~ Q & A with James Mann

Q & A With James Mann, author of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

What’s new in this book?

I looked at the hidden history of the late-Reagan era, the material that hasn’t come to light before: For example, Reagan’s secret White House showdown with Richard Nixon, a meeting of the two old Cold Warriors, in which (contrary to general perceptions) Reagan emerged as the dove on Soviet policy and Nixon as the hawk.

The story of Reagan’s use of a highly irregular adviser, Suzanne Massie, and of the White House intrigues against her. Reagan’s efforts to convert Mikhail Gorbachev. The account of Reagan’s battles with Republican conservatives, who were furious at his diplomacy with Gorbachev.

The story of how the “Berlin Wall” speech was written. On all these subjects, the book offers lots of new information. I tried to look at the hidden Reagan, too.

In public, he always conveyed an aura of small-town innocence, like a character from a Thornton Wilder play. But behind the scenes, he swapped “fart” jokes with aides and called one Soviet leader a “prick.”

Without giving too much away, how do you see Reagan’s role in the end of the Cold War?

I concluded that Reagan contributed significantly to the end of the Cold War, but in a way that is different from-just about the opposite of-the way that many people think.

He recognized the significance of Mikhail Gorbachev as a fundamentally different sort of Soviet leader, at a time when both Reagan’s old conservative friends and many in Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, like Henry Kissinger or Robert Gates, were portraying Gorbachev as representing continuity, not change.

And Reagan proceeded to forge a strong relationship with Gorbachev, again over the advice of his old conservative friends. The result was to help build up Gorbachev and give him the time and space to open up the Soviet system, to the point where Gorbachev’s domestic changes were finally irreversible.

How is this relevant today? What do you think Reagan would have to say about the challenges facing our newly elected president? Do you see any parallels to today’s world and the world Reagan faced back then?

First of all, I think that Reagan would be supporting the ongoing efforts for the abolition of nuclear weapons, as he did over considerable Washington resistance while he was in the White House.

Secondly, the historical record shows that Reagan emphasized the importance of high-level diplomacy, as Barack Obama did during the 2008 campaign. Reagan believed that when the time is right, you sit down with foreign leaders and talk to them.

He placed great value on summits with Gorbachev, although his critics on the right were excoriating him for doing so.

Even at the peak of tensions between the Reagan administration and the Soviet Union, during the same period where Reagan at one point called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” he was also secretly telling his aides he didn’t want to do anything that would stand in the way of “compromise and quiet diplomacy” with Soviet leaders.

Can you tell us a little bit about the research you conducted for this book? You use new interviews and memos and documents not even seen in Reagan’s diaries. How did it work?

People love to voice judgments about Reagan, pro and anti, while assuming that the basic historical facts are known.

I didn’t want to take what’s already been written about this era as a given, because it’s just the starting point. You mentioned the Reagan diaries-as I found, they’re incomplete. Reagan’ secret meeting with Nixon, for example, appears in Reagan’s diaries only as a meeting between Reagan and two White House aides.

In general, I went through archives and other documents, looking for information that could provide insight about what was really happening.

And meanwhile, I conducted interviews with senior Reagan administration officials like George Shultz, Colin Powell and Frank Carlucci, as well as Nancy Reagan. For the German section of the book, I moved to Berlin and eventually interviewed both former West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and also Egon Krenz, who was the East German Communist Party leader at the time the Berlin Wall fell.

Occasionally, the archives and the interviews meshed in a really satisfying way.

In the Reagan Library, I found some scrawled handwritten pages. They seemed to be the notes of a meeting where Reagan’s very informal adviser, Suzanne Massie, brings him a secret message from Moscow about the possibilities for summit meetings.

I guessed that these were notes taken by Carlucci, then Reagan’s national security adviser. I made a copy of the notes and brought them to an interview with Carlucci. He confirmed that the notes were in his own handwriting.

Why did you decide to write about Reagan’s dealings with Nixon?

Because their interaction helped to show who Reagan was and what he believed.

When it came to electoral politics, Nixon and Reagan were, together, the two most successful anti-communist politicians of the Cold War. Look at the ten presidential elections of the Cold War, and in eight of them either Nixon or Reagan played a leading role.

They were both anti-communists, but in different ways: Nixon’s focus was on geopolitical strategy, while Reagan’s was on ideas, beliefs and economics. Nixon tended to view the Cold War as static, while Reagan saw the possibilities for dramatic change.

