by Nancy Reagan
When she came to tea in Geneva that first day, she struck me as a woman who expected to be deferred to. When she didn’t like the chair she was seated in, she snapped her fingers to summon her KGB guards, who promptly moved her to another chair. After sitting in the new spot for a couple of minutes, she decided she didn’t like that one either, so she snapped her fingers and they moved her again.
I couldn’t believe it. I had met first ladies, princesses, and queens, but I had never seen anybody act this way. I’m still not sure whether she wanted to make a point with me or was just trying out her new position. Or perhaps she was nervous or uncomfortable. Whatever the reason, nothing like this ever happened again.
That first tea in Geneva lasted slightly more than an hour. I offered Raisa a choice of coffee or decaffeinated almond tea, my personal favorite. She chose the tea and seemed to enjoy it. We sat in the drawing room in the late afternoon. There was a fire in the fireplace, but the conversation was dry, impersonal, and tedious. She was lecturing me about Communism, and I couldn’t wait for her to stop.
The following day she invited me for tea at the Soviet mission to the U.N. She was dressed severely—in a black skirt, a white blouse, and a black tie. At the time I wondered about that outfit, which was so unlike anything she had worn before, and which didn’t seem to be her style. Later I learned that this was the standard uniform for teachers in the Soviet Union, and that Raisa was wearing this outfit, which made her look like a prison matron, because they were taking the only photograph of her at the Geneva summit that would be shown back home.
For all my difficulties with Raisa, I knew she was under pressures that I couldn’t even imagine, and I didn’t envy her. When the Gorbachevs landed in Geneva, for example, I noticed that they got off the plane together. But when they returned to Moscow, he got off in front, without her, and she left discreetly through the rear exit. It would have driven me crazy to have to act one way at home and completely different abroad.
Still, her conversational style made me bristle. When I came to tea at the Soviet mission, the hall was decorated with children’s paintings, and Raisa insisted that I look at each one while she described the meaning behind it. I felt condescended to, and I wanted to say, “Enough. You don’t have to tell me what a missile is. I get the message!”
Tea was served at a long table. “Welcome,” she said. “I wanted you to see what a typical Russian tea looks like.” On the table was a lovely antique samovar, and next to it was a mouth-watering array of delicacies: blinis with caviar, cabbage rolls, blueberry pie, cookies, chocolates, honey and jam. I couldn’t possibly try everything, and I finally had to give up. It was a beautiful spread, but if that was an ordinary housewife’s tea, then I’m Catherine the Great.
The day before the summit began, Ronnie and I had a tour of Fleur d’Eau, the twenty-room nineteenth-century château overlooking Lake Leman, where the talks were going to take place. When we walked into the meeting room, Ronnie sat down in his chair, and I impulsively sat in Gorbachev’s. Ronnie looked over at me and smiled. “My, Mr. General Secretary,” he said. “You’re much prettier than I expected.”
About a hundred yards from the château was a beach house on the lake. Inside, we found a beautiful room with a fireplace, and a breathtaking view of the water. Ronnie was eager to meet with Gorbachev privately, without their advisers, and as soon as we walked into this room we knew it was the perfect spot. Here, by the warmth of the fire, they could take a few minutes to begin to know each other as human beings. There were people on our side—and presumably on the other side, too—who didn’t think a private meeting was such a great idea, but I strongly encouraged Ronnie to follow his instincts. We both felt that it was important for these two men to begin building a personal relationship, and that this was far more likely to occur if they had a few minutes alone with just their translators.
The following afternoon, as planned, Ronnie suggested that he and Gorbachev take a break from the larger meeting on arms control and walk over to the beach house. Gorbachev was out of his seat before Ronnie had finished his sentence.
Their tête-à-tête in front of the fire had been scheduled to last fifteen minutes. After twenty-five minutes had gone by, Don Regan came up to Jim Kuhn, Ronnie’s personal assistant, and asked him to break up the meeting because it was running over schedule.
I can’t do that, Jim thought. The two most powerful men in the world are meeting together for the first time. History is being made here!
Ten minutes later, Regan said to Jim, “Haven’t you broken up that meeting yet?”
Jim still didn’t think it was a good idea, so he raised the question with Bud McFarlane, the national security adviser, who suggested he ask George Shultz.
So Jim went into the room where Shultz was meeting with Eduard Shevardnadze, his Soviet counterpart. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “here’s the situation. The president’s private meeting with Mr. Gorbachev was scheduled for fifteen minutes, and they’ve been together almost forty. Don thinks I should go in and break it up. Bud said I should check with you. What do you think?”
George was shocked by the question: “If you’re stupid enough to go in and break up that meeting,” he said, “then you don’t deserve the job you have!”
The meeting between Ronnie and Gorbachev ran for an hour and twenty minutes. As they finished up, Ronnie invited Gorbachev to visit Washington. Gorbachev immediately agreed—provided that the summit after that would be in Moscow. When the two leaders returned to the meeting and reported that they had just made plans for two additional summits, their advisers just about fainted.
