Reagan: The Life (76 page)

Regan thought Nancy was being overly protective. He perceived the president as far sturdier than the vulnerable invalid of her imagination. Reagan greeted Regan and
Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, with a joke when they entered the postoperative recovery room to see if he was ready to reassume the authority he had again surrendered to George Bush during his surgery. “
The Russians have dropped the bomb!” Reagan said, referring to the sober expressions on Regan’s and Fielding’s faces. Regan assured the president that they were simply concerned for his health. Tentatively, Regan handed the president the required letter. “Can you read?” Regan asked.

“Let me see that thing,” Reagan said, snatching the letter. He held it at arm’s length, as he didn’t have his reading glasses handy.

“Do you understand it?” Regan asked.

“Yup,” Reagan said. “I’ll sign it now.” He wrote his name with a flourish.

“Then, in an impressive display of alertness,” Regan continued, “he took up where he had left off before he went under the anesthetic.” Reagan’s last words had been criticism of Bob Dole for not supporting the administration on the budget. “What’s the matter with Bob Dole?” Reagan resumed. “He’s got to be a leader on this budget.” Regan had rarely seen him sharper. “He seemed so strong and clear-minded that I took another minute or two to tell him that all was calm on the international scene. He listened, then thought of something that made his cheerful expression change. ‘Any word on the hostages?’ he asked.”

After some discussion of the hostages, Reagan demanded, “How long do I have to stay here?” Reagan’s brother, Neil, coincidentally had recently undergone surgery similar to the president’s and been released from the hospital after just a few days. “I want to get out of here soon, Don,” Reagan said. “See what you can do.”

“Mr. President, forget it,” Regan said. “Just follow your doctors’ orders.”

Though Regan refused to abet Reagan’s early release, the president’s tone and demeanor made him think he could stand occasional visitors, including Bush and McFarlane. The vice president had been at his summer home in Maine when Reagan’s routine procedure turned more serious, and he had flown straight to Washington. He wished to pay his respects to the president, and Regan thought he ought to be allowed to. The visit could take only minutes. McFarlane also wanted a moment of the president’s time. The national security adviser said he needed to tell the president something important. Regan put Bush and McFarlane on the president’s schedule.

Nancy was outraged when she learned of it. “Why are you doing this?” she demanded of Regan by phone. “It’s too much. He needs rest.” Regan explained his thinking. She was not persuaded. She took the opportunity to express her displeasure at his plan to use the presidential helicopter for the trip from the White House to Bethesda. Regan replied that the helicopter would conserve valuable time. She brushed his answer away. She said the president’s helicopter was for the president.

Regan retreated tentatively. He said he would consult with the presi
dent’s doctors before allowing the visit by Bush and McFarlane. And he would reconsider the use of Air Force Two.

He had scarcely put down the phone when he received a call from Edward Hickey, who handled White House transportation and had known the Reagans for years. “I’d cancel the helicopter if I were you, Don,” he said. “The first lady’s staff are talking about it.”

“Why should they talk about it?” Regan responded. “I’m just trying to save time. I’ve got to go out there seven days a week and it’s forty minutes by car each way. That’s more than ten hours down the drain in a single week.”

“That would be good reason to fly instead of drive under normal circumstances,” Hickey said. “But right now circumstances aren’t normal. The buzzards are out, Don. Be careful what you’re doing.”

Regan later recalled being surprised at this comment. He had grown used to gossip around the West Wing, though he didn’t like it. But gossip from the East Wing, the realm of the First Lady, was something he hadn’t expected. He liked it even less. Yet he sensed that it might be more troublesome than the West Wing whispers.

“Okay,” he told Hickey. “Cancel the damn helicopter.”

B
EFORE HE BECAME
president, Reagan derided the potential of personal diplomacy, especially with leaders of communist countries. The godless commissars were immune to charm, humor, persuasion, or appeals to a shared humanity; they responded only to force or its threat.

But as president, Reagan took a different view. He was supremely confident of his own ability to find common ground with foreign counterparts, even the leaders of the Soviet Union. He wanted to get into a room with Brezhnev, but the longtime Kremlin boss ignored his invitation to a summit and then died. Andropov and Chernenko shortly followed him to the grave.

