I hope, Mr. President, that you will feel from this letter that the Soviet leadership, including myself personally, intends to act vigorously as to find common ways to improving relations between our countries.
I think that it is also clear from my letter that we attach great importance to contacts at the highest level. For this reason I have a positive attitude to the idea you expressed about holding a personal meeting between us. And, it would seem that such a meeting should not necessarily be concluded by signing some major documents, though agreements on certain issues of mutual interest, if they were worked out by that time, could well be formalized during the meeting. The main thing is that it should be a meeting to search for mutual understanding on the basis of equality and account of legitimate interests of each other.
As to a venue for the meeting, I thank you for the invitation to visit Washington. But let us agree that we shall return again to the question of the place and time for the meeting.
M. Gorbachev
March 24, 1985
I can’t claim that I believed from the start that Mikhail Gorbachev was going to be a different sort of Soviet leader.
Instead, as this note in my diary five weeks after he became general secretary of the Communist Party indicates, I was wary:
“Met with our Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Art Hartman. He confirms what I believe, that Gorbachev will be as tough as any of their leaders. If he wasn’t a confirmed ideologue, he never would have been chosen by the Politburo.”
We’d have to be as tough as ever in dealing with the Soviets, I told George Shultz and others in the National Security Planning Group who were helping me coordinate our effort to improve relations with them, but I said we should work hard to establish channels directly between Gorbachev and me through quiet diplomacy—as I put it in the diary, “to lean on the Soviets one on one, not in the papers.”
The ball was now in his court regarding a summit. I’d given him an invitation.
The new round of arms negotiations got under way in Geneva, while I kept pressing Congress to approve the MX program so we could keep pressure on Moscow and make Gorbachev see the wisdom of bargaining in good faith. It took a lot of phone calls and meetings with congressmen, but in several close votes we beat back attempts to kill the MX, including a crucial 217-to-210 victory in the House.
In late March, I was awakened shortly after dawn by Bud McFarlane, who said Major Arthur D. Nicholson, Jr., a thirty-seven-year-old Army officer, one of fourteen U.S. military men based in East Germany, had been shot by a Soviet guard as he was legally reconnoitering border facilities in that country. It was all but wanton murder. The guard continued shooting after the officer fell, pinning down an American sergeant who might have gotten to Major Nicholson to administer first aid; by the time Soviet medics arrived an hour later, the major was dead. A few days later, Tip O’Neill and Bob Michel, the Republican leader in the House, were scheduled to lead a bipartisan Congressional group to the Soviet Union to meet Gorbachev. I gave them my blessing, plus a letter for Gorbachev in which I protested the killing of Major Nicholson and the continuing Soviet backing of insurgents in Third World countries. Here are excerpts from my letter:
I believe that new opportunities are now opening up in U.S.-Soviet relations. We must take advantage of them. You know my view that there are such opportunities in every area of our relations, including humanitarian, regional, bilateral and arms control issues. In improving stability, there is no more important issue than the arms control talks we have jointly undertaken in Geneva. Our negotiators have very flexible instructions to work with your negotiators in drafting agreements which can lead to radical reductions and toward our common goal, elimination of nuclear weapons. . . .
In seizing new opportunities, we must also take care to avoid situations which can seriously damage our relations. In addition to the personal tragedy of this brave officer, this act seems to many in our country to be only the latest example of a Soviet military action which threatens to undo our best efforts to fashion a sustainable, more constructive relationship for the long term.
I want you to know it is also a matter of personal importance to me that we take steps to prevent the recurrence of this tragedy and I hope you will do all in your power to prevent such actions in the future.
As you know, I look forward to meeting you personally at a mutually convenient time. Together I am confident that we can provide the important political impetus you mentioned in your last letter for moving toward a more constructive and stable relation between our two countries.
Let me close by affirming the value I place on our correspondence. I will be replying in greater detail to your last letter. I hope we can continue to speak frankly in future letters as we attempt to build stronger relations between ourselves and between our two countries.
Sincerely,
Ronald Reagan
April 4, 1985
Subsequently, the Soviet Union issued a statement saying it had ordered its sentries in East Germany not to use deadly force against Americans, an encouraging signal from the Kremlin. But almost at the same time Gorbachev met with Daniel Ortega and promised the Sandinistas continued Soviet financial support; we announced a U.S. trade embargo against Nicaragua. In May, Secretary of Commerce Mac Baldrige went to Moscow to discuss possible expansion of trade between our countries. I decided to use his trip as an opportunity to remind Gorbachev that while we were still hopeful of improved relations, we expected good deeds from Moscow before there could be a genuine thaw in our relationship—deeds ranging from permitting Soviet Jews and persecuted Christians to emigrate to ending Soviet interference in Central America. In a message Mac carried to Gorbachev for me, I said: “While I believe there is some action we can take now to facilitate trade, I doubt that there can be a fundamental change in our trade relationship without parallel improvements in other aspects of our relationship.”
