Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War

By Ken AdelmanBroadside Books, 2014“The Reykjavik summit,” former diplomat and Reagan apparatchik Ken Adelman enthuses right out of the starting gate of his new book Reagan at Reykjavik, “is something out of an Agatha Christie thriller. Two vivid characters meet over a weekend, on a desolate and windswept island, in a reputedly haunted house with rain lashing against its windowpanes, where they experience the most amazing things.”It’s a racy opening for anything claiming to be a work of history, and it sets the tone for much of Adelman’s book. It’s also just a bit stupid – none of the Gothic gymnastics it lists was ever used by Agatha Christie even on a bad day – and that too, alas, gives readers a clear warning of what they can expect in this breathless little thing, which wants to be two parts “I was there” and eight parts “setting the record straight” but ends up being two parts “I was there” and eight parts “when the kitchen ran short of beverages, I’m pretty sure I saw the Boss turn water into wine.”When assessing an oddly hybridized work like this one, it’s important to try to figure out up front if the openly iconic claims of its title are actually true. Was the two-day conference in October of 1986 between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev really as movie-title monumental as Henry V at Agincourt, or Montgomery at Alamein, or Kirk at Kitomer? Or was it a minor meeting at which the only noteworthy surprise was the fact that the two world leaders happened to like each other?As with so many aspects of the Reagan presidency, the answer to questions like this is “Well, yes, but not really.” And in any case, Ken Adelman is hardly in a position to be this turning point’s chronicler; he was there, yes, but he was there from first to last as a Reagan lieutenant (indeed, a self-confessedly blinkered one: “Whereas [Secretary of State George] Shultz and everyone else around the cabinet table had dozens of issues thrown at them,” Adelman writes, “I focused on arms control all day and night”) – and even now, thirty years later, that’s a faith with no apostates. The hilarious subtitle of Adelman’s book, “Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War,” ought to be signal enough that what follows will be short on Johnson and long on Boswell; you can be reasonably sure that Reagan will take no long and worrisomely unplanned naps in this account.Even before you settle into the welcoming Icelandic hotspring of Adelman’s book, you might be rude enough to ask what the hell it’s doing here, with its open pretensions of Hollywood shorthand – Reagan at Reykjavik, coming soon to a theater near you (or perhaps an opera house, in a double billing with John Adams’ Nixon in China).  Actual bare-bones history describes the Reykjavik summit as a failure, after all, where President Reagan’s childish refusal to abandon SDI, the multimillion-dollar boondoggle colloquially known as “Star Wars,” scuttled any possible preliminary agreements on a whole range of important issues ranging from human rights to tense espionage standoffs on desolate, windswept islands. Every newspaper East and West called it a failure; some accounts have the Soviet premiere saying “I don’t know what we could have done differently” and the President petulantly hissing, “Well, you could have said yes.” This seems like unpromising gristle around which to brew a soup; if it’s shorthand for anything “Reagan at Reykjavik” should stand for mulish stubbornness on the very brink of disaster.Adelman has another story in mind.In order to tell the story of that weekend in October at Hofdi House, he has to set the stage, and the rough shape of that larger setting will be familiar to most readers older than the age of 70: the Soviet Union, its society and economy groaning under the twin burdens of runaway weapons spending and the bankrupt political system of Communism, lurched its way at last to the bargaining table in November, 1985 in Geneva in a desperate attempt to negotiate itself out of an arms race it could no longer afford. As luck would have it, the Soviet Union at the time was led by exactly the Secretary General who could best make such overtures to the West: not a slab-faced Politburo Stalingrad-survivor but instead a canny and charming huckster named Mikhail Gorbachev, who trod the public relations hustings with new Russian terms, glastnost and perestroika, and a new willingness to smile for the cameras.At Geneva, Adelman’s story goes, this teddyish version of the Russian bear met his match: former screen actor Ronald Reagan, freshly re-elected to the White House in a Republican landslide even more thunderous than the one that got him elected in the first place, a genial, smiling figure fond of over-burnished anecdotes (at one point Adelman tells us, invoking a rather alarming precedent, that Reagan spoke “in stories, almost in parables”) and doggedly memorized bits and scraps of facts (for all things Soviet, his favorite was the nonexistent “old Russian saying” Doveryai, no proveryai – “trust but verify”). Reagan had made a career (in fact, two) out of being tough on Communists, and in his presidential years he’d made a something of a crusade out of nuclear arms reduction; when Gorbachev sent him a letter impulsively proposing a quick and relatively fuss-free arms reduction summit in London or Iceland, Reagan immediately agreed (he chose Iceland so he wouldn’t need to waste time paying official visits to Prime Minister Thatcher and the Queen). Although Adelman writes with great conviction about Gorbachev’s remarkable qualities, he reserves his most ardent enthusiasm – and his most unbroken strings of clichés – for the man in the Oval Office:

