The Washington Spectator / Gorbasms

...When I asked him whether he thought better of Reagan the peacenik, he made it clear that, as far as Carl Sagan is concerned, Reagan is still in the doghouse...

...For Americans," he informed Gorbachev, "an adversary is a friend they haven't met yet...

...It was put in a speech and Reagan just read it—not that he didn't believe it, but it was somebody else's language, somebody else's idea to say it...

...he did refer enthusiastically to Gorbachev's idea of a "joint manned and womanned mission to Mars...

...His tie loosened, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, Fitzwater chatted informally with the desperate reporters...

...Make that Mister Rogers...

...There an elderly woman jumped up and down, waving a sign and shouting...

...intervention in Archangel back during the civil war...

...We're all familiar with the phenomenon of moral equivalence, in which arguments are formulated in such a way as to accord identical moral standing to the Soviet Union and the United States, or Congress and the Politburo, or Gorbachev and Reagan...

...What happened to the old fire-breather, anyway...

...It seems someone was out to undermine the Gorbachev-Reagan meeting, this chance to save humanity, Ulianov said, his neck by now at shoulder width...

...Do you think you'll ever get away from such slogans and cliches...

...Pretty soon he was complaining about the water supply in Reagan's America, and the literacy rate, and the deficit, and to top it all off, Detroit can't make a car that's worth a tinker's damn...

...10001 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 49...

...He meant the transformation of the gunslinging cowboy of left-wing mythology into the sober, "realistic" leader with visions of a "nuclear-free world" dancing in his head...

...With bright lights fastened to the tops of their cameras and sound-men in train, the cameramen filmed the empty podium at the front of the room, the charwomen emptying ashtrays, the television monitors tuned to CNN, the countless reporters who were busy interviewing other reporters, and, at last, in that eerie, metaphysically disconcerting reflex, they filmed each other filming each other...

...Is he just trying to get Nancy off his back...

...Throughout the summit there were reminders of that fact, in the form of demonstrations in Lafayette Square across from the White House, put on by Latvians, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Afghans, Estonians, Armenians, Cubans, Ukrainians, Crimeans, Ethiopians, Angolans, Vietnamese—the list goes on and on, and its length is testimony to the reach of Soviet brutality...

...Indeed, the NRDC is famous (although not as famous as it should be) for chugging along manfully with every radical enthusiasm relating to the dreaded nukes...

...Camera crews, finding themselves with nothing to do, started filming things...

...In such fashion were the most serious men and women, whose causes should lie at the heart of America's moral ardor, reduced to the endearing eccentrics of democracy, colorful denizens of bughouse square.—AF • • • "Jews, Jews, what's all this stuff I see on your TV about Jews...

...WP AUTHORS WANTED BY NEW YORK PUBLISHER Leading subsidy book publisher seeks manuscripts of all types: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly and juvenile works, etc...

...Aside from its daily press releases, perfectly timed to illuminate the arcane issues of arms control for confused reporters on deadline, SummitWatch held briefings each morning in the bourgeois cushiness of the Hay Adams Hotel...

...It's the petty bureaucrats, the chinovniki, who are the real target...

...Gorbachev he seemed to like a little better...

...Rubbish...

...Now it appears we elected Will Rogers...

...The President," said Marlin, "will use the ceremony to draw an analogy between the Christmas season and the kind of peace he's hoping for in the summit...

...But on Haynes, as on most of his colleagues and the summiteers at large, the lesson was lost...

...Well, let's see, Belaev said: pornography, racist materials, war mongering .. . You mean, just like during the time of Brezhnev...

...Yeah, and I had a movie in the can for twenty years that's finally being released, added Ulianov...

...A few feet away, a young woman was fervently and repeatedly shouting into a microphone...

...They do quite well on their own...

...The speaker was Mikhail Ulianov, director of Moscow's Taganka theater who along with five Soviet editors was engaged in roundtable discussion with American counterparts in the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich offices on Connecticut Avenue three days before the summit...

...As always on such occasions, they represented various ethnic, religious and national groups expressing diametrically opposite, passionately held views...

...But there's truth in his formulation, nevertheless...

...With Gorbi grinning and nodding at his right, Reagan remarked approvingly that "many Americans have sent you the keys to their homes...

