The Moscow Summit : Reagan and Gorbachev: 2 ‘Who Respect Each Other’

MOSCOW —  Ronald Reagan, sensitive as perhaps only a professional actor could be, had a complaint that he wanted relayed to Mikhail S. Gorbachev:

“You tell Mr. Gorbachev some of my shows were A-rated,” Reagan said one day to Georgy A. Arbatov, the noted Soviet expert on U.S. affairs.

It was a good-natured complaint, prompted by Arbatov’s crack that Reagan had been a B-rated movie actor, and Arbatov cited it as an example of the extent to which the two leaders are now getting along: the former actor, now President, good-humoredly pretending to bristle at the idea that Gorbachev, like others, may have once considered him but a second-rate player.

No matter that it was Arbatov who had actually made the slight.

And so, when Ronald Wilson Reagan and Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev sat down together Sunday in St. Catherine’s Hall in the Kremlin, they came together, if not as two old friends, then as well-acquainted world leaders whose no-longer embryonic relationship plays a central role in the otherwise impersonal world of arms control and superpower rivalry.

“If you saw their reactions in the welcoming ceremony, you saw two people who have a respect for each other,” said White House Communications Director Tom Griscom.

Gorbachev’s Wariness

“It’s interesting to watch the two of them,” said a White House official who has had the opportunity to observe Reagan and Gorbachev together at close range. “You see the Ronald Reagan-polite-to-everyone instinctively open up to this guy . . . and you see Gorbachev, who has an instinctive wariness--Gorbachev sort of looking at him as if to say, ‘Is this guy for real and what’s coming next?’

“It appears to me that although Gorbachev may be reluctant to admit it, there is a physical comfort with each other,” this official said.

Indeed, Reagan, asked during an interview with foreign reporters in Washington before setting out for Moscow whether he considered Gorbachev “a real friend,” replied, “I can’t help but say yes to that.”

He continued: “The difference that I’ve found between him and other previous leaders that I have met with is that, yes, we can debate and we disagree, and it is true he’s made it apparent that he believes much of the Communist propaganda that he’s grown up hearing about our country--the big corporations and whether they dictate . . . to government or not. I try to disabuse him of those beliefs. But there is never a sense of personal animus when the arguments are over.”

For his part, Gorbachev is less forthcoming in discussing Reagan, saying in an interview with the Washington Post published May 22, “I’m not particularly fond of giving personal character references.”

But, he added, “I would like to say that realism is an important quality in President Reagan as a politician. By this, I mean the ability to adapt one’s views to the changing situation, while remaining faithful to one’s convictions.”

Yet all is not sweetness and light between the two:

“When they get together, Gorbachev reacts to what he thinks is the President’s lecturing and tries to demonstrate his technical knowledge to the point of trying to show the President up,” a White House official said, adding:

“The President doesn’t let himself be drawn into it. He tries to deal with the issues on a more basic level. He tries to make a point by (going) slow and steady.”

Arbatov, who as head of the Soviet Union’s U.S.A. and Canada Institute views the other half of the same coin, has also seen the relationship develop from the first, perhaps awkward and certainly anxious, meeting in Geneva in November, 1985.

“I have never heard Mr. Gorbachev complain” regarding the relationship with Reagan, Arbatov said in an interview with The Times. “I think they can understand each other. They can each have their frustrations.”

U.S. No ‘Evil Empire’

Referring to Reagan’s denunciation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” in March, 1983, the Soviet official added that Gorbachev “never thought of the United States as an evil empire, so he never thought of Reagan with horns and hoofs.”

Yet if all outward signs indicate that the two leaders have struck up a special relationship--”a personal chemistry,” one senior White House official says--there are those who question its depth and indeed its importance.

Yes, the President did suggest during the Washington summit last December that in private, the general secretary could call him Ron, and Gorbachev replied that he could be addressed as Mikhail, even as they used the more formal “Mr. President” and “Mr. General Secretary” in public.

Rozanne L. Ridgway, the assistant secretary of state whose territory of responsibility includes the Soviet Union, raised questions about this when she said that perhaps they address each other familiarly “when nobody else is in the room, but I have not seen them deal with each other on a first-name basis.”

But, said Stephen R. Sestanovich, the former director of policy development on the White House National Security Council staff, “I don’t think that we know that they get along. Moreover, in some ways, they may not know either.

A Political Relationship

“They’re not demonstrating a personal relationship. They’re demonstrating a political relationship, and that’s one in which friendship doesn’t count as much as national interests,” Sestanovich said in Washington before the summit began.

“Each has certain objectives, which can be achieved even if they don’t get along famously, and if they do get along famously, they still might not achieve their objectives.”

He added: “Whether Reagan likes Gorbachev probably doesn’t matter. Whether he has confidence Gorbachev is seriously on a reformist track that will mean real change in foreign and domestic matters does matter. How much confidence he has in Gorbachev as a serious reformer does depend on what he sees of the man in the meetings. But that’s not the same as liking him.”

Richard Pipes, a Soviet affairs expert at Harvard University who was a key government adviser on U.S.-Soviet relations at the start of the Reagan Administration, is even more skeptical.

“From the Soviet point of view,” he said, the relationship between the two leaders “matters very little” because “they exploit personalities.”

Reliance on Personal Relations

On the other hand, “it matters to the President enormously because he reacts to people and bases his policy on personal relations.”

“If he didn’t like Gorbachev, our policy would be very different,” Pipes said, adding that Reagan “doesn’t know much about the Soviet Union, he doesn’t care about the Soviet Union.”

But, said a senior White House official who is familiar with the President’s thinking, Reagan’s expressions of trust in Gorbachev means that he accepts what the Soviet leader says “at face value,” rather than that he believes “every word” Gorbachev utters.

Gorbachev, said the senior official--who has known every Soviet leader since Nikita S. Khrushchev, who was deposed in 1964--”is not only a skillful intellect, but he is also a world leader, and he still heads up the ‘evil empire’ and the President has no illusions about that.”

As surprising as it may seem that the same Reagan who built his political reputation to a large extent on a hard-line approach to the Soviet Union is now warming to a Soviet leader (“a different Soviet leader,” Reagan calls Gorbachev), it is Gorbachev who may have the most to gain from this relationship in the view of some experts.

Gorbachev a ‘Talented Fellow’

“Gorbachev is a very talented fellow (who) believes he is something of a magician when dealing with foreigners. He would try to be the very visible host in charge of events” during the summit, said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the former State Department counselor who played a major role in U.S.-Soviet policy during the era of detente promoted by Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford in the 1970s.

“That would help him domestically,” Sonnenfeldt said.

Questioning whether the U.S. relationship with Moscow could have progressed to the extent it has had Gorbachev not taken over as Communist Party general secretary in March, 1985, he said:

“Gorbachev needs more momentum at home--acceptance of what he’s doing, if not approval--greater respect for the Soviet Union as a great power, and it is important for the Soviets to pin down Reagan on this general tack” that the overall U.S.-Soviet relationship has taken.

And, said a U.S. government analyst, speaking on the condition of anonymity, the three previous encounters with Reagan--in Geneva, Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, and Washington--have allowed Gorbachev to learn Reagan’s strengths and weaknesses: “What he’s like and how you have to be very conscious of the way you deal with him, depending on what you want to do.

“He learned what not do to at Reykjavik,” this source said, referring to the October, 1986, summit that broke down when Gorbachev pushed too hard to persuade Reagan to relax his support for the “Star Wars” missile defense program.

“He learned how the President could use the media at Geneva. He learned pretty much how best to maneuver with the President in Washington,” he said.