TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=90TT2924> <link 93XP0256> <link 93XP0254> <link 93HT0824> <link 93HT0716> <link 93HT0606> <title> Nov. 05, 1990: Reagan Memoirs:American Dreamer </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 Nov. 05, 1990 Reagan Memoirs </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> EXCERPT, Page 60 COVER STORIES American Dreamer: The Memoirs Of Ronald Reagan By Ronald Reagan </hdr><body> [(c) 1990 by Ronald W. Reagan. From An American Life, to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc.] Nancy and I awoke early on the morning of Nov. 19, 1985, and at the first glimmer of daylight we looked out from our bedroom at the long gray expanse of Lake Geneva. There were patches of snow along the edge of the lake and in the gardens of Maison de Saussure, the magnificent lakeside 18th century residence that had been lent to us by Prince Karim, the Aga Khan. In the distance we could see the majestic peaks of the Alps. I had looked forward to this day for more than five years. For weeks I'd been given detailed information about the Soviet Union, nuclear-arms control and the new man in the Kremlin. In my diary the night before, I wrote, "Lord, I hope I'm ready." George Shultz told me that if the only thing that came out of this first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev was an agreement to hold another summit, it would be a success. But I wanted to accomplish more than that. I believed that if we were ever going to break down the barriers of mistrust that divided our countries, we had to begin by establishing a personal relationship between the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth. During the previous five years, I had come to realize there were people in the Kremlin who had a genuine fear of the United States. I wanted to convince Gorbachev that we wanted peace and that they had nothing to fear from us. So I had gone to Geneva with a plan: I wanted a chance to see Gorbachev alone. Since Gorbachev had taken office eight months earlier, he and I had exchanged a series of letters that had suggested to me he might be different from the Soviet leaders we had known before. That morning, as we shook hands and I looked into his smile, I sensed I had been right and felt optimistic that my plan might work. After the first round of meetings at Fleur d'Eau, I suggested to Gorbachev that the two of us walk down to a boathouse along the lakeshore for a breath of fresh air and a talk. He leaped out of his chair almost before I finished. A fire was roaring when we got to the cottage and sat across from each other in stuffed chairs beside the hearth. I had considered suggesting to him that we go on a first-name basis. But our experts had told me he wasn't likely to appreciate such informality at our first meeting, so I addressed him as Mr. General Secretary. I said I thought the two of us were in a unique situation. Here we were, I said, two men who had been born in obscure rural hamlets in our respective countries, each of us poor and from humble beginnings. Now we were the leaders of our countries and probably the only two men in the world who could bring about World War III. At the same time, I said, we were possibly the only two men who might be able to bring peace to the world. I said I thought we owed it to the world to use the opportunity that had been presented us to work at building the kind of human trust and confidence in each other that could lead to genuine peace. Listening to the translation, Gorbachev seemed to nod in agreement. As Gorbachev and I talked, it was clear he believed completely in the Soviet way of life and accepted a lot of the propaganda he'd heard about America: that munitions makers ruled our country, black people were treated like slaves, half our population slept in the streets. Yet I also sensed that he was willing to listen and that possibly he sensed, as I did, that myths and misconceptions on both sides of the Iron Curtain had contributed to misunderstandings and our potentially fatal mistrust of each other. He also had strong motives for wanting to end the arms race. He had to know that America's military technology was overwhelmingly superior to his. He had to know we could outspend the Soviets on weapons. "We have a choice," I told him. "We can agree to reduce arms, or we can continue the arms race, which I think you know you can't win. We won't stand by and let you maintain weapon superiority over us. But together we can try to do something about ending the arms race." Our meeting went on for an hour and a half, and when it was over I couldn't help thinking that something fundamental had changed in the relationship between our countries. Now we had to keep it going. I understood the irony of what happened that morning under the overcast Geneva sky. I had spent much of my life sounding a warning about the threat of communism to America and the rest of the free world. I had been called a saber rattler and a right-wing extremist. I'd called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Now here I was opening negotiations with the Kremlin, and while doing so, I had extended my hand with warmth and a smile to its highest leader. In the preceding months I'd thought many times about this first meeting with Gorbachev. I felt that if I could ever get in a room alone with one of the top Soviet leaders, there was a chance the two of us could make some progress in easing tensions between our two countries. I have always placed a lot of faith in the simple power of human contact in solving problems. Since the 1960s, our defense against the Soviets was based on the so-called MAD policy -- mutual assured destruction. The U.S. and the Soviet Union each kept enough nuclear weapons at the ready so that if one attacked, the other would still have enough to annihilate the attacker. As President, I carried no wallet, no money, no driver's license, no keys. But wherever I went, I carried a small plastic-coated card, and a military aide was always close by carrying a small bag referred to as "the football." It contained directives for launching our nuclear weapons, and the plastic card listed codes confirming that it was actually the President of the U.S. who was ordering the unleashing of these weapons. The decision to launch was mine alone to make. One of the first statistics I saw as President was one of the most sobering and startling I'd ever heard: at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union -- even if we "won." The planet would be so poisoned the "survivors" would have no place to live. Even if a nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it. No one could "win" a nuclear war. Yet as long as nuclear weapons existed, there would always be risks that they would be used, and once the first nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end? My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons. Some of my advisers, including a number at the Pentagon, did not share this dream. They said a nuclear-free world was unattainable, and it would be dangerous for us even if it were possible; some even claimed nuclear war was "inevitable" and we had to