When History Reaches a Peak

By Hugh Sidey

By Wednesday night it will all be over. Ronald Reagan will be packing to leave for Brussels to report to NATO allies, then will hurry on to Washington to address a joint session of Congress that will be televised to a waiting nation. Mikhail Gorbachev will be getting ready to head back to the halls of the Kremlin, where he will weigh his impressions of the American leader. Soviet officials, newly savvy about influencing public opinion, and American officials, veterans in the art, will be struggling to put the proper spin on what took place in the first encounter between their two leaders--just as these officials spent the previous week trying to manipulate the expectations. After the 3,000 journalists who converged on Geneva file their final reports, after the last evening broadcasts by Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw are transmitted from specially built new ground stations, it will be possible once again to get a hotel room and a table in a restaurant--and easier than ever to get an outside phone line in a city where 1,250 miles of new cables were laid for the most heavily chronicled superpower summit in history.

For 40 years the world has watched with growing concern every move in the fitful drama of Soviet-American relations. As arms-control talks sputter and arsenals inexorably grow, so do the fears and, perhaps miraculously, so do the hopes. That is why Geneva was destined to be, more than any of the ten summits that have preceded it since the end of World War II, a global extravaganza, an event whose very occurrence transcended in importance whatever might be put on paper at its end.

Yet for all the hoopla, the most important moment in Geneva was likely to have been the most personal and private one. On Tuesday morning at 10:05, shortly after meeting for the first time, Reagan and Gorbachev were scheduled to excuse themselves from the ceremonial opening din and sit down together in a tranquil room in the villa Fleur d'Eau with only their interpreters. No battalions of advisers, no swarms of reporters. Alone in the room with just their wits and their heavy sense of responsibility. That is when, in all likelihood, the full wonder of the moment will have most powerfully gripped them. Two humans out of 5 billion somehow chosen to carry the hopes of all, searching each other's eyes, listening to the timbre of each other's voice, looking for some familiar signal that could lead to a better way to live together on this planet.

John Kennedy probably best described the realizations that come from such a moment. He was back home in Palm Beach, Fla., resting after the 1961 summit in Vienna, a daiquiri in hand, Frank Sinatra records filling the night air. He remembered Nikita Khrushchev as seeming, well, so different when the two first sat down alone. "I looked him over pretty good," Kennedy chortled. He became fascinated with his adversary's hands. They were always thumping, fiddling. They were blunt, ungraceful hands, Kennedy recalled, but strong, so quick. "You're an old country, we're a young country," blurted Khrushchev. "Look across the table," retorted Kennedy, "and you will see that we are not so old." One moment Khrushchev was a battering ram determined to end the irritation of West Berlin, a threatened democratic enclave in the midst of Communist East Germany. The next, he was country cracker. Kennedy's cigar match went wild and landed behind Khrushchev's chair. "Are you trying to set me on fire?" snorted Khrushchev. "Not at all," Kennedy assured him (though, as Kennedy later mused, the thought was tempting). "Ah ha!" answered Khrushchev. "A capitalist, not an incendiary."

Echoes from that hastily conceived summit have resounded down the years. The complaints of the various Soviet bosses have been similar, their pride so predictably fragile. Kennedy thrust at the core of the problem between the leaders when on an impulse he asked Khrushchev, "Do you ever admit you're wrong?" Surprised, Khrushchev clouded up, then angrily pointed out that in the 20th Party Congress he had made his famous speech attacking the Stalin regime. "Those weren't your mistakes," said Kennedy. For the first time Khrushchev had no rejoinder, but his eyes smoldered.

After Vienna, Kennedy did win a little help from the Soviets in dampening the fight in Laos, but there were no agreements on nuclear-weapons testing or on Berlin. The summit, it soon developed, was a prelude to crisis. Khrushchev sized up the young President and decided Kennedy could be challenged. The Berlin Wall followed. The Cuban missile crisis followed. Kennedy, the romantic, came away from the meeting with the conviction that the two most important ingredients in these confrontations were strength--and strength.

Back in August 1968, Lyndon Johnson convened one of his Tuesday lunches to plot the Viet Nam War. These were often grim affairs, where discouraging news was ladled out with the soup. On that particular Tuesday, however, he was bubbling over with a secret. He had the stewards bring in a little "sherry wine" and pour each of his aides a glass. Then he announced that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. would soon begin nuclear arms talks, and he and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin would hold a summit to seal the deal. That afternoon Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia on their brutal mission of suppression. End of dreams.

