An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  “But I cannot understand why our programs can be considered threatening,” I wrote. Since 1970, the letter went on, the USSR had developed three new intercontinental ballistic missiles, five new submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and thirteen modernized versions of other Soviet missiles. Yes, we had begun to develop new weapons systems after a long period, but only in response to the Soviet buildup.

  As we see it, you claim to be responding to the U.S. program. Yet your new missiles have been deployed years ahead of their U.S. counterparts, not to mention in greater numbers . . . I recognize that neither of us will be able to persuade the other as to who is to blame for the poor state of our relations, nor would it be productive for the two of us to engage in a lengthy debate on the subject. I doubt, however, that we can make progress in reducing the high levels of armaments if either of us is unwilling to take into account the concerns of the other.

  As for myself, I am prepared to consider your concerns seriously, even when I have difficulty understanding why they are held. I am willing to explore possible ways to alleviate them. But solutions will elude us if you are unable to approach our discussions in the same spirit, or if you demand concessions as an entry fee for the discussions themselves.

  (This was a reference to Moscow’s demands that we halt deployment of NATO’s new INF missiles before it would return to Geneva.)

  Perhaps, America’s policies had been misunderstood in Moscow: Contrary to what Soviet leaders might believe, I wrote, the United States

  has no desire to threaten the security of the Soviet Union and its allies, nor are we seeking military superiority or to impose our will on others. . . .

  Alluding to a remark by Chernenko that it was dangerous for either side to attempt to upset the prevailing balance of forces and gain a military advantage (a veiled reference to the INF missiles), I continued:

  I agree that such attempts are dangerous, but many actions of the Soviet Union in recent years would represent just such attempts. I do not intend to debate these matters in this letter because the United States views are well known; I feel we should move beyond mutual recrimination and attempts to assess blame and find concrete steps we can both take to put the relations on a more positive track. . . .

  I wrote that all of us involved in arms control discussions must realize we had to hurdle a difficult practical stumbling block before we reached an agreement: For understandable reasons of history and geography, I wrote, the Soviet strategic forces were made up almost exclusively of land-based intercontinental-range missiles while the United States had a three-tiered force of land-, sea-, and air-launched missiles.

  Since we were dealing to some extent with apples and oranges, I wrote that reaching an equitable agreement would be hard but not impossible; from our perspective, the most destabilizing aspect of the nuclear arms race was the Soviets’ substantial edge over the United States in long-range missiles, but I said we were prepared to discuss trade-offs that acknowledged the differences in our forces and bridged the proposals of both sides. The INF weapons in Europe, I wrote, were obviously a major sticking point in our relations, and if the Soviets had any new ideas on how to deal with the impasse, we would pay attention to them. In the meantime, I suggested we move ahead on other issues, including work on a treaty to ban chemical weapons and begin the development of better communications and procedures to avert miscalculations or misunderstandings that might lead to disaster during an international crisis:

  Mr. General Secretary, following his visit to Moscow, Vice President Bush conveyed to me your message that we should take steps to insure that history recalls us as leaders known to be good, wise and kind. Nothing is more important to me, and we should take steps to bring this about.

  Referring to the Soviet decision to allow the Pentecostalist families to emigrate to America, I wrote that I was

  touched by that gesture and in my view, it showed how quiet and sincere efforts could solve even the most sensitive problems in our relationship. Similar humanitarian gestures this year would touch the heart of all Americans. Therefore, I conclude as you did, that a turn toward steady and good relations between our two countries is desirable and feasible and I am determined to do my part in working for that end.

  Sincerely,

  Ronald Reagan

  At the end of the letter, I wrote a postscript by hand:

  P.S. Mr. Chairman. In thinking through this letter, I have reflected at some length on the tragedy and scale of Soviet losses in warfare through the ages. Surely those losses, which are beyond description, must affect your thinking today. I want you to know that neither I nor the American people hold any offensive intentions toward the Soviet people. The truth of that statement is underwritten by the history of our restraint at the time when our virtual monopoly on strategic power provided the means for expansion had we so chosen. We did not then nor shall we now. Our common and urgent purpose must be the translation of this reality into a lasting reduction of tensions between us. I pledge to you my profound commitment to that goal.

  75

  MOSCOW’S RESPONSE to this attempt at quiet diplomacy was a cold shoulder: Ambassador Dobrynin told George Shultz the Soviet leadership wasn’t interested in a summit and Chernenko’s reply stated that he had no interest in pursuing a dialogue without acts of “concrete, weighty substance” on the part of the United States—which to him meant removing the Pershing II and cruise missiles. Here are excerpts from his letter, which, like mine, was seven pages long:

  We have already made it known to the United States before, but since you go back again to the matter of intentions and how they can be perceived, I will express thoughts and illustrate them with specific examples:

  If one is to summarize what was on many occasions publicly stated by you and other representatives of your administration, the bottom line will be that the United States would only agree with such a situation where it would be militarily ahead of the USSR. But the point of the matter is that we, however, have not agreed nor do we agree with such a situation. In this respect, we have some experience earned the hard way. The history of our relations, especially the postwar period, has seen quite a few complications too; quite a few attempts were made to exert political, economic as well as military pressure on us.

