Reagan's NSC Soviet expert who assembled the 'Soviet 101' briefing papers and the last US ambassador to the USSR
Matlock recalled, "I've never had a better student than Ronald Reagan. He knew that he didn't know a lot of things, and he wasn't ashamed of it."
Jack Matlock was an American Soviet specialist who fell in love with Russia reading Dostoevsky and spent a 35-year Foreign Service career immersed in US-Soviet relations, beginning with translating Kennedy-Khrushchev messages during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis from the Moscow embassy. As Reagan's NSC senior director for European and Soviet affairs, he assembled the 'Soviet 101' curriculum: 24 briefing papers by CIA and State Department analysts, and role-played Gorbachev in mock summits to prepare Reagan for Geneva. Appointed ambassador to the USSR in 1987, he witnessed the country's final four years and later judged Gorbachev's failure to secure a written SDI-sharing commitment from Reagan at Geneva a 'strategic error.'
Career Timeline
- 1929Born Greensboro, NC; Duke University (BA), Columbia University (MA)
- 1956–1971Foreign Service: Vienna, Moscow, West and East Africa; translated Kennedy-Khrushchev correspondence during Cuban Missile Crisis
- 1971–1974State Department Director of Soviet Affairs
- 1974–1978Deputy Chief of Mission, US Embassy Moscow
- 1981–1983US Ambassador to Czechoslovakia
- 1983–1986NSC Senior Director; assembled 'Soviet 101,' prepared Geneva and Reykjavik summits
- 1987–1991US Ambassador to USSR; witnessed the final four years
- 1991–Columbia, Institute for Advanced Study; authored Autopsy on an Empire and Reagan and Gorbachev
Related historical events
- 1985–1989The New Thinking and the End of the Cold WarUS Ambassador to the USSRAhead of Malta, recommended Bush suspend Jackson-Vanik and open trade policy toward the USSR; attended the summit as part of the US delegation.
- 1991The August Coup and the Collapse of the USSRUS ambassador to the USSR during the collapseAs the last US ambassador to the Soviet Union, he witnessed firsthand the events surrounding the August Coup on the ground.
Opposition to NATO Expansion and Post-Cold War Critique
After retiring from the Foreign Service in 1991, Matlock became one of the most consistent critics of post-Cold War US foreign policy. In June 1997, he joined George Kennan, Paul Nitze, and other architects of the Cold War's end in signing an open letter to President Clinton opposing NATO expansion, then testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that admitting new members "may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War." He warned that expansion would strengthen anti-democratic forces in Russia, jeopardize ratification of arms reduction treaties, and draw a new dividing line across Europe.
In his 2010 book Superpower Illusions, Matlock dissected the myths that distorted American policy: the claim that the United States "won" the Cold War by military pressure, the justifications for NATO expansion, and the unilateralism that led to the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror. He argued that the Soviet collapse resulted from Gorbachev's reforms and diplomatic negotiation, not American pressure, and that expanding NATO up to Russia's borders squandered the opportunity to build a cooperative European security architecture that included Russia.
During the 2021–2022 Ukraine crisis, Matlock, then in his nineties, returned to public debate to argue that the war could have been avoided had the United States not pressed for Ukraine's admission to NATO. Without justifying Putin's invasion, he identified the abandonment of what he believed was a commitment not to expand NATO, made to Gorbachev during German reunification talks, as a root cause of the confrontation. In February 2022 he warned that the crisis brought the world closer to nuclear exchange than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.