Ronald Reagan had a dream of a world free of nuclear weapons. It was easy to ridicule. Many of his associates thought he was unbelievably naive. Dètente was dead. At the end of his first term, the arms race was Many of the people around Reagan had little regard for his intelligence or skill in foreign affairs. The hawkish coterie of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, CIA Director William Casey, several National Security advisers and most of the national security staff had been opposed to negotiations of any kind, but they were convinced it would be a catastrophe when Reagan himself got involved. Shultz had a different view. He believed that beneath Reagan's proclivity to ignore "tedious detail" lay "a bedrock of principle and purpose." He was right. He also believed that the accession of Gorbachev opened a door, and he was right again.
Reagan had little grasp of the stupefying complexities of differentiated American and Russian arsenals. Gorbachev was fluent in throw weights and telemetry. Reagan's memory for facts had always been weak. He preferred telling stories. In one anguished encounter, while he and Gorbachev fretted for the outcome of a last-minute wrangle on wording, he began a tale he had read in People magazine about a 1,200-pound man who got stuck in his bathroom doorway. Gorbachev tried to fathom the hidden relevance in Reagan's recital of the man's knee measurements. As Reagan's press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, tells it, Gorbachev took his ambassador into the men's room to ask what in the hell this 1,200-pound man was all about.
Reagan's team was always on pins and needles in negotiations when the President drifted into story mode. He was fondest of describing how Americans and Russians would unite to repel invaders of Earth from other planets by laser beams from his fanciful nuclear umbrella, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). "Oh, no," his aides would groan, "here come the little green men again." When Reagan went for his meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva, staff hung a sign from the low underhang of the stairs at the Villa Pometta. "Jerry Ford says watch your head, Mr. President." He laughed and continued laughing all the way to the motorcade. They need not have worried. As General Colin Powell observed, while Gorbachev was clearly superior to Reagan in mastery of the details, there was not a trace of condescension in his manner. He recognized that Reagan was "the embodiment of his people's down-to-earth character, practicality and optimism."
In four Reagan-Gorbachev summits,
in Geneva, Reykjav’k, Washington and Moscow, Shultz found a way to give form and articulation to Reagan's inchoate longings to be a great peacemaker. The breakthroughs were breathtaking. At Reykjav’k on October 11-12, 1986, where Reagan and Gorbachev had 9 hours and 48 minutes of face-to-face meetings, Gorbachev was forthcoming in nearly every area of arms control. He and Reagan astonishingly agreed on a first step to cut strategic nuclear forces in half. Then they got excited about the prospect of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether, including missiles and strategic bombers. "I have a picture," said Reagan, "that after ten years you and I come to Iceland and bring the last two missiles in the world and have the biggest damn celebration of it!"
One word-"one lousy word," said Reagan later-spoiled that picture. Gorbachev insisted on confining SDI to "laboratory" testing. And Reagan would not forsake his pet project. Remarkably, he offered to share it. Gorbachev feared SDI would expose the Soviets to an unanswerable strike. At midnight, haggard from the long day, the two men walked in silence from a supposedly haunted Hofdi House. "Mr. President," said Gorbachev when they reached Reagan's car, "you have missed a unique chance of going down in history as a great president who paved the way for nuclear disarmament." A gloomy Reagan answered: "That applies to both of us."
His hawks were appalled that he had offered to give up all nuclear weapons. They tried to cover it up. "They resembled," wrote Garry Wills, "a crew of absent-minded Frankensteins who had fiddled at separate parts of a monster for benevolent but widely varying purposes, only to see him break the clasps and rear himself up off the table in a weird compulsion to do some monstrous Good Thing that none of them had ever believed possible."
Reagan, beset at the same time by the Iran-contra fiasco, did not lose his nerve. He reaped a rich reward. In February 1987, Gorbachev said he would no longer let SDI stand in the way of a treaty to remove missiles from Europe and Asia. The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty the leaders signed on December 8, 1987, led to the first-ever agreement to destroy nuclear missiles: 859 of America's and 1,836 Soviet missiles with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles. That was only 4 percent of the nuclear arsenal but it was unprecedented and unpredicted, and it was an exhilarating prelude to the end of the Cold War.
deadlier than ever. America and the Russians had both evaded the SALT limits on launchers by adding multiple warheads to thousands of missiles. Reagan himself, having denounced the "evil empire," had called for more weapons to close a "window of vulnerability" created by the Russian lead in intercontinental missiles. The Soviets, for their part, saw his pledge to build an antimissile defense system as an attempt to gain a first-strike advantage. They installed SS-20 intermediate range missiles to hold Europe hostage. NATO retaliated with midrange Pershing missiles that could destroy Moscow in five minutes.
Alone among the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz tried to keep the lines open to the Kremlin after the Soviets walked out of arms talks in Geneva. He was reviled for his pains. According to George Bush, the National Security Council staff repeatedly sent Reagan "absolutely vicious memos" contradicting Shultz's own; Shultz wrote in his memoirs, "Apparently my office was bugged by the NSC." His big chance came with the accession of the dynamic reformist Mikhail Gorbachev in March 1985. By the end of the year, Shultz had Gorbachev, 54, and Reagan, 74, tucked away for a cozy fireside chat in the pool house of a lakeside château in wintry Geneva. They hit it off personally, but Washington worried about Reagan's ability to deal with Gorbachev. John Kennedy's 1961 humiliation by Khrushchev in Vienna was every diplomat's scar tissue.