An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  Gromyko was convinced of the rightness of the Soviet position, and it was impossible for me not to sense in this frosty old Stalinist the confidence that, despite all its problems, Communism was going to prevail over capitalism and eventually there would be a one-world Communist state. We had three hours of give-and-take. I told him we were willing to go back to the negotiating table, but only if the Soviets indicated a genuine interest in negotiating an equitable and mutually satisfactory agreement. As I’d planned, I also tried to let him know the Soviet Union had nothing to fear from us. But if I scored any points, Gromyko didn’t admit it to me. He was as hard as granite. He said both of us were sitting on gigantic piles of nuclear weapons that were getting higher and higher and more and more dangerous, and I agreed. He wouldn’t commit himself, but he left me with the impression that the Soviets might consider a return to the bargaining table. However, I think he didn’t intend to do anything about that until after our election.

  Following our meeting, I began devoting more time to the reelection campaign. I told George Shultz and the others to stick with our policies, and said that if I won the Russians would return to the table in Geneva.

  George Shultz and Cap Weinberger were having one of their disputes over policy. Cap was not as interested as George in opening negotiating with the Russians, and some of his advisors at the Pentagon strongly opposed some of my ideas on arms control that George supported, including my hope for eventually eliminating all nuclear weapons from the world. Cap had allies among some of my more conservative political supporters, who let me know they thought Shultz had gone soft on the Russians and they wanted me to fire him—an idea, I told them, that was utter nonsense. Meanwhile, Bud McFarlane, who also sometimes differed with Cap and angered him by claiming the Pentagon could modernize its forces effectively at substantially lower cost than Cap was asking for, sided with George. Bill Casey and Ed Meese lined up in Cap’s camp in favoring an even harder line toward the Russians, as this entry from my diary in November reflected: “. . . [the dispute] is so out of hand George sounds like he wants out. I can’t let that happen. Actually George is carrying out my policy. I’m going to meet with Cap and Bill and lay it out to them. Won’t be fun but has to be done.” I didn’t disagree with Weinberger that the Russians were an evil force in the world and untrustworthy, but I didn’t think that meant we shouldn’t talk to them.

  As I expected, a few days after the election Gromyko said he wanted to meet with George in Geneva to discuss holding a new round of arms control talks.

  George agreed and a meeting was set for January.

  Following the election, I also got a very unusual message congratulating me on my reelection: Scrawled by hand in Russian on a tiny piece of tissue paper about half the size of a business card, in characters so small a microscope was almost necessary to read them, the message came from ten women who were imprisoned at a Soviet forced-labor camp.

  Mr. President:

  We, women political prisoners of the Soviet Union, congratulate you on your reelection to the spot of President of the USA. We look with hope to your country which is on the road of FREEDOM and respect for HUMAN RIGHTS. We wish you success on this road.

  With their message was a poem and a chart that listed a series of hunger strikes these brave women had conducted at their camp in 1983 and 1984 in defiance of a cruel regime that threw people in jail simply because they expressed a belief in freedom or said they wanted to emigrate from Russia for religious reasons. The material had been smuggled out of the camp and then out of Russia and delivered to the offices of Radio Free Europe in Munich. This is a translation of the poem they sent to me:

  On the day of your election

  There we were, in deep dejection,

  In a filthy prison cell

  Freezing cold and most unwell.

  We did not have books or papers

  Warming food or legal status,

  Only frigid wind and stars

  Through the naked window bars,

  Like a breath of Dante’s hell

  As befits a prison cell.

  And while others cast their ballots,

  Partied, danced—we sat on pallets,

  Vainly guessing (what a chore!)

  How much more we had in store

  Isolations, deprivations,

  And what for?

  Then a warder scurried up,

  Threatened, lied to shut us up,

  But by our calculation

  Right across your mighty nation

  States like Kansas, Illinois,

  Gave us cause for lots of joy.

  By “lights out” it was quite clear

  You had nothing left to fear.

  So we hunkered down to sleep

  By the heater (minus heat)

  Chilly drafts crept round the cell

  And we sighed: We wish you well

  Mister President,

  The White House,

  Coast to coast the USA

  And those there, who’re still awake

  We’re not sleeping, just like you,

  All in goose-bumps, cold and blue,

  Our teeth chattering in sorrow:

  “Great October” day tomorrow!

  What manner of government, I asked myself, stifled a people’s yearnings for freedom by making them prisoners?

  During December, I held a series of meetings with the small group within the NSPG that I had delegated to help me in developing strategy for our new talks with the Russians.

  Cap, a strong booster of the SDI, said the Russians were almost certainly going to demand that we kill it as the price for holding substantive negotiations. I told the group as emphatically as I could: The Strategic Defense Initiative was not a “bargaining chip” and we were going to stick with it no matter what the Russians wanted.

  The SDI might take decades to develop, but what more important mission did we have than finding the means to neutralize the terrible weapons produced by the nuclear age?

  I never viewed the SDI as an impenetrable shield—no defense could ever be expected to be one hundred percent effective.