About this same time, George Shultz told me he was tired and wanted to resign before the summer was over. I told him that from the time he took over as secretary of state, I never envisioned anyone but him serving me in that job. Although I said I didn’t have the heart to lean on him if he really wanted to go, I also said I really needed him, especially to look after our new approach to the Soviets. I think I convinced him how important he was to our hopes of improving relations with the Russians, and shortly before he left Washington for a meeting with Andrei Gromyko in Helsinki, George agreed to stay on the job. I asked him to suggest to Gromyko the possibility of a summit in mid-November in Washington and, if a subsequent meeting were held, a commitment to hold it in Moscow. If the Soviets insisted on a neutral locale for our first meeting, I suggested Geneva.
In a ten-page reply to my previous letter sent to me in early June, Gorbachev confirmed my intuition that he was going to be tough to deal with, and also my suspicion that he shared many of the misconceptions of his predecessors about America. Still, Gorbachev’s letter indicated that he took the question of improving our relations and reducing the threat of a nuclear war as seriously as I did. Addressing some of the complaints I’d raised about Soviet adventurism in Central America and other parts of the world, Gorbachev wrote:
. . . with regard to third world countries, we impose neither our ideology, nor our social system on anybody. And do not ascribe to us what does not exist. If the question is to be raised without diplomatic contrivances as to who contributes to the international law and order and who acts in a different direction, then it appears that it is precisely the U.S. that turns out to be on the side of the groupings working against legitimate governments. And what about direct pressure on the governments whose policy does not suit the U.S.? There are enough examples of both on various continents. . . .
I think a lot about the shape the affairs between our countries can take. I even more firmly believe in a point I made in my previous letter: an improvement in the relationship between the USSR and the U.S. is possible. There is objective ground for this.
Of course, differences and different views remained, but it was our interaction that was the determining factor and it opened up peaceful vistas. . . .
As to the assertions that the USSR is allegedly engaged in a “large research program in the area of strategic defense,” as the Americans put it, apples are confused with oranges. The Soviet Union does nothing that would contravene the ABM treaty, does not develop attack space weapons.
Mr. President, I would like to hope that you will have another close look at the problem of non-militarization of space and its interrelationship with solving the problem of nuclear weapons and from that angle, at the prospects for the Geneva negotiations. . . .
Gorbachev proposed that both our countries continue voluntary compliance with the SALT treaties, impose a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, ban space weapons, negotiate a reduction of conventional forces in Central Europe, and continue the process I had suggested of assisting each other in trying to see events through each other’s eyes:
One of the sources of tensions in the relations between the USSR and the U.S. is a difference in the assessment of what is going on in the world. It seems that the American side frequently ignores the in-depth causes of events and does not take fully into account the fact that today a great number of states operate—and most actively, too—in world politics, each with its own face and interests. All this immensely complicates the general picture. A correct understanding of the world helps avoid serious mistakes and miscalculations.
Without saying so, Gorbachev implied that the Soviets would like to extricate themselves from the war in Afghanistan and urged us to convince the Pakistanis not to support the Afghan rebels. If we did, it would be a “positive signal” from the U.S. side.
Some kind of movement seems to be discernible in the area of strictly bilateral relations between our countries. You, evidently, have noticed that we support this trend. However, there should be no misunderstanding concerning the fact that we do not intend and will not conduct any negotiations relating to human rights in the Soviet Union. We, as any other sovereign state, have regarded and will regard, these questions in accordance with our existing laws and regulations. Let us proceed, Mr. President, proceed from this in order not to aggravate adversely our relations. The development of our ties can be based only on mutual interest, equality and mutual benefit, respect for the rights and legitimate interests of each other . . . we live in a time when people shaping the policy of the USSR and the U.S. must necessarily meet, have contacts with each other. To speak in broad terms, we stand for building vigorously a bridge to mutual understanding and cooperation and for developing trust.
Gorbachev then asserted that he had a positive attitude about holding a summit conference between the two of us:
As to the place for holding it, I understand that there are motives which make you prefer the meeting to be held in the U.S. But I have no less weighty motives due to which, taking into account the present state of Soviet-American affairs, this variant is unrealistic. . . . Important international problems are involved and we should use the time to search for possible agreements which could be reached for the meeting. For our part, we are entirely for this.
About the same time Gorbachev was drafting this letter, a new hurdle appeared in the road leading to improved U.S.-Soviet relations: The unratified but voluntarily adhered-to SALT II treaty was scheduled to expire December 31 at the same time that some of our new weapons developed under the strategic modernization program were scheduled to come on line. If we put them into service, we’d have to remove older weapons to stay within the SALT limits.
