In some respects, Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Washington was a heady replay of the 1987 summit. Once again, he signed historic agreements with American president. He held forth before respectful audiences of congressmen and celebrities. He received awards and adulation from humanitarian groups. He plunged into Gorbymanic crowds on the sidewalks. “Looking at the Americans, I feel completely at home,” he said after one such encounter. The televised high lights played on the news at 9 back in Moscow, showing Gorbachev to his best–and much-needed–advantage. But up close in Washington, the pressures on him told. Although always composed, he acted in private like a man who wants help. One senior U.S. official, a veteran of previous summits, remarked: “He seemed more alone this time.”
And this time, there were growing doubts that Gorbachev is the man to finish what he started. At the summit, he and George Bush wrapped up some business left over from the cold-war era, but they got nowhere on major new issues–the unification of Germany, the independence of Lithuania–created by the political revolution that Gorbachev himself unleashed. The main cause of the stalemate was that Gorbachev didn’t dare move any–further or he didn’t know where he wanted to go. Back home, the failures of his stewardship were widely apparent. Food panics and ethnic tensions threatened new disorder. Lithuania continued to defy Gorbachev, gathering fresh support from other Soviet republics. And Gorbachev’s moment in the summit sun was clouded by the man who wasn’t there: Boris Yeltsin. As Gorbachev headed to Canada and the United States last week, Yeltsin, his perennial nemesis, was elected leader of the Russian Federation, by far the largest and most important republic. A gifted demagogue, Yeltsin immediately began to make mischief for his beleaguered rival (page 20).
Given his domestic difficulties, Gorbachev needed a successful summit, and he played a weak hand well enough to get one. He and Bush signed a commitment to reduce long-range nuclear weapons and a treaty to eliminate most of their poison-gas arsenals. Those and other arms agreements concluded at the summit were less momentous than they seemed (page 19), but they gave Gorbachev one of the two positive outcomes that he thought he had to bring home from Washington. The other was a trade agreement that included no Soviet concessions on Lithuania. The deal won’t help the Soviet economy much, but it could kick up a storm in Congress.
On a personal level, the Soviet leader established an affable new rapport with Bush. In a news conference on Sunday, Gorbachev said of Bush: “This is the kind of person to do business with.” The two men laughed and kidded each other in public, and in private Gorbachev told several dirty jokes, which Bush thoroughly enjoyed. The president’s only disappointment on the personal front was that he could not lure Gorbachev into a game of horseshoes when the summiteers moved to Camp David. Instead, Gorbachev went for a walk without Bush and tentatively tossed three horseshoes. He made a ringer and quit while he was ahead. “I wanna tell you, these meetings haven’t been all sweetness and light,” Bush said later at dinner in Laurel Lodge. “It’s very important for me to do well in sports. I like to win. So you can imagine how I felt when I learned that my visitor–throwing a horseshoe for the first time in his life–got a ringer.” Then Bush reached under the table and pulled out the shoe, hastily mounted on a plaque.
The human side: The personal contact seemed to do both leaders good. “I’ve never seen the guy so relaxed,” a U.S. official said of Gorbachev at Camp David. He added that Bush “got exactly what he wanted from this: a better fix on the human being inside the politician.” Even Raisa Gorbachev proved to be a congenial guest, bonding better with Barbara Bush than she ever did with Nancy Reagan (page 26). The state visit drew a few crowds of demonstrators for Lithuania, Armenia and other causes that are not popular in the Kremlin. But the Gorbachevs were getting their best look yet at the American landscape, with a postsummit trip planned to Minnesota and California.
Gorbachev’s voyage got off to a bumpy start. Before he left Moscow, he was forced to go on television to reassure distraught consumers about his latest economic plan (NEWSWEEK, June 4). “I am asking you, dear comrades, not to panic,” he said. The day after his arrival in Washington, he presided at a lunch for Americans whom his embassy described as “intellectuals.” (The intelligentsia included Henry Kissinger, Jesse Jackson, Jane Fonda, Dizzy Gillespie and Gregory Peck Frank Sinatra couldn’t attend.) Gorbachev’s performance was uneven. His speech, on the soporific subject of the Soviet economy, was rambling and disjointed. He would start a sentence, break off the thought and lurch into something else. “Gorbachev is completely burnt out,” said an American with ties to Soviet officialdom. “He wasn’t like that six months ago.”
