Three Days in Moscow

by Bret Baier

  “We can only hope that this history-making agreement will not be an end in itself,” Reagan said after they had signed the documents and exchanged pens, “but the beginning of a working relationship that will enable us to tackle the other issues, 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 that God has granted to all men.”

  Gorbachev added a thoughtful statement about what the agreement meant to the world: “May Dec. 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.”

  With a twinkle in his eye, Reagan added a familiar warning: “We have listened to the wisdom in an old Russian maxim. Though my pronunciation may give you difficulty, the maxim is, Doveryai no proveryai—trust but verify.”

  Gorbachev laughed. “You repeat that at every meeting.”

  “I like it,” Reagan agreed with a broad smile.

  The president was restless going into the post-signing meeting. The high point of the day had already passed. He wasn’t focused on Gorbachev’s explanations of the problems he was having instituting perestroika in the Soviet Union. He broke the seriousness with a joke that was notably tone deaf to the current mood: “An American scholar, on his way to the airport before a flight to the Soviet Union, got into a conversation with his cabdriver, a young man who said that he was still finishing his education. The scholar asked, ‘When you finish your schooling, what do you want to do?’ The young man answered, ‘I haven’t decided yet.’ ” Then, Reagan went on, the scholar flew to Moscow, where he again took a cab from the airport. Speaking Russian, he asked his cabdriver what he wanted to be when he finished his schooling. The cabdriver replied, “They haven’t told me yet.” The joke landed like a bomb in the room, with Reagan’s team cringing and Gorbachev looking briefly angry. He said he hoped that Reagan would not enlist Jack Matlock to collect anecdotes about the people of Moscow; that would surely harm relations. But they moved on quickly, and later Reagan was apologetic.

  The state dinner that evening was a lavish event overseen by Nancy, an astounding feat given the circumstances. Only six weeks earlier, she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a radical mastectomy. Then, days after she returned from the hospital, she learned that her mother had died of a massive stroke.

  Kathy Osborne was awed by the first lady’s strength. “Probably, they put more into this state dinner than any we’d ever had,” she said. “It was so important. It was done very well and very nicely. But here she had to be the perfect First Lady of the United States when she just buried her mother and just went through some very serious surgery. Having gone through a similar situation myself with breast cancer, I was thinking, This woman has never had a moment to grieve for her mother or for her illness, and here she is being the absolute perfect First Lady for the Russian state dinner. It was just amazing. But it’s just such an example, I think, of what a strong woman she is.”

  Nancy looked stunning in a long black beaded gown and diamond drop earrings. Raisa also wore black, matching her counterpart in style with a two-piece brocaded gown with pearls. Although it was a black-tie event, Gorbachev and the other Soviets wore business suits—tuxedos just weren’t worn in the Soviet Union.

  More than a hundred prominent Americans attended the dinner, representing business, politics, the arts, and sports. Joe DiMaggio brought a baseball, hoping to get it signed by both Reagan and Gorbachev. Reagan took it with him to be signed later. They dined on Columbia River salmon with lobster medallions.

  In a warm toast, Gorbachev said, “A boundless world stretches far and wide beyond the walls of this house and, may I say, you and I are accountable to it.”

  Nancy had secured the pianist Van Cliburn to give a recital during dessert. The Gorbachevs were clearly thrilled to see him and exchanged warm hugs with him. They excitedly recalled when Cliburn had come to Moscow in 1958, at the height of the Cold War, to participate in the first International Tchaikovsky Competition. Playing the music of the great Russian masters, Cliburn had won the competition and momentarily opened up a small window of shared values between the nations. Now he sat at the grand piano and began playing “Moscow Nights,” an anthem of sorts for Russians. Deeply moved, the Gorbachevs and their entire delegation sang along as Cliburn played. There were many tearful eyes in the room.

