Forward Spin

By George J. Church.

Flying home from Reykjavik at the start of last week, Ronald Reagan appeared to be winging from one debacle to another. The dejection in the President's carriage as he walked out of Hofdi house, the disappointment etched into every line of Secretary of State George Shultz's face as he briefed the press, had flashed an unmistakable message to TV watchers around the world: the summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev had ended in failure. Worse, headlines were already spreading the impression that Reagan had thrown away the promise of a nuclear-free world by clinging to his vision of a space-based defense -- even if there might be no missiles to defend against.

But even before Air Force One reached Washington, White House Spokesman Larry Speakes and Chief of Staff Donald Regan launched a campaign to reverse the downbeat impressions. They urged National Security Adviser John Poindexter to wander back into the press compartment of the plane. "Do you really want me to do it?" asked Poindexter, who had assiduously avoided the press during his first ten months in office. Assured that it was unavoidable, he conducted an 80-min. airborne briefing. While it was in progress, Regan and eight aides were sketching the next steps in what flowered into a publicity blitz unprecedented in this Administration. Its purpose: to persuade the U.S. and the world to emulate the optimistic child in one of Reagan's favorite jokes who finds a pile of manure in his room on Christmas morning and begins shoveling away, convinced that "there must be a pony here somewhere."

After his Monday night televised report to the nation, the Great Communicator took his case on the campaign trail. But his aides handled most of the spin control, trooping before every microphone, TV camera, journalistic conclave or group of citizens they could find or summon to uncover a pony of hope under what at first looked like the manure of Reykjavik. Shultz, who rarely sees the press, in two days invited himself to sessions with editors of the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and all three TV networks, then returned from a quick trip to El Salvador for a Friday speech to the National Press Club. Regan logged 23 sessions with newsmagazines, columnists and other journalists, while Poindexter got himself interviewed by representatives of British, French, German, Turkish and Norwegian TV stations. He sought out American reporters so avidly that ABC Correspondent Sam Donaldson, approached by Poindexter in a White House corridor, recoiled in mock horror and said, "No, no, you can't force me to interview you."

All told, the three top aides last week logged 44 briefings and interviews that, contrary to usual practice, were all on-the-record. A summit that had begun with a news blackout ended up producing a whiteout of pronouncements, amplifications and amended remarks.

This week aides will take the show on the road, fanning out to 15 areas from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles. Says Speakes, their dispatcher: "I told these guys they had to get an invitation to do a speech, then hold an open press conference, do a local television show and an editorial-board meeting with the local papers, and then they could come home." In every speech, interview and appearance, the spin doctors hammered at three main points:

-- It was Gorbachev, not Reagan, who had blocked a drastic reduction in nuclear weapons. He did so by demanding a price he should have known Reagan would never pay: confining all work on the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative to laboratory research for ten years.

-- The President had no choice but to reject this demand, which would have killed SDI. Said Reagan at a Baltimore rally for Republican Senatorial Candidate Linda Chavez: "SDI is America's insurance policy that the Soviets will begin living up to the arms control agreements that they've agreed to. SDI is one of the chief reasons the Soviets went to the summit and one of the primary reasons they'll come back again. SDI is the key to a world free of nuclear blackmail."

-- Most important, the summit was not a failure but, in its way, an astonishing success. It brought the world to the brink of a deal that seemed unimaginable before Reagan and Gorbachev arrived in Iceland: destruction of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe and a radical reduction of their number in Soviet Asia; a 50% slash in the superpowers' long-range ballistic missiles in five years and their total elimination after five more -- to name only the most striking elements of the bargain that was almost struck. Now that these proposals have been made, the U.S. says they cannot be withdrawn, and the American side will bring them up again and again in negotiations in Geneva. Says Donald Regan about the Soviets: "They put it on the table, and we are going to hold them to it."