While the Gorbachevs stayed at the Soviet mission, Ronnie and I were at Maison de Saussure, a charming eighteenth-century chateau on Lake Geneva, which was the home of Prince Karim, Aga Khan, and his wife, the Begum Salina. The prince and his wife are friends of ours, and when they heard we were coming for the summit, they offered to move out and lend us their house for a few days. When we arrived, I found that Sally, who is a most thoughtful hostess, had emptied all of her drawers and closets, and had even restocked the bathroom cabinet.
On the first night of the summit, the Gorbachevs had us to dinner at the Soviet mission, which was the coldest, barest, and most impersonal building I had ever seen. We began with fruit juice instead of cocktails, because Gorbachev was cutting down on the consumption of vodka in the Soviet Union. We all sat at one long table, with the overhead light turned up full force. It wasn’t exactly what I would call cozy. It was also my first taste of Russian food, which I didn’t find very tasty.
The following night, the Gorbachevs came to dinner at Maison de Saussure. In addition to the four of us, there were eight other guests: George Shultz, Donald Regan, Bud McFarlane, and Arthur Hartman (our ambassador to Moscow) from our side, as well as Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Ambassador Dobrynin, and two of Gorbachev’s advisers. The house looked wonderful with the fireplaces lit and plenty of flowers all around, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the Gorbachevs were aware of the difference.
Dinner, which was prepared by the house chef, consisted of soufflé of lobster, suprême of chicken Périgourdin, endive salad, mousse de fromage with avocado, and, for dessert, hot lemon soufflé with raspberry sauce. As always, we served California wines.
The previous night, when I met Gorbachev for the first time, I felt a certain coldness from him. At our dinner, however, he warmed up considerably. From then on, the more I saw him, the more I liked him. Whereas Raisa tends to be serious, almost solemn, and takes the lead even at the dinner table, her husband has a fine sense of humor and is not very formal. That night, he told me a little about where he had gone to school, and how he’d met Raisa, and how they didn’t have much money when they got married.
He also asked Ronnie a number of questions about Hollywood and seemed genuinely interested in hearing about the great film studios of the 1940s. And he was particularly happy when the soufflé was served for dessert. “Oh, this is good,”
he said. “I like this. What do you call it?” He had, it seemed, never tasted a soufflé!
Even in Geneva, when Ronnie and Gorbachev were just starting to know each other, I noticed an unmistakable warmth between them. By the time the Gorbachevs came for dinner, the two men had already met for a second private talk. I knew they must have been getting along when Ronnie mentioned that he had told Gorbachev a joke he’d heard about glasnost. An old Russian woman comes to the Kremlin and demands to see the general secretary. When she reaches Gorbachev’s office, she says, “We must have a more open society. Why, in America, anyone can go to the White House and walk up to President Reagan and say, ‘I don’t like the way you’re running the country.’ ”
“My dear lady,” replies Gorbachev. “You can do the very same thing right here in the Soviet Union. Anytime you like, you can come into my office and tell me that you don’t like the way President Reagan is running his country!”
Most people might have been careful about telling such a joke to Gorbachev unless they knew him awfully well, but Ronnie uses humor whenever he can. It must have worked, because Gorbachev responded with a hearty laugh.
Our dinner was supposed to have been a largely social affair following the final meetings between the two sides. But apparently the talks had not gone as well as we had hoped. Our negotiators felt that the Soviets had gone back on promises they had already made, and George Shultz was furious. Dinner was pleasant enough, but when we adjourned to the library for coffee, George told Gorbachev how angry he was. Pointing to Georgi Korniyenko, the Soviet first deputy foreign minister, he said, “Mr. General Secretary, you and the president have agreed on several important points. But the reason we don’t have an agreement yet is because this man is holding up progress.”
Suddenly the entire room fell quiet. Raisa had been talking to me, but she immediately turned around to see what was going on. Gorbachev seemed very concerned about what George said, and in the end, the two negotiating teams stayed up all night to produce an agreement to continue talking and to speed up progress on arms control.
Ronnie’s main objective for the Geneva summit had already been met: Above all, he had wanted to establish a personal working relationship with Gorbachev. Everything else would follow from that.
• • •
A year later, Ronnie and Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland. The idea for the meeting came from Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, who was in Washington for talks with George Shultz. He delivered a letter to Ronnie from Gorbachev, who wanted to meet with Ronnie as soon as possible to speed up talks on the intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. This would be not a summit, but a preparatory meeting to set the stage for the real summit, which we’d already agreed would be held in Washington.
But at the time Ronnie was furious at the arrest of Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, who had been accused of spying. Without even opening the letter from Gorbachev, he really lit into Shevardnadze. (I wasn’t there, but George Shultz, who was, told me later that he had never seen Ronnie so angry for so long.) “Daniloff is not a spy,” he said, “and there won’t be any meeting until he’s free.”
Ten days later, as soon as Daniloff was released, a meeting between Ronnie and Gorbachev was scheduled for October 11 and 12 in Iceland. From the outset, this was a business meeting, and wives were not invited. But then, just a few days before it began, it was announced that Raisa would be coming. This put me in an awkward position: Should I go simply because she was going? No, I decided. Raisa’s last-minute reversal struck me as a bit of one-upsmanship. I had a full schedule in Washington, as I’m sure she knew, and I didn’t want to change it.
