The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Months ago when Mikhail Gorbachev began to move more visibly around the power circuit of the Soviet Union, U.S. intelligence analysts started to feed background on him into Ronald Reagan's morning reading. There was an assumption among the experts that something was bubbling up in the Kremlin's gerontocracy, whose members were expiring with discouraging regularity. After 67 years there were signs that the old group of Soviet leaders, steeped in the traditions of the revolution and shaped by the horrors of World War II, was giving way to a new generation.

In the President's intelligence report, a thick black notebook with gold lettering that is delivered to the Oval Office at 9:30 a.m. every working day, single lines about Gorbachev grew to paragraphs, and head shots became full- length photographs of a well-tailored, energetic man. Reagan took notice, knowing that Konstantin Chernenko would be dead sooner than later. Gorbachev's good-humored outing in Britain last December with his fur-clad, stylish wife provided plenty of new material. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stored up a lot of impressions from her 3 1/2 hours of meetings with Gorbachev, and she carried them all across the Atlantic with her a month ago and constructed for Reagan the first flesh-and-blood portrait of his new adversary. The thrust of Thatcher's counsel was that Gorbachev, while still a Soviet and a Communist, was fresh and intelligent, a potentially major improvement over being dim and dying. The Prime Minister found something hopeful in the man's eyes and manner. The 30 or so people who run this world analyze one another that way and then make decisions of life and death for us. Scary, but true.

When Reagan was handed a note at about 10 a.m. Monday saying that Gorbachev had been confirmed as General Secretary, he knew more about this Soviet leader than he had about Andropov or Chernenko. He had been told that Gorbachev is a 9-to-9, six-day-a-week worker, family man, restrained vodka imbiber, classical music fancier, hiker, reader. The problem of course is that those kinds of data tell almost nothing about Gorbachev as leader of a surly, hostile superpower. How did he rise so fast? Why was he chosen? What makes him special? There is no sure way to measure a man's soul.

Gorbachev may be an admission of sorts by the Soviets that personality can be as potent as armies. The superpowers are fighting a war of words, and the Soviets may have concluded that they too need a great communicator. Whether Gorbachev can lead is another matter. Personality is an outcropping of character, but there is no true test of character at that level until it goes through the fire.

"It's for them to solve their problems," an aide said Reagan had told his staff after Gorbachev's elevation. "If the Soviets worry about us being aggressive, we ought to be able to solve that one. Beyond that, we can only keep trying." Reagan's first try was to send George Bush to the Chernenko funeral; then he shaped the personal letter to Gorbachev that the Vice President would carry. The responses from Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko to such private entreaties had read like the handiwork of a committee, and not a very skilled committee at that. Reagan rather thinks he will get a personal, and perhaps mildly revealing, answer this time. Prime Minister Thatcher did in correspondence following Gorbachev's visit to Britain.

Meantime, Bush, the professional mourner (six funerals of top foreign leaders), was Reagan's eyes and ears when he gripped Gorbachev's hand in Moscow last Wednesday afternoon. Funerals are robust ground for political intrigue. Bush, the former CIA head, hardly needed coaching. From the Brezhnev and Andropov burials he returned with mental notes on eye contact, humor, intellectual agility, confidence, vitality, tailoring, shirt collars, hair color, complexion and hand size.

The short of it is that we are starting a new chapter in superpower relations, and the twists and turns that lie ahead are for the most part utterly unknown. More than ever the reaction of one man to another will set the mood of this anxious world. That chemistry is not fathomed yet even by the two men themselves. Still scary, but still true.