prepare for this reality. There had to be some way to remove this threat and give the world a greater chance of survival. But how? Our relationship with the Soviets was based on detente, a French word the Russians had interpreted as a freedom to pursue subversion, aggression and expansionism anywhere in the world. Except for a brief time-out during World War II, the Russians had been our de facto enemies for almost 65 years, devoted to destroying democracy and imposing communism. During the late 1970s, I felt our country had begun to abdicate its historical role as spiritual leader of the free world. The previous Administration had accepted the notion that America was no longer the world power it had once been, that it had become powerless to shape world events. When I had arrived in the White House in 1981, American military muscle was so atrophied that our ability to respond effectively to a Soviet attack was very much in doubt. Consciously or unconsciously, we had sent out a message that Washington was no longer sure of itself, its ideals or its commitments to our allies and that it seemed to accept as inevitable the advance of Soviet expansionism. Predictably, the Soviets had interpreted our hesitation and reluctance to act and our reduced sense of national self-confidence as a weakness and had tried to exploit it to the fullest. With the breathtaking events that have occurred in Eastern Europe since then, it can be easy to forget what the world was like in the spring of 1981: the Soviets were more dedicated than ever to achieving Lenin's goal of a communist world. Under the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, they claimed the right to suppress, through armed intervention, any challenge to communist governments anywhere in the world. As the foundation of my foreign policy, I decided we had to send a powerful message to the Russians that we weren't going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments. I set out to say some frank things about the Russians, to let them know there were some new fellows in Washington who had a realistic view of what they were up to and weren't going to let them keep it up. Besides, I knew that the communist system was having problems of its own. I had always believed that as an economic system, communism was doomed. As President I learned the Soviet economy was in even worse shape than I'd realized. It was a basket case, partly because of massive spending on armaments. But in addition to sending out the word that we were dealing with the Soviet Union from a new basis of realism, I wanted to let them know that we realized the nuclear standoff was futile and dangerous and that we had no designs on their territories. They had nothing to fear from us if they behaved themselves. We wanted to reduce the tensions that had led us to a nuclear standoff. Someone in the Kremlin, I thought, had to realize that in arming themselves to the teeth, they were aggravating the desperate economic problem in the Soviet Union. Yet, to be candid, I doubted I'd ever meet anybody like that. [On March 30, 1981, after a speech at the Washington Hilton, Reagan was severely wounded by a "mixed-up young man from a fine family," John Hinckley Jr. During his recuperation, he determined to pursue a personal dialogue with the leader of the U.S.S.R. "As I sat in the sun-filled White House solarium in robe and pajamas that spring, I wondered how to get the process started," writes Reagan. "Perhaps having come so close to death made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God had given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war." In April he wrote a personal letter to Brezhnev, informing him that he was lifting the grain embargo and appealing to him to move beyond ideology and address "the everyday problems of people." A few days later, he received "an icy reply" in which Brezhnev told him in effect to mind his own business. "So much," Reagan writes, "for my first attempt at personal diplomacy." Brezhnev died on Nov. 10, 1982. Reagan was not much more successful with the man who followed him, former KGB chief Yuri Andropov. The President's "evil empire" speech in Orlando in March 1983 and the shooting down of KAL 007 on Sept. 1, 1983, "made U.S.-Soviet relations go from bad to worse," says Reagan. "What prospects might have existed for a summit evaporated."] That autumn, convinced we had to do everything possible to build a defense against the horrible weapons of mass destruction that the atomic age had produced, I gave a go-ahead to speed up research on the Strategic Defense Initiative, the program I announced earlier in 1983 to develop a shield against nuclear missiles. Early in my first term, I called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and asked, Isn't it possible to invent a defensive weapon that could intercept nuclear weapons and destroy them as they emerged from their silos? They looked at each other, then asked if they could huddle for a few moments. Very shortly, they came out of their huddle and said, "Yes, it's an idea worth exploring." My answer was "Let's do it." So the SDI was born, and some named it "Star Wars." One of the myths about SDI was that I saw it as a bargaining chip to get the Soviets to reduce their weaponry. I've had to tell the Soviet leaders a hundred times that the SDI was not a bargaining chip. I've told them I'd share it with others willing to give up their nuclear missiles. We all know how to make the missiles. One day a madman could come along and make the missiles and blackmail all of us,but not if we have a defense against them. My closing line was "We all got together in 1925 and banned the use of poison gas. But we all kept our gas masks." If I had to choose the single most important reason, on the U.S. side, for the historic breakthroughs that were to occur during the next five years in the quest for peace and a better relationship with the Soviet Union, I would say it was the Strategic Defense Initiative, along with the modernization of our military forces. But improvements in U.S.-Soviet relations didn't come quickly, and they didn't come easily. [In November 1983 the Soviets walked out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces talks in Geneva, hoping to exploit public opposition in both the U.S. and Europe to Reagan's insistence on deploying Pershing II and cruise missiles. "From a propaganda point of view," writes Reagan, "we were on the defensive." Reagan's Jan. 16, 1984, speech offering to renew talks was met with a "harsh" letter from Andropov. In early February, Andropov died. He was replaced by Konstantin Chernenko, whom George Bush met in Moscow and described as "less hard-nosed and abrasive" than his predecessor. "I have a gut feeling I'd like to talk to him about our problems man to man," Reagan wrote in his diary. A day later, Chernenko wrote to say the Soviet leadership stood by Andropov's last tough letter. Throughout 1984, the Soviets continued to balk at Reagan's arms-control positions. They also boycotted the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics in retaliation for Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games. In January 