Should we continue conducting our policies within these restrictions even though we knew the Soviets were cheating on them?
The point of decision on the issue was to come later in the year with the launching of our first new Trident missile-firing submarine; if we continued abiding by SALT II, we would have to scrap an older Poseidon submarine that had missiles of lesser capabilities.
I had always had great doubts about the SALT treaties. Cap Weinberger shared this view. Because he was convinced the Russians were violating the treaties, he wanted to go ahead and deploy the Trident submarines but not remove the Poseidon subs from service; on this some of my conservative supporters expressed a similar view. They believed America would look foolish continuing to adhere to the SALT limits in the face of Soviet cheating. On the other hand, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and some of our arms control negotiators said it was better for us to apply restraint and continue abiding by the limits because, they argued, we had little to gain militarily by not doing so, the Russians had lived up to the most important provisions of the treaties that limited offensive weapons, and it would be a red flag to them and those in the world who were hoping for a slowing of the arms race.
Although all of us agreed the Soviets were cheating on the SALT limits, we knew it might be difficult to prove it before the court of world opinion because of ambiguities in the treaties.
For the moment, I decided on a policy of guarded and cautious restraint, as these entries of my diary during June 1985 indicate:
June 4
An N.S.C. meeting about what to do about the SALT II treaty provisions we and the Soviets are pledged to observe but on which they are cheating. Come Sept., under our agreement we’d have to dismantle a Poseidon missile submarine. I was again presented five options with no consensus on any of them. Our allies want us to continue observing SALT II. I must have an answer before Monday . . .
June 6
I made my decision on the SALT II matter. We will continue to practice restraint on the building of nuclear weapons. That restraint will keep us generally within the frame work of the SALT II but only commensurate with the Soviets’ observance of the SALT II restraints and for only as long as the Soviets abide by SALT II restraints.
June 10
. . . today we told Congress and the world what we intended doing about SALT II. Apparently my decision was right—at least I’m being called a statesman by both the left and right.
A few days later, I got a tough letter from Gorbachev in which he attacked our deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe as well as the qualifications I’d expressed in announcing the decision to continue abiding by the SALT limitations (I had reserved the right to change my mind if we became further convinced of Soviet violations).
Mr. President, your version of the past and present state of affairs cannot stand comparison with the facts . . . the United States crossed a dangerous threshold when it preferred to cast aside the practicality of the SALT treaty instead of taking up, as was envisaged, the resolution of those issues that were dealt with . . . it is no secret the U.S. wanted to do so, so it could deploy cruise missiles. The U.S. sought to sharply tilt in its favor the fine-tuned balance of interests underlying the agreement. Now you see, I believe, that it did not work out that way. We too are deploying cruise missiles, which we had proposed to ban. But even now we are prepared to come to an agreement on such a ban, should the U.S., taking a realistic position, agree to take such an important step.
The U.S. deployment in Western Europe of new missile systems designed to perform strategic missions is a clear circumvention, that is, noncompliance by the American side with regard to the SALT II treaty. In this, Mr. President, we see an attempt by the United States to gain a virtual monopoly on the use of weapons in a situation for which our country has no analogs. I know [the need] on your side . . . for some regional balance and sometimes control. But even in that case, it is incomprehensible why the U.S. refuses to resolve this issue in a man
ner which would establish in the zone of Europe a balance of medium-range missiles, whereby the USSR would not have more missiles and warheads on them than there are currently in the possession of England and France. Such a formula would not infringe upon anyone’s interest, whereas the distortion caused by the American missiles in Europe is not a balance at all. . . . I would like you to have a clear understanding of the fact that, in practice, strategic parity between our countries will be maintained. We cannot envisage now nor can we permit a different situation. The question, however, is at what level parity will be maintained—at a decreasing or an increasing one. We are for the former, for the reduction in the level of strategic confrontation. Your government, by all indications, favors the latter, evidently hoping that at some stage the U.S. will ultimately succeed in getting ahead. This is the essence of the current situation. Should one be surprised, then, that we are conducting negotiations, yet the process of practical arms limitations remains suspended? It would probably not be too great a misfortune if this process simply remained frozen. But even this is not the case. The “Star Wars” program—I must tell you this, Mr. President—already at this stage is seriously undermining stability. We strongly advise you to halt this sharply destabilizing and dangerous program while things have not gone too far. If the situation in this area is not corrected, we shall have no choice but to take steps required by our security and that of our allies . . . the SALT II treaty is an important element of the strategic equilibrium and one should clearly understand its role as well as the fact that, according to the well known expression, one can’t have one’s pie and eat it too.
An American Life Page 65
