Three Days in Moscow

Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire

Bret Baier, Catherine Whitney

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780062748362
• eBook ISBN: 9780062748492
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

"An instant classic, if not the finest book to date on Ronald Reagan.” — Jay Winik

President Reagan's dramatic battle to win the Cold War is revealed as never before by the #1 bestselling author and award-winning anchor of the #1 rated Special Report with Bret Baier.

Moscow, 1988: 1,000 miles behind the Iron Curtain, Ronald Reagan stood for freedom and confronted the Soviet empire. 

In his acclaimed bestseller Three Days in January, Bret Baier illuminated the extraordinary leadership of President Dwight Eisenhower at the dawn of the Cold War. Now in his highly anticipated new history, Three Days in Moscow, Baier explores the dramatic endgame of America’s long struggle with the Soviet Union and President Ronald Reagan’s central role in shaping the world we live in today.

On May 31, 1988, Reagan stood on Russian soil and addressed a packed audience at Moscow State University, delivering a remarkable—yet now largely forgotten—speech that capped his first visit to the Soviet capital. This fourth in a series of summits between Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, was a dramatic coda to their tireless efforts to reduce the nuclear threat. More than that, Reagan viewed it as “a grand historical moment”: an opportunity to light a path for the Soviet people—toward freedom, human rights, and a future he told them they could embrace if they chose. It was the first time an American president had given an address about human rights on Russian soil. Reagan had once called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Now, saying that depiction was from “another time,” he beckoned the Soviets to join him in a new vision of the future. The importance of Reagan’s Moscow speech was largely overlooked at the time, but the new world he spoke of was fast approaching; the following year, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, leaving the United States the sole superpower on the world stage.

Today, the end of the Cold War is perhaps the defining historical moment of the past half century, and must be understood if we are to make sense of America’s current place in the world, amid the re-emergence of US-Russian tensions during Vladimir Putin’s tenure. Using Reagan’s three days in Moscow to tell the larger story of the president’s critical and often misunderstood role in orchestrating a successful, peaceful ending to the Cold War, Baier illuminates the character of one of our nation’s most venerated leaders—and reveals the unique qualities that allowed him to succeed in forming an alliance for peace with the Soviet Union, when his predecessors had fallen short.

Part One

Reagan’s Destiny

Chapter 1

Dream Maker

Ronald Reagan often told a story about his childhood that captures a key aspect of his unique appeal. As the drum major for the YMCA boys’ band in Dixon, Illinois, a position he had secured because he didn’t play a musical instrument, he was out front during a small-town parade for Decoration Day, marching behind the marshal, who was on his horse. At one point the marshal turned his mount around and rode back to check on the line of marchers. “I kept marching down the street,” Reagan wrote, “pumping my baton up and down, in the direction I thought we were supposed to go. But after a few minutes, I noticed the music behind me was growing fainter and fainter.” Turning, he found that he was marching alone. Unbeknown to Reagan, the marshal had returned to the front of the band and directed them to turn a corner. “It wasn’t the last time, incidentally, that people have said I sometimes march to a different drummer,” Reagan observed.

Reagan was an enigma in the political world, a complex person who defied labels. He could be called a sociable loner, a man of amiable warmth who was most content in his own company. “I’ve always said that Ronald Reagan would make a superb hermit,” Lyn Nofziger, an early aide and confidant, said. “He really didn’t need anybody . . . he was not a typical gregarious politician.”

This paradox of his personality has fascinated pundits and historians for decades. The search to know the real Reagan has thwarted his closest friends and allies, presidential historians, and even sometimes his beloved wife, Nancy, who wrote that he built a wall around himself that even she sometimes felt: “He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.”

The journalist Robert Draper referred to his “sunny aloofness,” capturing a certain remoteness that Reagan himself acknowledged. “I’ve never had trouble making friends,” he explained, “but I’ve been inclined to hold back a little of myself, reserving it for myself.”