1985, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed to renew arms talks. On March 10, 1985, Chernenko died.] So, once again, there was a new man in the Kremlin. "How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians," I asked Nancy, "if they keep dying on me?" I decided not to lose any time in trying to get to know the new leader. When George Bush went to Moscow for Chernenko's funeral, he took an invitation from me to Gorbachev for a summit conference in the U.S. Gorbachev replied two weeks later. In doing so, he completed the first round of a correspondence between us that was to last for years and encompass scores of letters. Those first letters marked the cautious beginning on both sides of what was to become the foundation of not only a better relationship between our countries but a friendship between two men. Gorbachev expressed less hostility than I'd come to expect from Soviet leaders. He said he was amenable to a summit, but not necessarily in Washington. Overall, his letter was encouraging. By embarking "upon the road of real improvement of relations," he wrote, "I am convinced we could do quite a bit to benefit the peoples of our countries, as well as the whole world." Gorbachev proposed that both countries continue voluntary compliance with the SALT treaties, impose a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, ban space weapons, negotiate a cut of conventional forces in Central Europe and continue assisting each other in trying to see events through each other's eyes. On July 1, 1985, it was agreed that we would meet in Geneva the following November. In September I had noted in my diary: "Made a decision we would not trade away our program of research SDI for a promise of Soviet reduction in nuclear arms." Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger strongly believed we should resist all Soviet efforts to limit research on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Our scientists and engineers, he said, were more optimistic each day that it would be possible to pinpoint missiles rising from their silos and shoot them down from space. Cap said what made him especially angry was that the Russians were whining about our research on the SDI while they had been conducting similar research for more than 20 years. Even though I agreed with Cap on this one, I sometimes had to ask him to mute his most critical public comments about the Soviets. In fact, once we'd agreed to hold a summit, I made a conscious decision to tone down my rhetoric to avoid goading Gorbachev with remarks about the "evil empire." Gorbachev had proposed a 50% reduction in nuclear weapons and a total of 6,000 warheads, pretty much what we had suggested. I wrote to him of a new U.S. proposal for "radical and stabilizing reductions in strategic offensive arms and a separate agreement on intermediate-range missile systems. We also propose that both sides provide assurances that their strategic-defense programs are and will remain in full accord with the ABM treaty." In early November, Secretary of State George Shultz met with Gorbachev to go over the agenda for Geneva. Gorbachev, he said, wasn't going to be a pushover. "Apparently not much progress. Gorbachev is adamant we must cave in on SDI," I wrote after I spoke to George on the secure phone from Moscow. "Well, this will be a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object." After returning to Washington, George said he was convinced Gorbachev was an intelligent man who was sure of himself, had a good sense of humor and seemed to be fully in charge in the Soviet Union. But he said Gorbachev seemed to be filled with anti-American, anticapitalist propaganda. Well, I thought, I'll have to get him in a room alone and set him straight. In Geneva it seemed clear Gorbachev believed propaganda about us that he had probably heard all his life. In some things he said there was a grain of truth, but a lot of the "facts" he cited, such as those about the treatment of blacks in the South, were long out of date. He didn't know, for example, about the vast improvements we'd made in race relations. I spoke about the dynamic energy of capitalism and said it provided an opportunity to all Americans to work and get ahead; whenever I alluded to the economic problems that were hounding his country, Gorbachev emphasized that he believed in the communist system, but he seemed to say mistakes had been made in running it and he was trying to correct them. Despite our disagreements, our conversations never turned hostile. He stood his ground, and I stood mine. At a plenary session with both our delegations, we went head-to-head on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Gorbachev, without saying it in so many words, suggested that when I'd made my offer to share our SDI research and open our laboratories to the Soviets so they could see that the SDI was not designed for offensive purposes, I was lying. No country would do that, he insisted, judging other countries by his own. He seemed convinced that I wanted to use the SDI as a cover for an offensive first-strike capability against the Soviet Union. When I brought up the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Gorbachev responded that he had known nothing about it personally until he heard a radio broadcast, suggesting that it was a war he had no responsibility and little enthusiasm for. During our final business session, Gorbachev and I discussed language for a joint statement that was to be issued at the close of the summit and that would make note of our mutual commitment to seek a 50% cut in nuclear weapons. When our teams went to work on the statement, he and I and the interpreters went into a small room and chatted for almost an hour. As we flew home I felt good: Gorbachev was tough and convinced communism was superior to capitalism, but after almost five years I'd finally met a Soviet leader I could talk to. It didn't occur to me then, but later on I was to remember something else about Gorbachev at Geneva: not once during our private sessions or at the plenary meetings did he express support for the old Marxist-Leninist goal of a one-world communist state or Soviet expansionism. He was the first Soviet leader I knew of who hadn't done that. A week later, I sent a handwritten letter to Gorbachev in which I tried to continue the process begun in Geneva and to overcome his resistance to the Strategic Defense Initiative: "I was struck by your conviction that the American SDI program is somehow designed to secure a strategic advantage or even to permit a first-strike capability. I also noted your concern that research and testing in the area could be a cover for developing and placing offensive weapons in space. As I told you, neither of these concerns is warranted. But I can understand that there are matters that cannot be taken on faith. I do not ask you to take my assurances on faith. However, the truth is that the United States has no intention of using its strategic defense program to gain any advantage and there is no development under way to create space-based weapons. "In Geneva I found our private sessions particularly useful. Both of us have