James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

The Reagans served as hosts at a state dinner with scores of prominent Americans, ranging from Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller to novelist Saul Bellow and baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Gorbachev was seated at Nancy Reagan’s dinner table next to Richard Perle and a couple of seats away from Dick Cheney, then a member of Congress. During the dinner, Perle and Cheney, the two ardent proponents of American military power, clinked glasses with Gorbachev and tried to engage him in conversation on subjects such as the Soviet defense budget and the American Strategic Defense Initiative. Afterward, Perle told reporters, “I don’t think either of us persuaded the other, but he is an intelligent man.” At one point, pianist Van Cliburn played “Moscow Nights,” and Gorbachev and the other Soviet officials rose to sing. 7

The centerpiece of the summit was the signing of the treaty banning intermediate nuclear weapons. It required the Soviet Union to destroy about 1,500 nuclear warheads already deployed in Europe and the United States, about 350. This was the first time that the two countries had agreed to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons. The two leaders formally endorsed the long-negotiated agreement in ceremonies at the White House at 1:45 p.m., Tuesday, December 8, the opening day of the summit. Only a few White House staff members, including Powell, realized that the specific time for the signing had been set by a California astrologer, Joan Quigley. Nancy Reagan had been regularly asking the astrologer for propitious times for presidential activities ever since John Hinckley’s assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981; her conversations with Quigley were a form of therapy, the first lady said. 8

When Reagan offered a few remarks at the signing ceremony for the INF treaty, he quickly fell back upon his customary refrain: “We have listened to the wisdom in an old Russian maxim… Doveryai no proveryai. Trust but verify.” The Soviet leader had by now heard this line too often. “You repeat that at every meeting,” Gorbachev said, as the crowd tittered. “I like it,” Reagan replied.

Gorbachev’s activities were not limited to the White House. During his three days in Washington, he hosted receptions at the Soviet embassy for artists, writers, and scholars; he engaged in some verbal sparring with American publishers, broadcasters, and newspaper editors; he courted American business executives. He sat down for a talk with congressional leaders, a session that was offered as a substitute for the speech to Congress that Gorbachev had originally sought. The Americans who participated were able to dine out for months or years afterward with stories of what they had told Gorbachev or he had told them. At one point, en route from the Soviet embassy to the White House, Gorbachev ordered his car to stop along Connecticut Avenue. He got out and plunged into the crowds, shaking hands as though he were an American political candidate and in the process, setting back the White House schedule. “Mrs. Reagan was furious, because here was the president and everybody else in the White House waiting, and Gorbachev was out there doing what he had learned from observing us—working the crowd, controlling the agenda,” recalled Griscom, the White House communications chief. 9

Gorbachev was covered not merely on American network news shows each night, but throughout the day on cable television (where CNN was then the relatively new, unchallenged source of minute-by-minute news). The extensive coverage of the Soviet leader ranged from positive to neutral in tone. The images of Gorbachev did not match the stereotypes of an iron-fisted Soviet leader. He seemed clearly smarter than Brezhnev and more sophisticated than Khrushchev, the only other Soviet party secretaries to have visited the United States.

By the end of the three days of meetings, Gorbachev was trying to match Reagan anecdote for anecdote and joke for joke. At the end of a farewell lunch in the White House family dining room, the two leaders found themselves killing time while they waited for their aides to negotiate the last details of the joint statement that the two governments planned to release. Reagan told Gorbachev about the farmer who had developed a three-legged chicken. When asked how it tasted, the farmer replied, “I don’t know, I’ve never been able to catch it.”

Not to be denied, Gorbachev countered with a yarn about a Russian who was accused of driving a government car to a public bath. To defend himself, the man replied that he had not taken a bath for two years. Then the Soviet leader dropped the joke for a moment: “The same could be true of our governments,” he said. “We would not want to be in the position of defending ourselves by saying we have done nothing—when we should have acted.” 10

When Gorbachev left for home, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings solemnly declared: “Look again at these good-byes this afternoon. Two men who really seemed determined that the adversarial relationship between the two countries not get out of control. Two men who say they will try harder to do better to keep the world away from war.” An ABC poll taken that night showed that 76 percent of Americans believed that the United States and the Soviet Union were entering a new era. 11

On the day following Gorbachev’s departure, Richard Nixon scrawled one of his occasional private missives to Ronald Reagan. Such Nixon notes were usually complimentary, praising some Reagan speech or press conference. This particular note began in the same vein. The previous night, Reagan had given a televised address to the nation about the summit, and Nixon told the president it was “one of the most eloquent you have ever delivered.”

But then Nixon went on to deliver a written warning to Reagan, one that was implicitly negative about the entire summit and its impact: “Just remember, Rome was not built in a day and it takes more than three days to civilize Moscow.” 12The note underscored how America’s two veteran anti-Communist politicians had repositioned themselves. Reagan had welcomed the Soviet visitors; Nixon countered by saying they were still uncivilized. Nixon, once the architect of détente, was now skeptical about a visit by Gorbachev that had demonstrated unprecedented warmth between Washington and Moscow.

Henry Kissinger was even more negative. He was upset by the outpouring of American enthusiasm for the Washington summit. Kissinger didn’t like Reagan’s antinuclear views or his courtship of Gorbachev. In a lengthy, biting column in Newsweek , Kissinger denounced the “near rapture” of Gorbachev’s American audiences, the mood of “euphoria” of the state dinner, and the “near ecstasy” of U.S. officials. He refused to take seriously the idea that Gorbachev might be seeking to wind down the Cold War. “He [Gorbachev] was in relentless pursuit of a strategic objective, to accelerate the loss of confidence in America’s strategic power,” Kissinger wrote. The Reagan administration was making a mistake if it tried to “help” Gorbachev, wrote Kissinger, because foreign relations do not depend upon “the fate of transitory personalities.” Reagan himself “reflected a quintessential American dream: that history can be reversed by good will.” 13

Above all, Kissinger mourned Reagan’s evident “preoccupation” with getting rid of nuclear weapons: “I could not shake a melancholy feeling as I watched the leaders of the country whose nuclear guarantee had protected free peoples for forty years embrace Gorbachev’s evocation of a nuclear-free world—a goal put forward, if with less panache, by every Soviet leader since Stalin.” 14

Reagan’s aides worried that the attacks by veterans of the national-security establishment would reinforce the separate denunciations from the political right. By this juncture, conservative leaders were heaping vituperation on their former hero. Several right-wing leaders held a press conference to announce the formation of an Anti-Appeasement Alliance aimed at defeating the new INF treaty. One of them, Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus, branded Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.” 15