Holding Their Ground

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Reagan and Gromyko make points but no breakthroughs

Ronald Reagan had said most of it before, but now he was making his points for the first time, face to face, to a senior Soviet leader in the White House. His comments were quite different in tone from those he had been accustomed to make early in his presidency. The U.S., Reagan said, respects the Soviet Union's status as a superpower and has no wish to change its social system. America does want to resume arms-control bargaining, and if the Soviets are prepared to return to the table they will find the U.S. stance flexible. "There's much you don't know about our positions," said Reagan.

Soviet Foreign Minister and First Deputy Premier Andrei Gromyko had said it all before too, and he was no more yielding in private than he had been in public. All very well to talk about flexibility, he said, in effect, but the U.S. is taking unreasonable positions; it would be pointless to resume bargaining until those positions start to change.

So it went for more than three hours last Friday--before a blazing fireplace in the Oval Office and over lunch in the State Dining Room--with aides present and, for eight minutes, alone. At that point the two leaders could be glimpsed through the windows standing almost toe to toe, speaking intensely and gesticulating freely. Their presentations throughout the meeting were forceful and at times almost aggressive, but always civil.

And the result of this historic meeting, the first extended discussion Reagan has ever held with a member of the top Kremlin leadership? "No visible signs" of any "practical, positive change in U.S. foreign policy," Gromyko complained in a statement to the Soviet 15 news agency TASS, and thus no reason to expect "a turn for the better" in superpower relations. Reagan put git more pungently to aides as Secretary of State George Shultz was escorting Gromyko out of the White House. Said the President: "Now I've learned to speak Russian--Nyet." In a formal briefing for the journalists who jammed the White House Press Room, Shultz reported just one achievement: "We agreed to stay in touch." Shultz pursued the subject in a follow-up meeting with Gromyko Saturday, and his aides said the Soviets expressed willingness to talk more frequently "above the ambassadorial level." But nothing was pinned down. The Secretary, in a telephoned report to Reagan, said, "We will await the Soviets' reflections on what they have been given, with the hope that a more regular discourse will be established."

Even that relatively modest outcome should make the meeting a re-election asset for Reagan. One of his few campaign weaknesses has been the nagging worry that he had let relations between the nuclear superpowers drift into a dangerous limbo. Simply appearing on TV with Gromyko should win him points from voters for at least trying to restart a dialogue.

In foreign-policy terms, though, a nebulous agreement simply to talk again was not much to boast about after a week of intense and much publicized diplomacy that began at the United Nations in New York. Appearing before the General Assembly on Monday, Reagan gave one of the most conciliatory speeches of his presidency, proposing regular negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union on many levels and varying issues. But Gromyko had made it clear in his harshly worded speech to the U.N. Thursday that Moscow was looking for U.S. concessions before resuming formal bargaining on arms control or, indeed, almost anything else. He clung to that position consistently, though a bit less polemically, in private meetings with Shultz and Reagan's Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale.

Nonetheless, some Reagan aides hoped to the end that their boss might pry some more substantive agreement out of the Soviet visitor. Gromyko was well aware of that attitude. As he entered the White House at 10 a.m. Friday, he was invited to sign the guest book in the Roosevelt Room, a task he had performed several times before. On this occasion he said, in English, "Aha, my first concession." It was pretty much his last. After four separate waves of photographers had paraded through the Oval Office, serious discussion began almost immediately. TIME has obtained this account:

Reagan, a bit tense initially, referred in his opening remarks to a statement he had written out in longhand. From the days of Vladimir Lenin to the current leadership of Konstantin Chernenko, he said, Moscow's policy has been to promote world revolution. In U.S. eyes the Soviet Union is still an expansionist state, and Americans naturally are worried. The President quickly followed, however, with his explicit recognition of Soviet status as a superpower and disavowal of any American desire to change its system. The U.S., said Reagan, does not seek military superiority over the Kremlin; it wants to deal with the Soviet Union as an equal. Washington and Moscow must work together to keep the competition between them peaceful.

In his opening statement, Gromyko basically blamed the U.S. for most of the tensions in the world. But, he said, Washington has no reason to fear the Soviet Union; Moscow wants to deal realistically. Gromyko then turned to the subject of nuclear weapons, which dominated the rest of the meeting, though there was occasional discussion of other problems such as the Iran-Iraq war and Lebanon. Reagan and Gromyko did nearly all the talking; their aides rarely got to say much.

Gromyko complained of an imbalance in nuclear arms "that, he said, favors the U.S. Take intermediate-range missiles in Europe, he said; the U.S. outguns the Soviets by 50%. Reagan interrupted to say he had to correct the record and pulled out a small chart to back up his words. It showed the situation in late 1983, when the Soviets walked out of talks in Geneva aimed at limiting medium-range misAt that point, said Rea-the Soviet Union had not just a preponderance but a "monopoly." By U.S. count, more than 300 Soviet triple-warhead SS-20 missiles were targeted on Western Europe, vs. no comparable American missiles at all. Just then, however, the U.S. began deploying in Western Europe the first of what eventually will be 572 single-warhead Pershing II and cruise missiles.