advisers, but in the final analysis, the responsibility to preserve peace and increase cooperation is ours." In addition to objecting to the SDI program in his Christmas Eve response, Gorbachev disputed my view that the Soviets' huge stockpile of long-range land-based missiles gave them superiority in the nuclear race; American Trident submarine-launched missiles, he argued, allowed us to launch a surprise attack with much less warning time than their land-based missiles and so were a threat to the Soviet Union exceeding that posed by Soviet missiles against the U.S. And he asked, "How can the Soviet Union view the Pershing II missiles deployed in Europe with their high accuracy and short flight time to U.S.S.R. targets as anything else but first-strike weapons? Really, this is a vitally important situation, and it simply cannot be avoided. Believe me, Mr. President, we have a real and extremely serious concern over U.S. nuclear weapons. The solution of this problem is only possible through consideration and calculations of the sum total of the corresponding weapons on both sides. "Mr. President, I would like for you to view my letter as another one of our `fireside chats.' I would sincerely like not only to keep the warmth of our Geneva meetings but also move further in the development of our dialogue." Early in the new year, Gorbachev sent me still another letter. Several hours before I received it, he made it public in Moscow. (Three weeks earlier, he'd written me that he valued the private nature of our confidential correspondence.) This latest letter was clearly meant for propaganda. He said the Soviet Union wanted to eliminate all INF weapons from Europe, in effect accepting my 1981 zero-zero proposal for intermediate-range missiles in Europe while trying to make it appear that it was a Soviet idea; he proposed a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing; and he called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons by both sides by the end of 1999, but only if the U.S. renounced "the development, testing and deployment of space-strike weapons," a reference to SDI. It was propaganda, yes, but we couldn't ignore it. In my reply to both his Christmas Eve letter and his mid-January proposal, I chided Gorbachev for making public his letter to me but said I was pleased we were approaching a common ground on the intermediate-range missiles and I hoped remaining problems of an INF agreement could be worked out shortly. I wrote that I agreed that we had to make decisions not on the basis of each other's assurances or intentions but with a cold-eyed regard for the capabilities of both sides. "Nevertheless," I added, "I do not understand the reasoning behind your conclusion that only a country preparing a disarming first strike would be interested in defenses against ballistic missiles. If such defenses prove feasible in the future, they could facilitate further reductions of nuclear weapons by creating a feeling of confidence that national security could be preserved without them. "Of course, as I have said before, I recognize that adding defensive systems to an arsenal replete with weapons with a disarming first-strike capability could under some conditions be destabilizing. That is why we are proposing that both sides concentrate first on reducing those weapons which can deliver a disarming first strike. If neither of our countries has forces suitable for a first strike, neither need fear that defenses against ballistic missiles would make a first-strike strategy possible. "So far as defensive systems are concerned, I would reiterate: if your concern is that such systems may be used to permit a first-strike strategy or as a cover for basing weapons of mass destruction in space, then there must be practical ways to prevent such possibilities." After our air strikes against Libya in April 1986 in response to terrorist acts, Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister, canceled a meeting with George Shultz at which they were to choose a date for the summit. The tragic accident at Chernobyl occurred later that month. I sent Gorbachev a letter conveying our sympathies along with my disappointment over cancellation of the Shultz-Shevardnadze meeting. In late July I sent a new, sweeping arms-reduction proposal to Gorbachev, calling for both sides to scrap all ballistic missiles while continuing research on missile defensive systems, and said that if these systems proved feasible, they would be shared with all nations once all nuclear missiles had been scrapped. In September Shevardnadze visited the White House with a message that Gorbachev wanted to meet me in London or Iceland the following month to see if the two of us could accelerate the arms-control process before our meeting in Washington. The letter from Gorbachev hinted at potential progress in arms control if we were to meet: "The negotiations need a major impulse; otherwise, they would continue to mark time while creating only the appearance of preparations for our meeting on American soil. They will lead nowhere unless you and I intervene personally." At Reykjavik in October, my hopes for a nuclear-free world soared briefly, then fell during one of the longest, most disappointing -- and ultimately angriest -- days of my presidency. For 1 1/2 days, Gorbachev and I made progress on arms reduction that even now seems breathtaking. On the first day he accepted in principle our zero-zero proposal for the elimination of nuclear missiles in Europe and my proposal for eliminating all ballistic missiles over 10 years. As the day wore on, I began to wonder whether the Chernobyl accident was behind Gorbachev's new eagerness to discuss abolishing nuclear weapons. He and I had at it all afternoon. The following day, a Sunday, we had scheduled meetings until noon. In addition to nuclear missiles, we said we would try to reduce and eventually eliminate other nuclear weapons as well, including bombers, and Gorbachev pledged his commitment to strong verification procedures. When I said we couldn't eliminate tactical battlefield nuclear weapons in Europe because they constituted NATO's principal deterrent against an invasion by the much larger Warsaw Pact conventional forces, Gorbachev volunteered drastic reductions in those forces; this was something we'd always considered a prerequisite to a nuclear-arms-reduction agreement but never expected to get in Iceland. As the day went on, I felt something momentous was occurring. Our noon deadline came and went. As evening approached, I thought to myself: Look what we have accomplished -- we have negotiated the most massive weapons reductions in history. I thought we were going to achieve something remarkable. Then, after everything had been decided, or so I thought, Gorbachev threw us a curve. With a smile on his face, he said, "This all depends, of course, on your giving up SDI." I couldn't believe it and blew my top. "I've said again and again the SDI wasn't a bargaining chip. With all we have accomplished here, you do this and throw in this roadblock, and everything is out the window. There is no way we are going to give up research to find a defense weapon against