James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

The contrast was striking. Reagan paid attention to the larger ideas and principles underlying the Cold War. He was the dominant force in his administration on questions of American politics and the mood of the public. His foreign-policy advisers thought of public speeches as a hazardous or frivolous diversion, but they cared about the lasting implications of a written statement. Reagan was largely indifferent to the nuances of a formal communiqué. To Reagan, the Berlin Wall was concrete. “Peaceful coexistence” was merely an abstraction.

Mikhail Gorbachev went out of his way to let the world know that he and Ronald Reagan liked each other. The relationship served important purposes for his foreign policy and for his personal standing as Soviet leader. The private reality was more complicated.

Sitting in a meeting with Reagan required patience—sometimes more patience than Gorbachev possessed. Reagan told anecdote after anecdote. He quoted from letters he claimed to have received. He repeated the same phrases and lines over and over again, never going beyond them or explaining their particular relevance to the point at hand. Gorbachev was a debater, a specialist in argument and refutation. Reagan was a storyteller. If he had a debating style at all, it was akin to Mohammed Ali’s “rope-a-dope” in boxing: let your opponent punch himself out until he is exhausted. After a session with Reagan, interlocutors would often find that they had engaged in pleasant and superficial banter but had achieved nothing. They would be left wondering whether Reagan had cleverly deflected them away from their purpose, or whether it had just turned out that way.

For Gorbachev, this process was exasperating. Rudolf Perina, the National Security Council aide who served as official notetaker for Reagan’s one-on-one sessions with Gorbachev in Moscow, described the tenor of the conversations. “In general, Gorbachev thought he was clearly smarter than Reagan. There was an element of condescension,” Perina said. “Sometimes, when Gorbachev made a clever point, he would look around the room, in the vain hope there would be some audience there to recognize his superior intelligence. But these were one-on-one meetings, and there was no one there but the notetakers, who would avert their eyes and go back to their notes.” 22

When Reagan arrived at Gorbachev’s Kremlin office for their final one-on-one session, the Soviet leader expressed some apparent uneasiness at the prospect of being left alone once again with the American president. The notes show that as the session started, the Soviet leader invited White House chief of staff Howard Baker, who had accompanied the president to the meeting, to stay. Baker demurred, saying he wasn’t scheduled to participate and would instead wait outside. 23

Reagan entered bearing a gift. He had brought Gorbachev a denim jacket. It was, he said, an example of the American wardrobe, a gift from a friend in the American West. Gorbachev seems to have been momentarily bewildered. He asked Reagan whether the jacket was in his size (perhaps wondering whether the CIA had somehow been covertly measuring his chest and waist). Reagan said he didn’t know. Gorbachev tactfully called the jacket “a marvelous souvenir. This was one he would keep at home.” He reciprocated by giving Reagan a scale model of the Kremlin.

By now, Gorbachev was prepared to deal with Reagan on Reagan’s terms. The Soviet leader escorted the president over to his desk and displayed some of the letters he said he had been receiving. He read excerpts from the letters; the Soviet leader was imitating Reagan’s style. Here was a letter from the city of Grodno in Byelorussia by a man who had named his son Ronald and wanted the American president to be the godfather, Gorbachev reported. Here was another letter from someone in Togliatti on the Volga, who had just named his newborn daughter Nancy in honor of the president’s wife. And here was another from Ivanovo in the Ukraine, from a woman who urged Reagan and Gorbachev to eliminate all nuclear weapons. 24

This time, it was Reagan’s turn to switch the conversation back to substantive issues. He said he had read Gorbachev’s book Perestroika and asked the Soviet leader what steps he would be taking next. Gorbachev gave an overview of the political reforms he expected to put forward at the party conference a few weeks later. The main thrust was greater democratization, Gorbachev told Reagan. He said the Communist Party of the Soviet Union “had to give up some of the functions it should not properly have.” Still, Gorbachev warned, these changes would all be carried out within the context of developing the socialist system.

It was not long before Reagan was telling stories again. This time, the Soviet leader could not hide his irritation. Reagan said there were examples in the United States of the kinds of economic opportunities that Gorbachev was trying to open up with his program of perestroika . Why, said Reagan, he had met an American woman, a professional pianist who had developed arthritis and could no longer play. She was at home with nothing to do. Her aunt reminded her that she baked the best brownies anyone had ever tasted. (Here, one of Reagan’s notetakers, Thomas Simons, had to explain to the Russian interpreter that brownies were small square-shaped chocolate cakes. 25) The woman had begun selling her brownies to grocery stores.

“That was three or four years ago,” Reagan went on, but before he could complete his story, Gorbachev interrupted. “I predict that she now has a prosperous business,” he said sarcastically, knowing exactly where Reagan’s anecdotes were invariably headed. Exactly right, Reagan said: the woman now employed more than thirty-five people, sold to the airlines and restaurants, and earned more than a million dollars a year.

Nevertheless, the tone of cordiality prevailed. The meeting was largely confined to generalities, but Reagan placed himself squarely on the side of those who wanted to improve relations with the Soviet Union. He told Gorbachev that he observed “one simple rule: you don’t get in trouble by talking to each other, and not just about each other.” Gorbachev complained that there were some people in America who asked, “Why help the Soviet Union expand? Wouldn’t it be better for it to be weak?” Reagan replied that he did not feel that way at all. Let us keep on building trust with each other, he said.

What followed, as it turned out, was the principal event of the summit.

After their talk, the two leaders strolled out of the Kremlin onto Red Square. They stopped to talk with small groups of people. Picking up a small boy in his arms, Gorbachev said, “Shake hands with Grandfather Reagan.” The president repeated in public the line he had used with Gorbachev a few minutes earlier: “We decided to talk to each other, instead of about each other.”

As the two men were walking back toward the Kremlin, Reagan was confronted with the same question he had been asked repeatedly over the past couple of years. Reporters brought up Reagan’s famous epithet about the Soviet Union five years earlier. “Do you still think you’re in an evil empire, Mr. President?” asked ABC correspondent Sam Donaldson.

Reagan didn’t hesitate. “No,” he answered. “I was talking about another time and another era.”

The reply appeared to be casual and spontaneous. Yet this was, in fact, precisely the issue that had been under discussion between Moscow and Washington at least since the previous March, when Dobrynin sent a message to Reagan asking him to renounce his past rhetoric about the Soviet Union. The president had stuck with the “evil empire” phraseology at the time of the Washington summit a half year earlier and throughout the Senate campaign to win ratification of the INF treaty. Now, Reagan moved to cut loose from the “evil empire” label.