Reagan: The Life (77 page)

Gates recommended that the CIA brief the president on the opportunities he spoke of. Casey agreed. But Robert McFarlane and
Jack Matlock got there first. “
Even before it was decided when and where Reagan and Gorbachev would meet, Bud McFarlane asked me to think about how we could see that the president had more and better knowledge of the Soviet Union before he faced the Soviet leader,” Matlock recalled. “Dealing as he did with Reagan every day, he was struck by the president’s spotty command of historical facts. Reagan had had very few contacts with Soviet officials and still tended to base many of his judgments more on generalities, even slogans, than on a nuanced understanding of Soviet reality.” Reagan, for his part, recognized his deficiencies and was eager to remedy them with information from experts. “
I want the best minds in the country, Republican or Democrat, academics or diplomats, to give me in-depth knowledge,” he told McFarlane.

McFarlane and Matlock organized what they called “Soviet Union 101.” Matlock oversaw the production of some two dozen papers of a few thousand words each on various aspects of Soviet politics, economics, history, and culture. Fresh papers were delivered to Reagan each Friday. He read them carefully over the weekend. “
He would devour them, annotate them,” McFarlane recalled. “He would come in Monday like a kid with a new toy. He would quiz his experts, would obsess about getting more information.” Matlock remembered that Reagan found some of the papers
more compelling than others. “
He was interested mainly in the people involved,” Matlock said. “His eyes would glaze over when you talked statistics.” One crucial question engaged him above all: “What makes this Gorbachev fellow tick?” Both McFarlane and Matlock found Reagan to be an apt pupil. “
Very, very quick,” McFarlane described him. Matlock, who taught in the Ivy League after leaving government, said, “
In many ways he was the best student I ever had.”

The CIA got its chance with Reagan a few days before he left for Geneva. Casey suggested an hour’s meeting between the president and the agency’s top Soviet analysts. Robert Gates led off. “
I described for Reagan the severe domestic problems Gorbachev faced and his need for a respite as well as Western economic cooperation and help,” Gates remembered. Yet he predicted that Gorbachev would move slowly in dealing with the West, especially the United States. “I said that I thought Gorbachev was not prepared to pay much for some breathing space with the United States—that he likely saw it coming anyway in the defense arena, especially SDI.” Gorbachev didn’t think Reagan could sustain spending on defense. “I said that the same would be true in the Third World, where support for freedom fighters would decline when Reagan left office. My bottom line: Gorbachev simply intended to outwait Reagan.”

Gates didn’t think he or his colleagues made much impression on Reagan. “I felt Reagan was alert but not very interested in what I and others had to say,” he recounted. There was one conspicuous exception.
Kay Oliver described the social stresses on the Soviet system, including alcoholism, crime, corruption, and the revival of religion. Reagan perked up. “He was riveted by Oliver’s briefing, I think because she described the Soviet Union in terms of human beings, everyday life, and the conditions under which they lived,” Gates wrote. “It was all far more real to the president than the strategic concepts and broad geopolitics the others of us went on about.”

Gates recalled another, different reaction from the president. “I was seated closest to him, and about two minutes into my comments I heard a piercing electrical hum. Reagan’s eyes got very wide, and he reached up to his ear to adjust his hearing aid. A couple of minutes later, the hum returned and, since I could hear it, I could only guess how loud it must have been in his ear. At that point, in some disgust, he reached up, pulled the hearing aid out of his ear, and pounded it on the palm of his hand a couple of times. As he replaced it in his ear, he looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘My
KGB handler must be trying to reach me.’ ”

R
EAGAN LISTENED TO
Gates and Matlock and the others. He weighed their words against his own experience of human nature and his discovery that the Soviets were human too. In an action rare for him, he committed his reflections to a memo, which summarized the state of his mind just ahead of the biggest meeting of his life. It also revealed subtleties of thought he declined to share with the public.

