The Presidency: I Think I Have Some Room to Maneuver

No butterflies in his stomach, no stage fright or sweaty palms. Ronald Reagan is booming over the phone, discussing his hopes and ideas as he prepares for Reykjavík.

“Maybe my first statement after I go in and sit down with General Secretary Gorbachev should be: ‘Well . . .?'” There is a long pause, and then the President chuckles softly and adds, “Here I am.”

That is, in fact, precisely the type of opening one would expect from Reagan, even at a historic confrontation. There is no guile in his manner. What you see, you get.

Despite the preparations he still must attend to, Reagan is willing to ruminate about his sense of the importance of the Iceland meeting, about how two men in a strange and distant room can shatter the world or heal it. “When I sat down with Gorbachev in Geneva, I told him that here were two individuals in a room who either could provide peace for the world or could bring about World War III,” says Reagan, his voice taking on a tone of urgency. “We needed to work to eliminate the mistrust between us and then the armaments that could lead to destruction.”

Before all of that there is this man-to-man exercise, the palpable event of settling into one of those big, brown leather chairs (Reagan carefully studied the advance pictures of the stark Reykjavík meeting room) and looking into the eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev and trying to discern what they are saying even as strange language tumbles out of his lips and is unscrambled by an interpreter between them.

“I am curious about what brought this flat-out invitation to meet now,” says Reagan. “He’s concerned about the summit, I think. He wants to be sure that we have a summit that will produce something.”

But more is at work in the world these days. The President’s voice hints that he senses a yearning the world over for reducing tension, for paying more heed to people’s needs. Maybe, he muses, they sense it in the Soviet Union too. “I’ve never believed I could break new ground with the General Secretary, that I could make him abandon his beliefs and embrace ours. The leopard is not going to change his spots. But what we do there can be for his good too.”

Reagan has some street smarts, conditioning that comes from being slapped around a good deal by critics on the right and left in his own country and from dealing for six years with a wily and unpredictable adversary.

“Somebody said the second most stupid thing in the world that a man could say was that he could understand the Russians,” declares the President. “I’ve often wondered what in hell was the first.” But, he adds, he certainly realizes the futility of believing the Russians can be fully understood.

Yes, insists Reagan, he will note every move Gorbachev makes, he will weigh his body language, his gestures. “I’ll watch all those things,” says Reagan. “His tone, his mood, his look. I’ve been doing that since I was a labor negotiator in California. In Geneva, when the Secretary posed his ideas, I could see that they were based on true belief and the statements that the Soviet Union put out. He really believes them. It was plain to me that I had to answer back just as earnestly about our beliefs. There is no question that he is intelligent, that he is dedicated to their system.”

And yet, and yet, Reagan is convinced that something special, something that was good and perhaps enduring, happened between them as one man to another man in Geneva. Now to keep it going.

Reagan will try humor, because last time when he told his few jokes to Gorbachev, the Soviet chief’s eyes lighted up. Humor sometimes penetrates heavy shadows when other thrusts fail.” It really was natural with him,” says the President. “I had a good supply of jokes, and I’ll have a few new ones for this time.”

Before he left for Iceland, Reagan tried a couple of his new jokes on his staff. They were so earthy that the staff voted thumbs down. Reagan, undaunted, laughed heartily. He may be keeping something about Gorbachev even from them. “We achieved a certain personal chemistry,” Reagan says. “There was no animosity. I think I have some room to maneuver with him. He is not a total czar in his nation. He has his own problems like I have mine. He needs to go home with something.”

Doesn’t Ronald Reagan? “Yup,” says the President, sounding as if he were off somewhere in the desert ready to ride into high noon. “But I am not going to agree to something that is not good just to have an agreement.”

By the usual standard of superpower face-offs, Reagan’s preparation for this one has been minimal. Reagan, for all his joviality, made clear that he was heading off to Iceland very much on his guard. He eyed the photo of the Hofdi guesthouse, the austere cottage where they will meet, and asked, “What about the ghosts?” There were a lot of wonderful stories about ghosts and elves, he was told.

Reagan loved the intrigue. He went through the schedule, got a weather report and recalled that he had left his fur hat at Camp David. He had learned a bit about Iceland, he noted, from Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising, which vividly depicts the island’s crucial importance to NATO. He also remembered an astronaut’s saying that the moon was nicer than training in Iceland.

But all that is prologue. The moment is here, as swift a job of casting and production as Reagan can recall. On the phone, his familiar voice sounds like that of an American heartlander who was somehow picked out to star in this drama, feeling his way but absolutely undaunted.

“I’m a little bit upbeat,” says the President. “The hardest thing to deal with is the Marxist-Leninist policy that says the Soviet Union must create one Communist world. That has to be countered. If they come to realize that our feelings about each other’s system do not mean we can’t live together, then we can live in this world in peace.”