by Bob Spitz
“Mr. President, I’m not so sure you’re going to need that coat and scarf,” he said. “You don’t know what Gorbachev’s doing. He may not have his coat on.” George Shultz, standing nearby, looked at the young assistant as if he were crazy. “It’s not an issue,” the secretary of state growled, not disguising his displeasure. The Russians were now five minutes out, but Kuhn kept working on the president, who was in a serious frame of mind and didn’t want to be bothered. “Jim, it’s okay,” he said, slipping into a nubby woolen overcoat. “Look,” Kuhn persisted, “nobody has any idea what’s going on with these coats, but if Gorbachev gets out of his car with just his business suit on . . .” Reagan had heard enough. “All right, Jim, goddammit, have it your way,” he said, ripping off the coat and scarf and throwing them at Kuhn. “There! Is that what you want? Are you satisfied now?”
Kuhn merely smiled. “Now,” he said reassuringly, “you’re ready to go.”
Sirens could be heard in the distance, signaling the arrival of the Gorbachev motorcade. The president moved outside to the front steps of the villa, flanked by Don Regan, George Shultz, and Bud McFarlane. Moments later an armored black ZIL limousine pulled up to the door, its windows darkened. Reagan shuffled down the few steps, as Mikhail Gorbachev emerged, all bundled up, in an overcoat buttoned to his ears, a scarf mufflered around his neck, and a dowdy black fedora. As he shook hands with Ronald Reagan, he pointed inquisitively at the president’s chest, as if to say, Where’s your coat? As the two men stood side by side, their ages seemed magically reversed. Walking into the building, Reagan took Gorbachev by the elbow to help him up the stairs and guide him inside. It was a gesture that did not go unnoticed, either by the press or the Russian premier. For the rest of the summit, before each event, Gorbachev leaned in to ask an aide, “Will it be coats on or coats off?”
After handshakes and a marathon photo op, the two leaders were scheduled to speak privately, with just their interpreters present, for twenty minutes in a small salon. “Here we are,” Ronald Reagan said, as they settled into armchairs positioned in front of a fireplace. “Between us, we could come up with things that could bring peace for years to come.” It was a good opening, if a bit wide-eyed, as their conversation soon devolved into a back-and-forth of confrontational rhetoric, braced by ideological bickering over the usual talking points, including human rights abuses and the arms race. To Gorbachev, it sounded like “the No. 1 Communist and the No. 1 imperialist trying to out-argue each other.” But they both felt good to get the points off their chests, sensing an underlying rapport they could explore later on.
There was something about the other that each man admired. Reagan sensed in Gorbachev “an intelligent man and a good listener.” There “was warmth in his face.” While he stood his ground on Communist Party policy, he was someone the president felt he could negotiate with. Meanwhile, Gorbachev sensed Reagan’s “desire [that] they understand each other.” Despite their adversarial positions and their irreconcilable differences, Reagan, too, “was a man you could do business with.”
Their introductory meeting stretched well past its twenty-minute limit. Don Regan and Bud McFarlane paced in front of the salon door, checking their watches and shaking their heads—when their boss was unscripted, he had a tendency to go off the reservation. They had briefed him well. He’d be on point for twenty minutes, but after that it was anyone’s guess. McFarlane suggested that Jim Kuhn rescue the president. “I’m not walking into that room,” Kuhn protested. “What do you think?” Regan wondered. Kuhn backed away from him. “I don’t think anything. Leave them alone.” At the forty-minute mark, Regan told Kuhn, “We’re too far behind schedule. You’ve got to go in and get him.” Kuhn demurred. “I don’t think the president would want that,” he said. The chief of staff and national security adviser continued their pacing and head-shaking. Finally, McFarlane ordered Kuhn to ask George Shultz what to do. Shultz was in an adjoining room, holding court with his Russian counterpart, Eduard Scheverdnadze, the Soviet foreign minister. Kuhn crept in and interrupted the conference. “The meeting’s gone way over schedule,” Kuhn said. “McFarlane and Regan think it needs to end. They want your input. What do you think?”