“
I believe Gorbachev is a highly intelligent leader totally dedicated to traditional Soviet goals,” Reagan wrote. “He will be a formidable negotiator and will try to make Soviet foreign and military policy more effective. He is (as are all Soviet General Secretaries) dependent on the Soviet-Communist hierarchy and will be out to prove to them his strength and dedication to Soviet traditional goals.” Gorbachev’s pursuit of arms control would be tactical rather than ethical. “If he really seeks an arms control agreement, it will only be because he wants to reduce the burden of defense spending that is stagnating the Soviet economy.”

Reagan believed that the struggling Soviet economy was Gorbachev’s Achilles’ heel. It might force him to make concessions on arms he wouldn’t have made otherwise. But Reagan had believed the same thing about Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko, and the Soviet system had outlasted them. It might outlast Reagan himself. He simply couldn’t know. For all he could tell, Gorbachev himself didn’t know. Consequently, Reagan wasn’t holding his breath awaiting its collapse, and he wouldn’t hold arms control hostage to its collapse. Yet he still thought the vulnerability of the economy afforded him leverage with Gorbachev, especially on SDI. “He doesn’t want to face the cost of competing with us,” Reagan wrote.

He saw Gorbachev as essentially conservative but shrewdly political.
“He doesn’t want to undertake any new adventures but will be stubborn and tough about holding what he has.” Gorbachev wanted to drive a wedge between the United States and its NATO allies. “That means making us look like the threat to peace while he appears to be a reasonable man of peace.” But he also had a domestic constituency, his own hard-liners, to consider. “If he has to make a choice, then he will opt for demonstrating to his own hierarchy that he is a strong leader.”

What did this mean for the summit? Reagan conceded that summitry entailed a large dose of public relations, but that didn’t make the summitry, or the public relations, any less important. “In the world of P.R. we are faced with two domestic elements. One argues that no agreement with the Soviets is worth the time, trouble or paper it’s written on, so we should dig in our heels and say ‘nyet’ to any concession. On the other side are those so hungry for an agreement of any kind that they would advise major concessions because a successful summit requires that.” Reagan granted the sincerity of the two sides but opted for a more basic, pragmatic standard. “My own view is that any agreement must be in the long-term interest of the United States and our allies. We’ll sign no other kind.” And he judged that success at the summit could come in alternative forms. “In a way, the summit will be viewed generally as a success because we’ve met, shaken hands and been civil to each other. It can also be a success if we fail to arrive at an arms agreement because I stubbornly held out for what I believe was right for our country.”

Reagan imagined himself in the place of Gorbachev and the Kremlin leadership. “What are some of their needs and priorities?” he asked. His study and briefings suggested answers. “I believe they hunger for some trade and technology transfers. There is no question but that we have a tremendous advantage on that front.” He intended to exploit that advantage. “Trade is for us a major bargaining chip. We shouldn’t give it away.”

Human rights would surface at the summit, whether Reagan liked it or not. In fact he did
not
like it, though he would never say so in public. “I’m sorry we are somewhat publicly on record about human rights. Front page stories that we are banging away at them on their human rights abuses will get us some cheers from the bleachers, but it won’t help those who are being abused.” Reagan approvingly recounted remarks by Richard Nixon, who told of being pressed by Jewish leaders to condition arms agreements upon the Kremlin’s letting more
Jews emigrate. Nixon refused. He got Brezhnev’s signature on the landmark SALT I treaty, and
only then, and privately, did he raise the human rights issue. The result was a dramatic increase in Jewish emigration.

Nixon had offered explicit advice to Reagan on dealing with Gorbachev. “He expressed optimism that I might accomplish what he did in 1972, but only if I didn’t force Gorbachev to eat crow and embarrass him publicly.” Reagan took this to heart. “We must always remember our main goal”—arms reduction—“and his need to show his strength to the Soviet gang back in the Kremlin,” he wrote. At the same time, Gorbachev must understand America’s strength and this American president’s determination. “Another of our goals, probably stated to Gorbachev in private, should be that failure to come to a solid, verifiable arms reduction agreement will leave no alternative except an arms race, and there is no way we will allow them to win such a race.”