  But what made the idea promising was that, if it worked and we then entered an era when the nations of the world agreed to eliminate nuclear weapons, it could serve as a safety valve against cheating—or attacks by lunatics who managed to get their hands on a nuclear missile. And, if we couldn’t reach an agreement eliminating nuclear missiles, the system would be able to knock down enough of an enemy’s missiles so that if he ever pushed the button to attack, he would be doing so in the knowledge his attack was unable to prevent a devastating retaliatory strike. The SDI held too much potential for the security of mankind to be traded away at the negotiating table, I said.

  I said at one meeting that I was getting fed up with the way the Russians were behaving and that too often in the past the United States had accepted flawed agreements with them simply because we couldn’t get any other kind of agreement. Afterward, I wrote in the diary: “I made it plain there must be no granting of concessions, one sided, to try to soften up the Soviets . . . we’re convinced they want above all to negotiate away our right to seek defensive weapons against ballistic missiles. They fear our technology. I believe such a defense could render nuclear weapons obsolete and thus we could rid the world of that threat. Question is, will they use that to break off the talks and blame us?” A few days later there is this entry in the diary: “We had an N.S.P.G. meeting again on our negotiating posture in the upcoming meeting with Gromyko and the arms talks. I believe the Soviets have agreed to the talks only to head off our research on a strategic defense against nuclear weapons. I stand firm we cannot retreat on that, no matter what they offer.” A few days after that, on December 18, I made this entry in my diary: “A meeting with the Joint Chiefs re our military force compared to that of the Soviets. In strategic weapons, when the Soviets refer to maintaining stability they mean superiority and they have it. More and more I’m thinking the Soviets are preparing t
o walk out on the talks if we won’t give up research on the strategic defense system. I hope I’m wrong. . . .”

  Just before Christmas, Margaret Thatcher came to Washington and Nancy and I invited her to Camp David. I met her helicopter in a golf cart and took her to Aspen, our weekend home, before going on to the main conference building, Laurel. She had just had a meeting with an up-and-coming member of the Soviet Politburo named Mikhail Gorbachev who, she said, expressed strong Soviet reservations over the SDI. When she seemed to share some of his misgivings I wondered if the British were concerned about the SDI and my hope of eliminating nuclear weapons because of fears that without the American nuclear shield the Soviets’ superiority in conventional weapons would pose a threat to Western Europe. I assured Margaret we were simply embarking on a long-term research effort, not making a commitment to deploy the SDI; obviously, I said, it would be some time before we knew it would work as we hoped.

  During this period in late 1984, we had another problem in the arms control arena to deal with: Until that time, both the Soviet Union and the United States had agreed to abide voluntarily by the expired SALT I treaty limiting nuclear weapons as well as by the SALT II treaty, which, because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, had never been ratified by our Senate.

  Cap thought we should stop living up to the treaties because of evidence indicating strongly that the Soviets were violating them, although the agreements were written so ambiguously that it was doubtful we could prove violations. The Russians were erecting elaborate new radar near the town of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, for example, that our scientists were convinced was designed specifically for a defensive system against U.S. missiles—a treaty violation. The Russians claimed the radar station was meant only for tracking space satellites. Although we believed that wasn’t so, the treaty language was so loosely written that a violation was difficult to prove.

  In early January 1985, while George Bush and I were getting ready for our second inaugural, George Shultz met with Gromyko in Geneva and they agreed to a resumption of arms control talks; when we rejected the Soviets’ insistence that the talks be limited to questions of space defense, Gromyko agreed they would also involve offensive nuclear missiles. After additional wrangling, a date and place were set for the resumption—March 12 in Geneva, fifteen months after the Soviets had walked out of the previous negotiations.

  Here are a few excerpts from my diary that month:

  March 4

  Our 33rd anniversary. Other than that it was another Monday morning. Why do they always seem different than other days?

  Met with the new Secretary General of O.E.CD. [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development]—Jean-Claude Paye. It was a brief but pleasant meeting. He is all for urging European members of O.E.CD. to take steps to free up their economies, etc., so as to catch up with our economic recovery.

  We had an N.S.C meeting with our arms talks leaders looking at various options for how we wanted to deal with the Soviets. It’s a very complicated business. I urged one decision on them—that we open the talks with a concession. Surprise! Since they have publicly stated they want to see nuclear weapons eliminated entirely, I told our people to open by saying we would accept their goal.

  Nancy came to the Oval Office for lunch and we cut an anniversary cake and had a few of the immediate staff share in it. That was the extent of our celebration except that at dinner we opened a 1911 bottle of Chateau Margaux.

