An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  In the area of strategic arms, the United States agrees with the objective of a fifty per cent reduction of strategic offensive forces. Our proposal builds on this, applying the fifty per cent principle in a manner that is both equitable and can enhance stability. In the area of intermediate range nuclear forces, we have also looked for elements that we find in common. While I continue to firmly believe that the best outcome would be the complete elimination of intermediate range missiles on both sides, in our new proposal we have also moved in your direction. In defense and space, we must begin now to establish a framework for a cooperative transition to more reliance on defenses and we would like to see a more developed dialogue on how such a transition could be jointly undertaken. We have designed our approach to provide for a mutually acceptable resolution of the range of nuclear and space arms issues; to take account of the interrelationship between the offense and the defense; and to address those concerns that you and your negotiators have described as of great importance to you. I am convinced that this new proposal can provide the basis for immediate and genuine progress on the numerous and complex issues facing us in the nuclear and space area and I look forward to discussing it with you in Geneva later this month.

  We will also have the opportunity in Geneva to discuss the other areas which make up our relationship. Much work remains to be done if we are to be able to announce specific progress on regional and bilateral issues. I hope that Secretary Shultz’s Moscow visit will be a stimulus to rapid progress in the weeks ahead.

  In conclusion, may I say once more that I am looking forward to our meeting and I sincerely hope we will be able to set our countries on a less confrontational and more cooperative course in the years ahead. I will personally spare no effort to bring this about.

  Sincerely,

  Ronald Reagan

  Oct. 31, 1985

  In early November, George Shultz met in Moscow with Gorbachev for four hours to go over the issues we were to consider at Geneva. Gorbachev, he said, wasn’t going to be a pushover. “Apparently not much progress,” I wrote after I spoke to George on the secure phone from Moscow. “Gorbachev is adamant we must cave in on SDI. Well, this will be a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.”

  Privately, I had made a decision: I was going to offer to share SDI technology with the Soviets. This, I thought, should convince them it would never be a threat to them.

  After returning to Washington from his meeting with Gorbachev, George said he was convinced Gorbachev was an intelligent man who was sure of himself, had a good sense of humor, and seemed to be fully in charge in the Soviet Union. But he said Gorbachev seemed to be filled with anti-American, anticapitalist propaganda—he believed, for example, along with other falsehoods about us, that Americans hated the Soviets because our arms manufacturers controlled our economy and stirred the people up with anti-Soviet propaganda, all for the purpose of keeping the arms race alive.

  Well, I thought, in Geneva I’ll have to get him in a room alone and set him straight.

  78

  ON THE EVE of our flight to Geneva, I made an address to the nation in which I said we were at a special moment in history, with a unique opportunity to set the course of peace through the twenty-first century, and I really felt that way. It was my hope and purpose that at Geneva Mikhail Gorbachev and I would begin a process that our successors and the peoples of our countries would continue after we were gone. The American goal at Geneva, I said, was not only to avoid war, but to strengthen peace; not only to prevent confrontation, but to begin the process of removing the sources of tension that produced confrontation; not to paper over our differences, but to acknowledge and address them realistically; to encourage talk not only between our leaders and diplomats, but between the people of our countries: “Since the dawn of the nuclear age, every American president has sought to limit and end the dangerous competition in nuclear arms. I have no higher priority than to finally realize that dream.”

  In going to Geneva, I was also planning to live by an old Russian adage:

  Dovorey no provorey.

  Trust, but verify.

  We left Andrews Air Force Base aboard Air Force One shortly after eight o’clock in the morning on November 16, 1985. Just before takeoff, we got word that the Soviets had allowed several of their citizens who were married to Americans to join their spouses in the United States. One wife hadn’t seen her American husband in eleven years. During some of my attempts at quiet diplomacy, I’d suggested we’d look favorably on such a decision to reunify these divided families and I took the Soviet decision as a positive signal before the summit.

  In Geneva, we drove to our temporary home, la Maison de Saussure, a beautiful villa on Lake Geneva loaned to us by Prince Karim, Aga Khan, and his wife for the duration of the summit. The view from our window looking out across the villa’s sweeping formal gardens and lake was spectacular.

  The next day, we toured Villa Fleur d’Eau, a twenty-room château where our first meetings were to take place, then Nancy and I walked down to the lakeshore boat house where I had decided to invite Gorbachev for a chat. She agreed it was a perfect spot for the private meeting I wanted with him.

  Usually at summit conferences, the real work is done in advance by diplomats and specialists on each side who, based on guidance from their superiors, do the spadework and work out any agreements that are to be signed at the meeting, after which the top leaders come in and preside over the formalities.

  Starting with Brezhnev, I’d dreamed of personally going one-on-one with a Soviet leader because I thought we might be able to accomplish things our countries’ diplomats couldn’t do because they didn’t have the authority. Putting that another way, I felt that if you got the top people negotiating and talking at a summit and then the two of you came out arm in arm saying, “We’ve agreed to this,” the bureaucrats wouldn’t be able to louse up the agreement. Until Gorbachev, I never got an opportunity to try out my idea. Now I had my chance.