...from the difficult business of making easy the principles of astronomy, he has descended to shilling for anti-intellectual fright-freaks, which by comparison must be a piece o' cake...

...Again, it's the masses who are the real force, and the course is irreversible...

...And now here was a spokesman for the President of the United States extending that odious practice to an unthought-of extreme: moral equivalence between Gorbachev and Santa...

...Hell no, there are plenty of factory jobs open...

...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 Conservatives have long argued that arms control summits—and no matter what the Administration says, the Washington summit was first and foremost an arms control summit—play into the hands of the NRDC and its allies...

...It certainly helps clear the field for left-wingers...

...SummitWatch," read the brochures, "is a project of the NRDC [the National Resources Defense Council] . . . designed to assist the working press covering the Washington Summit by supplying independent data, analysis and commentary from leading independent defense and nuclear weapons experts...

...When reporters showed up at the Marriott press center every morning, they would find by their work stations a piece of literature, handsomely done up by something called "SummitWatch," analyzing an aspect of the INF treaty or the Start negotiations...

...About halfway through the summit a liberal British journalist said to me, "The story here is not Gorbachev, not his wife, not the INF treaty, not even the summit as an event...

...Reagan a march were to be organized by Soviet citizens outraged at U.S...

...The course is irreversible...

...Look buddy, I had a novel that went unpublished for twelve years that's out now, Belaev said...

...Ulianov, listeners were reassured by V. A. Belaev of Ogonyok magazine and at that moment a self-admitted Jew, is not a Jew-hater...

...After Reagan's gruesome pre-summit interview with the four network anchors, in which he said that some to his right who opposed the INF treaty had decided that a war between the U.S...

...has always done the same thing, for instance not letting Robert Oppenheimer out for security reasons...

...Coffee was served, and pretty girls took the reporters' names and checked their press passes...

...Send for free, illustrated 40-page brochure H- 80 Vantage Press, 516 W. 34 St., New York, N.Y...

...Now we have perestroika, which is deeply embedded in the will of the masses as expressed at the Party plenum of March 1985 and reaffirmed in March 1986...

...Won't throwing them out cause massive unemployment...

...If you include their families, that's upwards of 60 million people...

...No, no, that was what is now known as the period of stagnation...

...instead, the President continued lamely in the same vein: "I've often thought," he said, "that we should have been better friends long ago...

...The real story is Ronald Reagan himself, the wonderful change this man has gone through...

...Doubtless the Soviets hoped it would be...

...The Freeze, Nuclear Winter, a Comprehensive Test Ban—each at one time or another has been pushed along by the NRDC's vast resources...

...sort of a decorous Curtis LeMay...

...The old Reagan would have been the first to advise these foolish people to get their locks changed but quick...

...What other dictator's presence could have drawn to a single place anguished Eritreans and bitter Laotians...

...God help us if the intelligentsia is behind anything, Baklanov replied as the others joined him in hearty laughter...

...The lesson of these "multi-ethnic" protests lay in the uniform nature of their grief, for the apparently dissimilar petitioners were bound together by a single strand: in far-flung reaches of the globe they or their friends or their families had felt the sting of the Soviet Union...

...Now this talk about a nuclear-free world, Reagan thought that up all by himself...

...For those of you who occasionally wonder how someone like Phillips has become a "spokesman" for the conservative movement, there's your answer...

...Then what was eating at Ulianov...

...What about the argument that perestroika is being carried out on the backs of the working class...

...Is it now possible in the Soviet Union to question the premises of Communism...

...Why of course, replied Georgi Baklanov of Znamia, just the other week in Leningrad there was a discussion of just this point at which two fellows got up and dismissed Communism as a Zionist concoction...

...What a stupid, insulting question...

...At a press conference the next day, Phillips, huffing with indignation, made his now-famous pronouncement that Reagan was a "useful idiot," an intemperate chunk of hyperbole which achieved its intended purpose of getting Howie's name in the New York Times...

...But given the priorities of the summit, the press for the most part saw such gatherings as nothing more than splashes of local color...

...and the USSR was inevitable, Howard Phillips smelled ink...

...Not that he's given up the astronomy thing altogether...

...Haynes Johnson, one of the Post's army of lugubrious moralists, took brief note of the protests, which made him feel all warm and mushy: "A stroll [through the park] showed democracy's enduring strengths: the right to dissent, to be wrong, to insult the mighty...