Then Gorbachev came along, and Reagan thought he would finally get his wish. Gorbachev responded cautiously at first to Reagan’s suggestion of a personal meeting, but as he gained his footing with the Politburo, he indicated that a summit would indeed make sense. Date and location would have to be determined, but the principle of a face-to-face meeting was one he could embrace.

T
HE POSSIBILITY OF
a summit triggered a battle within the American foreign policy establishment.
Henry Kissinger visited the White House to urge Reagan to move slowly. An opportunity existed, the co-architect of
détente declared, but it must be handled very carefully. “
Let it mature,” Kissinger said.
Zbigniew Brzezinski warned against Soviet tricks at a summit. “
They will spring a surprise so as to put the president on the
defensive,” Brzezinski told Don Regan. “This is a contest.” The president needed to be thoroughly prepared.

The battle raged most heatedly inside the administration. The hard-line anticommunist wing, headquartered in the Defense Department and the CIA, was as opposed to summitry as Reagan once had been. “
Caspar Weinberger was utterly convinced that there was no potential benefit in negotiating anything with the Soviet leaders and that most negotiations were dangerous traps,”
Jack Matlock recalled. Matlock was a Soviet expert from the foreign service who had been pulled from the diplomatic ranks to head the National Security Council’s Soviet and European division. He became Reagan’s right-hand man in dealing with the Kremlin. He found Weinberger’s opposition to summitry irksome but bureaucratically predictable. The business of the Pentagon was weapons development and procurement, not diplomacy and negotiation; the Pentagon’s chief could be expected to promote the former and oppose the latter. But Matlock thought Weinberger pushed the opposition too far, for even after Reagan made clear he wanted to meet with Gorbachev, Weinberger resorted to leaks that undermined and implicitly insulted the president. Matlock thought Reagan thought so too, though Reagan rose above the issue. “When leaks that represented his ideas turned up in the press, most often in the
Washington Times
or in comments by columnists and television pundits
Rowland Evans and
Robert Novak,” Matlock said of Weinberger, “Reagan was annoyed, sometimes even infuriated, but he usually tolerated them. He disliked direct confrontation with cabinet members, particularly old friends like Weinberger. He also understood that he would need the acquiescence, if not the active support, of the hardliners in his administration if he was to implement a positive agenda with the Soviet Union.”

William Casey lacked Weinberger’s long ties to Reagan, but as intelligence director he possessed information and therefore credibility of a sort commanded by no one else in the administration. Casey didn’t believe Gorbachev was a sincere reformer in either domestic or foreign policy. “
While some Soviet officials have indicated he is sympathetic to the use of pragmatic methods, including tapping private initiative,” Casey wrote to Reagan, “his statements and actions underscore his overall commitment to the current economic system and his determination to make it work better.” In foreign policy Gorbachev adhered to the traditional Soviet belief in military strength and the ultimate victory of socialism. On this account the United States needed to pursue its own policy of strength, and it needed to convince the Kremlin it would continue to do so. “Achieving
this Soviet conviction against the doubts that are accumulating in Moscow will require political victories for your policy agenda in the Congress, the U.S. public, and the Alliance,” Casey wrote. “It will require skill and adherence to a durable strategic concept in dealing with all the issues that attach to the U.S.-Soviet superpower struggle.” Summitry was distracting at best, pernicious at worst.

George Shultz at State was the strongest voice in favor of a summit. He was also the person with the closest contacts in the Soviet government. He met regularly with
Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, who would presumably deliver any message from Gorbachev accepting Reagan’s invitation to get together. Shultz tried to crack Gromyko’s stolid front. At a diplomatic dinner Gromyko described Gorbachev’s campaign against alcoholism; Shultz responded that the Reagan administration was trying to deter drunk driving in America. He repeated a joke then circulating in Russia, according to Shultz’s informants. Two men are standing in a long line waiting to buy vodka from the state-run store. The line hardly moves. Finally one says, “
I’m fed up. I’m going over to the Kremlin to shoot Gorbachev.” He leaves. He comes back a while later. His friend is still in line. “Well, did you shoot him?” the friend asks. “Hell, no,” the first man says. “The line there was even longer than this one!” Gromyko didn’t crack a smile.

