The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Actually, I really did put my feet up at one point," George Bush said last week by telephone from the White House. "I did it thinking, 'I'll show 'em I really meant it to be a feet-up meeting.' So I put my feet up on one of those round sofas that were bolted to the deck of the Gorky. Gorbachev and I were leaning over toward one another. There were no inhibitions."

The President had been a little tentative going into such a highly charged superpower meeting, when the great Malta storm struck. But the outcome reassured the world and seemed to enhance Bush's presidential stature. His reflections on his eight hours with the Soviet boss came over the telephone line like pages out of a good reporter's notebook.

"Yes, I think I can trust Gorbachev," Bush said. "I looked him in the eye, I appraised him. He was very determined. Yet there was a twinkle. He is a guy quite sure of what he is doing. He has got a political feel. I could tell by the way he was laughing with us. A little wink now and then. He has a wonderful way of communicating with Westerners. I had the feeling that I could bring up any subject at all.

"We had quite an animated discussion about Western values vs. democratic values. I thought they were the same thing. But he interpreted our definition of Western values to mean that we were right and he was wrong. Whereas democratic values are what he has been working for.

"I told him there was one question that always kept coming up. What would happen if trouble developed inside the Soviet Union and they had to use force to put it down? I said I always refused to answer such a hypothetical question, but Americans were asking it. He did not give a direct answer, but he strongly implied, 'Look, I'm going to succeed.' "

The drama of two men in the blustery Mediterranean closing the book on 40 years of animosity is one of the surprises that history deals up in this strange world. "The changes are so monumental. So different. But it did not seem overwhelming when we sat down. Two reasonable people sat down with their staffs. Even the contentious matters were brought up without rancor. When I first met him in Moscow when I was Vice President and brought up human rights, he grew very heated. This time he talked very rationally, not rancorously.

"I had the feeling that the way we clicked off our list of things that we wanted to accomplish didn't exactly disarm him, but it did show him that we were ready to move forward on a lot of things he wanted. He may have been pleased it wasn't going to take hours to drag them out of us.

"There are always invisible barriers that come from the enormous differences between our societies. I am not naive enough to believe that all the problems will be solved. But I told him that I thought the meeting made good sense. I told him that I never had favored this kind of meeting before but that I had changed my mind. I am going to keep the personal part of this going. I'll find ways to contact him in a quiet fashion. I can write. I can call now. I'm not going to become a pen pal, but we can communicate."

To put down any lingering rumors of seasickness or distress on Malta's surging waves, Bush waxed eloquent about the night in the driving storm. "I loved it on the ship. We ate a wonderful dinner and had a good bottle of white wine. I went out on the fantail first, and for a couple of hours I watched those young boys working the anchor chains so skillfully in the high seas, and it was thrilling." That story undoubtedly will be enlarged and enriched as the years go on. Old sailors are just that way.