ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE REAGAN WAS to meet Gorbachev, Matlock finally had the chance to put together a Soviet seminar for the president.
He sensed that if Reagan figured out how to appeal to Gorbachev’s interests, the Soviet leader would respond in a way that could creatively disrupt the old arms-control paradigm, just as Reagan was attempting to do with the Strategic Defense Initiative. When Reagan spoke of complete disarmament, as he often did, many of his military advisors worried about how to ground his point of view. Matlock believed the opposite: Reagan’s passion and sincerity in these moments was the strongest weapon in the American arsenal.
The presentations would have to be short and concise. To elevate the meeting’s importance, Matlock had to ensure that the National Security Council would attend. This proved hard; Weinberger, for one, thought it was a colossal waste of time.1
R. Mark Palmer, the forty-four-year-old Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe, tried to stack the deck with participants who would bring Reagan down to earth. Arnold Hoelick of the RAND Corporation did not believe that the Soviet system would allow Gorbachev to reform it even if he wanted to. Sovietologist Richard Pipes, brought back from exile, was still pressing Reagan to tighten economic sanctions against the Soviets. Reagan had consulted with Jim Billington, the head of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars before. Adam Ulam, a Polish-born intellectual historian, had strong views of how Marxism continued to influence Soviet policy making.2
The outsider, and the one Matlock was counting on, was Nina Tumarkin. She was one of two women who would be in the room (Roz Ridgway, a senior State Department official, as the other); Tumarkin was the only guest who had not been to the White House before. And ideologically, although not a doctrinaire Massachusetts liberal, she did not subscribe to the president’s domestic agenda.
Matlock’s deputy, Ty Cobb, had given Tumarkin her main charge: tell Reagan about how the Soviet people see their leadership. Explain the pressures on Gorbachev from below. Give the president a feel for how the Soviets understand the United States. All this, she was told, would have to be squeezed into three minutes, or the president would lose interest.
The day of the seminar, Tumarkin arrived early. Like any first-time visitor to the White House, she was nervous and worried she’d be out of her depth. She paid close attention to every detail, reading these powerful men whose names and faces she knew mostly from the news.
She was ushered into the cabinet room, a few steps away from the Oval Office. Its door was closed, and she marveled at its enormous lock plate and keyhole. “Reminds me of Alice in Wonderland,” she said to Cobb. He smiled and replied, “The resemblance to Wonderland around here is more than just a keyhole.”3
Bud McFarlane, the National Security Advisor, wandered in, along with Matlock. McFarlane gripped Tumarkin’s hands and looked into her eyes. “I really thank you for coming. I really thank you.” His charisma and bedroom eyes were slightly creepy, but when she later told her friend, the lobbyist Anne Wexler, about the encounter, she understood his gaze to be an artifact of his Marine training. That was just how McFarlane greeted everyone.
Then the president bounded in. Tumarkin froze.
“Move,” Matlock whispered to her.
She stepped to the side.
He introduced her to the president, who nodded and said “hello,” and walked around the room to greet the other guests.
“We’re here today to do something useful to help the president understand the Soviet Union,” McFarlane said by way of introduction.
As they settled into their chairs, Reagan had two things on his mind.
“You know, I was asked by someone whether I would give the Soviets veto power over SDI, and I gave them a two-word answer: ‘Hell no!’ And then, I’m sometimes asked if I’m fed up with Gorbachev, and I tell them, ‘Not yet!’ ”
Tumarkin got the impression that Reagan had been fed the lines in order to ease any tension. As her fellow guests began to present their ideas, she looked around the room. Weinberger sat to the president’s left. He looked gaunt, “the kind of man who makes dreadful things in his basement at night,” she wrote in her diary. He did not seem happy to be there and did not say a word during the session.
First, Billington gave an overview of the Soviet mood, peppering his remarks with allusions to “new visions,” cultural revolutions, and esoteric comparisons to other eras. Bill Hyland, a former aide to Henry Kissinger and strong proponent of ballistic missile defense, urged Reagan to stick with SDI. “It gives you great leverage,” he said.
When it was Tumarkin’s turn, she remembered that she had been told to look directly into the president’s eyes and to speak slowly. She turned her body to face him. George Shultz, the Secretary of State, moved his chair back so there was only a few feet of distance between the scholar and the president.
Mikhail Gorbachev, she began, “sees himself as certainly, and portrays himself, as a peacemaker. This image is received positively by the Soviet people.” She noted that that very morning marked the sixty-eighth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. They’d celebrate with a parade in Red Square, and to Americans, that read as militaristic. But the Soviets, she said, associated with it strength. “They see themselves as peacemakers. When I was in the Soviet Union last year, I talked with a lot of veterans, including a little old lady in Red Square. I told her I was an American. She smiled and said, ‘Ah, you’ve seen our military parade, so now you see that we want peace?’ ” It might seem like a paradox, she said, but the Soviets feared war in their marrow. Strong leadership keeps the Soviets out of war, and Gorbachev was seen as a strong leader.
