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

The following Monday, Ronnie announced that his new national security adviser would be Robert C. (“Bud”) McFarlane, who had been Clark’s deputy. McFarlane had been the second choice of both factions and represented a compromise candidate. “My decision not to appoint Jim Baker as national security advisor, I suppose, was a turning point for my administration, although I had no idea at the time how significant it would be,” Ronnie wrote later. McFarlane would become a key player in the Iran-contra scandal.

Not quite a year later, longtime Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko visited Washington, and Shultz arranged for him to have a working lunch with Ronnie and the administration’s senior foreign-policy team. The meeting on September 28, 1984, marked the first time a Soviet official of such high rank had been publicly received at the Reagan White House. Gromyko, who had dealt with nine presidents and fourteen secretaries of state, was known as a tough, unbending negotiator who took exacting measure of his adversaries and always arrived prepared.

Shultz decided it would be a good idea for the foreign minister to meet the first lady and orchestrated a way for it to happen, supposedly impromptu, at a prelunch reception in the Red Room.

“Nancy, here’s what happens,” Shultz told her. “He comes to the Oval Office. We have a meeting, and we all walk down the hallway to the mansion. That’s your home. There’s some stand-around time, and then there’s a working lunch. How about being there in the stand-around time? You’re the hostess. It would be a nice thing.” Her presence at the reception surprised and delighted the foreign minister. “When Gromyko gets there, he’s no fool; he sees Nancy, and he goes right over to her, engages her in conversation,” Shultz said.

The flirtatious first lady turned on the charm, captivating the dour man known as “Grim Grom” and “Mr. Nyet.” As the reception was winding up, Gromyko casually took a glass of cranberry juice from a waiter’s tray, lifted it in a toast, and asked Nancy why it had been so hard to get Ronnie to the bargaining table.

“Does your husband believe in peace?” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she replied, bristling slightly.

“Then whisper ‘peace’ in your husband’s ear every night,” Gromyko told her.

“I will, and I’ll also whisper it in your ear,” Nancy said. She put her hands on the foreign minister’s shoulders, pulled him close, and said softly: “Peace.”

Gromyko would tell that story many times over the years. He took it as an assurance, from the most reliable of authorities, that Ronnie was indeed serious about turning a new page in US-Soviet relations. More than three decades later, Shultz still chuckled as he recounted that moment to me: “I said, ‘Nancy, you just won the Cold War.’ ” Not too long after that, the Soviet news agency Tass began covering Nancy’s public appearances.

On Thanksgiving Day, Washington and Moscow announced that their chief diplomats would meet in January in Geneva. They were to set the terms upon which they could move forward on negotiations aimed at reaching “mutually acceptable agreements on the whole range of questions concerning nuclear and outer space arms.” A Soviet spokesman cautioned the Washington Post that this agreement to talk should not be seen as the dawn of a new age of détente, but rather as “a small crack in the East-West ice.” Still, Shultz was jubilant. “That basic policy of strength, realism, and readiness to negotiate had paid off,” he wrote later. “Now the work would begin.”

Once the preliminaries were done, more substantive talks were to get under way on March 12, 1985. At four in the morning the day before, National Security Adviser McFarlane awakened Ronnie with a phone call. Soviet president Konstantin Chernenko had died—the third elderly Soviet leader to do so in less than two and a half years. Chernenko had hoped to make his mark in foreign policy by reversing his predecessors’ confrontational stance toward the United States but had held power for only 390 days, during which he had been seriously ill.

In picking the Soviet Union’s next leader, the policy-making Central Committee decided to make a generational U-turn. The new general secretary of the Communist Party would be fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Kremlin leadership. Leaders in the West had already identified him as a comer. Nancy encouraged Ronnie to meet with Gorbachev as soon as possible, though some on his national security team opposed it. “Yes,” she acknowledged in her memoir, “I did push Ronnie a little. But he would never have met Gorbachev if he hadn’t wanted to.”

It helped that Margaret Thatcher had sized up the rising Soviet leader favorably the previous year, when Gorbachev had led a parliamentary delegation to London. Thatcher had spoken highly of Gorbachev to Ronnie when she visited Camp David for the first time a few days before Christmas 1984. Gorbachev was no soft touch, but nonetheless a more pragmatic type than Thatcher had encountered before in her dealings with the Kremlin. Unlike others before him, Gorbachev didn’t interrupt when she raised contentious issues, or drone on with lengthy recitations of principles that she had heard many times before. A memorandum summarizing her private meeting with Ronnie at Camp David shows Thatcher confided to Ronnie that Gorbachev was “an unusual Russian in that he was much less constrained, more charming, open to discussion and debate, and did not stick to prepared notes.” Neither she nor Ronnie, however, could have known how soon they would be dealing with him as the leader of his nation.

Though Gorbachev’s ascension offered the tantalizing possibility that a new era might be dawning in US-Soviet relations, there were bumps along the way to scheduling a summit. Ronnie’s advisers were divided over how ambitious the agenda should be, and there was wrangling between Moscow and Washington about where it should be held. Nancy was relentless in pushing for it to happen as soon as possible, using every opportunity, including social events,