You refuse to count British and French missiles, Gromyko protested. Nor should we, said Reagan. They are strategic (i.e., long-range) weapons--and anyway, even if they were counted in the same class as the Soviet SS-20s, Moscow would still have the edge.

Gromyko changed the subject to the long-range nuclear weapons that the U.S. and the Soviet Union would fire directly at each other in war. Separate talks on reducing the numbers of these weapons also broke off in Geneva at the end of 1983. Gromyko complained that the U.S. position in these talks had been unreasonable: Washington had built up forces of missile-carrying submarines and intercontinental bombers but proposed the biggest cuts in land-based missiles, on which Moscow had concentrated. Land-based systems, Reagan countered, are the most destabilizing and pose the greatest risk. But, he added, the U.S. has already said it is willing to talk about submarines and bombers too, so let's resume bargaining. Reagan remarked that the U.S. has been reducing the number of its nuclear weapons unilaterally: the Carter Administration pulled 1,000 small battlefield weapons out of Western Europe in 1979, and the Reagan Administration is removing an additional 1,400. The Kremlin, said the President, also has artillery capable of firing nuclear shells, and it is not reducing the number of those weapons.

Gromyko turned to space-based weapons. The U.S., he said, is trying to start a new arms race in the heavens. No, replied Reagan, speaking specifically of satellite-killing systems. "It doesn't matter how you or I may characterize it, you had it first. You have one and we don't. We have one at the test stage." (True, but the Soviet antisatellite system is relatively crude; the American one is far more sophisticated.) Reagan implied to Gromyko, however, that the U.S. would consider mutual restraints on further testing of antisatellite systems once formal negotiations begin.

Washington, Reagan continued, is willing to negotiate about systems that do not yet exist, meaning the space weapons of the future. But it also wants to bargain again about nuclear weapons that do exist and are deployed by the thousands. "We are not insistent about any particular format," said the President; if Moscow did not like the form in which the talks on either intermediate-range or strategic weapons were held in Geneva, let it propose some new way of proceeding. Gromyko then made his remark about the uselessness of bargaining unless the U.S. changes its positions, and Reagan came back with the rejoinder that the Kremlin would see new American proposals if it agreed to negotiate formally.

The two sides could not resolve that you-first-Alphonse impasse, though they continued talking for a while. On nonnuclear issues, Reagan raised the subject of human rights; Gromyko replied simply that it was not an appropriate topic on this occasion. There was a bit of small talk at lunch, Gromyko chatting about his hobby of hunting, Reagan commenting that Americans are drinking more wine (a 1981 California Chardonnay was served, along with Russian vodka). Then the conversation returned to arms control and other serious subjects. Reagan described the meeting in his Saturday radio address as "useful" and aides said that despite the lack of concrete accomplishment, the President "felt it had gone about as well as he could expect." It is indeed possible that his session with Gromyko marked some real, though faint, warming of the atmosphere between the White House and the Kremlin. Any reasonably polite talk is a welcome contrast to the frozen silence that has enveloped U.S.-Soviet relations for the past year or so.

The effort to improve the atmosphere began Sunday, when Reagan flew to New York to play host that night at the annual American reception for delegates attending the U.N. General Assembly meeting, and to get a look at Gromyko five days before their White House talk. The Soviet Foreign Minister, showing a rare smile, was the ninth of more than 200 foreign dignitaries to file past the President at the head of the receiving line in the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf-Astoria. Reporters timed their handshake at a long 23 seconds. Gromyko reminded Reagan that they had greeted each other once before, in 1973, when the then Governor of California was introduced to Soviet officials accompanying Leonid Brezhnev on a visit to President Nixon in San Clemente.* Reagan and Gromyko encountered each other again during the "mix and mingle" portion of the reception, and the Soviet leader indulged in some skeptical banter. Referring to Reagan's forthcoming speech to the U.N., Gromyko asked the President, in English, "How many arrows will you shoot at me tomorrow?" Reagan smilingly answered that he had no arrows in his quiver. Gromyko pressed on: "Twenty arrows? Ten?" Reagan let Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., reply for him: "Not even a dart will be thrown."