This case is not entirely consistent. If the Administration is correct in arguing that the summit showed the stopping of SDI to be Gorbachev's goal of goals, then it is hard to discern much ground for its simultaneous contention that the Reykjavik meeting brought a comprehensive arms deal much closer. Says Poindexter: "If they really want to kill SDI, which it appears is their motivation, there is no way we can come to an agreement on that. There is no way we would ever agree to eliminate all ballistic missiles without a defense system."

Nonetheless, in painting the summit as a success, the Administration got an assist from, of all people, Gorbachev. The Soviet leader launched his own spin-doctoring campaign as soon as the summit broke up, dispatching 15 diplomats to 35 countries from Austria to Zimbabwe. On successive days, Max Kampelman and Victor Karpov, the heads of the American and Soviet arms- negotiating teams in Geneva, turned up in Bonn to conduct briefings for the West German government. Tuesday night Gorbachev, like Reagan a day earlier, went on television to give his version of the summit events to his fellow countrymen.

In one sense, the Soviet campaign is a mirror image of the Reagan Administration's p.r. blitz. It sought to pin the blame squarely on the U.S. for blocking a deal that Gorbachev said could have constituted a "turning point in world history." In his TV speech the Soviet leader at times took a condescending, almost derisive tone toward Reagan, portraying the President as a confused leader "demonstrating his complete ignorance and misunderstanding of . . . the socialist world." But Gorbachev was as insistent as any Reaganaut in denying that the summit had failed. Said Gorbachev: "The work that went on during the meeting will not be wasted . . . We have cleared the path toward developing further struggle for peace and disarmament."

By week's end the Administration had reason to believe that its publicity campaign was paying off. In a poll for TIME by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 45% of the respondents thought Gorbachev was primarily to blame for the failure to reach agreement at the Iceland summit, while only 14% said Reagan was mainly at fault. A thumping 69% said the President was right in refusing to restrict Star Wars as the price for a deal that would reduce nuclear arms. Day-to-day surveys taken for the White House by Richard Wirthlin showed Reagan's general approval rating jumping sharply from 64% just before the summit to 73% by last Tuesday night.

That seemed to defuse what otherwise might have been sharp criticism from Democrats campaigning for next month's congressional elections. Missouri Lieutenant Governor Harriett Woods, a liberal running for the Senate, contented herself with this bland comment: "I'm not saying the President should have accepted (Gorbachev's offer). I do think that the Administration must now define SDI's purpose more clearly."

Overseas, the governments of Britain, West Germany and Japan all expressed strong public support for Reagan's stand at Reykjavik. Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone chose to stress the progress made toward an agreement that would slash the number of Soviet SS-20 missiles targeted on his country rather than the failure to conclude the deal. Said Nakasone: "This progress . . . was made possible first of all by the unity of countries in the Western camp."

Such comments have a tinge of self-interest: the British, West German and Japanese governments have all signed up to participate in Star Wars research. But European leaders like West Germany's Helmut Kohl have other reasons to be glad that the final package was rejected. Kohl and his advisers were surprised by the sweeping nature of the proposals that, almost at a stroke, would have changed the military and nuclear balance of Western Europe. In private, they were frankly relieved that they still had time to look at the fine print of the offers rather than waking up to find they were back in an era of conventional warfare.

Nonetheless, much of Western Europe's press and expert opinion appeared to be impressed that the superpower leaders were at last talking seriously about deep slashes in nuclear arms. Even the antinuclear European left generally declined to indulge in Reagan bashing. In the Netherlands, the Inter-Church Peace Council deplored a "historic chance that was missed," but chastised the Soviets for linking reductions in intermediate-range nuclear weapons to restrictions on SDI.

For all the early success of its all-out spin-control operation, though, it is by no means certain that the Administration can maintain its momentum. The rise in Reagan's poll standings is the kind of rally-'round-the-President response that appears almost automatically at any time of intense concentration on foreign affairs, but usually disappears in a fortnight or so. Some aspects of the Administration's explanation of "what really happened" at Reykjavik seem inconsistent or even contradictory. Poindexter at first implied that it was Reagan who in effect brought the summit to an end by picking up his papers and walking out; later the White House amended that to say that Gorbachev reached for his briefcase before Reagan stood up in response. Poindexter, Shultz and others contend that they went to Reykjavik fully prepared for anything that might come up. Yet they admit, almost in the same breath, that they were surprised to find themselves in a detailed negotiation touched off by Gorbachev's unexpectedly sweeping arms-reduction proposals.