  The dinner might have been an opportunity for Nancy and Raisa to grow closer. But the uneasy chill persisted. Nancy was offended that Raisa never asked her about the surgery or mentioned her mother’s death. At the end of the summit, driving to the airport with Raisa, Barbara Bush brought it up, asking Raisa if she knew about Nancy’s surgery. She said yes, but in her country, surgery on the breast would never be mentioned publicly.

  Raisa had a habit that irked Nancy of dropping insults into conversation. For example, after she visited the White House for a tour given by the first lady, she told a reporter it was more like a museum, not a place a human being would like to live in. Public fascination with Raisa was high, and Nancy couldn’t match that. Americans already knew her.

  The Gorbachevs were troubled by a seeming effort to keep Raisa under wraps. For example, at one point she was scheduled to go on a sightseeing tour of Washington, during which she would stop and interact with groups of Americans. Instead, her car sped by the sites without stopping. Frustrated, she demanded to know why she was being kept inside the car and was told it was for security reasons. But later the press reported it had been her choice. Welcome to the sting of the free press! Raisa also disliked the media characterization of a “cold war” between her and Nancy. Raisa presented herself as being above such petty rivalry.

  The next morning, when Gorbachev arrived, Reagan took him into his private study off the Oval Office. He was bouncing Joe DiMaggio’s baseball in his hand. “There is something called an American idiom,” he told Gorbachev. “We can continue with our rigid ideological positions, or we can play ball”—and he tossed the ball up in the air. “What would you like to do?”

  Gorbachev looked Reagan straight in the eye and replied, “Let’s play ball.”

  “If you want inside baseball, that’s inside baseball,” Ken Duberstein observed. (By the way, Reagan got Gorbachev’s signature on the ball and added his own, so DiMaggio had his souvenir.)

  When they started talking, Reagan immediately launched into a forceful argument about SDI, followed by a rundown by Shultz of the steps they would need to take going forward in reducing strategic offensive arms.

  Gorbachev had given up arguing with the president about his favorite program. He finally said that if the United States wanted to go ahead with SDI, it was their business—as long as it was consistent with the arms treaties. That statement, delivered without fanfare, was a huge breakthrough in negotiations.

  But Gorbachev had a bone to pick with the American media. In a December 1 interview with Tom Brokaw, he had appeared to say that the Soviets were working on their own SDI program. Now he said that his comments had been distorted. He had not said that—only that the Soviets were working on their own research projects in many areas. He had pointedly said that the Soviets were not developing SDI, and the reporters had gotten it wrong.

  They openly discussed what might be achieved in a Moscow summit the following year. Gorbachev, while saying that Reagan was always welcome in his country, added that it would be disappointing if the summit did not produce another agreement, specifically the START treaty. If Reagan didn’t think that was possible, he should say so. In Russian, Gorbachev recounted a saying, translated as “If you respect me, don’t make a fool of me. Tell me what you want.”

  Reagan wanted a treaty, too, but getting one would be complicated. As they moved further down the road to disarmament, protections would have to be in
place, regional conflicts spurred by Soviet aggression would have to be settled, and progress would have to be made in loosening the USSR’s iron hold on East Germany, even if Gorbachev wasn’t yet ready to tear down the Berlin Wall.

  That evening, the Gorbachevs hosted the Reagans at the Soviet Embassy at a dinner that matched the White House’s in grandeur. With vodka and champagne flowing and caviar piled high, the two leaders toasted each other, Gorbachev raising his glass to proclaim, “Until we meet in Moscow!”

  The next morning, the final day of the summit, was scheduled to begin at 10:30 A.M., but a call came that Gorbachev was in a meeting at the embassy and would be fifteen minutes late. Fifteen minutes came and went, then thirty, then forty-five. Finally, Fitzwater turned on CNN in the president’s secretarial office, thinking it might report Gorbachev’s whereabouts. There, filling the screen, was Gorbachev’s limo and the sight of the general secretary plunging into the crowds on Connecticut Avenue. Reagan ambled in and stood watching.