Besides, I thought it was important, as my son Ron put it, not to be jerked around. I felt that Raisa was testing me, to see if I would cave in and change my mind. But she had to know that schedules are made out long in advance, and I was determined not to give in. This was supposed to be a meeting, not a formal summit, and as far as I was concerned, that’s the way it would stay.
Still, it felt strange to be among those saying goodbye to Ronnie on the White House lawn as he boarded the helicopter for Andrews Air Force Base. I hated to see him go off without me.
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!
The following afternoon, Ronnie and Gorbachev had their final meeting. I was watching on television, and when the two leaders came outside, I knew from Ronnie’s expression that something had gone wrong. He looked angry, very angry. 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.
Gorbachev and Ronnie had made great progress in their talks. By the end of the meetings, they were on the verge of a historic agreement providing for the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons by 1996. But there was a catch: Gorbachev suddenly insisted on a ten-year ban on the development and testing, outside the laboratory, of our Strategic Defense Initiative (commonly known as Star Wars).
Ronnie was enraged, because there had been no mention of this condition during the meetings. Gorbachev knew full well that Ronnie was irrevocably committed to SDI research as an insurance policy for our national security. Ronnie was perfectly willing to share our research with the Soviets, but he refused to abandon SDI, or to tie his own hands and the hands of future American presidents.
Later, Ronnie told me that when the session ended, Gorbachev said, “I don’t know what more I could have done.”
“I do,” Ronnie replied. “You could have said yes.”
That evening, Ronnie sent word from Air Force One that the plane would not be landing until eleven at night, and that I shouldn’t bother coming out to Andrews to meet him. Fat chance! I couldn’t wait to get there.
We didn’t get to bed until very late that night, because Ronnie wanted to tell me everything, just as Gorbachev, presumably, had told Raisa. As I listened to his account of the meetings, I was furious at the Russians for not negotiating in good faith. I was also angry that Raisa had been there; her presence seemed frivolous, as mine would have been.
But I was proud of Ronnie for having the strength to reject a bad proposal. He would have received a great deal of praise for reaching a dramatic agreement with Gorbachev, and as I expected, he took a lot of heat for not signing it.
I now believe that Gorbachev was testing Ronnie at Reykjavik. By standing up to him, Ronnie paved the way for future summits and further progress toward peace. I think Gorbachev learned a lot about Ronnie at that meeting.
The Washington summit finally took place in December 1987. Raisa and I hadn’t seen each other in two years, but nothing much had changed. Following the traditional arrival ceremony at the White House, the men went off for meetings in the West Wing while I entertained Raisa, Barbara Bush, Mrs. John F. Matlock (whose husband was our ambassador to Moscow), Mrs. Yuri Dubinin (whose husband was the Soviet ambassador to the United States), Obie (Mrs. George) Shultz, the translators, and one or two others for coffee in the Green Room—which is the normal procedure for state visits.
I had a fairly good idea of what to expect, but my guests were taken completely aback when Raisa proceeded to lecture us for the entire hour about the history of Russia, its political system, and how there were no homeless people in the Soviet Union. (When I mentioned that last item to Ronnie, he said, “Sure. If anybody over there is homeless, they throw him in a labor camp!”)
Later, one of the guests came up to me and said, “That was the rudest thing I’ve ever seen.” The others just shook their heads in amazement. I was glad that o
ther people could see what I had been going through.
Raisa and I saw each other several times that week, but she never once mentioned my recent breast cancer surgery, or asked me how I was feeling. Nor did she offer condolences on the death of my mother. The Soviets know everything, so I can’t believe she didn’t know what I had gone through only a few weeks earlier. Maybe I was overly sensitive, but I don’t think so.
The following day, Raisa returned for a private tour of the White House. It should have been a simple matter, but arranging it had been anything but. Three weeks earlier, after Raisa had told Ambassador Matlock that she was interested in seeing the White House, I had invited her to come on December 9 for tea and a private tour. Two weeks passed, and I still hadn’t received a reply, although she had already accepted an invitation from Pamela Harriman, the prominent Democratic fund-raiser, which had been arranged by the Soviet ambassador.
I was offended. In the circle we moved in, you don’t ignore an invitation from the head of state or his wife.
Finally, with time running out, I had to insist on an answer. Two days later, I was informed that Raisa did want to come, but that she couldn’t be there for tea and a tour of the house at three o’clock, as I had suggested. But she could come for coffee at eleven-thirty. I agreed, although this plan would not allow me enough time to show her the residence. I found out later that she intended to join her husband at an afternoon meeting with American publishers and editors at the Soviet embassy.
Because we had only one hour, I was eager to get things moving. But that was difficult because Raisa kept stopping to talk to the press. When I put my hand on her arm, she pulled away. I finally had to say, “If we don’t move along, we’ll never have time for coffee.”