...This is the same Administration that warned our allies not to sell arms to Iran, and then sold arms to Iran," Sagan said...

...Don't try to tell us nothing's changed...

...If he didn't exist the establishment press would have to invent him, for he and his like can always be relied upon to cough up a quote so ludicrous as to place the conservatives they are alleged to represent (all of them) far outside the realm of serious discourse...

...Carl Sagan gave the invocation, which was—how to say it?—wide ranging...

...Everywhere Jews...

...That's Ronald Reagan being Ronald Reagan...

...For a complete itemization of the NRDC's good works, see "The Nuclear Test Ban Hoax," by Rael Jean Isaac, in the May 1987 TAS...

...Talk about useful idiots...

...The Brit was partly speaking from the desperation that overtook many journalists when they realized that for all the hoopla, objectively there wasn't much of a story anywhere in the summit—thus the real story had to be something less obvious, calling for some scalpel work on Reagan's psyche...

...What if, Belaev chimed in, on the eve of a visit to Moscow by Mr...

...Into this torpor ambled Marlin Fitzwater, the President's genial press secretary, to deliver an unheralded but deeply significant quote that in retrospect seems to sum up summit week...

...As for all this nonsense about "brain drain," not only did Comrade Gorbachev not say anything close to that to Tom Brokaw, but in any case it's not an issue and anyway the U.S...

...His address at the welcoming ceremony for Gorbachev on the south lawn of the White House was a case in point...

...In truth its defining characteristic is that it is a police state with insatiable international ambitions...

...The Reagan Era is indeed over...

...Of course, Reagan too seemed a captive of the Christmas spirit in the weeks leading up to the summit, and during the summit itself...

...This last bit of disinformation was passed along by Oleg Beniuk of Soviet Life and the Soviet embassy...

...But already there were depressing signs of what the week held in store for the press...

...What cannot be published in the Soviet Union...

...Has he maybe made a deal with Maureen, whereby he'll praise Gorbachev if she agrees to move out of the White House...

...That mined the harbors in Nicaragua, but refused to enforce sanctions against South Africa . . ." I looked around and noticed my colleagues scribbling like mad...

...The summits do this by tacitly confirming the premise that the defining characteristic of the Soviet Union, and hence of its relationship with the United States, is its possession of nuclear weapons...

...Back home it's the Stalinists who argue this way, emotionally, subjectively...

...There have been countless reasons to worry about Reagan over the past few years, but you can overdo it, and not just tactically but to the point of embarrassing yourself, assuming you're the type who can be embarrassed...

...When an organization describes itself as "independent" twice in one sentence, you can be reasonably sure it's not...

...What about poor Boris Yeltsin—wasn't his demise a blow to the intelligentsia, which in the West is regarded as the real force behind perestroika...

...Even Carl Sagan has yet to blame Reagan for that...

...All vented their feelings, pro or con . . ." Reading such guff you're entitled to ask, "As always on what occasions, Haynes...

...Besides, the left-wingers don't need Phillips's help...

...New authors welcomed...

...On the contrary, he played Tevye in a Soviet production of Fiddler on the Roof`and what a Tevye he played...

...Remember," he told me, "it was somebody else, a speechwriter, who came up with the talk about 'the Evil Empire' and 'the focus of evil in the modern world,' and all that...

...This late in the day it is hard to remember the old Sagan, the friendly science popularizer...

...Try again...

...THE WASHINGTON SPECTATOR GORBASMS On the Monday afternoon before the summit, after Gorbi had landed at Andrews Air Force base but before the festivities had begun, the Official International Press Center in the J. W. Marriott Hotel was quiet—sleepy, even...

...The briefing I went to, on the last day of the summit, was well attended, mostly by European reporters along with the obligatory heavy-set fellows from Tass and Izvestia...

...He slipped into his Press Secretary mode only briefly, when someone asked him what his boss would say at the lighting of the national Christmas tree that evening...

...Now he tells us...

...I raised the question with an old Reagan hand who worked closely with the President during the first term, the salad days of that splendidly destabilizing "Evil Empire" rhetoric...

...Many voters, certainly most who would style themselves Reaganites, thought that when they threw in with Reagan they were electing a man who could go toe-to-toe with the Russkies and remain steely-eyed, meanwhile keeping the peaceniks at bay...