He was a handsome actor—in the style of Robert Taylor, his agent suggested—who never quite clicked as a romantic leading man on the big screen, yet as a politician he was idolized. He was sentimental and loving, penning long letters to strangers, yet his own children often felt rebuffed by him. He was mocked by his critics for being an empty suit, yet he was a careful, studious chief executive—a voracious reader and talented writer who often left his speechwriters in awe. He was surrounded by loyal advisors, some of whom stayed with him throughout his political life, yet he had few if any real friends apart from Nancy. He projected a welcoming demeanor, yet on the inside he was tough as nails. Martin Anderson, a policy advisor, once depicted him as “warmly ruthless.” He revitalized the conservative movement, achieved bold economic goals, and set the stage for the end of the Cold War, yet he was habitually underestimated. He did march to a different drummer, yet he captured the imagination of the nation and the world and counted as allies the most substantive political figures of his era. In her eulogy to him, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher spoke of his special nature: “In his lifetime, Ronald Reagan was such a cheerful and invigorating presence that it was easy to forget what daunting historic tasks he set himself.”

He has been likened to Franklin D. Roosevelt in his gift for communication, especially the way he could reach out across the airwaves and impart a vision and sense of purpose to the American people. He shared with Eisenhower a hardscrabble childhood, a human touch, and a restrained ego. Like Ike, he despised pretention and was skeptical of praise. He might grimace were he alive today to observe the almost religious reverence with which he is regarded in Republican circles. Adulation embarrassed him, and he couldn’t tolerate people being obsequious in his presence. A small plaque on his Oval Office desk read, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can do it if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.”

In his early life, Reagan wasn’t a person of grand ambitions. He wrote that he would have been happy to spend his life as a sports announcer. He was drawn to politics through passion and ideas, and he was as surprised as anyone when they connected with the public. “I thought I married an actor,” Nancy wrote in her memoir. “I honestly never expected that Ronald Reagan would go into politics.”

It’s interesting to speculate how this reserved, complex man, who did not wear his high ambitions on his sleeve, grew up to be a president of such iconic stature and achievement. But clues can be found in his upbringing, with its blend of moral conviction, homespun values, and struggle.

RONALD WILSON REAGAN WAS born on February 6, 1911, in a modest apartment above the Pitney General Store in the small farming town of Tampico, Illinois. The family legend has it that his father, Jack, took one look at him, bawling his head off, and said, “For such a little bit of a fat Dutchman, he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he?” Thus his nickname, Dutch, an odd moniker for the son of an Irishman whose ancestors, the O’Regans, hailed from County Tipperary, and a Scots-English mother. The nickname stuck, though it was seldom used after he entered politics. It didn’t fit the rosy-cheeked Irishman all that well. Reagan’s brother, Neil, two and a half years older, also had a nickname, Moon, given him in high school, after the comic strip character Moon Mullins, which stayed with him for life.

Jack and Nelle Reagan, whom their children called by their first names, were attractive people—Jack was tall, dark-haired, and muscular, and Nelle was small and auburn-haired with bright blue eyes. He was a Catholic, and she was a Protestant (Disciples of Christ), both devout in their religious beliefs and practices. In reminiscences Reagan spoke of an all-American childhood and liked to recall happy times and boyish adventures. He loved and admired his parents, even though Jack, a shoe salesman whose big dreams were frequently dashed, struggled to provide for the family. “He loved shoes,” Reagan wrote, saying his father had even studied about them in correspondence courses. “He might have made a brilliant career out of selling, but he lived in a time—and with a weakness—that made him a frustrated man.”

That weakness was alcoholism. Jack’s battle with drink was a constant theme of Reagan’s childhood, but mostly it was kept in the background, until the day at age eleven when Reagan came home alone one cold, windy night to find his dad sprawled on the front porch, passed out drunk. “I wanted to let myself in the house and go to bed and pretend he wasn’t there,” Reagan recalled, with some sympathy for that young boy. Instead, he dragged his slumbering father inside and somehow got him into bed. The confrontation with the hard truth of his father’s struggle stayed with him, but he never condemned him. Nelle had taught her boys not to disparage their father for his drinking; it was a sickness, not a moral failing, she said, and they learned to see it that way, too.