Johnson had thought that his odd little meeting in Glassboro, N.J., with Kosygin a year before had created a special personal rapport. It was man to man, story for story. Kosygin told of working in a textile plant as a boy. Johnson fired back that he had been on a road gang and had chopped cotton. "You want war, we want peace," said Kosygin. "I agree with half of what you said," answered Johnson. "You want peace--so do we." They parted without a deal, and Johnson flew off to his ranch scheming how he would handle Kosygin next time. That time was not to be.

Richard Nixon was born for summitry, eager to show a hostile world he was somebody. He relished the pageantry and the pomp, the feeling of being at center stage as history was made. In 1972, when his aides feared that his visit to China and the mining of Haiphong harbor would so anger the Soviets that they would never talk to him, Nixon figured differently. His long years of trekking about the world as Senator, Vice President and Pepsi-Cola hustler had given him a feel for the realities of power. His audacity and conspiratorial bent fascinated the Soviets. When Henry Kissinger arrived in Moscow to prepare for the summit, he found the Soviets awed by Nixon. After a vodka or two, important officials took Kissinger to a dim corner and probed quietly about Nixon. "He's a little crazy, is he not?" asked one. Maybe, Kissinger replied, leaving the answer hanging mysteriously.

Crazy like a fox. Nixon went to Moscow with his old blue bedroom slippers, his supply of Wheaties and martini mixings, and a healthy distrust of everybody he was about to meet. When he got there he hammered out the SALT I nuclear-arms limitation treaty, the only one that survives, the first concrete step in realizing the hopes of this weary world that those hideous weapons could be restrained. There were other agreements on antiballistic missiles, safety at sea, cooperation in space. It was a stunning season of diplomacy, borne along by a singular relationship that grew up between Nixon and Communist Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev.

When the two met again at Camp David in 1973, they grew even more friendly. Things went so well that Brezhnev hatched the idea that the Soviets might build their own Camp David especially for the return visit scheduled in 1974. But Brezhnev, the executor of absolute power, did not have a firm feel for the American system. He flew off praising his friend Nixon the very day that John Dean took the stand in the Senate's Watergate investigation.

Jerry Ford tried heroically to pick up the torch when he flew to Vladivostok in 1974. Old Brezhnev, by that time ailing, also tried hard to fan the dying flame. Greeting the U.S. delegation at the ramp of Air Force One, Brezhnev jammed a fur hat on Ford's head, then peeled off the President's brand-new fur coat in jest. The two huddled that night as a gentle snow fell across the land, and they agreed to resume nuclear arms talks the following year.

It was this Vladivostok agreement that Jimmy Carter wanted to push aside in 1977 in his evangelic zeal to substitute deep cuts in missiles and warheads. But surprises are not welcome in the programmed society of the U.S.S.R. Brezhnev, sicker than ever, angrily turned down the idea. It took Carter two years more to get back to Ford's agreement. Before he rushed off to tell the world of his SALT II achievement in Vienna's Hofburg Palace, he kissed Brezhnev on both cheeks, the way they do down in Georgia--Soviet Georgia--a kiss seen round the world.

Six months later the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. An angry Sunday-school teacher is dangerous. Carter thrashed about in his despair, pulling the U.S. out of the Moscow Olympics, embargoing the sale of American grain to the Soviets, and losing the nation's confidence in his Vienna nuclear arms deal. It died in Congress.

But there is in this world a craving for peace that will not die. Almost against their wills, Gorbachev and Reagan have been pulled and poked toward the summit. "I don't underestimate the difficulty of the task ahead," the President said in a televised address last week, recounting the problems his predecessors faced. "But these sad chapters do not relieve me of the obligation to try to make this a safer, better world." He proposed an expanded program of "people-to-people exchanges," spoke of "a historic opportunity" to change the course of Soviet-American relations, and dubbed his trip "a mission for peace."

Yet as his advisers have been doing for weeks, Reagan played down hopes that the summit would produce a major breakthrough in arms control. Now that summits are media extravaganzas, somewhat like presidential primaries, manipulating expectations is part of the walk-up. The Reagan Administration's official line was one of "tactical pessimism." The idea was to explain away in advance any failure to reach substantive accords as the fault of a new Soviet leader who, for all his pretense to the role of Great Communicator, is in fact just another dogmatic Kremlin apparatchik. For their part, the Soviets engaged in similar pre-emptive propaganda about how the Reagan Administration had all but doomed the summit's chances.

The awesome responsibility that faced Reagan and Gorbachev was to withdraw from this distressing clamor and, in those quiet moments by themselves, search for some genuine gesture from each other. For the good of mankind. It did not matter if it was just a look or a word; it could be a start toward something much larger. --By Hugh Sidey