Geneva Summit (1985)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Geneva Summit of 1985 brought Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev face to face for the first time on the 19th of November, 1985, in a lakeside villa called Fleur d'Eau in Versoix, Switzerland. No serious arms reduction treaty would emerge from those three days. No grand bargain would be struck. Yet the two men who held the fate of nuclear war in their hands agreed, at the end of it all, to keep talking. How two leaders who fundamentally distrusted each other's systems managed even that modest result is a story of calculated imagery, surprising candor, and a stalled conversation over alien invasions. The questions hanging over Geneva were not only about missiles and treaties. They were about whether two men from rural backgrounds on opposite sides of the planet could sit across a fireplace and find enough common ground to avoid catastrophe.

• 2. The Road to Geneva

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  Gorbachev had been general secretary for only two months when the first quiet feelers about a meeting went out. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko approached Secretary of State George Shultz discreetly in Vienna in May 1985, asking him to begin planning for the two leaders to meet. The choice of venue turned into an early test of will. Reagan wanted Gorbachev to come to Washington, D.C., arguing that two previous American presidents, Nixon and Ford, had both traveled to the Soviet Union in 1974 and that it was now the Soviets' turn. Gorbachev held out for neutral ground. Geneva was agreed upon sometime in June 1985.

  Back in Washington, Reagan's advisors Bud McFarlane and Jack Matlock had identified a problem with the president himself. Reagan, they concluded, still tended to base his judgments about the Soviet Union more on generalities and slogans than on a nuanced understanding of Soviet reality. Beginning in June 1985, a series of briefing papers was written for him, organized to give Reagan a rounded picture of the country and its people.

  Even the question of where the Reagans would sleep in Geneva passed through an unusual filter. The White House advance team identified two possible residences, but Nancy Reagan vetoed the first choice. After consulting with her astrologer, Joan Quigley, Nancy Reagan insisted on Maison de Saussure, the same residence President Eisenhower had used during the Geneva Summit of 1955. Quigley also specified the exact departure time from Andrews Air Force Base: 8:35 in the morning, a detail that made its way unaltered into the official schedule.

• 3. The Coat and the Fireplace

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  Jack Matlock later wrote that the summit's planners spent as much time on presentation and appearance as on the substantive issues themselves. William J. Henkel, who headed the White House advance team to Geneva, attended to every detail of imagery: where the press pool would stand, what would appear in the background of photographs, how to position Reagan as the dominant partner in the dialogue.

  The first morning at Fleur d'Eau produced the summit's most reproduced image. When the Soviet motorcade deposited Gorbachev at the villa's eastern facade, Reagan stepped outside without his overcoat to greet him. Reagan had actually been wearing an overcoat and scarf, but his personal aide, Jim Kuhn, urged him to take them off for appearance's sake. Commentators quickly read the image of Reagan in his blue suit beside a bundled Gorbachev as a sign of Reagan's vitality.

  The pool house fireplace was equally deliberate. According to Matlock, it was Henkel's idea to have a fire burning there when Reagan would invite Gorbachev in for a private chat during their planned walk. White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes described the whole episode to reporters as spontaneous: the two leaders had ended their afternoon meeting fifty minutes early, strolled to the lake accompanied only by interpreters, and then happened upon the pool house. Speakes did not explain to the Los Angeles Times how a pool house the leaders supposedly discovered on an unplanned walk had managed to have two chairs and an active fireplace ready and waiting. When pressed, he said, with apparent amusement, that it was probably one of those pool houses that keeps a twenty-four-hour-a-day fire.

• 4. Alien Invasions and Arms Proposals

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  The pool house conversation that followed the staged walk turned out to be among the more unusual exchanges in Cold War diplomatic history. Speaking with a group of Maryland high school students shortly after the summit, Reagan revealed that he had raised with Gorbachev the prospect of an alien invasion, telling the students: "I couldn't help but say to him, just think how easy his task and mine might be if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet outside in the universe." Reagan's reasoning was that such a shared threat would dissolve the differences between the superpowers and reveal that both sides were, in the end, human beings together on the same planet.

  In a 2009 interview, Gorbachev confirmed the exchange. He said Reagan asked whether the Soviet Union would help the United States if it were invaded by aliens. Gorbachev said yes, and Reagan replied that the United States would do the same.

  The pool house session also carried more conventional business. Reagan presented Gorbachev with two pages listing nine separate arms control proposals. Gorbachev read them as a package deal, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, and indicated that the items as stated were not acceptable. Despite the impasse, the walk back from the pool house produced an agreement of a different kind: the two leaders decided they would continue meeting at further summits. The first private meeting, scheduled for fifteen minutes, had already run well past its allotted time. That overrun was almost certainly explained by the mechanics of consecutive translation, the mode used in the private sessions, which by its nature tends to double the time spent on any exchange.

