An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  As Gorbachev’s letter indicated, our Geneva negotiators, with concurrence by West German leaders, were moving close to a compromise regarding Germany’s older Pershing missiles. Over the next few weeks, the compromise, which was ultimately pivotal to reaching agreement on the INF treaty, was completed. Under the compromise, Germany’s older Pershing missiles were excluded from the U.S.-Soviet agreement, but West Germany agreed to remove them once the agreement took effect—and we agreed to remove and destroy the U.S.-controlled nuclear warheads installed in these missiles.

  Even after this compromise, Gorbachev refused to set a date for a summit. He was waiting me out, still expecting me, I suspect, to cave in on the SDI because of the continuing furor over the Iran-Contra affair.

  I sent word to him through George Shultz that I wasn’t budging on the SDI, and so the impasse continued into the first weeks of autumn.

  83

  ON OCTOBER 19, 1987, the stock market, after a record run-up, had the largest one-day collapse of prices since 1914. It was in many ways a crisis for the country. But I confess this was a period of time in which I was more concerned about the possibility of an even greater tragedy in my own life than I was about the stock market.

  On a Monday afternoon early that month, Dr. John Hutton of the White House medical staff came to the Oval Office and told me he wanted to give me some news about Nancy: During one of her regular mammogram checkups at Bethesda, doctors had detected what appeared to be a possible tumor in her left breast; a biopsy was necessary to determine if it was malignant. If it was malignant, she would have to have an operation. Afterward, John told Nancy I reacted to the news with an expression he would never forget. “I think the president,” he told her, “has always believed that nothing would ever happen to you.”

  He was right.

  When I came up to the family quarters, I kissed Nancy and felt a tension in her body that I knew from long experience indicated she was very worried. “I wish I could erase the worry which she feels,” I wrote that night in my diary.

  But this was another one of those instances that reminded me of human limitations: For all the powers of the president of the United States, there are some situations that made me feel helpless and very humble.

  All I could do was pray—and I did a lot of praying for Nancy during the next few weeks.

  The next ten days may have been the longest ten days of our lives. Nancy continued her full schedule of responsibilities, refusing to cancel commitments in her campaign against drugs and the foster grandparent program that were dear to her heart. While we waited it out, I had to battle Congress for approval of my nominee to the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, and then the stock market turned unusually volatile, prompting this comment in my diary October 16: “I’m concerned about the money supply. Has Fed been too tight? Alan [Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve] doesn’t agree and believes this is only an overdue correction.” (In hindsight, I think the stock market crashed principally because it was simply overpriced; investors suddenly realized the prices were too high.)

  The same night, I flew with Nancy to Bethesda, where she was bedded down on the eve of her surgery. I returned to the White House, but was restless much of the night. I got up at six the next morning to fly to the hospital, but heavy fog made it unsafe for the helicopter, so we had to drive and I was late; I got there only in time to kiss Nancy and watch her being wheeled on a gurney down a hallway into the operating room.

  Nancy’s brother, Dick, had come from Philadelphia to be with us, and the two of us tried to busy ourselves with newspapers to make the time pass, but it didn’t work. Then, with no news, we adjourned to a small dining area and were eating breakfast when I looked up and saw John Hutton and Dr. Ollie Beahrs of the Mayo Clinic approach us.

  Their faces telegraphed the news that they were about to give me:

  Nancy had a malignancy and she and her doctors decided on a mastectomy.

  I know how desperately Nancy had hoped this would not be the case and I couldn’t reply to them. I just dropped my head and cried. After they left, I remained at the table, motionless and unable to speak. Then I felt an arm around my shoulders and heard a few quiet, comforting words. They were spoken by Paula Trivette, one of the four military nurses assigned to the White House and, like all of them, a warm and wonderful human being. With her words and her arm on my shoulder she was trying to comfort me. I learned later that John Hutton had suggested she do it; she stepped in and was truly an angel of mercy. I can’t recall her exact words but they lifted me from the pit I was in and kept me out of it.

  In the early afternoon, I was able to visit Nancy in the recovery room. She was asleep when Dick and I got there. Suddenly, as we were standing by her bed, there was a little movement of her body. Her eyes didn’t open, but I heard a tiny voice say, “My breast is gone.”

  Barely conscious because of her anesthesia, Nancy somehow had sensed we were there. She was devastated by the loss of her breast—not because she was worried about herself, but because she was worried about me and how I would feel about her as a woman.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I love you.” Then I leaned over and kissed her softly, and repeated that it made no difference to me. But seeing that sadness in her eyes, it was all I could do to avoid breaking up again.

  Two days later, the stock market took its plunge. But stock market or no stock market, it was mainly Nancy, not Wall Street, I worried about—and, as thousands of letters and calls to the White House indicated, she was in the hearts and minds of many Americans during that period, too.

  As ever, Nancy had been a brave woman.

  The doctors had told her that she had two choices for the removal of the tumor: She could have a lumpectomy or a mastectomy. After listening to them, she chose a mastectomy because she realized she wouldn’t be able to perform her duties as first lady if she had to undergo the radiation that would be required after a lumpectomy, and, at her age, she thought it was best.