nuclear missiles. "If you are willing to abolish nuclear weapons," I asked Gorbachev, "why are you so anxious to get rid of a defense against nuclear weapons? A non-nuclear defensive system like the SDI threatens no one." It looked as if the Soviets didn't want us to proceed with the SDI, I said, because the U.S. was ahead in this technology, and they were trying to catch up. To prove we had no intention of using the SDI offensively or as a shield during a first strike, I repeated my offer to make the system available to all; I said it was to be a defense for the entire world that would make nuclear weapons obsolete and speed the day when nations had enough confidence in their security to give up such weapons. "We all know how to make nuclear weapons," I said. "Even if we all agree that we are never going to use them, who knows what kind of madman might come along after we're gone? Governments change; in your own country there already have been four leaders during my term. I believe you mean it when you say you want peace, but there could be a change. It's the same thing on the other side: I think you know I want peace, but you also know I will not be in a position to personally keep the promises I've made to you. That's why we need insurance that our agreements eliminating nuclear weapons will be kept in the future. "If you think I'm soft in the head in wanting to give away the SDI technology, think of this: Suppose we were at the point of deploying the SDI system, and we alone had it; our research is done but it is going to take months, maybe years, to deploy. We are also sitting with a great arsenal of nuclear weapons, and the world knows it; it might seem very tempting for them to push the button on their weapons before our defense is installed because of a fear we'd soon be able to blackmail the world. "When the time comes to deploy SDI, the U.S. would have no rational choice but to avoid this situation by making the system available to all countries, so they know we wouldn't have the power to blackmail them. We're not being altruistic." Gorbachev heard the translation of my remarks, but he wasn't listening. He wouldn't budge. He just sat there smiling, and then he said he still didn't believe me when I said the U.S. would make the SDI available to other countries. I was getting angrier and angrier. I realized he had brought me to Iceland with one purpose: to kill the SDI. He must have known from the beginning he was going to bring it up at the last minute. "The meeting is over," I said. "Let's go, George, we're leaving." When we reached our cars before leaving Reykjavik, Gorbachev said, "I don't know what else I could have done." I said, "I do. You could have said yes." That night I wrote, "He wanted language that would have killed SDI. The price was high but I wouldn't sell. I'd pledged I wouldn't give away SDI and I didn't, but that meant no deal on any of the arms reductions. He tried to act jovial, but I was mad and showed it. Well, the ball is now in his court, and I'm convinced he'll come around when he sees how the world is reacting." It would be more than a year after I walked out on Gorbachev at Reykjavik before the warming of U.S.-Soviet relations that began at Geneva would resume. Despite a perception by some that the Reykjavik summit was a failure, I think history will show it was a major turning point in the quest for a safe and secure world. During those 10 hours of discussions, we agreed on the basic terms for what 14 months later would become the INF agreement, a treaty that for the first time in history provided for the elimination of an entire class of nuclear weapons; we created a framework for the START agreement to reduce strategic missiles on each side and for agreements on reduction of chemical weapons and conventional forces, while preserving our right to develop the SDI. In the same way that I think the Soviets returned to the negotiating table at Geneva only because we refused to halt deployment of NATO's intermediate-range missiles during the fall of 1983, I think Gorbachev was ready to talk the next time we met because we had walked out on him at Reykjavik and gone ahead with the SDI. But during those 14 months, progress didn't come easily. Gorbachev continued his resistance to the SDI through 1987. And not all of the obstacles to continuing the momentum originated in Moscow. In Congress, there were new efforts by the Democrats to cut the military programs that were essential to continuing our policy of peace through strength that had brought the Soviets to the arms-control table. And at the Pentagon, there were a few misgivings about my dream of a nuclear-free world. The Joint Chiefs said we would require nuclear missiles for the foreseeable future because of the need to offset the Soviet bloc's huge imbalance of conventional forces in Europe and an unwillingness by Congress to approve bigger budgets. (Maintaining nuclear deterrent forces costs far less than the salary and upkeep for conventional armies.) Eventually, based on their advice, we proposed a 50% cut in ICBMs over seven years instead of five, and the Russians concurred. Although Soviet troops were still fighting in Afghanistan and the Soviets were still supporting guerrillas in Central America and elsewhere, we were at last seeing real deeds from Moscow. Still, almost two years after Gorbachev had accepted my invitation to Washington, he was refusing to set a date for our next summit, largely because of the dispute over the SDI. He kept insisting that we must surrender our right to conduct research on space-based missile defenses, and I kept insisting we wouldn't do that. In September 1987, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze came to Washington to discuss the substantial hurdles that remained regarding the language and verification procedures for the INF treaty. He brought another letter from Gorbachev: "We are facing the dilemma of either rapidly completing an agreement on intermediate- and shorter-range missiles or missing the chance to reach an accord, which has almost entirely taken shape. I would ask you once again to weigh carefully all the factors involved and convey to me your final decision on whether the agreement is to be concluded now or postponed, or even set aside. "I propose, Mr. President, that necessary steps be taken so that full-scale agreements could be reached within the next few months both on the radical reduction of strategic offensive arms and ensuring strict observance of the ABM treaty. If all those efforts were crowned with success, we would be able to provide a firm basis for a stable and forward-moving development not just of the Soviet-U.S. relationship but of international relations as a whole for many years ahead." Once again I told Shevardnadze to tell Gorbachev that we weren't going to give in on the SDI. Still, I think his visit was a turning point. We kept alive the process of trying to improve relations. Moreover, there was a new atmosphere in our dealings. I commented in my diary after Shevardnadze left: "They were good meetings, free of the hostility we used to see even if we were disagreeing on some things." Over the next few weeks our Geneva negotiators, with concurrence by West German leaders, worked out a compromise regarding Germany's older Pershing missiles. Even after this, Gorbachev refused to set a date for a summit. He was waiting me out, still expecting me, I suspect, to cave in on the SDI because of the furor over the Iran-contra affair. I sent word through George Shultz that I wasn't budging. [Despite no movement on space weapons, by November the year-end summit in Washington was set.] Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev pulled up to the White House on the morning of Dec. 8 in a large Russian-made limousine. That afternoon, we signed the INF treaty. The next day, Gorbachev came back to the White House, and we agreed that our next goal was to achieve a 50% reduction of strategic missiles on both sides. I think we both felt as if we'd participated in something important, and we relaxed a little. I told him I'd been collecting stories about the Russians. I told him one about an American and a Russian who were arguing about the respective merits of their countries. The American said, "Look, in my country I can walk into the Oval Office and I can pound on the President's desk and say, `Mr. President, I don't like the way you are running the country.'" To which the Russian said, "I can do that too." The American said, "You can?" And his friend said, "Sure, I can go into the Kremlin and pound on the General Secretary's desk and say, `Mr. General Secretary, I don't like the way President Reagan is running his country.'" When the interpreter got to the punch line, Gorbachev howled. During his visit, our teams made substantial progress in defining the principles for the START agreement Gorbachev and I wanted to sign in Moscow in the spring. We both knew serious problems remained, particularly the question of how sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles were to fit into the agreement. Among all nuclear missiles, they were the hardest to count and verify. Just before noon the next day, Gorbachev returned a final time to the White House for more work on the START treaty. When the two of us were walking to lunch across the White House lawn under gray, threatening clouds that later turned to rain, I told him there was one thing he could do that would go a long way toward improving U.S.-Soviet relations: he could end the shipment of Soviet military weapons to Nicaragua. Gorbachev told me he would do that. The summit ended as Nancy and I said goodbye to the Gorbachevs under a light rain. I wrote in the diary that night, "I think the whole thing was the best summit we've ever had with the Soviet Union." Gorbachev was a tough, hard bargainer. He was a Russian patriot who loved his country. We could -- and did -- debate from opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. But there was a chemistry between us that produced something very close to a friendship, that kept our conversations on a man-to-man basis, without hate or hostility. I liked Gorbachev even though he was a dedicated communist and I was a confirmed capitalist. But he was different from the communists who had preceded him to the top of the Kremlin hierarchy. Before him, every one had vowed to pursue the Marxist commitment to a one-world communist state; he was the first not to push Soviet expansionism, the first to agree to destroy nuclear weapons, the first to suggest a free market and to support open elections and freedom of expression. I can only speculate as to why Gorbachev ultimately decided to abandon many of the fundamental tenets of communism along with the empire that Joe Stalin had seized in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II. Perhaps the metamorphosis started when he was still a young man, working his way up the inefficient and corrupt communist bureaucracy and witnessing the brutality of the Stalin regime. Then, I think that when he reached the top of the hierarchy he discovered how bad things really were and realized that he had to make changes in a hurry. Seventy years of communism had bankrupted the Soviet Union economically and spiritually. Gorbachev must have realized it could no longer support or control Stalin's totalitarian colonial empire; the survival of the Soviet Union was more important to him. He must have looked at the economic disaster his country was facing and concluded that it couldn't continue spending so much of its wealth on an arms race that, as I told him at Geneva, we would never let his country win. I'm convinced the tragedy at Chernobyl a year after Gorbachev took office also affected him and made him try harder to resolve Soviet differences with the West. And I think in our meetings I might have helped him understand why we considered the Soviet Union and its policy of expansionism a threat to us. I might have helped him see that the Soviet Union had less to fear from the West than he thought, and that the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe wasn't needed for the security of the Soviet Union. Whatever his reasons, Gorbachev had the intelligence to admit communism was not working, the courage to battle for change and, ultimately, the wisdom to introduce the beginnings of democracy, individual freedom and free enterprise. As I said at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, the Soviet Union faced a choice: either it made fundamental changes or it became obsolete. Gorbachev saw the handwriting on the Wall and opted for change. At our Moscow summit in late May and early June 1988, Gorbachev and I pledged again to do our best during my last months in office to complete the START treaty and parallel agreements to reduce chemical weapons and conventional forces in Europe. Despite our differences, it was not a contentious meeting. We agreed that we had each begun our relationship with misconceptions about the other, and that it had taken these one-on-one sessions to build trust and understanding. That, I thought to myself, was what I'd been trying to do since I sent my first letter to Brezhnev in 1981 a few weeks after I was shot. By early September, four months before I was scheduled to move out of the White House, it had become apparent that we weren't going to resolve the remaining problems on the START agreement before I left office. Later that month, Gorbachev sent me a letter that expressed his regrets and looked back on the journey the two of us had traveled together: "For the first time in history, nuclear missiles have been destroyed. Nuclear disarmament is becoming an established and routine practice. "In several regions of the world, a process of political settlement of conflicts and national reconciliation has got under way. The human dimension of our relations, to which we have agreed to give special attention, is becoming richer. "The four summit meetings over the past three years have laid good groundwork for our dialogue and raised it to a qualitatively new level. And, as you know, from high ground it is easier to see the path we have covered, the problems of the day, and the prospects that emerge. "Our relationship is a dynamic stream, and you and I are working together to widen it. A stream cannot be slowed down; it