Shultz rose from his seat, his face flushed with anger. Ignoring Scheverdnadze, he laced into Kuhn, saying, “If you’re that stupid to walk into that room, then you don’t deserve the job you have.” McFarlane suggested sending in a note. “Are you crazy?” Shultz bellowed. “This is our guy.”
Sixty-four minutes after the meeting began, the two leaders finally emerged from the room, smiling to show their encouragement. Each had laid his cards on the table, but acknowledged that they were opening hands. “This guy is different,” Reagan told his delegation during a debriefing over lunch at the Villa Palmetto, a mansion next to the Reagans’ where the staff was quartered. “We are able to talk; there is a chemistry we developed.” The American officials told the president that he had “done good,” and they meant it. McFarlane noticed how radiant Reagan was. “You’d have thought he had just gotten an Oscar,” he says.
The good news was temporarily suspended by McFarlane’s disclosure before lunch was served that eighty HAWK missiles were being sent by Israel to Iran in exchange for hostages. This was the first the president had heard of the operation. He was razor-focused on the summit agenda and was having trouble absorbing what McFarlane was telling him. What’s more, the details were complicated—Regan, listening to the conversation, described them as “bizarre”—and difficult to follow. The missiles were being disguised as oil-drilling equipment to evade customs inspections and were siphoned off the Israeli stockpile, which the United States agreed to replenish. If all went according to plan, the exchange would take place two days hence at a secret rendezvous in Portugal.
The president nodded mechanically throughout the conversation; it was clear he had other things on his mind. “Well, let’s see what happens” was his distracted response. As soon as McFarlane was finished, Reagan launched back into the debriefing of his and Gorbachev’s exchange. “He’s really head-up over the Strategic Defense Initiative,” the president reported to no one’s surprise. Right off the bat, Gorbachev tried to disabuse him of illusions that SDI could bankrupt the Soviet Union. “Make no mistake,” the general secretary had warned him, “we can match you whatever you do.”
Gorbachev continued this line in the afternoon session. He grew animated as he gave a penetrating criticism of SDI, leaning right across the conference table. “Mr. President, you cannot do this!” he exclaimed, striking the table sharply with the side of his hand “You are taking the war to the heavens.” He argued that SDI was forcing both countries into a new, more dangerous arms race. Reagan had anticipated this line of attack and was ready for it . . . with a stunner. “This is something you and I have an obligation to do,” he said, “and because we do, once the system has been technically perfected, I fully intend to open our laboratories and to share the technology with you.”
He intended to give the Soviets the Star Wars technology.
Gorbachev wasn’t buying it. “Mr. President,” he scoffed, “you don’t understand me. You are spending enormous amounts of money you ought to be devoting to education, health care, and housing.”
“Well, we’re going to have to find a way to do that, too,” he replied in a lighthearted manner.
Again they went back and forth—Gorbachev presenting fiery, passionate critiques of SDI, Reagan rebutting him lightly, almost tenderly, as if he were a consoling pastor of the Beverly Hills Church. Gorbachev took a long moment to collect himself before fixing a steely eye on the president. “We should ban introduction of all space weapons,” he said. “Ban them! Ban all space weapons!” They had reached an impasse. After this last go-round, Gorbachev slouched in his seat. “Well, I disagree with everything you’ve said,” he conceded, “but I will reconsider.”
He’d reconsider. McFarlane and Shultz exchanged incre
dulous glances. McFarlane thought, “Wow! This is the turning point of history right here.”
Ronald Reagan could sense they needed a breather. “How about taking a walk?” he asked Gorbachev.
“Da,” the general secretary replied. “Maybe fresh air will bring fresh ideas.”
This was no spur-of-the-moment thought. The president had concocted it with his wife and Bud McFarlane before they arrived in Geneva. It would give Reagan a chance to take a reading of Mikhail Gorbachev and perhaps to connect with him in a more intimate way, without any interference from their handlers. The pool house at the end of the garden walkway had been staged for just such an opportunity. Logs blazed in the fireplace, the dimpled surface of the silver-blue lake shimmering in the window. The president knew how to break the ice when they settled there. Earlier, he’d overheard Georgy Arbatov, the Soviet foreign policy adviser, take a swipe at his acting career. Now he implored Gorbachev to “tell Mr. Arbitov that I did some good pictures and not just grade-B movies.” Gorbachev smiled and said, “I know. I saw you in one where you played the man without legs.” Kings Row, Reagan’s personal favorite.