Reagan interrupted: “You speak of the Russian people expecting and respecting a strong leader. Is Gorbachev anything like Peter the Great?”
There was a moment of silence. “I’m reading about Peter the Great, and boy, was he tough,” the president said.
Tumarkin said that Gorbachev seemed vigorous in comparison to other Soviet leaders as of late—and she chose her words carefully, because Reagan was not exactly a young man—but implied that the Soviet people had lost confidence in their leadership until Gorbachev came along.
Whether Gorbachev was that leader—she couldn’t yet say.
Her time running short, she moved to her advice.
Don’t be confused by the Soviets’ constant references to Communist ideologies. They aren’t guidelines for policy, she said, as much as they are a ritual, a way of connecting with the past. “Look at them the way an anthropologist would look at the incantations of a tribe,” she told Reagan. He did not seem to understand what she meant.
The US and USSR have wholly different systems but need common ground to begin a discussion. “You can support Gorbachev’s love for his country. You can tell him that you respect and appreciate the Soviets’ bravery in the great World War. That you understand why the Soviets would be so patriotic.” Doing so, she said, “would move him and cost you nothing and be generous of spirit.”
Matlock made a private note here. Reagan had mentioned the Soviets and World War II before, but it might have a greater effect if he said something in person, or to the Russian people directly. Tumarkin handed Reagan a framed photograph. He studied it for a while. It showed three men and a woman, their faces crinkly from age, all with medals around their necks. They stood in Red Square on Victory Day in 1984. The Soviets, she noted, lost 20 million people in that war.
“I could tell them what I did during the war, because Gorbachev was just a youngster during the time,” the president said.
Tumarkin had finished her presentation. She did not know what to think of Reagan’s reactions. From reading his face, she could see that he had listened. She noted that he was reading her lips and that he had a hearing aid. But she did not know whether he had learned anything.
Ulam went next, describing the Soviet capacity for mischief making in the third world. “Professor Tumarkin, by the way, is right about human rights. The Soviets are really defensive about human rights.”
She had suggested that Reagan not dwell on the topic in public—they get very defensive and discussions tend to bog down.
Pipes spoke up. “Mr. President, you are the first president to question the Soviet system, and that is quite right. The problem is not weapons, it’s relations. Britain and France have nuclear weapons, but we don’t worry about them. I think pressing them on human rights is a good thing.”
“When I was president of the Screen Actors Guild,” Reagan replied, “I learned that real negotiations take place in the men’s room.”
But the president moved back to the point: the conversations should be private, as they had been with Nixon working with Brezhnev on Jewish immigration—and more recently, “when our private discussions got the Pentecostalists out of the embassy.”
After a few more quips, the meeting was over, and the president was ushered out. The guests lingered and gave their own postmortem. Vice President Bush told them that it was the most fun meeting on the Soviets he could remember in a while.
Tumarkin was thrilled by the moment and confused by the president’s reactions. She believed she had acquitted herself well, but she did not know whether the president would find her ideas valuable. She did not know what to make of his mind or his comprehension.
That same day, newspapers and pundits were scoring the president’s prospects. Their background sources in the White House were not unanimous; some were optimistic that the summit would accomplish something meaningful. Others were not.
Right before Reagan left for Switzerland, the Washington Post and the New York Times obtained a private memo from Weinberger urging Reagan to stick to his guns on the Strategic Defense Initiative and stress to Gorbachev that the US would negotiate nothing until the Soviets complied with the letter of existing arms-control agreements.4
The leak sent McFarlane and Shultz into fits of apoplexy. Its goal was transparent, because Reagan had heard Weinberger argue strongly for SDI as the sine qua non for months—the Defense Secretary was “more Catholic than the Pope” on SDI—and had become more optimistic than Reagan about the program’s technological feasibility. Weinberger wanted to use the allegations of Soviet chicanery on ABM treaty violations to persuade Reagan to rethink a decision the president had made a month before: to comply with the spirit of the 1972 treaty, Reagan would not allow new SDI-related programs to be tested in the field.5 This was intended as a gesture to Gorbachev. The CIA and Margaret Thatcher suggested that Gorbachev intended to use the Geneva meeting as a venue to try to convince Reagan to return to the core of the framework of the ABM Treaty—which would mean the effective abolition of SDI—and perhaps persuade Reagan to sign the SALT II treaty that Jimmy Carter had abandoned after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.6
This was significant for the Pentagon, because most of its ballistic missile programs had been folded into SDI, and everything related to SDI was considered to be on the outer bounds of that treaty. If the Pentagon could not test SDI, it would stand to lose billions of dollars; existing ballistic missile projects that were permitted by the treaty would lose momentum; the Soviets could continue to research and test their anti-satellite weapons with impunity, and moreover, the Soviet perception of its national security interests would supplant the United States’s as the departure point for arms-control talks.7
The leak was designed to replant the argument in Reagan’s head on the eve of his departure. Knowing that Gorbachev would make his opposition to SDI the centerpiece of the summit, Reagan wanted to say, in essence, “We’re moving forward with it, but we won’t do anything threatening, because we’ll stick with the treaty,” McFarlane said later.8
He believed that the Pentagon leak undercut Reagan because the Soviets could use it as a straw man as often as they wished during the first round of negotiations. For Matlock, it was vital that the president get to know Gorbachev on his own terms. The SDI trap laid by the Pentagon was as close as he’d ever seen to a Pentagon sabotaging a president.9 (Reagan wasn’t too perturbed; didn’t everyone already know what Weinberger thought anyway?)
