whenever Radio Moscow switched to classical music, some other leader had gone. That was the only word you got.”

Ronnie’s mantra of “peace through strength” was dismissed on the Left—and sometimes on the Right—as a contradiction. But Nancy discerned the history-shattering path that Ronnie might be able to blaze, and she was skeptical that the more conventionally hawkish figures on his national security team were truly committed to his longer-term goals. She became especially disturbed when Ronnie made a speech in March 1983 to an evangelical audience in Florida in which he branded the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” The phrase, crafted by speechwriter Anthony Dolan, set off a firestorm. In Moscow, the Soviet news agency Tass said the “evil empire” label represented “bellicose hysteria” grounded in “pathological hatred.” The Kremlin’s mouthpiece declared that the Reagan administration “can think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anti-Communism.”

Ronnie was unapologetic, writing later in his memoir: “Frankly, I think it worked, even though some people—including Nancy—tried persuading me to lower the temperature of my rhetoric. I told Nancy I had a reason for saying those things: I wanted the Russians to know I understood their system and what it stood for.”

A few days after the speech, political strategist Stu Spencer joined the first couple for dinner at the White House. Nancy was still berating Ronnie for having used such intemperate words. Spencer and Nancy were of like mind on the subject of Ronnie’s posture toward the Soviet Union. The two of them were both worried about internal polling showing that even Americans who had a generally favorable view of the president feared that he might move the country closer to war—a concern that could jeopardize his reelection prospects in 1984.

Ronnie, having had enough of his wife’s tirade about the “evil empire” speech, turned to Spencer: “What do you think, Stu?”

Spencer tried to be tactful.

“You’re right,” he began, “they’re an evil empire—but that was a pretty tough statement to make—”

“Okay, thanks, Stu,” Ronnie replied, cutting him off before he gave Nancy any more fodder. “What’s for dessert?”

While there had been a rotating cast of leaders in Moscow, Nancy was keeping a close eye on the big changes that were simultaneously going