Gorbachev later acknowledged this helped to break the tension, but soon enough they were at odds again. The president had brought with him a nine-point proposal for arms control that would be raised in the next phase of their negotiations. It was a list of guidelines that the Soviets could browse through, but not choose from, he said; the package was offered on an all-or-nothing basis. Gorbachev read carefully through a Russian translation and rejected it out of hand. Sandwiched between the proposals to reduce nuclear arms by 50 percent and an agreement on intermediate range missiles in Europe was a provision that allowed the United States to proceed with its space-based defense program.
In the course of this exchange, the president let go a doozy. A lifelong Edgar Rice Burroughs fan, he told the Soviet premier that he was certain the U.S. and the USSR would cooperate if Earth was threatened by an invasion from outer space. Gorbachev politely ignored the comment. Discouraged, he shook his head. He could see that he wasn’t going to move Reagan off SDI.
The two men put on their coats and went back outside. They’d decided that their attendance at an afternoon plenary session was pointless and that it would be better to catch up on some rest. Pausing in the parking lot while their staffs regrouped, Reagan invited Gorbachev to another summit, this time in Washington. Without hesitation, Gorbachev accepted—and extended the same offer to Reagan: “I invite you to come to the Soviet Union.” “I accept,” the president said. Neither had consulted their advisers on the matter, but it was a done deal. If nothing else came of the Geneva summit, this was no small thing.
The evenings were devoted to entertainment. Protocol demanded that a dinner thrown the first evening by the Soviets at their Geneva mission would be reciprocated the next night at the Maison de Saussure with the Americans as hosts. On both occasions, the president was at his toastmaster’s best, mixing Hollywood stories with jokes that got lost in the translation. Nevertheless, his charm wasn’t lost on the Soviet premier, whose “eyes shone” at Reagan’s accounts of showbiz elbow-rubbing with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.
It was Nancy Reagan who suffered through the events. She found the Russian mission cold, the food distasteful, and the conversation hijacked by Gorbachev’s wife, whose loquacious nature unsettled her. “My fundamental impression of Raisa Gorbachev was that she never stopped talking,” Nancy complained. “Or lecturing, to be more accurate.” The First Lady was accustomed to holding up her end of superficial chitchat with diplomatic spouses—“our husbands, our children, being in the limelight,” their supportive roles. Raisa Gorbachev was no such animal. “We have things of substance to discuss,” she said earlier over tea. “She was very sharp-tongued,” according to an administration official, “insulting at times, short, and curt.” She was an educated woman, a professor of Marxist-Leninist theory, and was particularly eloquent when it came to the fundamentals of Soviet policy. Nancy Reagan didn’t want to hear it. “Who does that dame think she is?” Don Regan overheard her say after their initial social engagement.
Don Regan was his own protocol liability. The final evening in Geneva, the summit’s major players repaired to a salon to review the text of a joint communiqué they’d issue at the conclusion of the negotiations. They were still working on wording about reducing strategic arms by half—the only substantive agreement to come out of the meetings—so that it was agreeable to both sides. In the interim, champagne was passed and the two leaders toasted peace. When the terms of the communiqué were finally approved, the pool photographer from U.S. News & World Report was ushered in to record the official handshake. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, seated on a lipstick-red couch, edged closer to each other and smiled genuinely, aware that the ensuing photo would appear the next day in newspapers around the globe. As etiquette required, their aides stepped away, but Don Regan, who was standing behind the couch, didn’t budge. Instead, he planted his elbows on the cushions between the two leaders and leaned in for the shot. “He just couldn’t resist,” a disbelieving observer recalls. “Everyone in the delegation kept asking, ‘What the hell is Regan doing in that photo?’” But it was too late; he’d literally stepped in it, big-time.