  Later, during talks to women about the importance of having mammograms, she would also tell them that this was a personal choice every woman had to make for herself.

  Very soon, we learned Nancy would have to plumb the depths of her courage again.

  I had just finished an interview with five foreign television reporters on October 26 when my secretary, Kathy Osborne, came into the office and said she had just been told by Elaine Crispen, Nancy’s press secretary, that Nancy’s mother, Edith Davis, had died in Phoenix.

  I canceled the rest of my schedule and took the elevator upstairs to see Nancy on what I knew would be a heartbreaking mission. Although she was making a good recovery, Nancy was still bedridden and weak from her surgery. On my way up to the family quarters, I saw Dr. Hutton and told him what had happened, and he went with me so he would be there when I broke the news to Nancy. She was talking to Ron when I came in but put the phone down when she saw us. Perhaps she had feared the worst.

  It was extremely difficult for her because I have never known any family with such a close bond between mother and child as there was in Nancy’s family. Nancy worshiped her mother and seldom a day passed when they did not talk on the phone. I worshiped her too. Like Nancy, she lit up a room when she walked into it. Deede was a remarkable, warm, and loving woman. From the time I met her, I could never tell another mother-in-law joke.

  As I knew she would, Nancy took the news very hard.

  At nine the next morning, we left for Phoenix. A half hour before we left, I had a conference call with George Shultz and others that I described this way in my diary:

  “The Soviets blinked. Shevardnadze, speaking for Gorbachev, is arriving Thursday for meetings on INF and plans for the Summit.”

  Although it was obvious I would have to be in Washington during the next few days to meet with Shevardnadze now that the Soviets were ready to talk seriously about setting a date for the summit, I couldn’t let Nancy make that sad trip to Phoenix alone, so I flew there with her, then returne
d to Washington later in the day.

  After landing in Arizona, we drove first to the mortuary. Seeing her mother was too much for Nancy. She broke down sobbing and began speaking to her mother, telling her how much she loved her and how much she meant to her. I had never seen Nancy in such pain. I held her and said that her mother knew how she felt but that she was no longer with her body. While I am sure I comforted Nancy a little, nothing I could say or do could bring Deede back, and once again I felt helpless against the limitations imposed on all men: I was president of the United States but there was nothing I could do to bring happiness to my wife at a time when she desperately needed it. All I could do was stand beside her, hold her, pray, and try to soak up some of the pain she was feeling.

  Then, after promising to return in three days for the funeral, I had to leave Nancy to deal with her grief alone, so that I could return to Washington for Shevardnadze’s visit. When Nancy asked me to give a eulogy, I said: “I wanted to do that, but I didn’t want to push myself.”

  Back in Washington, we cleared away the last obstacles to the INF treaty and then announced the date for the summit. This is a portion of the entry in my diary for October 30, 1987:

  Shevardnadze brought me a letter from Gorbachev. It was statesmanlike and indicated a real desire for us to work out any differences. The outcome of the letter and meetings was a Summit to start here Dec. 7. Purpose to sign INF agreement and set in motion the START treaty to reduce ICBM’s by 50 per cent and to finalize that at a summit in Moscow next spring. On that note of optimism we lifted off the South Lawn for Andrews Air Force Base . . . for Phoenix and Deede’s funeral.

  Everyone in the family came to the funeral in Phoenix except Patti. Her absence added to the hurt Nancy felt during this month of almost nonstop pain.

  Although Nancy would never get over the loss of her mother, the funeral went a long way toward helping her deal with her grief—she saw how much so many people loved Deede, and I think she realized Deede had joined her husband in heaven.

  Perhaps I considered the letter Shevardnadze had brought from Gorbachev “statesmanlike” because he had accepted our position on several key points: Although he said he wanted to discuss space defense (i.e., the SDI) in Washington, he dropped his insistence that we had to accept limits on SDI development as a prerequisite to signing the INF treaty, discussing the START treaty, or setting an agenda for our next summit in Moscow.

  With the language of the INF treaty now settled, he said he hoped we could agree on the principles for the START agreement during his visit in Washington, then sign it when I came to Moscow. In addition, he appeared to back away from his previous insistence that the ABM treaty be strengthened, insisting only that it be observed and that we make a ten-year commitment not to withdraw from the treaty.

  Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev pulled up to the White House on the morning of December 8 in a large Russian-made limousine. After the customary welcoming ceremonies, he and I and our interpreters went to the Oval Office and, as I reflected later in the diary, had “a good rousing meeting.” I brought up Soviet human rights abuses again: I said we were pleased that some Soviet Jews were being allowed to leave the Soviet Union, but felt more should be allowed to emigrate. As he had at Geneva and Reykjavik, Gorbachev bristled when he heard the translation of my remarks on Soviet human rights abuses.

  He replied that he was not the accused standing in a dock and I was not a prosecutor, and that I had no right to bring up domestic matters of the Soviet Union. In fact, he said, a proposal then current in Washington to build a fence along the Mexican border was as bad as anything the Soviets had ever done.