Germany was widely billed as the most important new issue at the summit. Gorbachev finessed it. The initial discussions showed that neither side was going to give in on German membership in NATO: Bush wanted it, the Soviet leader didn’t. Gorbachev conceded that the United States should have a continuing military role in Europe, but it was not at all clear what he wanted to do about Germany. “He knows what he does not want–a united Germany in NATO–but he has not decided what he does want,” a Soviet foreign-policy specialist said later. Gorbachev’s lack of precision seemed to upset even his own Foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze. According to a U.S. official, Shevardnadze complained to Gorbachev: “We need some political direction here.”
At one point, when Bush said the German people were free to make their own decision, Gorbachev apparently thought he had engineered a breakthrough; Shevardnadze had to tell him, in front of the Americans, that the U.S. position hadn’t changed. Still, Gorbachev insisted that Shevardnadze and Secretary of State James Baker should pursue the subject after the summit. Then he went out and told reporters that both sides had “put forward certain ideas and suggestions” requiring “a more in-depth discussion” by the ministers. It wasn’t true, and U.S. officials expected little to emerge from this week’s Baker-Shevardnadze meeting. But by putting off the German discussion, Gorbachev avoided the appearance of stonewalling.
That meant he was desperate for a trade deal. “Without either trade or Germany, this summit would not have given Gorbachev the political boost he wanted,” said a Soviet official who was well informed about his leader’s thinking. Gorbachev wanted a deal that would normalize trade and obtain most-favored-nation (MFN) tariff status for Soviet exports to the United States. A trade agreement had been blocked by a longstanding U.S. demand fore liberalized Soviet law on emigration by Jews and others, and by more recent warnings that Congress would deny Moscow MFN status until Gorbachev stops bullying Lithuania.
Tough talk: At a meeting with congressional leaders, Gorbachev talked tough. To complaints about Soviet behavior in Lithuania, he replied: “Why did you let your administration intervene in Panama if you love freedom so much?” He accused Washington of hypocrisy in doling out trade preferences. “You have given MFN to China after [the massacre at] Tiananmen,” he said. “What should we do, declare presidential rule in Lithuania?” He also warned that “it would be humiliating if we were to ask, to beg for something from you.”
He was less aggressive with Bush. In three private conversations, U.S. sources said, Gorbachev pressed Bush for help, especially with his economic problems. “He said it was something he really needed,” said a senior White House aide. “In a perverse way, Boris Yeltsin helped,” suggested a Soviet source. “If Yeltsin had not been elected, Bush would have not been so concerned about Gorbachev going home empty-handed. " Gorbachev had extra leverage: a pending deal for Moscow to buy 10 million metric tons of grain a year from U.S. farmers. “If the trade agreement was going to be a hostage to Lithuania, then the grain agreement was going to be a hostage to trade,” said a Soviet official. “In the end, there was an exchange of hostages.”
On Friday afternoon, the two presidents signed an agreement aimed at normalizing trade. Bush said he would not submit it for ratification or grant MFN status until the Soviet Parliament passes a pending immigration law. He had vague private assurances from Gorbachev concerning Lithuania, the Soviet leader repeating his public pledges not to use force and to begin talks.; That was good enough for Bush, but it did I nothing immediately to help Lithuania. I And together with the lack of progress on Germany, it suggested that the summit had made no headway on post-cold-war problems. “We didn’t expect to close any deals in those areas,” a senior U.S. official said of Germany and Lithuania, “but we had hoped that this summit would open the bidding. It didn’t.”
It may be that Bush missed an opportunity to take advantage of Gorbachev’s weakness and extract better terms from him. But Bush calculated that Gorbachev has trouble enough already, and that further undermining him would not serve U.S. interests. They are expected to meet twice more this year, however, and a continued stalemate on issues like Germany and Lithuania will only highlight Gorbachev’s weaknesses. At the same time Gorbachev must deal with staggering domestic problems: secessionism, ethnic violence, economic chaos, and now the challenge from Yeltsin. Summits are no panacea. “The Soviet people are more concerned about their everyday problems,” said a Soviet parliamentarian in Gorbachev’s delegation. “They are not going to be impressed by a chemical-weapons agreement if they cannot get milk in the stores.” Handling that crisis will make or break Gorbachev and determine the fate of his reforms.
the flesh, demonstrators in Washington’s Lafayette Park protest killings in Soviet Armenia
