Cold War: Geneva (Reagan-Gorbachev) Summit (Shultz memoirs)

[Valin]

The Margaret Thatcher Foundation:

The Summit Begins

On Tuesday, November 19, the summit began. Ronald Reagan greeted Mikhail Gorbachev at 10:00 a.m. with an engaging smile. Flashbulbs lit[fo 1] the landscape. The image was dramatic: the hatless, coatless seventy-four-year-old who had bounded out energetically in the bitter cold to greet the leader twenty years his junior. In the photos, Gorbachev – in topcoat and brown fedora – looked older than the president. President Reagan steered his guest into a side room for what was planned to be a meeting of about twenty minutes. Thirty went by, then forty. Jim Kuhn , the president's personal assistant and keeper of the schedule, approached me asking whether he should go in and give the president an opening to break up the meeting. What did I think?

"If you're dumb enough to do that, you shouldn't be in your job," I said, perhaps a bit harshly, as Don Regan , I discovered later, had sent him to me with the question. The rest of us, Americans and Soviets, sat around the large table that had been set up in the villa's dining room, engaged in casual conversation, and stared through the high windows at the frozen scene outside. While the president and Gorbachev met, I spent the time in conversation with Shevardnadze . We agreed to go through our own agenda when our bosses were meeting as a way to prepare ground for them. We started on regional issues, beginning with a mutual assessment of developments in Southern Africa.

After about an hour and a quarter, the leaders emerged, smiling. The president later told me that he and Gorbachev hit it off well. The president described how he brought up the importance of human rights and said that the balance of their talk had been a short version of what had followed at the big table.

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