  He saw Gorbachev engaged in his own PR initiative, and it was going over well with the crowds. Recent polls had shown an 81 percent approval rating for Gorbachev among Americans. Under his leadership, the old Cold War fears had begun to dissipate as people observed that here at last there was a Soviet leader who could get along with the West. They loved his smile, his distinctive birthmark, his fashionable wife, his ease with the public, his westernized mannerisms, the way he called their president by his first name. There was a cachet to being close to a Soviet leader. Americans often took Gorbachev at face value because they liked him, but they couldn’t necessarily square their warm feelings for him with the undeniable manifestations of Soviet power around the world: that ugly wall in Berlin, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, the support of Marxist regimes in places such as Nicaragua, Cambodia, and Angola. Not to mention the human rights violations in the Soviet Union itself. But when it came to Gorbachev, they were willing to compartmentalize.

  When Gorbachev finally arrived at the White House at noon, Reagan greeted him with a slight smile. “I thought you’d gone home,” he said reproachfully.

  Gorbachev might not have noticed the edge in Reagan’s voice. He was ebullient about the warm response he had received from ordinary Americans. He confessed that he’d been so engaged by the crowd that he’d been reluctant to leave.

  That’s known by American politicians as “working the crowd,” Baker said.

  Gorbachev dismissed the idea that it was American style. He’d done it throughout his career. He reminded those present that he had spent most of his career out in the provinces, where it was important to listen to the people, as there was more common sense in the provinces than in the nation’s capital—a sentiment Reagan heartily approved of.

  At a small luncheon in the Family Dining Room, Reagan and Gorbachev shared reflections on the status of their negotiations. Both were frustrated by the knuckle draggers in their own countries. It was a friendly back-and-forth, replete with pointed anecdotes. Reagan and Gorbachev were certainly on the same page when it came to despising bureaucracy. Reagan recounted an incident from World War II. There was a warehouse full of obsolete records. He’d asked for permission to destroy the documents in order to make room for current documents. The answer came down through the chain of command that he could destroy the documents as long as he first made copies of them.

  That reminded Gorbachev of a popular joke about Russian business: Someone bought a case of Russian vodka, and emptied the bottles by pouring out the vodka. He then returned the bottles for money, which he used to buy more vodka.

  They continued on in that manner, with much laughter around the table. At that moment, they were just two harried chief executives bemoaning the silliness of bureaucratic tangles that prevented men of vision from doing what they set out to do.

  Near the end of the luncheon, a page handed Baker a note from Shultz saying to stretch it out because the diplomats working behind the scenes hadn’t been able to agree on a departure statement. Baker whispered to the president, “Maybe you can tell some stories.”

  Reagan was puzzled, but he launched into more anecdotes as the Russians looked at him curiously. What was happening? They were ready to go.

  Another page handed Baker a note: Raisa and Nancy were in the Red Room alone and did not appear happy. Baker gave it to the president and whispered, “We’ve got to go.” Reagan and Gorbachev soon joined their wives in the library on the ground floor, milling around, waiting. Shultz walked in. “We have not agreed on a departure statement,” he said, looking frustrated.

  Reagan eyed Gorbachev. “Well, we’re going to have to go anyway. My statement will be that we were not able to agree on a departure statement.”

  Gorbachev recoiled. It meant everything to him that the summit appear to be a success, and if Reagan suggested that the Soviet side had been unwilling to reach a compromise on a statement, he’d look bad. He grimaced. “Oh, all right,” he said in English, and they walked out together, smiling as if there had never been an issue.

  The final ceremony had been planned with much fanfare; more than five thousand people were crowded onto the South Lawn to observe. Both men gave strong statements, citing the important step that had been taken for peace in the world. But the most striking aspect of their statements was when they spoke from the heart about their personal feelings for each other’s people.