can only be blocked or diverted. But that would not be in our interests. Politics, of course, is the art of the possible. But it is only by working and maintaining a dynamic dialogue that we will put into effect what we have made possible, and will make possible tomorrow what is yet impossible today." After the Moscow summit, I saw Gorbachev one more time as President. In December 1988 -- less than seven weeks before I was to leave the White House -- he came to New York to make a speech to the United Nations announcing substantial cuts in the conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact. When Gorbachev came to New York, I was concerned for his safety. Soviet officials had expressed concern that while he was away there would be a coup attempt and as part of it, someone from the Eastern bloc would try to kill him and make it look as if an American had done it. As far as I know, no attempts were made on Gorbachev's life while he was in New York. But I still worry, how hard and fast can he push his reforms without risking his life? Gorbachev, George Bush and I met on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Gorbachev and George seemed to have a rapport that encouraged optimism for the future. I wrote in my diary: "Gorbachev sounded as if he saw us as partners making a better world." One of my regrets as President is that I was never able to take Mikhail Gorbachev on a trip across our country. I wanted to take him up in a helicopter and show him how Americans lived. From the air I would have pointed out an ordinary factory and showed him its parking lot filled with workers' cars; then we'd fly over a residential neighborhood and I'd tell him that's where those workers lived -- in homes with lawns and backyards, perhaps with a second car or a boat in the driveway, not the concrete rabbit warrens I'd seen in Moscow -- and I'd say, "They not only live there, they own that property." I even dreamed of landing in one of those neighborhoods and inviting Gorbachev to walk down the street with me, and I'd say, "Pick any home you want; we'll knock on the door and you can ask the people how they live and what they think of our system." During my stay in Moscow, I spent some time talking with ordinary Soviet citizens. My impression was that they were generally indistinguishable from people I had seen all my life on countless streets in America -- ordinary people who longed, I am sure, for the same things that Americans did: peace, love, security, a better life for themselves and their children. On the streets of Moscow, looking into thousands of faces, I was reminded once again that it's not people who make war but governments, and people deserve governments that fight for peace in the nuclear age. There will be bumps in the road. But after talking with the bright young people in Moscow and seeing what was happening in their country, I couldn't help feeling optimistic. We were at the threshold of a new era in the political and economic history of the world. I can't wait to see where it will lead us. NEXT WEEK In the concluding excerpt from An American Life, Ronald Reagan tells of his frustration -- and grief -- in dealing with the Middle East. The tangled Iran-contra affair. The real Reaganomics. Sorry, Kid On the November evening in 1966 when I was elected Governor of California, three of our four children -- Maureen, Mike and Ron -- joined Nancy and me at a victory celebration. Patti was away at school in Arizona, and when we called and told her that I'd won, she started to cry. She was only 14, but as a child of the 1960s she believed the anti-Establishment rhetoric that was popular among members of her generation, and she let me know that she didn't like having a member of the Establishment in the family. Call Him "Dutch" I was born Feb. 6, 1911, in a flat above the local bank in Tampico, Ill. According to family legend, when my father ran up the stairs and looked at his newborn son, he quipped, "He looks like a little Dutchman. But who knows, he might grow up to be President some day." My parents wanted to call me Donald. But after one of my mother's sisters beat her to it and named her son Donald, I became Ronald. I never thought "Ronald" was rugged enough for a red-blooded American boy, so I asked people to call me "Dutch," a nickname that grew out of my father's calling me "the Dutchman." Song with A Message Before going to Hollywood, I spent four years at station WHO in Des Moines, and they were among the most pleasant of my life. At 22, I'd achieved my dream: I was a sports announcer. If I had stopped there, I believe I would have been happy the rest of my life. During the depths of the Depression, I was earning $75 a week and gaining the kind of fame that brought in speaking engagements, which provided extra income to help out my parents; my father's heart troubles left him unable to work. I "covered" hundreds of baseball games played by the Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox via remote control. Wherever they were playing, a telegrapher tapped out a report in Morse code after each pitch and each play. In Des Moines another telegraph operator decoded a burst of dots and dashes from the stadium, typed a few words on a slip of paper and handed it to me. I then described the play as if I'd been in the press box. I broadcast only one football game, Michigan-Iowa, in the same way. The most memorable thing about it was the name of Michigan's center -- Gerald Ford. Sometimes I interviewed visiting celebrities. One night our guest was evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who'd come to Des Moines for a revival meeting not long after she'd been accused of having a romantic liaison with one of her followers, paid for with disciples' contributions. The interview ended four minutes before our next program. I signaled the engineer and said, "We conclude this interview with a brief interlude of transcribed music." A song blasted. My guest looked at me with fire in her eyes, then turned and left with her coat standing out behind her in the wind. The engineer had played the first disk on his stack -- Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day. Why Run for President? Although many of my supporters wanted me to run for a third term as Governor of California in 1974, I'd sworn that I was going to stop at two terms. Nancy and I left Sacramento in early 1975. The previous eight years had changed both of us -- and we had found a new love. Its name was Rancho del Cielo, Ranch in the Sky: 688 acres that can make you feel as if you are on a cloud looking down at the world. I spent a lot of time riding my horse, Little Man, around the ranch thinking about the future. My health was excellent, and even though I was nearly 65, I never gave a thought to retiring. I had a newspaper column and radio spot that gave me a chance to continue speaking out about things that concerned me. We had our home in Pacific Palisades; we could see the children often; we were looking forward to fixing up the ranch. I think we would have been content to spend the rest of our lives that way. Yet hardly a day passed when someone didn't call and ask me