  Neither Nancy nor I slept very well as we waited for the meetings to begin, but I never felt tired. The juices were flowing. I wanted to get started. In a very real sense, preparations for the summit had begun five years earlier, when we began strengthening our economy, restoring our national will, and rebuilding our defenses. I felt ready.

  On the morning of November 19, I was waiting for Gorbachev at Villa Fleur d’Eau. When I was told his car had arrived, I hurried out to the porch and walked down several steps to greet him. He was dressed in a heavy topcoat and wearing a hat; I was hatless and in a suit. Why the press made a point of the fact that he was bundled up and I wasn’t, I don’t know—I suppose this was only one measure of the enormous attention being paid to the summit—but for whatever reason, the reporters who were keeping score gave me credit for winning the first round at the summit because I looked more casual than he did. (I hadn’t planned it that way; the next time we were outdoors, I was wearing a topcoat—I didn’t want to rub it in.)

  As we shook hands for the first time, I had to admit—as Margaret Thatcher and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada predicted I would—that there was something likable about Gorbachev. There was warmth in his face and his style, not the coldness bordering on hatred I’d seen in most senior Soviet officials I’d met until then.

  Our first session was scheduled to be a fifteen-minute one-on-one, get-acquainted meeting. It lasted almost an hour and we managed to break the ice, then joined the plenary meeting where each of us was backed up by a team of specialists and experts. I gave the floor to Gorbachev first and he went into a long pitch arguing that Americans had no reasons to mistrust the Soviets and that we should apply no preconditions to our discussions. As George Shultz had predicted, Gorbachev said he believed American munitions makers were the principal obstacle to peace on the American side: They were our ruling class, he suggested, and they kept our people fired up against the Soviets simply because they wanted to sell more weapons. Then he took off on U.S. think tanks t
hat he said tried to do the same thing, and he complained that the United States had declared zones of special interest around the world while attacking the USSR for doing the same thing.

  Finally it was my turn and I took Gorbachev through the long history of Soviet aggression, citing chapter and verse of the Soviet Union’s policy of expansionism from 1917 onward. I wanted to explain why the Free World had good reason to put up its guard against the Soviet bloc.

  As we broke for lunch, I assured Gorbachev he could have the floor next to rebut me, and he used it, arguing again that we had no reason to be suspicious of the Soviets—they were peace-loving and good citizens. When it was my turn to make a rebuttal, I cited more reasons for our skepticism about the Soviets such as the Soviet betrayal of Stalin’s promise at Yalta to hold free elections in the nations of Eastern Europe after World War II.

  After I finished my rebuttal, our arms control experts were given the floor, and it was during this pause that I suggested to Gorbachev that the two of us walk down to the boat house for a breath of fresh air and a talk. He leaped out of his chair almost before I finished.

  The fire was roaring when we got to the cottage and sat down across from each other in stuffed chairs beside the hearth. I had considered suggesting to him that we go on a first-name basis, as our group did at economic summits, but our experts had told me he wasn’t likely to appreciate such a gesture of informality at our first meeting, and so I addressed him as “Mr. General Secretary.”

  It was during the first moments of this fireside chat that I said I thought the two of us were in a unique situation. Here we were, I said, two men who had been born in obscure rural hamlets in the middle of our respective countries, each of us poor and from humble beginnings. Now we were the leaders of our countries and probably the only two men in the world who could bring about World War III.

  At the same time, I said, we were possibly the only two men in the world who might be able to bring peace to the world.

  I said I thought we owed it to the world to use the opportunity that had been presented us to work at building the kind of human trust and confidence in each other that could lead to genuine peace.

  I watched as Gorbachev listened to the translation of my words, and he seemed to nod in agreement.

  As our conversation continued beside the blazing fire, he convinced me I had been right to suspect there was a deep-seated fear of the United States and its nuclear arsenal among Soviet leaders. I tried to dispel this vision. After World War II, I pointed out, we had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, but had not used them for aggression or to exert our influence because America was not an expansionist country. We had no designs on any people or any nation; we had built our force of nuclear missiles only to deter a Soviet attack. Then we began debating the Strategic Defense Initiative; he was adamant and so was I.

  I told him it was a research project to develop a nonnuclear defense that was permitted under our ABM treaty, and that if it led to an operational defensive system against missiles, it would change the world.

  I said it would be years before we knew whether it was practical or not, but if it was, the United States would sit down with other countries to discuss how it would be used, open its laboratories to the Soviets, and offer the fruits of its research to all countries, so the entire world could enjoy security against a nuclear holocaust.

  The choice we faced, I said as I wound up, was either an agreement to reduce arms or a continuation of the arms race, “and I have to tell you if it’s an arms race, you must know it’s an arms race you can’t win, because we’re not going to allow you to maintain this superiority over us.”

  After more than an hour, Gorbachev and I decided it was probably time for us to rejoin the others, so we began walking up the path to the main building.

  Midway in our walk, in the center of a parking lot, I stopped him and, because of a hunch that the time was right to do so, I invited Gorbachev to Washington for another summit.

