As we walked across the White House lawn under gray, threatening clouds that later turned to rain, Gorbachev told me he would do that.
Forty minutes behind schedule, the summit came to an end as Nancy and I said good-bye to the Gorbachevs under a light rain. “Well, at last it’s over,” I wrote in the diary that night. “They’ve departed and I think the whole thing was the best summit we’ve ever had with the Soviet Union.”
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ON JANUARY 25, 1988, in my eighth State of the Union address, I said I hoped during my final year in office to complete the START agreement so that the Soviet Union and the United States could begin reducing the number of nuclear warheads we aimed at each other. We came close, but not close enough.
I thought the state of the union was pretty good that night and said so before a joint session of Congress: The country was strong, our economy prosperous, our spirits high.
Across the country, employment was at a record level; government spending, taxes, and inflation were falling; militarily, we were second to no nation on earth; and, above all, Americans felt good about their country and good about themselves.
Then, after pointing with pride to what Americans had accomplished, I took extra pride in pointing to one member of the audience: I thanked Nancy for what she had accomplished in her war against illegal drugs, but in my heart, I was really trying to say, “Thank you, Nancy, for everything; thank you for lighting up my life for almost forty years.”
A few days before I gave the State of the Union speech, I read Perestroika, the book by Mikhail Gorbachev that outlined his goals for restructuring the Soviet economy.
Although he didn’t describe it as such, it was a bill of particulars condemning the workings of Communism, and it was as damning as anything ever written about Communism in the West. It was an epitaph: Capitalism had triumphed over Communism.
The rapid changes we were then beginning to see in the domestic life of the Soviet Union under perestroika and glasnost were not the only developments that gave the Free World reason to feel optimistic at the start of 1988:
Gorbachev would soon announce his decision to pull out of Afghanistan after eight years of a brutal war. In Poland, a people stubbornly determined to rid itself of tyranny was rising up in a final historic upwelling of freedom that would mark the beginning of the end for the Soviet empire—and yes, it was an evil empire.
Before long, the Berlin Wall would crack and then crumble and the captive nations of Europe would enter a new era of freedom.
All around the world, in a reverse of what people once called the domino theory, the forces of Communism were in retreat; the world was saying, to paraphrase a onetime fellow traveler:
“We have seen the future, and it doesn’t work.”
In Nicaragua, despite the risky and shortsighted resistance of many in Congress to supporting the Contras, the Sandinistas had lost the battle for the soul of their country, and before many months would pass, freedom and democracy would prevail and the corrupt Sandinista comandantes in designer glasses would be thrown out of office.
In dozens of other countries, from Latin America to the Philippine Islands, there was a stunning renaissance of democracy and economic freedom. In 1981, fewer than a third of the people in the Americas were living under democracies. By 1988, this figure was ninety percent. Emulating our efforts to put more freedom in the free market, many democracies around the world were waging war on excess regulation, high taxes, and oversize and domineering central governments, unloosing economic forces for the good of all their citizens.
That’s not to say there weren’t still many problems in the world at the start of 1988.
While we were negotiating an agreement with the Soviets to reduce nuclear arms, the capability to produce nuclear weapons was continuing to spread to other countries—according to some reports, to Pakistan, Taiwan, Israel, and possibly other nations. China had entered the business of exporting missiles, offering nations the potential to send nuclear or chemical weapons over great distances.
In Panama, although we tried many different approaches over several months during the spring of 1988, I was unable to persuade Manuel Noriega to end his corrupt dictatorship peacefully. After I was gone, the situation continued to deteriorate. President Bush decided the safety of Americans living in Panama required us to help the people of Panama end his criminal rule and bring him to justice on drug charges in the United States. I agree wholeheartedly with what he did.
In 1988, the Middle East was as much a snake pit of problems as it was when I unpacked my bags in Washington in 1981.
Although our air attack on Libya had silenced some of the state-sponsored terrorism directed from Tripoli, the forces of radical Islamic fundamentalism were on the march there and elsewhere in the Middle East; Colonel Qaddafi had begun a crash program to develop chemical weapons to advance his revolution, with all that meant to a world that had good reason to worry about the next move by this unpredictable clown. The bloody Iran-Iraq war was still raging and, after Iran attacked U.S. vessels that were keeping the Persian Gulf open to lawful navigation, we had to respond in kind. Lebanon was more hopelessly mired than ever in the senseless, bloody, sectarian violence of civil war, and Israel and its Arab neighbors remained at each other’s throats.
