Preparations began for the first Soviet–American summit in six years. Shultz came to Moscow and Shevardnadze went to Washington, DC. It was heavy going. We had a sense that the idea of a substantive meeting, not just a first acquaintance but a serious discussion leading to meaningful results, was coming up against major obstacles in Reagan’s administration. The Americans had a particularly sour reaction to our proposal that the summit should conclude with a joint statement announcing a programme to break the deadlock in negotiations on disarmament and restoring normal relations between our countries. Who needs rhetoric? What the Americans needed was action. By action, they meant unilateral concessions by the Soviet Union, while their own position remained unchanged.
In the end, however, common sense prevailed. Literally at the last moment, Shultz told us that the Americans were prepared to work on the joint statement. We discovered that Secretary of Defence Caspar Weinberger and other ‘hawks’ in the administration were furious that Shultz had managed to persuade President Reagan to take this step.
When we began work on the text, we found Shultz to be a constructive partner. We were able to document the vitally important principles that nuclear war was totally unacceptable and that the two sides would not strive to gain military superiority over each other. We recalled that work many times in our conversations in later years, and I am glad to say that Shultz never departed from those principles.
We agreed that the negotiations would be conducted through official channels, that our chief negotiators would be the USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs and the US Secretary of State, and also our countries’ ambassadors in Moscow and Washington. Shultz was against secret diplomacy, ‘back channels’ and similar methods. I was all in favour of his approach. Negotiations should be conducted honestly and, as far as possible, openly, without offstage plots and surprises.
In the course of my numerous meetings with George Shultz, I gradually built up an understanding of his negotiating style and approach to the big issues of world politics. He showed himself to be a true diplomat, able to defend his negotiating stance, while at the same time looking out for points of contact with the position of the other party. It was crucial that at moments of heightened tension, which most often resulted from attempts by opponents of improved Soviet–American relations to put a spanner in the works, George showed restraint and tolerance and tried to keep the temperature down. This was much in evidence, for example, during the ‘spy ring scandal’ in autumn 1986, which almost torpedoed the Reykjavik summit.
Before Eduard Shevardnadze left for the UN General Assembly session in New York in September 1986, I instructed him to convey to Shultz the question, partly rhetorical but important, of who needed to provoke a bout of spy mania on the eve of a meeting on which the fate of negotiations on nuclear disarmament depended. I was not, of course, expecting a direct answer to the question, but to give Secretary of State Shultz his due, he participated personally in negotiations which succeeded in untying the knot. It was a real diplomatic marathon, and reports of the conversations were forwarded urgently to Moscow. Ultimately, a solution was devised that enabled both sides to save face.
In the spring of 1987, when George Shultz arrived in Moscow to discuss preparations for my first visit to the United States, literally on the eve of his arrival, a new ‘sex for secrets’ spy scandal broke. Opponents of better Soviet–American relations behaved like personal enemies of Shultz. The Secretary of State found himself in a difficult position and obliged to read out in Moscow a text with accusations against the Soviet Union. We could see he was doing so without the least enthusiasm. Most of our time was spent on specific issues relating to the negotiations on nuclear weapons. We were able to make progress not only on the issue of medium-range missiles, but also on a number of problems concerning strategic weapons.
Many years later, George and I met in Moscow and were reminiscing about the dramatic months before the signing in Washington of the first agreement on real nuclear disarmament, the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate- and Shorter-Range Missiles. George told me:
The amazing thing is that when everyone realized we were on the verge of signing the treaty, it became apparent that many people in the United States and many Western leaders were opposed to the ‘zero option’ of withdrawing all Soviet and American intermediate nuclear missiles from Europe. Yet at one time that had been proposed by President Reagan himself. It seemed to me a matter of honour to complete the job, but by no means everybody agreed. We had opponents in our administration as well as outside it. Kissinger was against; Scowcroft was against; Mitterrand and Thatcher were against it too. It took a whole lot of effort and political will to get that treaty finally signed.
In early 1988, it became clear that Shultz wanted Ronald Reagan’s presidency to end with the signing of the strategic arms reduction treaty. It seemed that was also what the president wanted, but it was Shultz who shouldered the main burden. He came to Moscow several times, accompanied by large groups of experts, and the negotiating was very intense.
Meeting Shultz during those months I could see that the burden was taking a toll on him physically. He often looked fatigued. In his memoirs, he later wrote candidly about how bitterly opponents of the treaty had resisted it in Washington, and this at a time when 98 per cent of the provisions of the treaty had already been agreed. This time, alas, the Washington ‘hawks’ defeated the Secretary of State. He told me later that it had been his greatest disappointment in all his years in Reagan’s administration.
Even after retiring, Shultz has retained enormous authority in American politics. His opinion on important international problems is listened to. He has also retained his interest in our country. All these years we have kept in touch, by correspondence, meeting at international conferences, during my visits to the United States and his to Russia.
My visit to the United States in May 1992 began with a meeting with Ronald Reagan, which was to prove our last. Ronald and Nancy invited us to the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. A large building with an exhibition, library and archive, it is a political centre open to the public. Presidential centres are an important American tradition, built with donations from sponsors and funded in part by the state. I have been in several, and each in its way reflects not only the career but also the personality of the president. Nancy showed us the place next to the Reagan Library where, as she put it, ‘we shall some day be laid to rest’. ‘But’, she added, ‘we are in no hurry.’
We also visited the Reagan ranch near Los Angeles. Over the years of our joint efforts we had come to understand each other better. It was not easy for a right-wing American conservative and a person whose career had developed inside the Soviet Communist Party to achieve mutual understanding and trust, but we were conscious of our responsibilities towards our countries and the world, and that made the difference.
I remember a few years ago asking George Shultz: ‘What if the president had been someone other than Reagan, do you think we would have been able to make progress on nuclear disarmament and get that first treaty signed?’ After a moment’s reflection, he replied:
I guess not. Reagan was the most conservative US president for many years. No one on the right could accuse him of being too soft or failing to stand up sufficiently for US interests. If instead there had been a Democrat in his place, those same right-wing politicians, and many other Republicans, would have pounced on him and made it impossible to get the treaty ratified.