Reagan at Reykjavik

Reagan at Reykjavik is a good read and has won praise from eminent reviewers including Henry Kissinger, Senator John McCain, and the writer Walter Isaacson. But is it good history? Is it literature? Is it journalism?I crossed paths with Kenneth Adelman on numerous occasions when I was covering foreign policy in Washington, DC, for United Press International in the 1970s and 1980s. He was director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, having served previously as an assistant to the secretary of defense. It seemed to me then that his main goal was to block Soviet-slanted proposals rather than to reach agreements.In 1986, as the Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report, I had the good fortune of covering the 1986 Reykjavik summit, which Adelman viewed from the inside as a member of Ronald Reagan's official delegation. I had no idea then that he had literary ambitions, was an aficionado of William Shakespeare, and had taught courses on Shakespeare at George Washington University.What this book clearly demonstrates is that Adelman is a man of deeply conservative views, an admirer of President Reagan but by no means uncritical, an accomplished writer with an eye for color who can spin phrases with a wry sense of humor. He has read the documentary sources—prime among them the declassified Reykjavik file at George Washington University's National Security Archive—as well as other U.S. and Soviet documents and all the relevant memoirs, including the published version of Reagan's diary. Adelman provides copious endnotes, listed by page but without superscripts for notes in the text.But one gets the feeling that, writing 28 years after the events, Adelman and his publisher were anxious to produce a trade book that would sell in what has become a down market. They did not want a dry history. Thus, they try to catch the reader at every turn with titillating details to keep the pages turning. The smallest example is that the volume is subtitled Forty Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War. Ended the Cold War? Really? To be fair, Adelman acknowledges in the text that Reykjavik was only an initial step.The most valuable part of Adelman's account is his description of the impromptu all-night meeting that began at 8:10 p.m. on Saturday night, 11 October 1986, and lasted until 6:20 a.m. on Sunday morning, 12 October, during which the two delegations fell into unusually candid, serious exchanges. This positive atmosphere was set by Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, chief of the Soviet General Staff, whom Mikhail Gorbachev brought with him as a total surprise in place of the long-time negotiator, Ambassador Viktor Karpov. For the first time during the Cold War, officials at the expert level were dealing seriously, rather than talking past each other. Participating in this unusual give-and-take were such tough-minded U.S. officials as Ambassador Paul Nitze and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.At around 4:00 a.m., Marshal Akhromeev dropped a bombshell after hurried consultations with Gorbachev. He disclosed that the Soviet Union was willing to accept a 50 percent cut in all types of strategic nuclear weapons, brushing aside myriad objections of the past. This would have been a major step toward President Reagan's proclaimed vision of eliminating all nuclear weapons in the United States, the Soviet Union, and eventually other countries like China, France, the United Kingdom, Israel, and India. But the proposal needed a high degree of trust that was lacking on both sides. Furthermore, Gorbachev constantly insisted that the U.S. development of a space-based missile defense system (the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI) must be restricted to the laboratory without field-testing.“The leaders’ intensity on SDI was likewise remarkable,” Adelman writes. “Indeed it was the most remarkable aspect of Reykjavik. Reagan's total faith in this chimerical defensive system still leaps off the pages of the official notes, whether written by the Russians or the Americans. His faith in SDI was heartfelt, almost transcendent, however misplaced. In October 1986, SDI wasn't much more than a presidential aspiration.”An aspiration, a chimera, perhaps, but many on the Soviet side believed it was real and threatening. Experts in the USSR assured Gorbachev that their country's technology was not in a position to match it. At that time, we Moscow correspondents learned that the Soviet response would be asymmetrical; they would develop means to disrupt SDI and prevent it from working. They did not believe that Reagan's offer to share the technology with the world was sincere.In some places Adelman offers unforgivably glib remarks. For example, he spends time describing the efforts by Gorbachev's wife, Raisa, to make a splash with the media in the absence of Nancy Reagan, who was no fan of hers. Adelman describes Raisa as “a professor of godless Marxism” who, he thinks, paradoxically wanted to visit a church in Reykjavik. Actually, Raisa was a serious sociologist as well as a wife. During my years in Moscow (1981–1986) I read her doctoral thesis in the Lenin Library; it focuses on the drunkenness and pathetic living conditions of farmers in southern Russia. She undoubtedly had an important influence on her husband in this area.In another place Adelman describes Valentin Falin, a Soviet delegation member and former ambassador to West Germany, as “a propagandist with few redeeming qualities.” I got to know Falin in Moscow when he became head of the Novosti Press Agency, one of the Soviet regime's image-making machines. I found him to be highly intelligent, open, and extremely well informed with a quick mind. He played a significant role in the reunification of Germany, Not until later was his reputation stained by peccadillos such as storing $600,000 in purloined U.S. currency in his office (the funds were discovered after the failed coup of August 1991 against Gorbachev).One of Adelman's best portraits is of Akhromeev, a major figure at Reykjavik who sympathized five years later in 1991 with the conspirators trying to overthrow Gorbachev for undermining the Soviet Union. Adelman struck up a friendship with the five-star officer and on one occasion when visiting Moscow called on him for an unscheduled visit. Adelman recalls that Akhromeev described himself as “the last of the Mohicans”—a tank soldier from the Second World War who worked his way to the top of the military hierarchy. But he was the last Mohican in another sense: devoted to the military, he committed suicide by hanging himself from the chandelier in his office when the coup failed and he believed his life's work had been in vain.The Reykjavik Summit did not end the Cold War. That much is clear. The fact that it took place at all is testimony to the urgent desire of both sides to ease the dangers of nuclear weapons and associated financial costs. The summit nearly did not take place because of the arrest in Moscow of a U.S. correspondent—this reviewer—on 30 August 1986 in a tit-for-tat retaliation for the arrest in New York by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of Soviet spy Gennadi Zakharov a week before. For a while the two superpowers locked horns in a tussle neither had wanted and did not know how to unlock. The resolution was the expulsion of Zakharov from the United States after he pleaded nolo contendere in a federal court to three counts of espionage, the release of this reviewer from a Moscow jail, and the go-ahead for Reykjavik.Looking back, I have one major impression of President Reagan at Reykjavik as viewed from the outside world of the press room. The collapse of the meeting created a feeling around the globe that the world was plunging back into the worst days of the Cold War. However, before leaving for home, Reagan addressed U.S. troops at the Keflavik air base with confident words that the world was not coming to an end, that negotiations would go on despite more pessimistic assessments by some of his aides. I thought then and think now that Reagan's optimism in a spasm of despair was a brilliant example of leadership. Adelman captures the spirit of that moment, although not the president's exact words.Although I would take issue with some of Adelman's descriptions, I can say he has produced a fine piece of long-form journalism cum history with a twist

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