to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. Eight years earlier, I'd been dragged kicking and screaming into politics. But now I didn't automatically turn a deaf ear to the appeals. I had changed, I think, because as Governor I'd felt the excitement and satisfaction that come from being able to bring about change, not just talk about it. Yet the longer I had been Governor, the more I realized the biggest problems regarding Big Government had to be solved in Washington, which was inexorably taking power from the states. James Madison said in 1788, "Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." As Governor, I'd experienced how Washington would establish a new program that the states were supposed to administer, then set so many rules and regulations that the state wasn't really administering it -- just following orders. Most of these programs could be operated more effectively and more economically under our own laws. Washington, ignoring principles of the Constitution, was trying to turn the states into administrative districts of the Federal Government. And the path to federal control had to a large extent become federal aid -- money with strings that reached all the way back to the Potomac. We had strayed a great distance from our Founding Fathers' vision of America: they regarded the central government's responsibility as that of providing national security, protecting our democratic freedoms and limiting the government's intrusion into our lives -- in sum, the protection of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They never envisioned vast agencies in Washington telling farmers what to plant, teachers what to teach, industries what to build. The Constitution they wrote established sovereign states, not administrative districts of the Federal Government. They believed in keeping government as close as possible to the people. The problems increased dramatically during Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty. Between 1965 and 1980, the federal budget jumped roughly fivefold, the federal deficit grew 53-fold, and the amount of money doled out under federal "entitlement" programs quadrupled to almost $300 billion a year. A lot of the money just got lost in the administrative process. Hundreds of billions were spent on poverty programs, and the plight of the poor grew more painful. The waste in dollars and cents was small compared with the waste of human potential. The narcotic of giveaway programs sapped the human spirit, diminished the incentive of people to work, destroyed families, and produced an increase in female and child poverty, deteriorating schools and disintegrating neighborhoods. The liberals had had their turn at bat in the 1960s, and they had struck out. As I rode Little Man around Rancho del Cielo, I thought a lot about the lost vision of our Founding Fathers and the importance of recapturing it. And I remembered something I'd once said: a candidate doesn't make the decision whether to run for President; the people make it for him. "Someone Was Looking Out for Me" I put on a brand-new blue suit for my speech to the Construction Trades conference on March 30, 1981. On several occasions the Secret Service had made me wear a bulletproof vest. That day no one had thought my iron underwear would be necessary because my only exposure was to be a 30-ft. walk to the car. After the speech, I left the hotel through a side entrance and was almost to the car when I heard what sounded like firecrackers to my left -- just a small, fluttering sound, pop, pop, pop. I turned and said, "What the hell's that?" Just then Jerry Parr, head of our Secret Service unit, grabbed me by the waist and literally hurled me into the back of the limousine. I landed on my face, atop the armrest across the backseat. When Jerry jumped on top of me, I felt a pain in my upper back that was unbelievable -- the most excruciating pain I had ever felt. "Jerry," I said, "get off, I think you've broken one of my ribs." "The White House," Jerry told the driver, then he scrambled off me onto the jump seat. I tried to sit up and was almost paralyzed by pain. As I was straightening up, I had to cough hard, and I saw that the palm of my hand was brimming with extremely red, frothy blood. "You not only broke a rib, I think the rib punctured my lung," I said. Jerry looked at the bubbles in the frothy blood and told the driver to head for George Washington University Hospital instead of the White House. By then my handkerchief was sopped with blood, and Jerry handed me his. Suddenly I realized I could barely breathe. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get enough air. I was frightened and started to panic a little. I just was not able to inhale enough air. At the hospital, I was first out of the limo and into the emergency room. A nurse came to meet me, and I told her I was having trouble breathing. All of a sudden my knees turned rubbery. The next thing I knew, I was lying faceup on a gurney and my brand-new pinstripe suit was being cut off me, never to be worn again. Then I guess I passed out. I was lying on the gurney half-conscious when I realized that someone was holding my hand. It was a soft, feminine hand. I felt it touch mine and then hold on tight to it. It must have been the hand of a nurse kneeling very close to the gurney, but I couldn't see her. I started asking, "Who's holding my hand? Who's holding my hand?" When I didn't hear any response, I said, "Does Nancy know about us?" Although I tried afterward to learn who the nurse was, I was never able to find her. I wanted to tell her how much the touch of her hand had meant to me, but I was never able to do that. Little by little, I learned what had happened: I had a bullet in my lung; Jim Brady, my press secretary, had been shot in the head; Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy had been shot in the chest; policeman Tom Delehanty had been shot in the neck. All of us had been hit by the gun of a lone young assailant who was in police custody. I began to realize that when Jerry Parr had thrown his body on me, he was gallantly putting his life on the line to save mine, and I felt guilty that I'd chewed him out right after it happened. Tim McCarthy had also bravely put his life on the line for me, spread-eagling himself between me and the gunman. John Hinckley Jr.'s bullet probably caught me in midair at the moment I was being thrown into the back of the car. After they took the bullet out of me, it looked like a nickel that was black on one side; it had been flattened into a small disk and darkened by the paint on the limousine. First the bullet struck the limousine, then it ricocheted through the small gap between the body of the car and the door hinges. It hit me under my left arm, where it made a small slit like a knife wound. I'd always been told that no pain is as excruciating as a broken bone; that's why I thought Jerry had broken my rib. But it wasn't Jerry's weight I felt. The flattened bullet had hit my rib edgewise, then turned over like a coin, tumbling down through my lung and stopping less than an inch from my heart. Someone was looking out for me that day. </body> </article> </text>