The frequent moves of his early childhood and his father’s alcoholism did not engender the typical expressions of resentment or fear. For that reason, Reagan’s memories of his father were warm and loving. In two memoirs, he went out of his way to highlight the aspects of Jack’s character that showed him in a positive light. But his biographer Lou Cannon observed that those facets of his upbringing might have contributed to his habit of keeping people at an emotional arm’s length. “If you’re the child of an alcoholic, you see things you don’t want to remember, and you certainly don’t want to tell anybody,” Cannon said. “Its main impact on Reagan was to create a kind of inward part of him that was a very, very important part of his character.”

Although Jack’s dreams went unfulfilled, he was a hard worker who believed that stability was always around the corner. They moved from place to place during Reagan’s early life—six moves in his first nine years. That itinerant life might have contributed to Reagan’s sense of himself as an outsider. Perhaps it was also responsible for his gift for reinvention.

There was never enough money, even with Nelle supplementing their income with sewing. But Reagan said, “I learned from my father the value of hard work and ambition, and maybe a little something about telling a story. From my mother, I learned the value of prayer, how to have dreams and believe I could make them come true.”

The family finally settled in Dixon, Illinois, on the south side of the Rock River, when Reagan was nine. Dixon was a classic exemplar of the American heartland. The family home at 816 South Hennepin Avenue, a modest two-story white frame house with a wide front porch, where they lived for three years, was later restored and designated by Congress as his official boyhood home, a national historic site. In 1984, President Reagan returned to Dixon on his seventy-third birthday and spoke of his boyhood. “Times were tough,” he told the audience. “But what I remember most clearly is that Dixon held together. Our faith was our strength. Our teachers pointed to the future. People held on to their hopes and dreams. Neighbors helped neighbors. We knew—my brother, Moon, and I, our mother and father, Nelle and Jack, saw to that—we would overcome adversity and that after the storm, the stars would come.”

Looking back on his childhood, Reagan could never resist casting a rosy glow over the experience. He loved to describe his heartland upbringing as being an essential American story, full of character-building experiences. He even wrote of his early childhood, “My existence turned into one of those rare Huck Finn–Tom Sawyer idylls. There were woods and mysteries, life and death among the small creatures, hunting and fishing; those were the days when I learned the real riches of rags.” Most of all, he loved football, which he considered “a matter of life and death.”

He was also a voracious reader. In a letter to a librarian shortly after he became president, he recalled his love of books. At least once a week after dinner he would take a long walk to the library, where he would spend a lot of time browsing before choosing two books to check out. He enjoyed a wide range of books, from Mark Twain to Horatio Alger to the Tarzan books and the Rover Boys, a popular adventure series. The Dixon Public Library, he declared, was his “house of magic.”

Those who idolize Reagan as the standard-bearer of conservatism might be surprised to learn that his most important early influences were not Republican—showing that patriotism can transcend party. Not only were his parents Democrats, they became fervent supporters of FDR, who earned their respect with his programs to rescue the country from the Great Depression. Jack Reagan was employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) coordinating food distribution to the poor. His father’s son, Ronald Reagan cast his first vote ever for FDR and remained loyal to him and then to the Democratic Party for twenty years. Certain liberal principles were appealing to him. His parents, he said, believed literally in the equality of all people, a progressive ideal in an era when Jim Crow was at its height. Reagan recalled the time when the film The Birth of a Nation came to town. The film portrayed blacks, who were played by white actors in blackface, as aggressive and threatening to white women, while elevating the Ku Klux Klan as a patriotic group. Jack Reagan said, “I’m damned if anyone in this family will go see it.” Regularly, during Reagan’s childhood, his father and mother reached out to blacks, welcoming them into their home and lending them their support. Reagan recounted another incident during his college years when his football team was away from campus, requiring an overnight stay in Dixon. When the hotel manager refused to take a black teammate, Reagan promptly invited him to his house, where he knew he’d be welcome. The moral principle of equality for all and respect for each person’s human dignity was burned into Reagan’s very being, and he carried it throughout his life. He was deeply pained when critics later accused him of racial insensitivity.