  I replied that the fence was meant to stop illegal immigration by people who wanted to join our society because it offered democratic and economic opportunities—that was hardly the same thing as building the Berlin Wall, which imprisoned people in a social system they didn’t want to be part of.

  “Americans have fewer human rights than the Soviet people,” Gorbachev persisted. “What about your people who sleep in the streets and all your unemployed? Where are their human rights?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but are you aware that we have something in this country called unemployment insurance, that when a man loses his job, for a certain period of time he continues to receive payment?”

  Gorbachev asked:

  “What happens when he comes to the end of that period and still doesn’t have a job?”

  “Well,” I said, “then we have another program. We call it welfare. They become eligible for that if they still can’t get a job.”

  He’d never heard of unemployment or welfare benefits before.

  We didn’t come to any agreement on this issue, but I enjoyed the debate and I think he did, too. We agreed to disagree. After that, we signed the INF treaty. I was proud to be part of a genuinely historic moment, something I’d been striving for since 1981, and I was very happy.

  Before the signing, Gorbachev and I each made brief remarks. “We can only hope,” I said,

  that this history-making agreement will not be an end in itself but the beginning of a working relationship that will enable us to tackle the other urgent issues before us: strategic offensive nuclear weapons, the balance of conventional forces in Europe, the destructive and tragic regional conflicts that beset so many parts of our globe, and respect for the human and natural rights God has granted to all men.

  Not only did the INF treaty provide for the elimination of an entire class of nuclear weapons, I said, it contained teeth to assure compliance. “We have listened to the wisdom of an old Russian maxim:

  “Dovorey no provorey—trust, but verify.”

  “You repeat that at every meeting,” Gorbachev said, to which I said, “I like it.”

  Gorbachev then made some remarks I agreed with:

  For everyone, and, above all, for our two great powers, the treaty whose text is on this table offers a big chance at last to get onto the road leading away from the threat of catastrophe. It is our duty to take full advantage of that chance and move together toward a nuclear-free world, which holds out for our children and grandchildren and for their children and grandchildren the promise of a fulfilling and happy life without fear and without a senseless waste of resources on weapons of destruction . . . may December 8, 1987, become a date that will be inscribed in the history books, a date that will mark the watershed separating the era of a mounting risk of nuclear war from the era of a demilitarization of human life.

  Under the INF agreement, more than fifteen hundred deployed Soviet nuclear warheads would be removed and all Soviet ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Europe, including the SS-20s, would be destroyed; on the U.S. side, all Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles, with some four hundred deployed warheads, would be destroyed, plus backup missiles on both sides. As part of the agreement, each nation was permitted to make on-site inspections in the other country to verify compliance with the agreement.

  It was the first time in history that any nations had ever agreed not only to stand down but to destroy nuclear missiles.

  The next day, Gorbachev came back to the White House and we agreed that our next goal was to achieve a fifty-percent reduction of strategic missiles on both sides. On this “morning after,” I think we both felt as if we’d participated in something important, and we relaxed a little. I told him I’d been collecting stories about the Russians; although there were quite a few I’d heard that I couldn’t tell him, I told him one about an American and a Russian who were arguing about the respective merits of their countries. The American said, “Look, in my country I can walk into the Oval Office and I can pound on the president’s desk and say, ‘Mr. President, I don’t like the way you are running the country,’” to which the Russian said, “I can do that, too.” The American said, “You can?” and his friend said:

  “Sure, I can go into the Kremlin and pound on the General Secretary’s desk and say, ‘Mr. General Secretary, I don’t like the way Pre
sident Reagan is running his country.’”

  The interpreter translated the joke, and when he got to the punch line, Gorbachev howled.

  Then I told him about an order that had gone out to traffic policemen in Moscow stating that, in the future, anyone caught speeding would be given a traffic ticket, no matter how important he might be. One day, I said, the General Secretary was leaving his home in the country and, discovering he was late for a meeting in the Kremlin, he told his driver: “Here, you get in the backseat and I’ll drive.”

  Down the road, they passed two motorcycle policemen and one of them took after the car. A few minutes later, he rejoined the other policeman, who asked him, “Did you give him a ticket?”

  “No,” the traffic cop said.

  “Why not? We were told that no matter who it was we were supposed to issue a ticket.”

  “No, this guy was too important,” his friend said.

  “Who was it?”

  His friend said:

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t recognize him, but his driver was Gorbachev.”

  He howled again.

  During the remainder of his visit, our teams met literally around the clock and made substantial progress in defining the principles for the START agreement Gorbachev and I wanted to sign in Moscow in the spring, although we both knew serious problems remained, particularly the question of how sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles were to fit into the agreement. Among all nuclear missiles, they were the hardest to count and verify—from space, it was virtually impossible for satellites to determine whether a seaborne missile launcher would fire nuclear warheads or conventional warheads.

  Just before noon the next day, Gorbachev returned a final time to the White House for more work on the START treaty. When this meeting was over and the two of us were walking to lunch, I told him there was one thing he could do that would go a long way toward improving U.S.-Soviet relations: He could end the shipment of Soviet military weapons to Nicaragua.