Washington Notebook
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Focus in Moscow The primary race lies behind us, the Presidential race looms ahead, and here I am still ruminating about the ReaganGorbachev...
...So it was with Nikita S. Khrushchev...
...Not much of substance in SovietAmerican relations is expected during the remainder of Reagan's term...
...When I asked Gorbachev at his news conference about the possibility of a fifth meeting with President Reagan, he said it "hinges on the one question" of an understanding about space defense that would open the way to a strategic weapons agreement...
...President Reagan arrives at convergence in his own fashion, having somehow been persuaded, or having persuaded himself, that the stirrings of democracy in the Soviet Union represent a victory for the Reagan Doctrine...
...The U.S...
...Meanwhile, Gorbachev seemed willing to counsel restraint to Syria...
...Even the abrasive issue of human rights can be turned into a constructive dialogue that could stimulate self-examination in each country of its human rights problems as perceived by the other—economic security vs...
...There is no sign that this will happen...
...Technical progress on a treaty reducing strategic weapons could not produce an agreement so long as the two governments remained divided on what constraints the ABM treaty imposes on the development of a space defense system...
...individual liberty, mediocre health care for all vs...
...But, in fact, the tacit agenda of the Moscow meeting was clearing the way for the next President...
...When I asked the Soviet Embassy a few years ago whether the statute of limitations had expired, I was advised, after inquiries were made in Moscow, that my KGB file had been lost...
...All that came back to me as I stood early this month at the grave where Khrushchev is buried...
...at the end of the Reagan Presidency...
...But, as he found out in Moscow, that phrase rankled with Soviet citizens, and it dogged his steps until, finally, he made a formal recantation, saying that he had in mind "a different time, a different era...
...When the Soviet leader later toured the United States, though, he found that those words had sunk deep...
...Gorbachev talked more impersonally of the usefulness of dialogue with the American President...
...The mood seemed considerably more upbeat when it came to other aspects of the Soviet-American relationship once considered peripheral—regional trouble spots, cultural and even economic cooperation...
...The Soviets insisted the protocol should be "based on" the earlier statement...
...Reagan appeared on tape, however, not live—the Soviets also believe in "Trust, but verify...
...Sometimes what the leader of a superpower says about the adversary country he has never seen causes such a profound reaction, it comes back to haunt him when finally he confronts the people of that country...
...Reagan talked effusively of his friendship with the Soviet General Secretary...
...That was natural enough...
...For President Reagan to denounce the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" while addressing the religious Right in the United States seemed about par for his course, too...
...Vice President George Bush has respectfully made it clear he believes the President has gone too far...
...The final task force argument that held up issuance of the joint statement at the conclusion of this summit had to do with the American wish to retreat from the ambiguous passage on ABM treaty observance in the joint statement of the December 1987 Washington summit...
...Now the pursuit of arms control has, perhaps temporarily, run out of steam...
...The President even got to make solo performances on Soviet television— something he had long been seeking, in emulation of a well-received Nixon TV speech in Moscow in 1972—when he spoke at the Writers' Union and at Moscow University...
...He proclaimed that Communism would triumph over capitalism and, pointing at American Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen, he shouted, "We will bury you...
...A Soviet journalist with long experience in the United States told me he thought that in contrast to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who had tried to act like a guest in Washington, Reagan tried to act like a provocateur...
...In 1956, trying to steady Communist regimes in a quaking Eastern Europe, Khrushchev made a rousing speech at the Polish Embassy in the presence of Party chief Wladyslaw Gomulka...
...Two words much heard in glasnostperestroika Moscow are "interdependence" and "convergence," implying that the superpowers need each other and are getting to be more like each other...
...Yet the trip succeeded, because it was destined to...
...It was given to Reagan, ironically, to usher in the post-Reagan era in Soviet-American relations...
...The compromise was "building on...
...Gorbachev, noting that the United States has sought to exclude the Soviet Union from involvement in the search for peace in the Middle East, suggested that his regime is willing to assume a constructive role there—if and when the opportunity arises...
...To speak of a new era in human history, as President Reagan does, is sheer hyperbole...
...Reagan seems to have rocketed from hatred to fondness...
...It may be easier to sort out impressions of President Reagan's Moscow Spring than of my own return to Moscow after 30 years...
...Having opened the CBS News bureau in 1955,1 was excluded from the Soviet Union at the end of 1957 for various transgressions against official censorship...
...both sides, after all, possessed the nuclear weapons with which they could threaten each other and the world at large...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Focus in Moscow The primary race lies behind us, the Presidential race looms ahead, and here I am still ruminating about the ReaganGorbachev summit...
...He should be reminded of the caution of President George Washington in his farewell address: "A nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave...
...The visit survived the original unflattering description, and it survived considerable tension over the schedule the President had set up for himself, including a trip to a monastery and meeting dissidents and refuseniks...
...Still, the atmosphere improved somewhat as the visit progressed—although, up to the end, Gorbachev was complaining about "sermonizing...
...In the words of the joint statement, the two governments intend to concentrate on " the expanding political dialogue" aimed at "resolving issues ot mutual interest and concern...
...delegation wanted to say that a protocol would be negotiated "building from" the December language...
...A Change in Relations One way of describing the latest summit is to say that it was more successful as a ceremony than as a negotiation...
...But that doesn't do it full justice...
...What lies between hatred and fondness for the Soviet Union will undoubtedly enliven the fall campaign and be high on the agenda of the next President...
...Looking Down the Road Aix this helps to clear the terrain for Reagan's successor...
...The stalled arms control talks can be revived whenever the new President is willing to trade an SDI with dubious prospects in Congress and in scientific reality for a strategic weapons treaty...
...The agreement on Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan is regarded as an icebreaker for discussion of superpower disengagement in Angola, Kampuchea and possibly Nicaragua...
...As the arms control impetus slows down, there appears to be a growing awareness that the Third World does not represent a zero-sum game where the gain of one superpower means a loss for the other...
...exquisite health care for some...
...It is a slave to its animosity or its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest...
...On his first visit to the Soviet capital —and the first by an American President since Richard M. Nixon's in 1974 —Ronald Reagan had a couple of words to eat along with the lavish state dinners, specifically "evil empire...
...Since the initial postwar East-West summit in 1955, involving President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Khrushchev, arms control had been the centerpiece of the superpower relationship...
...It signaled a shift in the nature of the Soviet-American relationship as well...
...Writing in the theoretical journal Kommunist, Soviet America-watcher Georgi Arbatov had indicated the "line" for this summit in a prominent article focused on "a major reappraisal...
...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for National Public Radio...
...He was challenged everywhere about how he squared his professions of friendship with his ominous-sounding threat...
...To those of us present, including Bohlen, who were accustomed to Khrushchev rhetoric, this display of bravado was not startling...
...The Soviet regime seemed resolutely determined to fulfill the obligation assumed by Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985—an exchange of visits—and to seize the opportunity to clear the ground for a more productive engagement with the next administration...
...He added, "What does one think of a guest who comes to your house and says he only wants to see the bathroom...
Vol. 71 • June 1988 • No. 10