Everyone in that era was intrigued by Ronald Reagan, especially his fellow politicians. He was, after all, the Leader of the Free World. Besides, he had been stunningly successful, having revived both the American economy and the American spirit. Everything he touched seemed to have turned to gold. Nothing thrown at him stuck; he was indeed “the Teflon president.”

Adelman paints a vivid picture of these two spotlight-ready world leaders coming to Iceland with comparatively minimal staff or preparation, each trusting to his natural charisma to move things forward. Although of two different generations (and different job-standings; Adelman insightfully points out that Gorbachev was still new to his job, whereas Reagan had been in office for half a decade and was at the height of his popularity), the two men were similar in temperament – each preferred conversation to negotiation, each looked for clean summaries over straggling details, and each loved nothing more than to distress their armed guards by diving into waiting crowds to shake hands and pat shoulders. By its very nature, Reykjavik highlighted these similarities, but our chronicler points out differences as well:

The session also revealed how, and how much, the men differed. Gorbachev acted like a capitalist CEO trying to analyze and solve the issues at hand. Reagan resembled a Russian artist, flitting here and there, following his imagination about.

Euphemisms of this sort help to pump Adelman’s pages full of helium. Reagan is like a Russian artist; he’s like Mickey Mantle; he’s “all Hotspur and no Hamlet.” “To say that Reagan had muscle memory for leadership, especially in foreign affairs,” Adelman tells us, “may be a great insight, or it may be trite, or even a tautology. Nonetheless, he did a lot well without a lot of deliberation.” Adelman’s readers, living in a nightmarish world largely the result of another non-deliberating U.S. president for eight years, may shudder a bit at the smiling allowances being made here (those who were able to afford the college education whose price-tag septupled under Reagan – or even who were able to glean a good education from the secondary school system whose funding he gutted – might also recall what Hotspur’s fate was at the hands of a deliberator).  But Adelman’s own shudderings are infrequent and entirely insincere; even now, decades later, he regurgitates the Reagan line with unblinking certainty:

By the end of 1986 the clock was already running down on Communist ideology and legitimacy … Gorbachev had no good response to Reagan’s critique. A man that intelligent and clear-sighted had to have seen that. He had to have known that Reagan was basically right and that the path the Soviet Union had taken was basically wrong.

Temporarily, anyway, the triumph of Reagan’s will is postponed while Adelman takes his readers through a breezily readable narrative of the weekend’s ups and downs in Iceland. Reagan and Gorbachev had a lengthy meeting alone but for their translators, and there followed many meetings with their respective State Department advisors brought in. Gorbachev enthusiastically embraced the idea of nuclear arms reduction, joining Reagan and his people in targeting intermediate nuclear missiles and hardly hesitating to open talks to contemplate the elimination of nuclear weapons altogether. This went well beyond the feelers put out at Geneva the previous year, and it wasn’t the only thing Gorbachev brought to the table; he was also willing to talk about conventional military forces, trade agreements, and even human rights in the Soviet Union. It was a bounty of flexibility, and the Secretary General had one main and apparently minor sticking point, one we’ve already mentioned: Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, derisively dubbed “Star Wars.” This missile defense system was still in the research stages at the time of Reykjavik, and Gorbachev wanted it to stay that way: he insisted that the whole system be confined to the laboratory for the next decade.Gorbachev had two main motives for this, and both of them were entirely sound: first, he looked with horror on the prospect of the increased military spending his country would need to lay out even to hope to stay “Star Wars” competitive, and second, he shared the fear of his experts that SDI, once developed, would weaponize Earth’s orbit and bristle with offensive capabilities (and he hardly could be expected to believe Reagan’s blithe assurances that the U.S. would gladly share the technology; his spies could tell him to the last dollar the enormous increases his opponent was spending on nuclear weapons while telling every nearby camera he wanted to eliminate such weapons – Gorbachev trusted, but verified). He naturally assumed that stalling this one still largely theoretical weapon system was a small price to pay for the wide range of wholesale compromises he was willing to make on so many other long-thorny issues.He assumed wrong, however; he reckoned without the obsessions of his Hotspur. The simplicity of SDI – the virtuous purity of a shield extended over all of the United States – seized Reagan’s primary-color imagination; he talked about the protection a roof affords a house, and if it hadn’t previously been known to Adelman and his colleagues, they learned with bruising clarity at Reykjavik that Reagan would not abandon “Star Wars.” Not for anything the Russians could offer. To Gorbachev’s flushed astonishment, Reagan walked out of the talks rather than hear any more on the question.By rights, that should be the end of any book called Reagan at Reykjavik, but of course Adelman can’t leave his story there. Much as Jack Matlock’s book Reagan and Gorbachev did back in 2004, Reagan at Reykjavik claims that Reagan’s persistence forced Gorbachev to realize that the Soviet Union must immediately mothball its military spending – and so, effectively, go out of business altogether. Adelman goes on narrate the official White House summit Reagan and Gorbachev had the following year, at which some arms reduction schedules were at last hammered out. This treaty wasn’t perfect, Adelman admits, but in addition to eliminating some classes of intermediate missiles, it also, “best of all,”