  It appears to be an American idiom to put somebody in someone else’s shoes. I ask you, Mr. President, to look at the realities of the international situation from our perspective, and you will see right from the start that the Soviet Union is encircled by a chain of American military bases.

  These bases are full of nuclear weapons. Their mission is well known. They are targeted at us. Nothing like it can be found around your country.

  And what about entire regions of the globe being proclaimed as spheres of American vital interest and also made subject to U.S. military presence?

  This is done, among other places, at our very doorstep. We, on our part, do not do anything like that. What conclusions should we draw from this as to the intentions of the United States? The conclusions readily present themselves: This course of action is nothing but a hyperatrophied idea of one’s interests when the legitimate interests of others are completely ignored. Nothing but an urge to gain, to put it mildly, positions of privilege at the expense of the other side. This course of action is not in line with the course of assuring stability; on the contrary, such a course and policy objectively helps to create and maintain tensions. . . .

  That no claims can be laid to the Soviet Union for the fact there is a rough parity between the USSR and the USA and in a wider sense between the members of the Warsaw Treaty and NATO can be disputed by no expert familiar with the state of affairs. The SALT II treaty embodied that fact. It was not the end of the road and we did not think it was. But the merit of the treaty was that, among other things, that it stated, I would say with mathematical precision, the existing strategic balance.

  I remind you that it was the Soviet Union that offered to reduce their number to the minimum on the
side of the USSR and NATO. And in response, Pershing and cruise missiles appeared in the vicinity of our borders.

  What would be your attitude, Mr. President, had something like this happened with respect to the United States? I believe your assessment of the intentions of the other side would have been under the circumstances only one with respect to that other side’s approach to negotiations, as well as the substance of its intentions. Even under these circumstances we have displayed utmost restraint. And the response measures we were forced to take as far as their scope and character are concerned, have not gone beyond the limits necessary to neutralize the threat created for us and our allies.

  Chernenko went on to write that it was conceivable that our countries might increase cooperation at some levels, but no significant progress on arms control was possible as long as NATO continued deploying the new missiles or the United States continued work on the Strategic Defense Initiative. He also said that the United States had no business raising human rights issues involving the Soviet Union.

  I must point out that the introduction into relations between our two states of solely domestic affairs of our or your country does not serve the purpose of improving these relations if this is our goal. I wish that questions of such nature do not burden our correspondence. . . .

  After reading Chernenko’s letter, I remarked in the diary: “They are going to be cold and stiff necked for awhile. But we must not become supplicants. We’re trying to get agreement on a few lesser matters.”

  A few weeks later, we got an even plainer signal from the Russians that they weren’t in a hurry to improve relations when they announced they were going to boycott the summer olympic games in Los Angeles along with other members of the Soviet bloc—a response to Jimmy Carter’s removal of our team from the 1980 games in Moscow following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

  George Shultz worked hard, in meetings with Dobrynin and other Soviet officials, through the spring and summer of 1984 to reopen a U.S.-Soviet dialogue, but without much success. As I once observed in my diary that spring: “They are utterly stonewalling us.”

  Meanwhile, in Congress, Tip O’Neill said he had taken on a moral commitment to block further development of the MX missile, and this, I knew, wouldn’t make it any easier for me to convince the Soviets that we were a united country committed to a policy of peace through strength.

  Once again, a committee of 535 was trying to set foreign policy.

  At the same time, opposition to our new strategic policy toward the Russians continued from small but well-organized and well-publicized antinuclear groups in Europe, and some European leaders, feeling the heat, began expressing doubts about NATO’s 1979 decision to deploy the new weapons.

  What would I think, I asked myself, if I were a Soviet leader and saw this kind of fractiousness among the leaders of the United States and the Western alliance? I’d try to exploit it, which is what they did. Seeing the split on our side, the Soviets intensified their propaganda offensive, trying to achieve political and military goals through a public relations campaign that blamed us for the impasse and claimed we were leading the world to the brink of nuclear war—when they had been the party who’d walked away at Geneva.

  I asked George Shultz, without retreating in any way from our basic positions, to keep probing for the possibility of a summit.

  “I have a gut feeling we should do this,” I wrote in my diary after I received another letter from Chernenko in June that repeated many of his earlier points. “His reply to my letter is in hand and it lends support to my idea that while we go on believing, and with some good reason, that the Soviets are plotting against us and mean us harm, maybe they are scared of us and think we are a threat.”

  The 1984 election was coming up. Several of our Soviet experts told me not to expect any movement from the Russians until after it was over. Our intelligence analysts believed Chernenko and other Soviet leaders had decided not to respond positively to suggestions for a summit because they felt that if they did they would help me get reelected. I have no way of knowing whether that was true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

  Over the next few months, we were to learn that to a large extent Chernenko was not as much in control of the Communist Party or the Politburo as Brezhnev or even Andropov, but shared it as spokesman for a kind of consensus leadership at the top of the hierarchy.