Although many aspects of Reagan’s early emotional life are mysterious, one thing is clear: the powerful influence of his mother. Nelle Reagan, outgoing, generous, and creative, nurtured Reagan’s dreams and helped shape his character. As Bonnie Angelo, the author of First Mothers: The Women Who Shaped the Presidents, put it, “When the credits roll on the Reagan life story, Nelle Wilson Reagan should be listed as director, producer, and head of casting.” Not only did she instill in him the optimistic spirit that made him such an attractive politician, she also trained him for public performances, involving him in the small plays she loved to put on for her church and demonstrating her own theatrical skills in amateur performances. A constantly positive presence despite the trials of poverty and a flawed husband, she became Reagan’s central model for living a life above the fray. In her eyes, anything could be accomplished, no matter how difficult.

The source of Nelle’s boundless spirit was her deep faith; its payoff was an opportunity for her children to rise. As Reagan wrote, “She had a natural and intuitive intelligence that went a long way toward overcoming a shortage of formal schooling. She had a drive to help my brother and me make something of ourselves.”

Nelle was also a writer, penning many poems and sonnets, such as this one:

To higher, nobler things my mind is bent

Thus giving of my strength, which God has lent,

I strive some needy souls unrest, to soothe

Lest they the paths of righteousness shall lose

In another era and under more fortunate circumstances, Nelle might have been famous in her own right. Instead, she had a son whose star shined on her behalf.

Like his mother, Reagan had poetic tendencies, and one poem, published in his high school yearbook, The Dixonian, reveals the inner conflict between suffering and joy that he would return to many times in his life.

Life

I wonder what it’s all about, and why

We suffer so, when little things go wrong?

We make our life a struggle,

When life should be a song.

Reagan was drawn to a heroic ideal and throughout his life often pointed to his summers as a lifeguard, which began in 1926, when he was fifteen, and continued for the next seven years, at Dixon’s Lowell Park, a beach on the Rock River, where, he said, he had saved seventy-seven lives. It seemed that he was as proud of that achievement as anything else in his life. As president, he wrote a letter to a woman whose son had reached out to say that Reagan had taught his mother to dive, saying “Just between us I think maybe lifeguarding at Lowell Park was the best job I ever had.” But he also learned a lesson: people didn’t always appreciate being saved. He wryly noted that “almost every one of them later sought me out and angrily denounced me for dragging them to shore.” Perhaps it was a perfect training ground for politics, planting a seed in Reagan’s mind that government “help” wasn’t always welcome or effective.

As he reached the end of his high school years, Reagan was determined to go to college, a lofty goal in his circumstances. In 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression, midwestern farming communities were struggling, and certainly Reagan’s family didn’t have extra funds for his education. But he set his sights on Eureka College, seventy-five miles from home, and secured a football scholarship for half his tuition, which was $400. The remainder he paid for with his lifeguarding savings, and he was given a job to cover his board, first washing dishes in a fraternity house. By his junior year, he was working as a lifeguard and official swim coach.

Eureka was a small college, run by the Disciples of Christ, wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Finding Reagan
• Prologue: The Walk
• Part One: Reagan’s Destiny
• Part Two: Speaking Truth
• Part Three: Three Days in Moscow
• Part Four: Dreams for the Future
• The Last Word: 2018
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Ronald Reagan’s Speech at Moscow State University
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Praise for Three Days in Moscow
• Also by Bret Baier
• Copyright
• About the Publisher