But he eventually raised the issue of a summit. He said Reagan would be welcome in Moscow in November. Shultz rejoined that it was the turn of the Soviet leader to come to the United States. Gromyko said this was out of the question. But Europe was not.

“Are you suggesting Geneva?” Shultz asked.

“If you say Geneva, I’ll have to say Helsinki,” Gromyko responded.

Shultz took this as progress. He went to Reagan to make sure he was still on board. He detected some doubt, apparently provoked by Weinberger and Casey. Reagan said November might be too soon. Perhaps he should play hard to get.

Shultz pushed back. “Many key people in your administration do not want a summit,” he said. “You have to make up your mind. You have to step up to the plate. And when it comes to the divisions in your administration over this issue, you can’t split the difference.”

A personal meeting had been Reagan’s idea in the first place, and he remained convinced that personal diplomacy would afford the best chance for a breakthrough in U.S.-Soviet relations, especially on arms control. In late May the White House hosted a small dinner for
Arkady Shevchenko,
a Soviet diplomat who had turned double agent before defecting to the West. “
Our guest sang for his supper,” Reagan wrote afterward. “He confirmed that Soviet leaders do have an inferiority complex about their superpower standing—that they are a superpower only in military power. That will be a factor in arms control talks. He also affirmed that they do nurse a feeling that we may be a threat to them.” Reagan knew the United States was not a threat to the Soviet Union, and he judged a face-to-face meeting with Gorbachev the best way to convince him of that fact.

He directed Shultz to set it up. The Kremlin agreed to Geneva, not least because Gorbachev kicked Gromyko upstairs to the ceremonial position of chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The foreign ministry went to
Eduard Shevardnadze, a Gorbachev man and an individual far less confrontational than Gromyko. In early July the White House and the Kremlin simultaneously announced the November dates they had set for the summit.

T
HE DECISION ALTERED
the dynamics within the administration. As the summit became inevitable, Weinberger shifted from opposition to sabotage. Though the Senate had never ratified the SALT II treaty, the United States—and the Soviet Union—had informally adhered to the limits it imposed on weapons systems. The limits were fairly generous, and during Reagan’s first term they didn’t inhibit the arms buildup he ordered. But early in his second term a new submarine was commissioned that would push the United States over the SALT II limit on submarine-based missiles unless the president retired an existing submarine. The older vessel was obsolete by the standards of the U.S. Navy, which had no desire to keep it in service. Yet Weinberger and the hawks at the Pentagon, with support from their allies in Congress and elsewhere, argued that it
should
be kept in service. Some contended that it remained essential to American defense; the more candid acknowledged that their goal was to break free from the SALT II limits on this and other systems. Reagan eventually decided to retire the older submarine, in large part to counter Soviet assertions that the American administration was bent on achieving military superiority that could only endanger world peace. But the decision cost him politically with the hawks, who made clear that they would be no pushovers for future arms agreements.

The CIA adopted a different tack. Robert Gates was less hostile to negotiations than Bill Casey, and he was considerably less devious. But
he thought the president should be urged to adopt a tough line with Gorbachev. “
Bill, I think Gorbachev wants and needs a deal so bad that he can taste it,” Gates wrote to Casey. “I’ve been involved in preparing a number of U.S.-Soviet summits and I have never seen such an open signaling of a desire to do business.” This gave the administration an important advantage. “President Reagan goes to Geneva holding better cards than any president meeting his Soviet counterpart since Eisenhower went to Geneva 30 years ago. Our planning should start from that premise and focus on specific, realistic demands we should make of Gorbachev—not to score debating points but to advance U.S. interests in concrete ways—from
Nicaragua to
Angola to
Afghanistan to
Kampuchea to Iran-Iraq war to arms control to cultural agreements to
human rights.” Gates thought the White House fundamentally misunderstood the opportunity. “The meeting is shaping up as a terribly important moment in the Reagan presidency. I fear that the president’s staff is approaching the meeting aiming just to survive it and without a clear view of the larger objectives—and opportunities.”