Reagan had in fact edited out of the drafts prepared by White House aides any direct criticism of Moscow. His speech on Monday, delivered in a tone of great earnestness before the General Assembly, contained little that could be construed as even indirect chiding; for example, he advocated "a negotiated outcome" in Afghanistan without once mentioning the Soviet invasion and occupation of that country. His theme was peace through negotiation, and to support it he cited two historical figures who had rarely before appeared in his pantheon of quotable heroes: St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus ("a Spanish soldier who gave up the ways of war for that path of love and peace"), and Mahatma Gandhi. The Indian apostle of nonviolence, Reagan recalled, had said, "If you approached people with trust and affection, you would have tenfold trust and thousandfold affection returned to you."

The President spread before the Soviets a smorgasbord of offers to negotiate differing problems in varying forums. He advocated "periodic consultations at the policy level about regional problems," presumably meetings of Soviet and American experts on, say, the Middle East or Southeast Asia. More broadly, Reagan proposed to "institutionalize regular ministerial or Cabinet-level meetings between our two countries on the whole agenda of issues before us." Such gatherings, he said, would provide "the best preparation" for eventual summit meetings. More ambitiously, and also rather vaguely, he talked of having the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. work out goals and priorities for arms control "during the next 20 years or so." Mixing three metaphors in as many sentences, Reagan said that this "umbrella" or "road map, if you will," would "enable us to avoid having all our hopes or expectations ride on any single set... of negotiations. If progress is temporarily halted at one set of talks, this newly established framework for arms control could help take up the slack at other negotiations."

Reagan's most specific proposals were that Washington and Moscow exchange "outlines of five-year military plans for weapons development" and that they arrange by next spring for U.S. and Soviet experts to visit each other's test sites and "measure directly the yields of tests of nuclear weapons." The second idea alluded to unratified treaties that would ban nearly all nuclear weapons tests and regulate peaceful atomic explosions; the U.S. objects that compliance with these pacts at present could not be verified. On the crucial subject of arms control, Reagan expressed willingness to negotiate on space weapons "by the end of the year or shortly thereafter," but only in company with discussions about the reduction of nuclear weapons back on earth.

The President had decided earlier to let the Pentagon and State Department continue debating what to propose if talks do resume. The dispute has become so fierce that at a recent interagency meeting, one Pentagonian referred to State as "that bandwagon full of people looking for goodies for Gromyko." Some State Department officials have suggested, as an opening move, limiting each country to one satellite-killing system. The Pentagon fears that any limitation on antisatellite weapons could eventually result in the abandonment of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.), more popularly known as the Star Wars proposal. Under this plan, the U.S. would develop a system that could intercept and destroy enemy missiles. Some people in the State Department would indeed like to use S.D.I, as a bargaining chip to be traded away, or significantly restricted, in the course of negotiating reductions in nuclear arms of all sorts.

Reagan, says one adviser, "is not going to let himself be stampeded by State into pre-emptive concessions in the heat of the campaign, nor is he going to let himself be stampeded by Defense into slamming any doors he may want to walk through later." In his U.N. speech, the President simply advocated negotiations and added a candid explanation of the difference in tone between that address and his earlier fulminations against the "evil empire." Said Reagan: "America has repaired its strength; we have invigorated our alliances and friendships. We are ready for constructive negotiations with the Soviet Union." Translation: two or three years ago, in Reagan's view, the U.S. was not militarily strong enough to talk turkey with the Soviets; now it is.

Characteristically, in a passage he inserted into the speech prepared by advisers, Reagan put the appeal for negotiations in highly personal terms. "You know," he remarked, "as I stand here and look out from this podium, there in front of me I can see the seat of the representative from the Soviet Union. And not far from that seat... is the seat of the representative from the United States." Returning to his text, the President continued, "In this historic assembly hall, it is clear there is not a great distance between us. Outside this room, while there will still be clear differences, there is every reason why we should do all that is possible to shorten that distance." These remarks prompted the only spontaneous applause from delegates. Gromyko, though, sat with the stolid lack of expression that has earned him the nickname Grim Grom.

The Soviet Foreign Minister appeared a bit less dour when he visited the U.S. Mission to the U.N. Wednesday morning for a private meeting with Secretary of State Shultz. The two posed amiably at a picture-taking session in Ambassador Kirkpatrick's office; Gromyko clicked softly to mimic the sound of camera lens shutters. The meeting was much shorter than the American side had expected, lasting just three hours. Neither side would disclose what was said, but American officials reported that the meeting represented "a good start."

That mood lasted not quite 24 hours -- until Gromyko mounted the podium Thursday morning for his speech to the U.N. General Assembly. His face wrinkling at times into the expression of a man who has scented a peculiarly unpleasant odor, Gromyko for 75 minutes assailed the U.S. as the cause of all political tensions that have plagued the world since 1946. His speech, delivered in an icy monotone, was replete with outrageous assertions ("Provocative intrigues continue against sov ereign and nonaligned Afghanistan") and devoid of the slightest hint of a change in Moscow's position on any subject.

