Tortuous Path to the Summit

By Ed Magnuson

For Ronald Reagan, the road to his first meeting with a Soviet leader has been bumpy and twisting. Driven by a lifelong visceral anti-Communism, he campaigned for the White House in 1980 by charging that detente was "an illusion" and that the arms-limitation treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union was "fatally flawed." At his first presidential press conference on Jan. 29, 1981, Reagan set a chilly tone. The Soviets, he said, "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat" in pursuit of world domination. Only three months later, the President adopted a pragmatic course that belied his hostile words: he lifted the ineffective grain embargo that Jimmy Carter had imposed on Soviet trade after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Ever since, the Administration's policy toward the Soviet Union has had a typically Reaganesque twist: harsh ideological rhetoric tempered by moves rooted in an emerging realism. The inconsistency has caused relations between the two superpowers to blow hot and cold. Mostly, they have blown cold.

The Reagan Administration was eight months old before the White House and the Kremlin could even agree to hold a high-level get-acquainted meeting; Secretary of State Alexander Haig received Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in New York in September 1981. Despite earlier reservations, Reagan took a first step toward arms control in November, unveiling his zero-option proposal to cancel the planned U.S. deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would dismantle its existing SS-20 missiles aimed at European targets. The offer was rejected, but talks on limiting such intermediate nuclear forces (INF) began the same month in Geneva. That December the Soviet-dominated government of Poland cracked down forcefully on growing unrest. Reagan reacted as impractically as Carter had, ordering U.S. companies to stop helping the Soviets build a natural-gas pipeline to Western Europe and later asking European allies to join the boycott by renouncing a raft of potentially profitable deals. They refused.

Hope for better relations grew in November 1982, when Yuri Andropov succeeded the deceased Leonid Brezhnev and the U.S. lifted the pipeline sanctions. But on March 8, 1983, Reagan reverted to his earlier themes, castigating the Soviet Union as "an evil empire." Soviet diplomats still refer bitterly to the speech. That same month the President proposed his Star Wars missile defense scheme, which has developed into a major element in U.S. strategic planning and a persistent obstacle to any new arms agreement.

When Soviet jet fighters shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan in September 1983, the justifiable U.S. outrage sent relations into a deep freeze. Two months later the first Pershing missiles were deployed in England and the Soviets walked out of the arms talks. Relations dropped to their lowest level since cold war days.

The political realities of 1984 and its approaching presidential election prompted Reagan to tone down his anti-Soviet language and toss out hints that he might like to attend a summit meeting. Even after the Soviets announced in May that they would boycott the Olympics in Los Angeles, Reagan repeated his willingness to "meet and talk anytime" with Soviet leaders. But not until Sept. 24, just a few weeks before the election, did Reagan meet with any senior Soviet official. He talked to Gromyko after each had addressed the United Nations.

It took Reagan's overwhelming re-election triumph to persuade the Soviets in turn that their adversary must be dealt with. The Kremlin began to indicate a new willingness to talk. Last January, Secretary of State George Shultz and Gromyko met in Geneva and agreed that arms-control bargaining should resume. With the death of Andropov's successor, Konstantin Chernenko, in March, the Soviet Union had its third leadership change in 28 months. Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded to power, and both sides warmed up to the idea of a summit. By July, Reagan and Gorbachev had pinned down the date and place for their meeting. This week the two adversaries having reached Geneva by notably tortuous paths, will learn if they can walk a straight line in harmony even a short way. --By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Barrett Seaman/Washington

With reporting by Reported by Barrett Seaman/Washington