  March 7

  Lunch with Tip O’Neill. . . . Tip surprised me—he won’t make an issue of MX but will not personally vote for it. He says it’s a matter of conscience; having the MX he says will provoke a Russian nuclear attack. He can’t respond when asked how we can remain defenseless and let the Soviets have thousands of missiles aimed at us. Big event was meeting with Politburo member Vladimir Shcherbitsky. He had Ambassador Dobrynin and a couple of others with him. I had George Shultz, Bud M, Don Regan and a couple of others with me. He and I went round and round. His was the usual diatribe that we are the destabilizing force, threatening them. It was almost a repeat of the Gromyko debate except that we got right down to arguing. I think he’ll go home knowing that we are ready for negotiations but we d—m well aren’t going to let our guard down or hold still while they continue to build up their offensive forces.

  March 8

  A large breakfast with members of Senate and House teams who are going to Geneva for opening of arms talks plus our negotiators. There seemed to be a feeling of unity even including Senator Ted Kennedy. Then over to the Roosevelt Room and we had formal send off. . . then it was off to Bethesda Naval Hospital for my annual check up. I’m so healthy I had a hard time not acting smug.

  March 11

  Awakened at 4 a.m. to be told Chernenko is dead. My mind turned to whether I should attend the funeral. My gut instinct said no. Got to the office at 9. George Shultz had some arguments that I should. He lost. I don’t think his heart was really in it. George Bush is in Geneva. He’ll go and George Shultz will join him leaving tonight.

  Word has been received that Gorbachev has been named head man in the Soviet Union.

  So, once again, there was a new man in the Kremlin. “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians,” I asked Nancy, “if they keep dying on me?”

  76

  I DECIDED NOT TO WASTE any time in trying to get to know the new Soviet leader. When George Bush went to Moscow for Konstantin Chernenko’s funeral, he took an invitation from me to Gorbachev for a summit conference in the United States. “You can be assured of my personal commitment to working with you and the rest of the Soviet leadership in serious negotiations,” I wrote. “In that spirit, I would like you to visit me in Washington at your earliest convenient opportunity. I recognize that arriving at an early answer may not be possible. But I want you to know that I look forward to a meeting that could yield results of benefit to both our countries and to the international community as a whole.”

  Gorbachev replied two weeks later. In doing so, he completed the first round of a correspondence between us that was to last for years and encompass scores of letters. As I look back on them now, I realize those first letters marked the cautious beginning on both sides of what was to become the foundation of not only a better relationship between our countries but a friendship between two men.

  Gorbachev thanked me for sending George to the funeral and expressed less hostility than I’d come to expect from Soviet leaders. He said he was amenable to holding a summit, but not necessarily in Washington. Overall, his letter was encouraging. Except for some formalities, here is the complete text of his letter:

  Our countries are different by their social systems, by the ideologies dominant in them—but we believe that this should not be a reason for animosity. Each social system has the right to life, and it should prove its advantages not by force, not by military means, but on the path of peaceful competition with the other system. And all people have the right to go the way they have chosen themselves, without anybody imposing his will on them from outside, interfering in their internal affairs. We believe that this is the only just and healthy basis for relations among states. For our part, we have always striven to build our relations with the United States, as well as with other countries, precisely in this manner. Besides, Soviet leadership is convinced that our two countries have one common interest uniting them beyond any doubt: not to let things come to the outbreak of nuclear war which would inevitably have catastrophic consequences for both sides. And both sides would be well advised to recall this more often in making their policy.

  I am convinced that given such approach to the business at hand, on the basis of a reasonable account of the realities of today’s world and treating with a due respect the rights and legitimate interests of the other side, we could do quite a bit to benefit the peoples of our countries, as well as the whole world having embarked upon the road of a real improvement of relations.

  It appears to us that it is important first of all
to start conducting business in such a manner that both we ourselves and others can see and feel that both countries are not aiming at deepening their differences and whipping up animosity, but rather, are making their policy looking to the prospect of revitalizing the situation and a peaceful, calm development. This would help create an atmosphere of greater trust between our countries. It is not an easy task, and I would say, a delicate one. For trust is a specially sensitive thing, keenly receptive to both deeds and words. It will not be enhanced if, for example, one were to talk as if in two languages; one for private contacts, and the other as they say, for the audience.

  The development of relations could well proceed through finding practical solutions between a number of problems of mutual interest. As I understand it, you also speak in favor of such a way.

  We believe that this should be done across the entire range of problems, both international and bilateral. Any problem can be solved, of course, only on a mutually acceptable basis, which means finding reasonable compromises, the main criteria being neither side should claim some special rights for itself or advantages, both on subjects between the two of them and in international affairs.

  No matter how important the questions involved in our relations or affecting them in this or that matter might be, the central priority area is that of security. The negotiations under way in Geneva require the foremost attention of the two of us. Obviously we will have to turn again and again to the questions under discussion there. At this point I do not intend to comment on what is going on at the talks—they have just started. I shall say though, that some statements which were made and are being made in your country will, with regard to the talks, cause concern.

  I would like you to know and appreciate the seriousness of our approach to the negotiations, our firm desire to work through positive results there. We will invariably adhere to the agreement on the subject and objectives of those negotiations. The fact that we were able to agree on this in January is already a big achievement and it should be treated with care.