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

on within Ronnie’s foreign-policy team. Richard Allen was replaced as national security adviser by another hard-liner, William Clark, in early 1982. Clark in turn laid the groundwork for Haig’s ouster as secretary of state less than six months later. That led to the welcome arrival of Shultz, who took over the State Department in June. Shultz’s deliberative, understated manner was often described as “Buddha-like.” But his demeanor was a misleading clue to his inner nature. He was a marine who served in the Pacific during World War II and had a Princeton University tiger tattooed on his butt. A canny infighter, Shultz would stay at the helm of the State Department for the remaining six and a half years of Ronnie’s presidency, becoming the longest-serving secretary there since Dean Rusk’s tenure under both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Nancy and Shultz saw eye to eye on their distaste for some of the president’s advisers. They knew that many of the top officials in the administration privately held a low regard for Ronnie’s intellect. “In truth, Ronald Reagan knew far more about the big picture and the matters of salient importance than most people—perhaps especially some of his immediate staff—gave him credit for or appreciated,” Shultz wrote in his massive, score-settling memoir Turmoil and Triumph. “He had blind spots and a tendency to avoid tedious detail. But the job of those around him was to protect him from those weaknesses and to build on his strengths. Some of them did just the opposite.”

When Nancy invited the Shultzes over for that private dinner in early 1983, Brezhnev had just died, and Washington was still trying to figure out what to make of the latest changes in leadership at the Kremlin. Shultz, though relatively new in his own job, had already begun a quiet dialogue with Anatoly Dobrynin, the savvy and charming veteran diplomat who had been Moscow’s ambassador to the United States since 1962. Ronnie had personally authorized Shultz’s discussions with Dobrynin, over the objections of some in the White House. But the new secretary of state had been reluctant to move toward ironing out the real substantive differences between the two nations, because he felt he did not have a solid sense of where the president stood. This was precisely what Nancy wanted Shultz to begin to understand that evening. Ronnie was more willing to press forward in developing relations with the Communist world—even travel there—than the secretary of state had previously believed.

“I will be meeting with Dobrynin again late Tuesday afternoon,” Shultz told Ronnie. “What would you think about my bringing Dobrynin over to the White House for a private chat?”

“Great,” the president replied, adding, “We have to keep this secret. I don’t intend to engage in a detailed exchange with Dobrynin, but I do intend to tell him that if Andropov is willing to do business, so am I.”

Early Monday morning, Shultz got a call from Bill Clark. The national security adviser was livid at what he saw as an end run by Shultz and thought that allowing the president to sit down with the Soviet ambassador was a mistake. But Ronnie insisted he wanted to do it, and Deaver made arrangements to send a White House car to the State Department garage to pick up Shultz and Dobrynin. Their meeting in the living room of the family quarters lasted two hours, during which the three men talked about arms control, the potential for a long-term deal on grain that the Soviets wanted, and recent developments in Poland and Afghanistan.

Ronnie also pressed the ambassador on human rights—particularly the plight of two families of Pentecostal Christians who had taken refuge in the US embassy in Moscow after being denied the right to leave a country where they faced persecution and arrest. At that point, the “Siberian Seven” had been living in the embassy basement for nearly five years, in one cramped room with only two beds. Ronnie told the Soviet ambassador: “If you can do something about the Pentecostals or another human rights issue, we will simply be delighted and will not embarrass you by undue publicity, by claims of credit for ourselves or by ‘crowing.’ ” As the ambassador and secretary of state left the meeting with Ronnie, Dobrynin told Shultz that he would see if anything could be done about this “special subject.” A few months later, the Pentecostal families were granted safe conduct out of the embassy and ultimately allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Ronnie made good on his promise not to boast.

“Nancy was very much involved,” Shultz told me. She understood, he added, that this delicate initial trust-building exercise involving the Pentecostal families “sent a message to the Soviets that you can deal with this man because he keeps his word. It made an impression on them that you can work a deal with these people, and they’ll carry through on it. In an odd way, it was a little something that happened as the result of Nancy’s phone call. ‘Come over and have supper with us.’ ”

On June 5, 1983, George and Helena “Obie” Shultz reciprocated Nancy’s invitation and had the Reagans over to their house in Bethesda. Their neighbors lined the street to wave and cheer as the presidential motorcade pulled up. Over dinner, the two couples celebrated a successful G-7 summit that Ronnie had recently hosted in Williamsburg, Virginia. “I learned something else of interest that evening: the president was uneasy with Bill Clark, and Nancy had no time for him at all,” Shultz wrote later.

That the national security adviser was on thin ice with the president was an important bit of internal intelligence for Shultz. At the time, the general perception was that Clark’s star was on the rise, much to the dismay of both Shultz and Nancy. In the media, he, not Shultz, was portrayed as the administration’s most important player when it came to international affairs. “Unlike his predecessors in the national security post, Mr. Clark is a self-proclaimed foreign-policy