Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

The summit began on an inauspicious note, with arguments over ideology and human rights. “At the beginning it was more like a dispute between the number one Communist and the number one capitalist than a working dialogue between the world’s two most powerful leaders,” Gorbachev recalled later. 75To ease the tension, Reagan suggested a walk in the fresh air. The younger man accepted with alacrity. By the time they got to the summer house, a fire was already blazing in the hearth, attended by a bureaucrat with top-level security clearance.

As Gorbachev settled into his armchair, the president consulted his script, typed on a deck of four-by-six index cards, which he occasionally shuffled. He had given some thought to how to address his Soviet guest. In the end, he settled for “Mr. General Secretary,” having been persuaded that the use of “Mikhail” on the first occasion might be misconstrued. Having got the formalities out of the way, he staked out some common ground. Here we are, he said, the two of us, sitting opposite each other in this room. You, like me, were born in an obscure hamlet, in the middle of a huge country. From these poor and humble beginnings, we have risen to become the leaders of America and Russia.

“We’re probably the only people in the world who could start World War III. And we’re also the only two people, perhaps, in the world that could prevent World War III.” 76

At first glance, it would be hard to think of any two men more different than the seventy-four-year-old president and the fifty-four-year-old gensek . One had made a career out on anticommunism; the other dreamed of giving communism a new lease on life. One was bored by the details of public policy and would happily abandon his briefing books for another viewing of The Sound of Music; the other was a workaholic who devoured position papers and intelligence assessments, underlining interesting passages with an iridescent marker. One held fast to certain immutable principles; the other was a compromiser born and bred. One was an amiable character, who liked telling jokes; the other didn’t much care for jokes and could be a bit of a bully.

Yet for all these differences Reagan was correct when he suggested to Gorbachev that they had a great deal in common. At the most basic level they both were superb actors, with the power of communicating ideas and feelings to large numbers of people. Reagan had been trained in the great movie studios of Hollywood. A natural television performer, he knew how to control his gestures and his voice to evoke a sense of empathy from his audience. At times he even seemed to model himself after characters in his own movies. Gorbachev, by contrast, had received his thespian initiation on the stage of High School No. 1 in Krasnogvardeyskoye. He was so convincing as the romantic lead in nineteenth-century Russian comedies that he once considered taking up acting as a career. 77He learned the art of attracting the attention of a live audience through deliberately exaggerated gestures, dramatic finger pointing, and a flamboyant stage presence.

There was a visionary, almost prophetic quality about both Reagan and Gorbachev. They were optimists, convinced they could make the world a better place. Unlike many politicians, they allowed themselves to dream, and their dreams and illusions became part of the geopolitical calculations of great powers. Reagan’s optimism was the unclouded optimism of a man who had lived the American dream and wanted others to share in his good fortune. At times it bordered on nostalgia. By proposing a space shield that would protect America from incoming nuclear missiles, the president hoped to re-create the security and well-being of his youth. Gorbachev’s optimism derived from his experience as a young man growing up during the heady years of the political thaw that had followed the death of Stalin. The general secretary was convinced that if socialism could only be cured of its Stalinist deformities and abuses, everything was still possible.

The two leaders also shared a horror of nuclear war. The dawning of the nuclear age had linked the destinies of America and Russia, creating a symbiotic relationship based on mutual insecurity. The vast open spaces that had allowed Russia to repel invasions by Napoleon and Hitler meant nothing when the Kremlin could be destroyed by a nuclear missile fired from an American submarine with scarcely any warning. The ocean that had protected America from foreign aggression for two centuries could be crossed by a Soviet warhead in less than thirty minutes. For the first time since the Revolutionary War against the British, there was a direct threat to the American heartland.

PRIOR TO THE GENEVA SUMMIT Reagan had met very few Russian politicians. He had had a brief encounter with Brezhnev in California in 1973 and a more substantive meeting with Gromyko in the White House in September 1984. It was easy to demonize such men. They seemed to take pride in acting as the faceless representatives of a totalitarian ideology. As Gromyko remarked on one occasion, “My personality doesn’t interest me.” Their stolid appearance and stonewall negotiating technique confirmed Reagan’s view of East-West relations as a titanic struggle between good and evil.

Although he had battled with Hollywood leftists in the late forties and early fifties, the president’s knowledge of communism and Communists was largely theoretical. Much of it derived from a book of spurious Lenin quotations, The Ten Commandments of Nikolai Lenin , given to him by a friend out in California. 78He kept the book in a drawer of his desk in the Oval Office and frequently referred to it when he wanted to make a point about Soviet perfidy. A favorite quotation, which he tried out on many foreign and congressional leaders, was: “We will not have to take the last bastion of capitalism, the United States. It will fall into our outstretched hand like overripe fruit.” 79Soviet experts in the administration went to some trouble to show that this and many other quotations in the book were false.

Reagan never abandoned his belief that communism was intrinsically evil. But he did change his tactics for dealing with Soviet leaders, to the dismay of some of his conservative supporters. He stopped referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” driven by a fanatical desire for world domination. In early 1984, in a calculated opening to Moscow, he was already musing what would happen if “Ivan and Anya” found themselves sharing a shelter from the rain with “Jim and Sally.” He concluded that the “common interest” of ordinary people in creating a “world without fear” was a phenomenon that transcended “all borders.” 80

The struggle for Reagan’s soul was symbolized by a rift in the administration. On one side were the pragmatists, led by Secretary of State George Shultz, who were impressed by Gorbachev and wanted to take advantage of the new political climate in the Soviet Union. On the other were the ideologues, represented by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who regarded the changes in Moscow as largely cosmetic and were deeply skeptical about the benefits of arms control negotiations. In his heart Reagan sided with the ideologues. But his political instincts and his confidence in the negotiating skills that he had developed in Hollywood told him that the time had come for a serious dialogue.

Nancy Reagan played an important role in persuading her husband to adopt a mellower, more conciliatory tone toward the Kremlin during the run-up to the 1984 presidential election. She was disturbed by public opinion polls suggesting that the president’s harsh Cold War rhetoric could cost him votes. “Ronnie, you have to present a more peaceful image,” she told her husband during a trip on Air Force One, in earshot of National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane. 81