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

three in the morning on his body clock, and he sounded a bit hoarse. Though the talks had not produced a “meeting of the minds,” he declared triumphantly that they had opened the way for “a new realism” in US-Soviet relations.

They also set the tone for personal relationships. Nancy decided she liked Gorbachev as much as Ronnie did, finding him funny and warm at the dinners they had shared in Geneva. But the frostiness between the two first ladies lingered. About a year later, in October 1986, Ronnie and Gorbachev met again in Reykjavik, Iceland, which was roughly halfway between their two capitals. This “working meeting” was not a full-scale summit. Expectations for significant progress were low, and it had been agreed that wives were not to be invited this time. But a few days before the event, Moscow announced that Raisa would, in fact, be going. This was an aggressive act of first lady one-upsmanship. Nancy agonized over whether to cancel everything on her own packed schedule and show up but felt that Raisa was testing her. She kissed Ronnie good-bye on the South Lawn as he boarded the helicopter for Andrews and settled in to monitor what was happening across the Atlantic.

As she recounted later in her book, the media coverage of the meeting was filled with images of Raisa:

“I followed the Iceland ‘summit’ on television and saw more of Raisa than of Ronnie or Gorbachev. I saw her at a swimming pool with children—the first time I had seen her do anything with children. I also saw her at a school, where she handed out pins of Lenin—which I thought was a bit much. Then, when an interviewer asked her why I wasn’t there, she said, ‘Perhaps she has something else to do. Or maybe she is not feeling well.’ Oh, please!”

That was not the only thing that bothered Nancy about what she saw in the news coverage. Before Ronnie left, Nancy told assistant Jim Kuhn to telephone her once a day on a secure line to tell her how things were going. On the first call, the first lady tore into Kuhn. “What the hell is going on there with the coat?” she demanded. Television had shown Ronnie wearing a ghastly overcoat from his Hollywood days, one that he should have discarded long before. It was drab green with wide, brown fur lapels, and was several sizes too large. Kuhn had seen Ronnie packing it before the trip and had tried to talk him into taking an elegant blue cashmere one instead. “Mr. President, it’s not that cold,” Kuhn argued. “This isn’t Greenland. They’ve got the jet stream.”

But Ronnie had an odd attachment to this particular piece of clothing. He insisted not only on taking it to Reykjavik but also on wearing it for a much-photographed meeting with Iceland’s president. “I want you to get that coat,” Nancy ordered Kuhn. “Get it away from him now and go lose the coat.” Frantic, Kuhn found presidential valet Eddie Serrano and told him: “Get rid of that coat. Don’t ever let him see it again. That’s per the first lady. You know what to do.”

Nancy’s concern over her husband’s clownish outerwear was not just sartorial fussiness on her part. More memorable than any other image from the Geneva summit had been the photos of Ronnie’s first handshake with Gorbachev. The US president wore a business suit in the frosty wind; Gorbachev was bundled up in a dark overcoat and scarf. Ronnie, though twenty years older than his Soviet counterpart, appeared the more vigorous man. Gorbachev picked up on the contrast immediately. As he prepared to reach out to Ronnie with one hand, he snatched the fedora off his head with the other. Kremlin press official Sergei Tarasenko lamented later: “We lost the game during this first movement.” For the remainder of that summit, when the two superpower leaders were to be in situations where cameras were present, Gorbachev would ask in advance: Coats on or coats off?

As Nancy monitored their second meeting from 2,800 miles away, she realized there were other problems more substantive than her husband’s wardrobe. When the two leaders emerged from their final session at Reykjavik’s reputedly haunted Hofdi House, Nancy could tell from Ronnie’s expression that something had gone wrong. “He looked angry, very angry,” she recalled. “His face was pale, and his teeth were clenched. I had seen that look before, but not often—and certainly not on television. You really have to push Ronnie very far to get that expression.” What she later learned was that he and Gorbachev had made a lot of progress; had even been on the verge of a historic agreement providing for the elimination of most or all nuclear weapons within a decade. But it fell apart when Gorbachev added one more condition: a ten-year ban on development and testing of Ronnie’s cherished concept of a space-based missile defense system. Ronnie felt he had been set up—that Gorbachev had brought him to Iceland for the sole purpose of killing his Strategic Defense Initiative—and refused. “Let’s go, George,” he told Shultz. “We’re leaving.”

The news coverage was scathing, as were the reactions of US allies. Reports had it that Ronnie had arrived unprepared and was too rigid. “No Deal,” Time’s cover proclaimed. “Star Wars Sinks the Summit.” But opinion outside media and diplomatic circles turned in Ronnie’s favor. A poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS News in mid-October found Americans thought their president had been right to hold the line, and were more optimistic than they had been that the two countries were on the path to a major reduction in nuclear weapons. Ronnie’s refusal to budge on his Strategic Defense Initiative served another purpose: it reinforced for Gorbachev the reality that the Soviet Union, with its ossified economy, would not be able to continue an arms race with the United States.

In June 1987 Ronnie stood a hundred yards from the concrete barrier that had divided East