  Like Andropov, we were told, Chernenko was ill and might not live long. When he appeared in public, he seldom said anything without a script. Another old hard-liner from the Stalin era, Andrei Gromyko, was calling the shots on Soviet foreign relations, and it was at his recommendation that the Soviets boycotted the Olympics.

  In the middle of the summer, the Russians told George Shultz that they would be willing to return to the arms control table, but to discuss one item only, what they called the “militarization of space,” a reference to our research on the Strategic Defense Initiative.

  The Soviets were demanding that we halt work on the SDI just as we were beginning to get indications from our scientists that it might work—and at a time when the Soviets already had missile defense weapons that in some cases were more sophisticated than ours.

  When it was time for me to host our annual dinner for the diplomatic corps that summer, my tablemate again was its dean, Anatoly Dobrynin. He confirmed that the Soviets wanted to meet in September in Vienna, but to talk only about space weapons. I told him we’d be in Vienna if they were, but to discuss reducing all kinds of nuclear weapons that operated in space, including ballistic missiles. We didn’t settle anything, but I got a few things off my chest.

  In late July, after stopping in Los Angeles to help open the Olympics, Nancy and I spent two weeks at the ranch, the longest uninterrupted time we’d ever spent there. She was busy planning Patti’s wedding, which gave me lots of time to do some thinking on the back of my horse about our impasse with the Soviets, and I came to a decision:

  Gromyko usually attended the opening session of the UN General Assembly in New York each September; after talking it over with George Shultz and Bud McFarlane, I decided to invite him to the White House after the UN meeting for a visit and some person-to-person diplomacy. As I wrote in the diary after discussing my idea with George and Bud: “I have a feeling we’ll get nowhere with arms reductions while they are as suspicious of our motives as we are of theirs. I believe we need a meeting to see if we can’t make them understand we have no designs on them but think they have designs on us. If we could once clear the air maybe reducing arms wouldn’t look so impossible to them.”

  After first indicating he had no interest in my invitation, Gromyko agreed to come to the White House September 28. In the diary, I wrote: “I intend to open up the whole matter of why we don’t trust them. Maybe if we can ease the mutual suspicion, arms talks can move better.”

  Several days before our meeting in Washington, I was scheduled to speak to the General Assembly and I went to work on a speech I hoped would tread a fine line, one reiterating our sense of realism and toughness regarding the Soviets, but not offensive enough to torpedo whatever prospects of success there might be for the meeting with Gromyko. I settled on a direct appeal to the Soviets that, while pointing out our concern for their misbehavior in Afghanistan and other places, requested that they return to the Geneva talks and suggested changes in the format of the negotiations to raise their prospects of success. At a reception the night before my speech, Gromyko and I saw each other briefly in a receiving line, and as I looked into his gray face he reminded me of all the Soviet leaders I’d ever seen or heard about in the past: He was tough, stiff, and unsmiling, with no apparent sense of humor unless he had concealed it somewhere beyond his steely eyes. We kept matters cordial and he reminded me that we had once met in California when I was governor. The next day when I gave my speech, he sat with the Soviet delegation front row center just below the microphone. I tried to catch their eyes several times but they looked right through me and their expres
sions never changed.

  The day before my meeting with Gromyko at the White House, the NSC, by coincidence, scheduled a briefing on Soviet espionage at our embassy in Moscow. I was overwhelmed by what Soviet spies had accomplished, including making high-tech alterations to the typewriters in the embassy that had transmitted to them copies of many top-secret documents typed at the embassy.

  This is how I recounted my session with the Soviet foreign minister the next day:

  Sept. 28

  The big day—Andrei Gromyko. Meeting held in Oval Office. Five waves of photographers, first time that many. I opened with my monologue and made the point that perhaps both of us felt the other was a threat, then explained by the record we had more reason to feel that way than they did. His opener was about 30 minutes, then we went into dialogue. I had taken notes on his pitch and rebutted with fact and figure a number of his points. I kept emphasizing that we were the two nations that could destroy or save the world. I figured they nurse a grudge that we don’t respect them as a super power. All in all, three hours including lunch were I believe well spent. Everyone at our end think he’s going home with a pretty clear view of where we stand.

  We agreed to the customary step of inviting the foreign minister to a small luncheon in the White House, which was also the practice when a head of state visited. As hostess of the White House, Nancy came to the reception. Before lunch, Gromyko came over to her, took her to the side, and whispered in her ear: “Does your husband believe in peace?” Nancy said, “Yes, of course.” And he said, “Then whisper the word peace in his ear every night.” And she said, “I will, and I’ll also whisper it in your ear,” and she leaned over and did it. For the first time that day, “Grim Grom,” as he had been nicknamed by some, cracked a smile.