Without ever mentioning Reagan's speech from the same rostrum three days earlier, Gromyko repeatedly expressed what sounded like angry distrust of the President's overtures. "The tug of war between the groups that determine U.S. foreign policy has been won by the militaristically minded," he said. The Administration's policy papers, he went on, "glorify the course aimed at U.S. domination in the Wold" In an obvious allusion to Reagan's comment that the U.S. now feels strong enough to negotiate, Gromyko stormed, "All we hear is that strength, strength and above all strength, is the guarantee of international peace. In other words, weapons, weapons and still more weapons ... This is a twisted logic, a logic of frenzied militarism." When American representatives do bargain with Soviet diplomats, Gromyko continued, "even elementary decency is lacking ... Everything ;he U.S. side says is intended to secure unilateral advantages for the United States. Therefore, from the very outset things are doomed to failure."

Gromyko did not totally close the door to new arms-control talks, but he stood by the Soviet line that the U.S. must first pull out the intermediate-range nuclear missiles it is deploying in Western Europe. More generally, said Gromyko, only "concrete deeds rather than verbal assurances" from the U.S. can lead to better relations with the Soviet Union. That seemed a conscious, mocking echo of Reagan's plea at a 1982 U.N. disarmament conference for "deeds, not words" from the Kremlin.

Shultz made no attempt to hide his chagrin at Gromyko's unyielding performance. As soon as the Soviet Foreign Minister stopped speaking, the Secretary of State, face red and eyes glittering, charged over to a battery of press microphones. Said Shultz: "It's sad and disappointing [that] Mr. Gromyko should give us yet another misrepresentation of history and a distortion of the peaceful and constructive role of the U.S. in world affairs. I can only say as President Reagan did Monday, we will try and try again to bring forth a more constructive relationship." The Secretary's aides were reduced to hoping that Gromyko might sound less strident in private.

Gromyko evidently did speak slightly differently 2 1/2 hours after his U.N. speech in a meeting with another critic of the Reagan Administration, Walter Mondale. The Democratic presidential nominee earlier in the week had voiced deep suspicion as to whether Reagan's soft words toward Moscow reflected anything beyond re-election tactics. Said Mondale, in a campaign speech Tuesday, referring to Reagan's U.N. address: "After four years of sounding like Ronald Reagan, six weeks before the election he's trying to sound like Walter Mondale ... My dad was a Methodist minister and he once told me, 'Son, be skeptical of deathbed conversions.' I asked why. And he said, 'Because sometimes they get well on you.' "

With Gromyko, however, Mondale said he stressed that Reagan spoke for all Americans in negotiating with Moscow. After their 90-minute meeting at the Soviet Mission to the U.N., Mondale reported. "My plea to Mr. Gromyko was to look past tensions, rhetoric, previous positions, whatever complaints and grievances they had and give this [the negotiations] a chance ... I did what I could to create a hopeful atmosphere [and] I do believe that there is an opportunity... to make significant progress." But Mondale did not fully explain what Gromyko had said to justify that belief. He paraphrased Gromyko as complaining that under the Reagan Administration, relations between Moscow and Washington had been almost destroyed. Gromyko characterized Reagan's attitude as reminiscent of an American song: "Don't bother me, don't bother me, don't bother me." The Soviet diplomat may have been thinking of Don't Blame Me, a ballad popular in the early 1950s.

While disclaiming any intent to negotiate, Mondale repeated his longstanding support for a mutual, verifiable nuclear freeze. TASS may have had this in mind when it reported late in the week that "W. Mondale" had advanced ideas that "would open up certain possibilities for bringing the position of the two superpowers closer together."

Indeed, Soviet TV showed pictures on Friday of Gromyko conferring with Mondale before suddenly shifting to a shot of the Foreign Minister together with Reagan in the Oval Office; it was the first time the Soviet Union's citizens had been informed that Gromyko was meeting with the President. A Soviet commentator remarked, exaggeratedly, that superpower relations had become the dominant issue in the U.S. campaign; then the camera showed a copy of last week's TIME with Gromyko on the cover.

The odds are, of course, that it will still be Reagan the Kremlin deals with after Nov. 6; the Soviets presumably think so, or Gromyko would not have taken the opportunity last week to size up the President in person. Reagan's aides, however, do not expect to hear anything more of a substantive nature from Moscow until after the voting. Gromyko, they believe, will need time to confer with his colleagues in the Soviet leadership on what to do next, and the Administration will also have to do some retooling of the position to take if and when formal negotiations resume. Soviet officials agree on the timing of any exchanges, but for a different reason. Says one Soviet diplomat: "We want to see how Ronald Reagan behaves after he is reelected, because we can't trust him before the election." --By George J. Church.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Johanna McGeary/Washington

--White House aides, who had been telling reporters that Reagan and Gromyko had never met, corrected themselves after this display of Gromyko's prodigious memory.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Johanna McGeary