• 5. Human Rights and a Controversial Interview

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  Much of the third private meeting, held at the Soviet Mission on the 20th of November, was spent on human rights. Reagan focused specifically on the desire of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, citing the large Jewish community in the United States and its influence on Congress. Reagan was careful about framing: he told Gorbachev that any progress on emigration would be handled quietly, with no suggestion that it resulted from American pressure. He argued this approach would make it easier for him to pursue areas of cooperation with the Soviets, including trade, for which he needed Congressional support.

  Gorbachev countered that human rights were being used as a political weapon, not only by anti-Soviet organizations but by officials of the U.S. Administration, including the president himself. He stated that the fate of Jewish people was of concern to the Soviet government and that after what the Fascists had done to the Jews, the Soviet Union had done everything it could to give them special attention.

  While this private exchange was underway, White House Chief of Staff Don Regan was generating a separate controversy. An interview he had given on the eve of the summit to the Washington Post landed on the summit's second day with damaging effect. Regan had suggested that news coverage of the first ladies' interactions would appeal to women in particular because women would not understand the summit's political, diplomatic, and military intricacies. The remarks drew immediate condemnation from politicians including Patricia Schroeder and Bella Abzug. Both Reagan and Gorbachev were asked to respond as they entered the Soviet Mission that morning, making Don Regan's comments a public subplot of a summit meant to project superpower seriousness.

• 6. The Fight Over the Final Statement

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  On the evening before the summit's concluding ceremony, Reagan and Gorbachev clashed over something that might have seemed minor: whether to issue a written communique, a verbal statement, or both. Gorbachev preferred a written document, arguing that it would better reflect the significance of what had been agreed and that allowing the leaders to speak extemporaneously risked an unfortunate phrase that would undermine the weight of their agreements.

  Reagan pushed hard for a verbal statement. His reasoning, documented in the memorandum of conversations, was frank: the summit had not produced the kind of major agreements the public might have expected, and a purely written document might leave people feeling disappointed. A verbal statement, Reagan argued, would reassure the public that the two leaders intended to keep meeting and that the process had value even without a dramatic breakthrough. He told Gorbachev that hope in the world had grown as a result of the summit and that people should not be disappointed.

  Gorbachev remained uneasy. The memorandum records him saying that there was no need for rose-colored glasses and that producing a document neither side fully believed in and then commenting warmly on it would only reinforce what was not there. Reagan acknowledged the concern but held to his position: it would be better for people who had placed hope in these meetings to hear that the two of them were going to continue meeting than to leave Geneva in silence. Gorbachev relented and agreed to a brief verbal statement of one to three minutes. Reagan quickly concurred that it had always been his intention to keep it short.

• 7. Agreements and Gifts

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  On the 21st of November, 1985, Reagan and Gorbachev held a joint press conference at Geneva's International Conference Center, the CICG. The formal results were modest by the standard of earlier Cold War summits. The Northern Pacific Air Safety accord, already signed, was to be implemented; its aim was to prevent a repeat of the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in September 1983. An agreement was signed on opening consulates in Kiev and New York. Regular dialogue on future summit meetings was formalized. Forty-one cultural exchange agreements were also signed, including the restart of exchanges of theatrical and artistic groups and major art exhibitions that had been suspended after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

  Both leaders gave press statements that acknowledged the gap between what was hoped and what was achieved, while insisting the process itself was the result. Gorbachev said plainly that the most important problems concerning the arms race had not been solved at the meeting and that important disagreements on matters of principle remained. Reagan said the real report card on Geneva would not come in for months or even years.

  The exchange of gifts reflected each side's self-understanding. Reagan gave Gorbachev a Colonial Williamsburg Chippendale-style mahogany box and desk set with fountain pens, carrying the theme "peace through communications," chosen in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz space mission. Gorbachev gave Reagan a set of sixteen bronze medallions in a leather case representing the fifteen constituent Soviet Republics along with the combined Soviet Union. Reagan then flew to Brussels to brief allies before addressing a joint session of Congress back in Washington. Gorbachev stopped in Prague to brief the Warsaw Pact.

• 8. What Geneva Started

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  By the time of the Geneva Summit, no meeting between an American president and a Soviet general secretary had taken place in six years. Both men left acknowledging that the summit had been less about signing agreements and more about establishing whether a relationship was possible at all. Reagan said the meetings expressed the will and desire of both sides to find answers that would benefit not only all the people of the world but also the yet unborn. Gorbachev framed it in terms of laying the first few bricks: a new start, a new phase.

  Jack Matlock's account of the planning process captures what distinguished this summit from a purely diplomatic exercise. The Reagan White House treated presentation as a first-order problem, as serious as the policy positions themselves. The Soviet advance team, Matlock noted, was obsessively protective of their leader's status but had little experience dealing with Western journalists and was no match for their American counterparts when it came to setting the stage. The image of Reagan without his coat, the roaring fire in the pool house, the choreographed spontaneity of the lakeside walk: all of it was engineered to project confidence and to define the visual terms of the encounter.

  The forty-one cultural exchange agreements signed at the CICG on the 21st of November were among the most concrete outputs of those three days, a quiet reopening of people-to-people ties that had been frozen since Afghanistan.