Nixon formed this initial judgment of Gorbachev from a distance, at his home in Saddle River, New Jersey. The following summer, Nixon visited Moscow and met Gorbachev for the first time. The session at the Kremlin late in the afternoon of July 18, 1986, lasted for more than an hour and a half. Afterward, Nixon wrote a private memo, twenty-six pages long, and sent a copy to Reagan. Once again, he portrayed the new Soviet leader as having the same aims as his predecessors:
Gorbachev is the third General Secretary of the U.S.S.R. that I have met. He is without question the ablest. While not quite as quick, he is as smart as Khrushchev. Unlike Khrushchev, he has no inferiority complex…. Gorbachev is as tough as Brezhnev, but better educated, more skillful, more subtle…. Brezhnev used a meat axe in his negotiations, Gorbachev uses a stiletto. But beyond the velvet glove he always wears, there is a steel fist…. In essence, he is the most affable of all the Soviet leaders I have met, but at the same time without question the most formidable because his goals are the same as theirs and he will be more effective in attempting to achieve them.4
Nixon’s personal impressions of Gorbachev fit the conventional American Cold War images: since the 1940s, Soviet leaders had been characterized as having steel fists (or flinty eyes or iron resolve) so often that Americans sometimes forgot that all these metallurgical allusions were merely metaphors. In fact, Gorbachev was not quite so formidable; under economic pressure, the new Soviet leader was beginning to establish more limited goals for Soviet foreign policy.
While Nixon’s views of Gorbachev embodied old stereotypes, his impressions of American politics were as shrewd as ever. He offered Gorbachev some sophisticated advice about why he should try to do business with the Reagan administration. Nixon told Gorbachev it would be a mistake to try to avoid negotiations with Reagan, in hopes that Reagan’s successor would take a softer line. Reagan had the ability to get whatever deal he made with the Soviet Union through the Senate, Nixon pointed out—unlike, for example, Jimmy Carter, who had negotiated a proposed treaty on strategic arms control that could not win Senate approval. Moreover, Nixon told Gorbachev, the Soviet Union should want to make sure that after Reagan left office in 1988, he would support good relations with Moscow and not stand in the way. “Failure to reach agreement while President Reagan is in office might run the risk of developing a situation where President Reagan might become a powerful critic of his successor’s Soviet-American initiatives,” Nixon asserted.5
On the question of whether to deal with Reagan or wait him out, Gorbachev needed little persuading. According to the Soviet notes of the Nixon meeting, Gorbachev himself raised this issue. Some had argued that he should postpone any hopes of an agreement with Washington until after the next presidential election, the Soviet leader said. “It would mean that we were ready to wait another three or four years,” Gorbachev said. “But during this time, much could change…. In today’s tense atmosphere, we simply cannot afford to wait.”6 That was a vague, fleeting acknowledgment of the huge problems of the Soviet economy and of the Soviet leadership’s desperate need for agreements that would limit their military expenditures.
Nixon and Kissinger were hardly unique in expressing the view that the arrival of Gorbachev meant little or no change for Soviet foreign policy. In fact, they were merely expressing the conventional view at the time within the U.S. government, particularly within the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community.
In June 1985, William Casey, CIA director, informed Reagan that Gorbachev and his associates “are not reformers and liberalizers, either in Soviet domestic or foreign policy.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and the CIA’s top Soviet specialist, Robert M. Gates, believed that Gorbachev was “simply a new and more clever and subtle proponent of Soviet global imperialism abroad and communism at home,” according to Gates. They found confirmation for their beliefs in some Soviet actions overseas during Gorbachev’s first two years, particularly the continuing Soviet war in Afghanistan. Yet they erred in extrapolating from these events sweeping conclusions about the nature of Gorbachev and the future direction of his policies. They were trapped in a clichéd world of steel fists and old wine in new bottles. They failed to see the dynamics that were propelling change. Reagan would come to grasp the situation better and more quickly than they did.
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ABOLITION
Within months, Nixon and Kissinger came to an open break with Reagan. They were supported by quite a few others at the top of America’s foreign-policy establishment who had been imbued with the geopolitics of an endless Cold War. The catalysts for this change were Reagan’s summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik in October 1986, and more generally, his willingness to move toward a world without nuclear weapons.
Reagan had arrived in the White House with a well-deserved reputation as a conservative Republican, a hawk on national defense and a proponent of openly confrontational policies toward the Soviet Union. However, after he became president, his own advisers were increasingly taken aback to discover that he also favored the abolition of nuclear weapons. “Reagan had a totally naïve view against nuclear weapons, which I saw time and again,” Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan aide and for a time the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, recalled many years later. “All of us who were conservative thought that when [Jimmy] Carter said, ‘I want to eliminate nuclear weapons,’ that was the stupidest thing we’d ever heard. We all made fun of it, and then we have our hero [Reagan] who says things really more extreme than Carter ever does, and he’s unstoppable in doing it.”1
Some commentators have argued that one can detect evidence of antinuclear sentiments throughout Reagan’s career. It is true that he occasionally voiced alarm about the impact of nuclear weapons. At the 1976 Republican National Convention, after President Ford had accepted the Republican nomination, he called Reagan to the podium and invited him to address the audience. Reagan, who had not prepared a speech, talked extemporaneously about the horrors of a world where the great powers have missiles and nuclear weapons “that can in minutes… destroy virtually the civilized world we live in.” Reagan told the assembled Republicans he had just been invited to write a letter for a time capsule. “Suddenly it dawned on me: those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired.”2
Those remarks stand out only in hindsight, however. More frequently, the early Reagan struck a belligerent pose. A more representative quote from the era of the 1960s and 1970s was Reagan’s reaction to North Korea’s seizure of the USS Pueblo and its American crew in 1968. Asked what he would have done, Reagan replied, “How many people were on that ship?” Told there were sixty-eight, Reagan continued, “Right, right, sixty-eight. I’ll tell you what I’d do, I’d send them a cable tonight listing sixty-eight cities, and I would tell them I’m going to bomb one city an hour until I get the boys back.”3 (As president, Reagan responded very differently to the seizure of American hostages in Lebanon. There was no city-an-hour bombing; Reagan instead negotiated for the hostages’ release, without acknowledging that he had done so.)