  “During World War II, when so many young Russians served at the front, the poem ‘Wait for Me’ became a prayer spoken on the lips of Russian families who dreamed one day of the happiness that their reunion would bring,” Reagan said, summoning up a time when the two nations had been aligned in a common goal. “The cause of world peace and world freedom is still waiting, Mr. General Secretary. It has waited long enough. . . . it is good that you came to America, and Nancy and I are pleased to have welcomed you here. Your visit was short, yet I hope you’ll take with you a better sense of the spirit and soul of the United States of America. And when you get back to Moscow, please pass on to the Soviet people the best wishes of the American people for a peaceful and prosperous new year.”

  Gorbachev reached out to Americans with the same tone: “In bidding farewell to America, I am looking forward to a new encounter with it, in the hope that I will then be able to see not only its Capital but also to meet face-to-face with its great people, to chat and to have some lively exchanges with ordinary Americans. I believe that what we have accomplished during the meeting and the discussions will, with time, help considerably to improve the atmosphere in the world at large and in America itself, in terms of its more correct and tolerant perception of my country, the Soviet Union.”

  The trip made a deep impression on Gorbachev, and it changed his perspective in a significant way. In Washington, he discovered an appreciation for the human factor in negotiations. “Before,” he said in remarks to the Politburo on his return to Moscow, “we treated such personal contacts as simply meetings between representatives of opposed and irreconcilable systems. But it turns out that politicians, including leaders of governments if they are really responsible people, represent purely human concerns, interests, and the hopes of ordinary people, [who] are guided by the most natural human motives and feelings.”

  Part Three

  Three Days in Moscow

  Chapter 9

  The True Mission

  The point was never just about the arms race for Reagan, or the balance of power, or the adding and subtracting of missiles on either side. From the start, it was about the noble goal of eradicating an existential hazard from the world. The Soviet Union wasn’t a threat only because of its weaponry, although weapons made the danger more immediate and tangible. It was a threat because of its ideology, which Reagan believed was a stain on human history.

  But Reagan wasn’t just a heroic cowboy facing his enemy on a dusty street in a town called Planet Earth, ready to test who was the faster draw; he was a strategist playing a long game, and over the course of his presidency th
at strategy had evolved on the diplomatic front.

  Some of his hard-core supporters surely asked how a man who had once given fiery speeches about the Evil Empire could break bread and sign treaties with the leader of that untrustworthy foe. Had the president softened on the Communist menace? Had the warm handshakes exchanged with Gorbachev weakened the United States’ position?

  Kenneth Adelman saw it another way. In spite of Reagan’s calm style of negotiation, he thought his most effective tool was his unwillingness to compromise on the important things. It was a quality he admired in Abraham Lincoln, and he was happy to make the comparison. “Look at Lincoln,” he said. “Lincoln’s tenacity in keeping the union together was beyond rational belief. . . . I mean, why should he have this mystical hold? No matter how many lives you’re going to save, can’t you work out a compromise? There’s something about, No, we’re not going to spread slavery anywhere and we’re not going to give up any of the union. It was just a force that everybody had to contend with. It was unstoppable for Lincoln. . . . With Reagan, with Lincoln, and people like that, you don’t deal in the real world.” By “real,” Adelman meant the world of giving in, of being bent by the winds of public opinion or the threat of pain.

  There were whispers, plenty of them, that in his final year in office Reagan had lost his edge. Aides spoke of his depression immediately after Iran-Contra, and some of them even worried about the distracted look in his eye, his wandering focus. Later, of course, people would pounce on those remarks as evidence that the initial signs of Alzheimer’s disease had already been visible while he was president. But those who knew him well heartily disputed such a characterization. To be sure, the presidency aged all of its occupants, some more than others. But the sheer magnitude of the daily responsibilities would have been impossible had Reagan truly been faltering. As his resolve on the Soviet Union plainly attests, he was as clear as ever in what he set out to do.