George Shultz worked hard through much of the spring of 1988 on a new effort to bring peace to the region by offering the help of the United States in arranging an international conference to deal with the Palestinian problem. But despite appeals from him and me, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refused to join in the effort, while the PLO and some of its Arab allies became more uncompromising than ever. George was unable to bring the parties together, ending our last initiative at bringing peace to the area. My support of Israel was as strong as ever: On the fortieth anniversary of its founding we restated our pledge to its security, and I repeatedly assured Shamir of our support. At the same time, I was still trying to strengthen U.S. ties with the moderate Arab nations in the belief that their cooperation could help produce a lasting solution to the deep-seated problems in the region. But whenever I tried to implement a more evenhanded U.S. policy by meeting their requests for advanced arms, I was thwarted by the friends of Israel in Congress, and some of the Arab nations began turning to China and other countries for arms. The continuing construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied Arab territories and, later, Israel’s stern efforts to suppress Arab uprisings in the territories made peace in the Middle East seem more remote than ever. For eight years, I gave high priority to bringing lasting peace to the Middle East, but in the end it eluded me, as it had eluded other American presidents before me.
Mikhail Gorbachev and I hoped to sign the START treaty when I went to Moscow in late May. Although our experts worked on it through the spring, they couldn’t resolve the remaining questions, particularly those involving sea- and air-launched cruise missiles. The experts said they remained hopeful that the hurdles could be overcome before I left office, but we wouldn’t be able to sign the START treaty in Moscow.
Nancy and I arrived in the Soviet Union on May 29, 1988. During a stopover in Finland, we learned that the Senate had overwhelmingly ratified the INF treaty after weeks of brinkmanship that made it uncertain Gorbachev and I could complete the ratification papers while I was in Moscow.
This was my first visit to the Soviet Union, but my fourth meeting with Gorbachev and perhaps the most memorable, partly because for the first time I also got to meet and shake hands with ordinary Soviet people.
At our first session alone, Gorbachev again expressed his desire for increased U.S.-Soviet trade. I was ready for him. I’d thought about what I was going to say when he brought up the issue: One reason we have trouble increasing trade with your country, I said, was that many members of Congress as well as many other Americans oppose it because of what they consider Soviet human rights abuses.
I brought up a thought that had been expressed to me in a letter from a recent immigran
t to America: Americans, he said, come from every corner of the world, but once they are in America, they are assimilated in a way that is unique in the world. An immigrant can live in France, he said, but not become a Frenchman; he can live in Germany but not become a German; he can live in Japan but not become a Japanese; but anyone from any part of the world can come to America and become an American. “Our people have diverse backgrounds,” I told Gorbachev, “but they are united when they see any people discriminated against simply because of their ethnic origin or religious belief.” Then I raised an issue that had been on my mind for a long time: religious freedom in the Soviet Union. “This isn’t something I’m suggesting we negotiate,” I told him, “just an idea. I’m not trying to tell you how to run your country, but I realize you are probably concerned that if you allow too many of the Jews who want to emigrate from the Soviet Union to leave, there’ll be a ‘brain drain,’ a loss of skilled people from your economy. [According to estimates I’d seen, something like four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand Jews wanted to leave the Soviet Union.] I can see where this could present problems. These people are part of your society and many of them must have important jobs. But did it ever occur to you, on this whole question of human rights, that maybe if these Jews were permitted to worship as they want to and teach their children the Hebrew language, that maybe they wouldn’t want to leave the Soviet Union?
“That’s how our country was started, by people who were not allowed to worship as they wished in their homeland, so they came to our shores, a wilderness across the Atlantic, and founded our nation. I’m sure a lot of your people who are asking to leave wouldn’t want to leave if they had freedom of religion. They say they want to leave, but they’re Russians. I know they must love their country as much as other Russians do, so perhaps if they were allowed to reopen their synagogues and worship as they want to, they might decide that they wouldn’t have to leave and there wouldn’t be that problem of a brain drain.”
I said Americans were very encouraged by the changes occurring in the Soviet Union and hoped the changes would soon be institutionalized as laws under the Soviet system. And, for all the changes that Gorbachev had made, I said, wouldn’t it be a good idea to tear down the Berlin Wall? Nothing in the West symbolized the differences between it and the Soviet Union more than the wall, I said; its removal would be seen as a gesture symbolizing that the Soviet Union wanted to join the broader community of nations.
Well, Gorbachev listened and seemed to take in my opinions; from his expression I knew he didn’t like some of the things I was saying, but he didn’t try to say anything harsh in rebuttal. Whether my words had any impact or not I don’t know, but after that the Soviet government began allowing more churches and synagogues to reopen and, of course, in time, the wall came tumbling down.
Looking back now, it’s clear that there was a chemistry between Gorbachev and me that produced something very close to a friendship. He was a tough, hard bargainer. He was a Russian patriot who loved his country. We could—and did—debate from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. But there was a chemistry that kept our conversations on a man-to-man basis, without hate or hostility. I liked Gorbachev even though he was a dedicated Communist and I was a confirmed capitalist. But he was different from the Communists who had preceded him to the top of the Kremlin hierarchy. Before him, every one had vowed to pursue the Marxist commitment to a one-world Communist state; he was the first not to push Soviet expansionism, the first to agree to destroy nuclear weapons, the first to suggest a free market and to support open elections and freedom of expression.
When Gorbachev came into power in March 1985, I believe, he would have continued on the same path as his predecessors if Communism had been working, but it wasn’t.