Oleg Gordievsky, in a memo from his hideaway in London, advised Reagan that “bureaucratic devices”—small gestures that gave the Soviet governing apparatus real work to do—would be the easiest way to reduce the tension and paranoia between the two countries.
He understood that Reagan would attempt to sell Gorbachev on the idea of sharing the fruits of SDI research—a “trick,” was the way Soviets would see it, unless it were offset by significant reductions in offensive weapons.
Gorbachev’s priorities “are arms control and Soviet/United States relations. Everything else is secondary,” Gordievsky wrote. “It is psychologically important for the Russians to feel that they are the equal of the United States.”10
Eleven days later, Reagan took Gorbachev’s measure for the first time, at the Château Fleur d’Eau, an eighteenth-century retreat with a view of Lake Geneva.11
After the photographers left them alone, Reagan began with a rehearsed preamble. Yes, the two men would talk about arms control, but wouldn’t it be better if the two men both agreed to reduce the suspicions each held about the other, first? If not, anything else they said would be “empty.” “You and I were born in two small towns which nobody ever heard of and no one expected anything from either of us,” he said.
For his part, Gorbachev thought Reagan was trying too hard. The point of the meeting, after all, was to get to know each other and build trust, so the president didn’t have to draw attention to the subtext. The Soviet leader saw Reagan’s opening words as a gambit, a sign that the American did not intend to make meaningful progress on arms reductions right then and there.
Gorbachev told Reagan that his starting point was reality: neither man could afford to ignore the other anymore. Moving forward would require sacrifices from both sides and enormous political will. So long as each country recognized the other as legitimate, and capable of pursuing its own interests without intending to harm the other, there was progress to be made.
Reagan spoke then of the “courage, the sacrifice” that the Soviets had made in World War II—the last time the Americans and the Soviets had been manifest allies—and said he understood that the Soviets had no desire for war.12
After both men aired their views of the world, Gorbachev took Reagan aside and informed him that Soviet scientists were predicting that a major earthquake would strike California or Nevada within the next three years, and while he assumed Reagan already knew such information, he felt duty-bound to share it. Reagan, confused by Gorbachev’s abrupt change of subject, responded didactically; the Californian knew about his earthquakes and assured Gorbachev that American scientists were doing all they could to predict them.13
The next day, Reagan handed Gorbachev a letter with starting points for a way forward. The first was easy: a reduction in offensive weapons. Gorbachev was on board. In response to the second—“intermediate nuclear forces”—Gorbachev insisted that French and British weapons had to be included. And the third was strategic defense. There, Gorbachev would not yield, as Gordievsky had projected. Why should he trust the United States to share its research into space weapons? (He, too, had read the newspapers and knew what the Pentagon was up to.)14 Well, why did Gorbachev keep referring to space weapons? Reagan wanted to know. SDI did not envision any such thing.
From there, the substance of the summit bogged down into a debate about the strategic and political feasibility of a space-based defense shield.15 Gorbachev would not budge, and neither would Reagan.
But this was not a failure; the talks did not founder. They were a beginning.
Reagan decided to invite Gorbachev to the United States the next year; Gorbachev accepted immediately. The two men, having spent hours together, would keep working the problem, as only they could do. Negotiators at lower levels had also agreed on six new starting points for talks—exactly the type of “bureaucratic devices” that would give the Soviets firm evidence of progress, as Gordievsky had suggested.
“Maggie was right. We can do business with this man,” Reagan told his cabinet when he returned to Washington.16
“And the world,” Jack Matlock wrote, “breathed a sigh of relief.”17