After Reagan won reelection, summitry with the Soviet Union was on the agenda virtually from the start. Reagan had the political latitude of a president who would not have to run again and could focus on what he might accomplish before leaving office. For their part, Soviet leaders quickly recognized that Reagan would be in the White House for another four years, and that they would have to deal with him in some way.
The president was especially interested in high-profile summitry in Washington and Moscow. Reagan realized that a summit in which a Soviet leader came to the United States, or in which an American president traveled to the Soviet Union, carried political meaning well beyond any such meeting on neutral ground. Only two Soviet leaders had ever come to Washington: Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 and Leonid Brezhnev in 1973. Nixon had been the only American president to visit Moscow.
Reagan was also under increasing pressure from some of America’s closest allies to start meeting face-to-face with Soviet leaders. West German chancellor Helmut Kohl was particularly eager. The acrimony between Washington and Moscow during Reagan’s first term had prevented West Germany from developing the closer economic ties it sought with Eastern Europe. “Our main interest was to get the second Reagan administration back to a summit with the Soviets, because we had learned that [West] Germany’s room for maneuver was dramatically restricted by this stalemate between the two superpowers,” recalled Horst Teltschik, Kohl’s foreign-policy adviser. “We felt that when they started the summits, we would get a new chance to develop our relations with the Central Europeans.”6
Kohl was the first Western European leader to visit the White House after Reagan’s reelection. On November 30, 1984, he persuaded Reagan to join with him in a statement that said the American president would be prepared for a summit with a Soviet leader at a “carefully prepared meeting.”7 The statement did not even mention the name of Chernenko, who by this time was terminally ill.
A few weeks later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited Camp David. She had just met in London with Gorbachev, then the rising star within the Politburo, who was already being viewed as a possible successor to Chernenko. During a speech in London, Gorbachev had talked about the possibility of reducing or even eliminating nuclear weapons. Thatcher had subsequently praised him in public, asserting that “we can do business together.” At Camp David, she told Reagan she thought Gorbachev was eager for change in Soviet policies. Reagan’s personal assistant, Jim Kuhn, later recalled that Thatcher’s early impressions of Gorbachev made a big impact upon Reagan.8
When Chernenko died less than three months later and Gorbachev was chosen to succeed him, Reagan moved with surprising alacrity. On March 11, 1985, the same day the Politburo named Gorbachev as the next general secretary of the Communist Party, Reagan wrote him a private letter in which he said: “I would like to invite you to visit me in Washington at your earliest convenient opportunity…. I want you to know that I look forward to a meeting that could yield results of benefit to both our countries and to the international community as a whole.”9 This was, in a sense, merely a cordial note to a new Soviet leader, but the significance could not be overstated: it was also Reagan’s first proposal for a summit, after more than four years in the White House.
Gorbachev responded two weeks later saying he had a “positive attitude” toward Reagan’s suggestion for a meeting. Gorbachev refused, however, to commit himself to a trip to Washington. When Secretary of State George Shultz attempted a few weeks later to arrange a Washington summit, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko replied, “Not possible. We can find a European city.”10
Even Reagan’s first two summits with Gorbachev, at Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavik in 1986, were viewed, at the time, merely as the forerunners to more important meetings in the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the main tangible result of Reagan’s initial meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva was the announcement that the two leaders had formally agreed to a summit in Washington and a subsequent one in Moscow. The press corps was informed that Reagan had extended a formal invitation to Gorbachev to visit Washington as the two men stood outside, without advisers, in a parking lot near Lake Geneva; Gorbachev was said to have accepted on the spot, and in return, invited Reagan to his own capital city. This version of events was meant to convey to the world a sense of spontaneity and personal intimacy between the two leaders. The reality was that Reagan had worked out the plans for follow-on summits well in advance of Geneva through private negotiations in Washington with Dobrynin.11
After Geneva, Gorbachev had balked at setting a date for a Washington summit. This time, it was the Soviets’ turn to seek concessions in advance, in the same way as the United States had done during Reagan’s early years in the White House. Gorbachev didn’t want to travel to Washington until the two sides had first settled on specific agreements on arms control that could be signed while he was there.
The Reagan-Gorbachev meeting at Reykjavik in October 1986 is now considered the most significant and tumultuous of all the sessions between the two leaders, because it was there that they suddenly began to discuss the possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons and missiles. Yet at the time, Reykjavik wasn’t even characterized as a full-blown summit; it was, rather, a hastily arranged business meeting whose purpose was merely to lay the groundwork for a summit in Washington. The meeting is “in no sense [a] substitute or surrogate for a summit,” one National Security Council official wrote in a memo preparing for the meeting. Indeed, Reagan’s desire for a Washington summit quickly became one part of the intense bargaining at Reykjavik.
“By the way, could we talk about the date for your visit? Are you going to give your suggestions, or should I name a date?” Reagan asked the Soviet leader during the opening morning of their talks there. Gorbachev avoided answering the question. “I will complete my thought,” he said, returning to a discussion of arms control.12
Reykjavik had ended in disarray, and by early 1987 there was still no date for the Washington summit, even though such an event had been under discussion for nearly two years. Gorbachev was still eager to complete one or more arms-control agreements before he agreed to visit.
By the early months of 1987, Reagan and his wife, Nancy, were becoming increasingly impatient for a Gorbachev visit. Iran-Contra had shattered the president’s popularity and threatened the collapse of his presidency. With the Democrats in control of Congress, Reagan had little hope of winning approval for any significant initiatives in domestic policy. One way of counteracting the devastating impact of Iran-Contra was to deliver ringing speeches, such as the one at the Berlin Wall. Yet the Reagans were also eager for something more tangible, some foreign-policy achievements that would extend beyond the realm of rhetoric. High-profile meetings with Gorbachev would serve this purpose.
Nancy Reagan had emerged alongside her husband as a strong and determined proponent of a summit with Gorbachev in the United States. Mrs. Reagan had been influential since the start of the administration. Inside the White House, Reagan referred to his wife as “Mommy,” a nickname that let others know of her weighty but ambiguous role. World leaders paid unusually close attention to Nancy Reagan, scrutinizing her attitudes and her views. “Mrs. Reagan had a big problem with us Germans—she obviously harbored great suspicions because of the Nazis,” reflected former West German chancellor Helmut Kohl two decades later. Kohl ascribed Nancy Reagan’s suspicion of Germans to the influence of her Jewish friends in Hollywood (an implausible notion, since Ronald Reagan, whom Kohl found to be congenial to Germans, had the same Hollywood friends as his wife).13