These points are scarcely of overwhelming importance in themselves. But they arouse skepticism at a time when credibility problems are already plaguing the Administration as a result of its alleged "disinformation" campaign about Libya and suspicions that the CIA has been aiding the Nicaraguan contras despite a congressional prohibition.

Critics already are raising some questions about the summit. Would confining SDI to laboratory research for ten years really kill all prospects of eventually deploying the defense shield? Reagan is on record that it would. Not all experts agree, but at the very least the ten-year proposal would give the Soviets more of a chance to catch up with U.S. technology. Are both sides absolutely clear on just what it was that they almost agreed to in Iceland -- specifically, would the near-deal on strategic weapons have eliminated only ballistic missiles or bombers and cruise missiles too? In either case, should the deal be revived, how would the Administration defend the U.S. and its allies against an overwhelming Soviet superiority in conventional arms without a nuclear deterrent? Shorter range, how can the Administration contend at the same time that it needs Star Wars to bring the Soviets back to the summit and + that it will never consent to bargaining away SDI?

It is this last question that most troubles critics in Congress who doubt that an effective defense against missiles can ever be built. In their view the program's value is precisely to serve as a bargaining chip. But Reagan's reluctance to use it is likely to intensify pressure in Congress to cut appropriations for SDI research even further below Administration requests. (The $3.5 billion appropriation for fiscal 1987, which began Oct. 1, is only about two-thirds of what the President had requested.) That movement will be all the greater if the Democrats win control of the Senate next month, a strong possibility that the summit outcome has not changed.

Reagan recognized that prospect in his Baltimore speech last week, appealing to voters not to elect "liberals" who would "chop up" SDI and thus, in effect, hand Gorbachev, free of charge, what he could not buy at a very high price in Reykjavik. Speakes later conceded that the speech had been "too shrill." Yet those in Congress who believe SDI should be a bargaining chip do face a dilemma: if they cut back funding for the program, which has so far been valuable in wangling serious concessions from the Soviets, it loses its value as a bargaining chip.

To head off cuts in SDI, Reagan needs to demonstrate continued progress toward the kind of deal he and Gorbachev could not bring off in Iceland. That in turn raises the most pressing question left hanging at the summit: which, if any, pieces of the package that fell apart in Reykjavik can be salvaged in lower-level negotiations? When arms-control talks resumed last week in Geneva, the U.S. immediately began probing. Said Chief of Staff Regan: "Right now, Max Kampelman is saying (to the Soviets), 'Our notes from Reykjavik show that we could agree on this. How do we get there?' " Secretary of State Shultz presumably will ask the same kind of questions of his frequent negotiating partner, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, when they meet again in Vienna in early November.

The Soviets so far have given contradictory answers. Negotiator Karpov told journalists in London last week that the West could still get a deal on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces weapons without a settlement on SDI. But Gorbachev told Argentine President Raul Alfonsin, who was visiting Moscow, that all his proposals at Reykjavik -- on INF, strategic weapons and SDI -- still constitute an "inseparable" package.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, the hardest-lining of all Pentagon hawks, still insists "there's the possibility of a compromise" on SDI. Presumably it would involve something between Gorbachev's demand for tight restrictions on testing and development and Reagan's insistence that the program not be "killed." That might involve finding some definition of "research" that allows testing of Star Wars components outside the lab yet does not constitute the development of an actual SDI system.

An important and substantive issue is involved in such distinctions. But as is the case with other issues in arms control, the difficulty of the problem may depend to a great extent on whether both sides perceive it to be difficult. That is why last week's concerted efforts by both sides to change perceptions about the arms control impasse at Reykjavik was so important: sometimes perceptions determine what is reality, instead of the other way around.

With reporting by David Beckwith and Johanna McGeary/Washington