They went through a remarkable role reversal: In the 1970s, Nixon pushed for détente with the Soviet Union, while Reagan opposed it. But in the late 1980s, when Reagan wanted to move ahead with Mikhail Gorbachev and to push for major reductions in nuclear weapons and missiles, Nixon sided with the conservative opposition to Reagan.

What about Suzanne Massie, who Reagan invited to the White House over and over again to talk about life in the Soviet Union?

She fascinated me, because of the role she played with Reagan and because I thought her story hadn’t really been explored.

She was described in passing at the time as an author who was helping to moderate Reagan’s earlier hard-line views about the Soviet Union. True.

But I found that she also served occasionally as an informal intermediary, carrying messages between Reagan and Moscow, including about summitry with Gorbachev.

And I also discovered in the archives that during Reagan’s last two years in office, there were intrigues inside the White House and National Security Council to limit Massie’s contact with Reagan, because of the fear that she was too dovish, too sympathetic to the Soviet point of view.

Can you describe the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev? Is it true that Reagan tried to get him to convert?

Reagan often drove Gorbachev crazy. He sat in meetings telling simple stories and anti-Soviet jokes, when Gorbachev wanted to talk about policy.

I think this was among other things Reagan’s way of deflecting issues and tough negotiations. Yet Reagan was also of extraordinary importance for Gorbachev, who needed to show he was making headway with the United States in order to keep the old guard in Moscow in check and to win support for his domestic reforms.

So Gorbachev endured the Reagan stories, and the two men formed a personal bond, and Gorbachev was grateful, then and afterwards. I guess one way to put it is that Reagan and Gorbachev wound up getting along in theory, but not so much in practice.

Yes, it’s true that Reagan tried to turn Gorbachev into a religious believer, even though aides like Colin Powell told Reagan correctly that this would never happen.

At the 1988 summit in Moscow, when the two leaders met one-on-one without the presence of their top aides, Reagan kept bringing the conversation back to the existence of a supreme being. Gorbachev switched the subject.

We are approaching the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Do you think Reagan and White House officials and aides were aware of the impact of the words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” when they wrote them?

There’s an incredible amount of mythology about that line. No one, including Reagan, could imagine at the time of Reagan’s Berlin speech that the Wall would come down two-and-a-half years later.

Reagan’s communication adviser acknowledged to me that the words “tear down this wall” were intended mainly as a “sound bite” to attract press coverage for the speech. People think now it was daring for Reagan to call for the Wall to be torn down-yet in fact, Reagan and many other American officials had said similar things long before the 1987 speech.

What was new was the direct appeal to Gorbachev. But as usual with Reagan, there was a difference between appearance and reality. “Tear down this Wall” was, among other things, an anti-communist speech that helped to preserve support for a president seeking to upgrade relations with the Soviet Union.

At the time of the Berlin speech, his policies were moving towards less confrontation with the Soviets, not more. So no, Reagan certainly didn’t envision the Berlin Wall coming down the way it did.

Yet in the broader sense, he definitely deserves credit for grasping that the Cold War was not a permanent state of affairs, that it could end, and for recognizing that the Cold War was a struggle of ideals and economic systems, not just tanks and missiles.

What was the internal squabbling in the White House like?

Endless. Reagan was, to say the least, not a hands-on manager.

He let factions and divisions develop on his staff and within his administration, and after decisions were apparently made, left it to others to make sure they were carried out.

His aides fought about everything from overall Soviet policy to the smallest details. I spent a bunch of time in the book on the battles over the Berlin Wall speech. On that, the conservative speechwriters conspired to win Reagan’s approval before the foreign policy hands could edit the text.

After the Iran-Contra scandal, the White House came to a standstill, until Nancy Reagan conspired to persuade Reagan to replace his chief of staff.

The book is full of personal details about Reagan-his penchant for repeating stories, his sense of humor, even an anecdote about him falling asleep during a meeting with the pope. How do you think his personality influenced his leadership style?

He was famously detached. And he seemed on the surface to be so simple, or simplistic. Nancy Reagan claimed to me that her husband was “absolutely without guile.”

This is also the one-dimensional image of Reagan that both his ardent supporters and his critics tend to accept-that he was either a man of uncomplicated virtues, as many conservatives like to believe, or a dunce, as his critics like to suggest.

But in fact, I came to the conclusion that Reagan did have more than a little guile, or at least remarkably crafty instincts. His endless story-telling, the jokes, the inattentiveness to detail, helped Reagan to deflect confrontation and, meanwhile, get his way on many of the big things he wanted.