  He not only accepted but invited me to come to Moscow for a third summit. Neither of us mentioned this to the others when we sat down, but after the session ended, when I told the members of our team that Gorbachev and I had already agreed to hold two more summits, they almost went through the ceiling in surprise.

  On our second day at Geneva, Gorbachev hosted the formal meeting at the Soviet mission, and he took me into a small room for a reprise of the private meeting we’d had the day before—just the two of us and our interpreters.

  Years before, when I’d sat across the bargaining table from the executives who ran the Hollywood studios, I’d learned a few lessons about negotiating: You’re unlikely to ever get all you want; you’ll probably get more of what you want if you don’t issue ultimatums and leave your adversary room to maneuver; you shouldn’t back your adversary into a corner, embarrass him, or humiliate him; and sometimes the easiest way to get some things done is for the top people to do them alone and in private.

  I decided at my next private meeting with Gorbachev to give him a list of the names of people who we knew wanted to leave the Soviet Union in search of freedom but who had been denied permission to do so. One was a pianist, Vladimir Feltsman, whom my son Ron had met in Russia. Ron had been very impressed by his talent and his unfortunate situation. Feltsman, who is Jewish, had stated in public that he wanted to emigrate to Israel. As soon as he did so, a Moscow radio announcer he knew told him he was ordered not to play his records on the air anymore; his records were taken from the stores; and he was no longer permitted to play with major orchestras in Moscow but was sent, if he was given any work at all, to the provinces to play. I mentioned the cases of Feltsman and others I’d heard about to Gorbachev and said I thought I would have a better chance of getting support for some of the things we might agree on in the future, such as increased trade, if his country eased some of its restrictions on ethnic and minority groups.

  Gorbachev is an intelligent man and a good listener. He didn’t comment on my remarks, but launched into criticism of the United States, saying, in effect, that I had no place talking about human rights in the Soviet Union because Americans lived under far worse conditions than Soviet citizens. He quoted statements by some of our more extreme feminists who claimed American women were downtrodden and argued that we treated blacks like slaves.

  The “most basic human right,” he said, “is everyone’s right to a job.” In the Soviet Union, everyone had a job—and that couldn’t be said for the United States. (He didn’t say that the Soviet people couldn’t choose their jobs, that they had to do whatever the government told them to do—if they were handed a broom, they started sweeping.)

  It seemed clear Gorbachev believed propaganda about us that he had probably heard all his life. In some things he said there was a grain of truth, but a lot of the “facts” he came armed with and cited so authoritatively about America—such as those about the treatment of blacks in the South—were long out of date, and he didn’t know, for example, about the vast improvements we’d made in race relations. “Things have changed,” I said, and told him what I had done in California as governor, appointing to policy-making and executive positions more blacks than all the previous governors put together. I spoke about the dynamic energy of capitalism and said it provided an opportunity to all Americans to work, apply themselves, and get ahead; whenever I alluded to the economic problems that by contrast were hounding his country, Gorbachev emphasized that he believed in the Communist system, but he seemed to say mistakes had been made in running it and he was trying to correct them. He was an eloquent debater as well as a good listener, and despite our disagreements, our conversations never turned hostile—he stood his ground and I stood mine.

  Later that day, at a plenary session with both our delegations, we went head-to-head again on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Gorbachev, without saying it in so many words, suggested that when I’d made my offer to share our SDI research and open our laboratories to the Soviets so they could see that the SDI wa
s not designed for offensive purposes, I was lying.

  No country would do that, he insisted, judging others by his own country. He seemed convinced that I wanted to get a leg up on the Soviets in the arms race and to use the SDI as a cover for an offensive first-strike capability against the Soviet Union. Once again, he was as adamant as I was, and neither of us retreated from our positions.

  When I brought up the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Gorbachev responded that he had known nothing about it personally until he heard a radio broadcast, suggesting that it was a war he had no responsibility—and little enthusiasm—for.

  I let him know that, whatever its roots, the people of America regarded Soviet aggression in Afghanistan as an example of a giant country trying to impose its will on a tiny one.

  That evening it was our turn to host dinner and I saw, as I had the night before when the Soviets had entertained us, that Gorbachev could be warm and outgoing in a social setting even though several hours earlier we’d had sharp differences of opinion; maybe there was a little of Tip O’Neill in him. He could tell jokes about himself and even about his country, and I grew to like him more.

  During our final business session earlier in the day, Gorbachev and I had discussed language for a joint statement that was to be issued at the close of the summit and that would make note of our mutual commitment to seek a fifty-percent cut in nuclear weapons and include references to several new cultural and diplomatic exchanges. Then, as I wrote in my diary, “we cut short the meeting and our teams went to work on the statement. He and I and the interpreters went into a small room and wound up telling stories.” He asked a few questions about Hollywood, and we discovered we had had a few similar experiences dealing with our respective bureaucracies. We chatted for almost an hour, just the two of us, and then the two teams came in to show us a number of things they’d agreed on and several they were still working on. Then we broke up, so he and I could get ready for a reception hosted by the Swiss president.