began a steep decline in the number of nuclear weapons held by both superpowers  - a decline that continues to this day. From this treaty, and especially from the precedent it set on verification, sprang other significant agreements concluded under subsequent presidents, including Barack Obama.

Adelman tries to shake off any illusions about the present even while he’s romanticizing the past, but he’ll have nothing of the assertion that all nuclear comparisons are equal. There are key differences, and he insists on them:

Anyone who asserts that our current predicament is more precarious than that during the Cold War either didn’t live during the Cold War or wasn’t alert to its dangers. Even with today’s risks – especially nuclear proliferation and terrorism – it has still been much safer living the twenty-seven years since Reykjavik than it was living the twenty-seven years before that weekend.

Such a summary can only comfortably be made by somebody who’s got a mighty powerful agenda to push, so we’re brought back to our opening question: what is this kind of book doing here, whitewashing the past and reducing the rogue-state chaos of the present to childish squabbles happening in a room long ago made safe by adults? At first you might think that agenda boils down to simple gloating, done by one of the victors at the distant expense of the losers. Certainly that’s the impression Adelman gives in his summation of the final fall of Communism on Christmas Day 1991:

Later that afternoon, with the Moscow winter sky already dark, the red hammer and sickle flag was lowered from the pole at the top of the Kremlin. A white, blue, and red flag of the Russian Federation was raised in its place. The Cold War thus ended just as Ronald Reagan had said it would.We won. They lost.

But by the end of this excited book, even the lure of gloating takes a back seat to the lure of extolling one particular victor, Adelman’s hero, who was not a thinker but a doer:Reagan can best be known by his deeds. The great architect Christopher Wren is buried in his masterpiece, Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. There is no statue or headstone, only a plaque on the marble wall which reads: Si monumentum requires, circumspice – if you want his monument, look around you.“We can look around us and see Reagan’s monument,” Adelman tells us, “a Europe united and free, some 415 million people liberated from Communism, and nuclear stockpiles sliced and dwindling.”But Reagan at Reykjavik had no way of knowing that his blockheaded single-issue mania wasn’t in fact scuppering the broadest peace-gesture the Soviet Union had ever made. He was lucky in the long-term outcome of his stubbornness, but blind luck isn’t a cause for veneration and shouldn’t be. We don’t put up statues in Central Park to last year’s lottery winner.Not that it matters to Adelman, who’s no stranger to single-issue mania. His great architect will be known by the Cold War he brought to an end – and by nothing else, apparently. Not the eviscerated middle class; not pauperized Nicaragua; not brutalized Thailand, nor the grotesquely engorged Federal government, nor dead Marines in Lebanon, nor the cheerfully financed Saddam Hussein, nor the thousands of AIDS sufferers who died on his watch.Instead, we’re to concentrate only on those few goodwill missiles that were taken off the board while their more lethal models were manufactured at unprecedented rates. Circumspice indeed.____Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.