Regan was already on the First Lady’s “Least Wanted” list for any number of transgressions. She’d never forgiven him for building an ostentatious patio outside his office in the West Wing and parading himself grandiosely as the administration’s “chief operating officer.” Keeping his Secret Service detail was another blot on his record, as was his bringing into the administration Pat Buchanan, whose strident right-wing politics she loathed, and his animosity toward Bud McFarlane, of whom she was particularly fond. And there was the interview Regan gave to the Washington Post before leaving for Geneva, in which he suggested that details of the negotiations would be too difficult for women to grasp. “They’re not going to understand throw-weights or what is happening in Afghanistan,” he said. But planting himself in the photo with her husband and Gorbachev completely infuriated her. “How dare he upstage Ronnie’s triumph?” she was heard to exclaim. She had already warned Regan to “keep a low profile,” insinuating that “people are talking” about his imperious behavior. This latest overstep put the idea in her head that Don Regan should look for other employment.
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If nothing else, the Geneva summit came off to the world as a public-relations success. The negotiations didn’t yield much in terms of policy breakthroughs. Sure, the two leaders had developed some personal chemistry, but the talks had failed to solve the very complex issues that fueled the arms race. As Gorbachev was quick to reflect, “Both sides are going to have to do an awful lot of work.” Reagan agreed. “We remain far apart on a number of issues,” he said, addressing a joint session of Congress the night he returned home. But Americans sensed that the winds of change were blowing. Popular opinion of the president’s performance in Geneva was strongly positive. An overnight CBS News poll indicated an 83 percent approval of his handling of the negotiations.
Only Larry Speakes had his doubts. The acting press secretary worried that the eloquent Gorbachev might have upstaged Reagan as the more committed peacemaker, and for insurance, Speakes fabricated two quotes that he attributed to Reagan in a conversation with the Soviet chief—“There is much that divides us, but I believe the world breathes easier because we are talking together,” and “Our differences are serious, but so is our commitment to improving understanding.” This wasn’t the first time Speakes put words into the president’s mouth. “Larry often made up quotes,” Jim Kuhn recalls, “touching up and enhancing them. We were on to him, but couldn’t get him to stop.”
Ronald Reagan emerged from Geneva enormously encouraged by his personal connection to Gorbachev. Certainly, Mikhail Gorbachev was dynamic, charismatic, and more open-minded than his predecessors were. And, yes, he
was forward-thinking, someone who preferred peace over the insanity of mutually assured destruction. “If I could ever get him alone and work on him,” Reagan reckoned, “I think I could bring him around.” But it was something that Gorbachev had let drop during their personal talks at the boathouse that Reagan deemed more profound than any of the other signals that Gorbachev gave off. Gorbachev let it be known that, “on some level,” he believed in God. A Communist leader believed in God.
Regardless of the level, with God in the mix, Ronald Reagan was convinced there was hope for peace.
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In the meantime, on no level was there any sign of hope in the Middle East. As soon as the president returned to Washington, he learned that upon delivery of the eighty HAWK missiles to Iran, not a single American hostage had been released.
The whole operation was a fiasco. McFarlane had originally issued orders that no weapons were to be exchanged before hostages were released. Convinced that Manucher Ghorbanifar was a con artist, McFarlane wasn’t taking any chances. But with the national security adviser preoccupied with negotiations in Geneva, the undertaking was left in the hands of his deputy, Oliver North, who directed the Israelis to go ahead and ship the HAWKs without any assurance of recompense. Meanwhile, the plane carrying the missiles was denied landing rights by Portuguese officials, who were confused that the plane’s manifest for medical supplies differed from the crew’s explanation that it carried oil-drilling parts. North flew to Lisbon under the alias John Copp to plead the case, but the cargo transport had already returned to Tel Aviv. Desperate, North went rogue. He appealed for help to his old buddy Dewey Clarridge, now the CIA’s European operations director. Clarridge agreed to let North use the CIA’s sham St. Lucia Airways and arranged with Turkey for clearances for a “humanitarian” flight to Iran. On Monday, November 25, 1985, the plane landed in Tehran and the missiles were delivered.