Reagan recorded his initial impressions of Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, in a private letter to his old friend George Murphy, another former actor, who had eventually become a conservative Republican senator from California. “He is a firm believer in their system (so is she), and he believes the propaganda they peddle about us,” Reagan wrote. “At the same time, he is practical and knows his economy is a basket case. I think our job is to show him he and they will be better off if we make some practical agreements, without attempting to convert him to our way of thinking.”11 For his own part, Gorbachev told others he had found Reagan was “so loaded with stereotypes that it was difficult for him to accept reason.” Yet Gorbachev concluded that Reagan wanted to improve relations with the Soviet Union and that there was a chance for progress on important issues.12
Within two months, on January 15, 1986, Gorbachev suddenly unveiled a sweeping proposal for a nuclear-free world by the year 2000. His highly publicized initiative appeared on TASS, the Soviet news service, within hours after it was sent to the White House, and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin later admitted, “It would not be honest to deny that Gorbachev’s proclamation carried elements of propaganda.” According to Jack Matlock, the Soviet specialist on the National Security Council at the time, most U.S. officials and agencies favored simply rejecting the idea outright, but Reagan personally intervened to insist upon a positive response. The White House then issued a statement saying that the United States would give the idea careful study.13
Gorbachev’s initiative reflected an intensified determination to change the direction of his country’s foreign policy. According to Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s principal foreign-policy adviser, the Soviet leader’s initial strategy after taking office had been to try to create divisions between Western Europe and the United States, creating indirect pressure on Washington to limit its military spending. But by early 1986, after nearly a year as general secretary, Gorbachev had decided instead to push for arms control through a direct dialogue with the Reagan administration.14
In August, while Gorbachev was on vacation in the Crimea, the Foreign Ministry sent him a draft letter to Reagan that reflected the Soviet government’s standard positions. After reading the paper, Gorbachev termed it “simply crap.” He wanted to speed things up and to drive harder for a breakthrough.15 He ordered his aides to propose that Reagan meet him relatively soon in London or Reykjavik, Iceland. Reagan soon gave his assent; American officials explained that the talks would be for the limited purpose of preparing for the Washington summit the two leaders had previously discussed.
Reagan and Gorbachev sat down in Reykjavik on October 11 and 12, 1986, for what turned out to be one of the most tumultuous summits of the entire Cold War. Reagan flew into the meeting against a backdrop of the usual admonitions in the United States that Gorbachev represented nothing new for Soviet foreign policy. “He was a protégé of Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, and Mikhail Suslov, then chief party ideologue,” wrote Henry Kissinger in Newsweek. “Neither of these men was likely to have been a closet dove.”16 In Reykjavik, however, Gorbachev quickly departed from the Soviet past by unveiling a startling package of Soviet proposals on arms control; these represented a series of concessions toward the American positions. Gorbachev suggested that the United States and Soviet Union cut by half their strategic weapons, including heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles. He also proposed that the two countries eliminate all their intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
Reagan, Shultz, and the rest of the American team grew increasingly excited by Gorbachev’s initiatives. By the second day, the two sides were trying to iron out the details of possible agreements. Reagan and Gorbachev began talking about going even further toward eliminating all ballistic missiles or possibly all nuclear weapons. “It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons,” Reagan said. “We can do that,” replied Gorbachev.17 Yet it finally became clear that all of Gorbachev’s proposals, from beginning to end, came with a single condition: that the United States accept severe limits on the development of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), confining all research to laboratories. It was a condition Reagan was unwilling to accept. At the end of the second day, after coming tantalizingly close to the most far-reaching arms control agreements in the history of the Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev walked out of the Reykjavik summit with no deal at all.
Reagan left the meeting both angry and upset. “I’d just never seen Ronald Reagan that way before, had never seen him with such a look,” said Kuhn, who accompanied him after the meetings and in his flight back to Washington. “He wasn’t certain that he had done the right thing by saying that we had to have SDI in return, instead of giving it up in return for eliminating all nuclear missiles.”18
At the time, Reykjavik was widely perceived as a failure. In retrospect, it was a turning point in the Cold War standoff over nuclear weapons, despite the absence of an agreement. Each side had seen how far the other was willing to go. Both sides came to realize that they could try again. “As we all know, once you put positions on the table, you can say, ‘I’ve withdrawn them,’ but they’re not withdrawn,” said Shultz. “They’re there. We’ve seen your bottom line, and so we know where it is, and they all came right back on the table before long.”19
Declassified documents show that soon after Reykjavik, Reagan attempted to galvanize the U.S. government to begin thinking about what the abolition of ballistic missiles would mean and how it could be accomplished. A memo from Poindexter to Reagan dated November 1, 1986, laid out plans for a study on “how best to make the transition to a world without offensive ballistic missiles.” The president was told that such a study would be a “follow-up to the proposals you made at Reykjavik.” (Soon, military officials began sending back replies on how expensive such a change would be: the U.S. Army would need more divisions, the Navy more antisubmarine warfare, the Air Force more bombers.)20
Reykjavik also seemed to alter the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev. In the immediate aftermath, Gorbachev claimed to be irked. He told the Politburo two days after the summit ended that Reagan had “exhibited extreme primitivism, a caveman outlook, and intellectual impotence.” Yet such remarks seemed to be tailored for the consumption of Communist Party hard-liners. Whatever annoyance he felt soon passed, and Gorbachev began to see Reagan in a different light. According to Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s foreign-policy adviser, it was at Reykjavik “that he became convinced it would ‘work out’ between him and Reagan…. After Reykjavik, he never again spoke about Reagan in his inner circle as he had before…. Never again did I hear statements such as, ‘The U.S. administration is political scum that is liable to do anything.’”21
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CONSERVATIVE UPROAR
On the Sunday evening on which the Reykjavik summit ended in disarray, Brent Scowcroft was having dinner with Vice President George H. W. Bush at the Naval Observatory in Washington, the vice president’s residence. They were old friends who had worked together closely in the past: Bush had been CIA director while Scowcroft had been national security adviser in the final year of the Ford administration. The two men watched on television the scenes of Reagan leaving the summit with a grim face and Shultz, exhausted and depressed, telling a press conference of his deep disappointment.