When I met him the first time in the fall of that year, he made it plain he believed wholeheartedly in the Communist system of government. I inferred from his remarks that he thought Communism had been managed poorly and it was his intention to change its management.
I can only speculate as to why he ultimately decided to abandon many of the fundamental tenets of Communism along with the empire that Joe Stalin had seized in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.
Perhaps the metamorphosis started when he was still a young man, working his way up the inefficient and corrupt Communist bureaucracy and witnessing the brutality of the Stalin regime. Then, I think that when he reached the top of the hierarchy he discovered how bad things really were and realized that he had to make changes in a hurry, before there was so much chaos in the Soviet Union nothing would be worth saving.
From my own experience, I know there are some aspects about governing a nation you can’t fully appreciate until you actually have your hands on the controls, and I think he probably discovered that, too. Perhaps it took something like discovering that the three percent of Soviet agricultural land cultivated by private, profit-making farmers produced forty percent of the meat in his country. Perhaps the robust recovery of the American and Western European economies following the recession of the early eighties—while the Communist economies went nowhere—convinced him that the central planning and bureaucratic control of the Soviet economy, as he wrote in Perestroika, sapped the people’s incentive to produce and excel.
Seventy years of Communism had bankrupted the Soviet Union economically and spiritually. Gorbachev must have realized it could no longer support or control Stalin’s totalitarian colonial empire; the survival of the Soviet Union was more important to him. He must have looked at the economic disaster his country was facing and concluded that it couldn’t continue spending so much of its wealth on weapons and an arms race that—as I told him at Geneva—we would never let his country win. I’m convinced the tragedy at Chernobyl a year after Gorbachev took office also affected him and made him try harder to resolve Soviet differences with the West. And I think in our meetings I might have helped him understand why we considered the Soviet Union and its policy of expansionism a threat to us. I might have helped him see that the Soviet Union had less to fear from the West than he thought, and that the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe wasn’t needed for the security of the Soviet Union.
Whatever his reasons, Gorbachev had the intelligence to admit Communism was not working, the courage to battle for change, and, ultimately, the wisdom to introduce the beginnings of democracy, individual freedom, and free enterprise.
As I said at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, the Soviet Union faced a choice: Either it made fundamental changes or it became obsolete.
Gorbachev saw the handwriting on the Wall and opted for change.
• • •
During our first session at the Moscow summit, he and I pledged again to do our best during my last months in office to complete the START treaty and parallel agreements to reduce chemical weapons and conventional forces in Europe, although I emphasized that no agreement on long-range missiles was possible until the Soviets dismantled the huge radar installation they were building at Krasnoyarsk in violation of the ABM treaty. Despite our differences, it was not a contentious meeting. Even though I raised my pet concerns about human rights and religious freedom, Gorbachev didn’t bristle as he had in the past. “It was a good session and a nice way to launch the summit,” I wrote that evening in my diary.
After my session with Gorbachev, Nancy and I wanted to go out on the streets of Moscow and meet some Muscovites. Our son Ron had told us about Arabat Street, which was lined with shops and artists displaying their work. “It was amazing how quickly the street was jammed curb to curb with people—warm, friendly people who couldn’t have been more affectionate,” I wrote later in my diary. “In addition to our Secret Service, the KGB was on hand, and I’ve never seen such brutal manhandling as they did on their own people who were in no way getting out of hand.” Boy, what a reminder that I was in a Communist country; perestroika or not, some things hadn’t changed.
But perhaps the deepest impression I had during this experi
ence and other meetings with Soviet citizens was that they were generally indistinguishable from people I had seen all my life on countless streets in America. They were simply ordinary people who longed, I am sure, for the same things that Americans did: peace, love, security, a better life for themselves and their children. On the streets of Moscow, looking into thousands of faces, I was reminded once again that it’s not people who make war, but governments—and people deserve governments that fight for peace in the nuclear age.
The following day, during another meeting with Gorbachev, we agreed that we had both begun our relationship with misconceptions about the other, and that it had taken these one-on-one sessions to build trust and understanding. That, I thought to myself, was what I’d been trying to do since I sent my first letter to Brezhnev in 1981 a few weeks after I was shot.
That evening, the Gorbachevs invited us to dinner at their home in the wooded countryside outside Moscow. For a description of that evening, I’ll rely on a memo written to me by Secretary Shultz:
Memorandum for: The President
From: George P. Shultz
While the memory is still fresh, I want to record for you my thoughts on the remarkable evening you, Nancy, O’Bie, and I had with the Gorbachevs and Shevardnadzes. The dinner at the Tsarist palace they styled a dacha was an historic occasion between our two countries and deserves to be recorded for posterity.
My first impression was of the liveliness of the conversation and the easy conviviality of the evening. Gorbachev seemed determined to match you joke for joke and even Raisa told a couple to spice up the conversation. There were hardly any lingering signs of rancor from the tough conversation of the morning or of any desire to return to old arguments. Indeed, the Gorbachevs and Shevardnadzes went out of their way to make it a pleasurable evening. It appeared they would have been happy to prolong it even longer than they did.
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