Reagan didn’t expect to solve all America’s problems with the Soviets at one outing. But he could make a start. “Let us agree this is the first of meetings to follow. That in itself will give an aura of success. We will have set up a process to avoid war in settling our differences in the future. Maybe we should settle on early 1987 as the next meeting time, and maybe we should discuss offering that it be in Moscow. He can come back here in 1988.”

C
ASPAR
W
EINBERGER WASN
’
T
invited to Geneva and might not have gone had he been. He still believed the summit was a bad idea, and he distrusted Reagan’s ability to stand up to Gorbachev or others pressing for agreements. To forestall such agreements he lectured the president in absentia. The
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
printed a letter, obviously leaked from the defense secretary’s office, in which Weinberger warned Reagan against what was awaiting him in Geneva. Weinberger’s pretext for writing was an earlier instruction from Reagan to gather information on Soviet violations of existing arms treaties. The violations had been consistent and serious, the secretary reported, and could not be wished away, as advocates of new treaties seemed to desire. “
The Soviet violations put us in a particularly vulnerable and dangerous position,” he declared. The president must keep this fact firmly in mind as he approached the summit, for the treaty-mongers—in both the Soviet Union and the United States—would conspire to make him forget it. “In Geneva, you will almost certainly come under great pressure to do three
things that would limit severely your options for responding to Soviet violations: One is to agree to continue to observe SALT II. The second is to agree formally to limit S.D.I. research, development and testing to only that research allowed under the most restrictive interpretation of the
ABM Treaty, even though you have determined that a less restrictive interpretation is justified legally. The Soviets doubtless will seek assurances that you will continue to be bound to such tight limits on S.D.I. development and testing that would discourage the Congress from making any but token appropriations. Third, the Soviets may propose communiqué or other language that obscures their record of arms control violations by referring to the ‘importance that both sides attach to compliance.’ ”

George Shultz read the letter and nearly exploded. Policy differences between Shultz and Weinberger had escalated into a personal dislike that rendered cooperation between the two secretaries nearly impossible. “
Shultz detested Weinberger,”
Robert Gates recalled, adding that Weinberger reciprocated the ill feeling. Shultz suspected the worst of Weinberger, and the leaked letter confirmed his suspicions. “
Weinberger’s letter must have been written and leaked deliberately to hamstring the president and sabotage the summit,” he asserted later. “
I was surprised the president tolerated it.” Robert McFarlane shared the secretary of state’s view. Asked by a reporter whether the Weinberger letter was an attempt to sabotage the summit, McFarlane responded bluntly, “
Sure it was.”
Jack Matlock thought Weinberger’s letter represented an attempt to upstage the president. “
It was written to be leaked,” Matlock recalled. “It was a flagrant attempt to steal the limelight.”

The presumed target of the leak kept above the furor. “
Reagan himself was pretty calm,” Matlock said. The president didn’t take this outbreak of bureaucratic politics any more seriously than he took other manifestations of the jockeying endemic to presidential administrations. “Doesn’t everyone know what Cap thinks?” he asked his staff dismissively during a meeting.

Many observers judged that Reagan’s inability to keep his subordinates in line revealed a failure of leadership. Robert Gates, by contrast, detected a purpose in the president’s acceptance of internecine squabbles. “
I think Reagan wanted conflict,” Gates said. Gates likened Reagan to Franklin Roosevelt, who was famous for pitting members of his administration against one another, in order that the final decision always rest with him. Gates saw Reagan doing the same thing. “It gave him more leverage in the decision process,” Gates said.
Ken Adelman, Reagan’s director
of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, thought the president’s firm sense of priorities allowed him to ig
nore the infighting. “
Reagan was going to do his own stuff,” Adelman said.

Whatever the cause, the president initially refused to dignify the Weinberger flap with a statement. But when reporters shouted questions at him on his arrival in Geneva, he exercised his selective hearing to make a point. A reporter inquired if he thought he was being sabotaged by Weinberger. “No,” Reagan said.

Was he going to fire Weinberger?

“Do you want a one-word answer or two?” Reagan asked.

Two words, the reporter said.