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Dressed in a dark blue suit and blue-striped tie, Gorbachev stood at the head of a receiving line in the white-and-gilt Hall of St. George. Premier Nikolai Tikhonov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and First Vice President Vasili Kuznetsov were by his side as he greeted the foreign dignitaries. Gorbachev looked his guests in the eye, occasionally giving a visitor a two-handed grip or flashing a reserved smile of recognition.
Later Gorbachev met privately with many of the leaders. Mitterrand described the new General Secretary as "a calm, relaxed man who appears willing to tackle problems firmly." Said Kohl: "You do not have the impression that you are listening to a Tibetan prayer wheel." Thatcher, who had proclaimed Gorbachev "a man with whom we can do business" after meeting him in Britain last December, said she was not changing her opinion after conversing with him for 55 minutes in Moscow. Said Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney: "He's clearly in command and I think it augurs well for the future. I was very impressed."
Bush came away from his 85-minute private session with Gorbachev in a cautiously optimistic mood. His feelings, Bush said, were "high, high on hope, high that we can make progress in Geneva, high for an overall reduction of tensions." Bush, who had flown to the Soviet Union on the heels of a 13,000-mile tour of Africa with a stop-over in Geneva to address a United Nations conference on that continent's famine, hand-delivered a special message to Gorbachev from President Reagan. The President had attended neither Brezhnev's nor Andropov's funeral, but, given the significance of the latest change in the Soviet leadership, there was some thought in the White House that a quick Reagan visit to Moscow for the Chernenko burial would constitute symbolic assurance of U.S. concern for better relations. At 9:30 a.m. Washington time, 3 1/2 hours after the announcement of Chernenko's death, Reagan and a small group of aides that included Secretary of State George Shultz and National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane gathered in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a Moscow trip. Shultz set forth the pros and cons of an impromptu summit, but Reagan had already made up his mind during earlier meetings with White House Chief of Staff Don Regan and Close Friend Michael Deaver. The decision was not to go, mainly because there was insufficient time to prepare for a meeting with Gorbachev and little prospect of fulfilling the high expectations such a trip would inevitably create.
Instead, the President decided to send Bush with a letter inviting Gorbachev to come to the U.S. for a meeting at a mutually convenient time. (The last two U.S.-Soviet summits were held outside the U.S.) The general nature of the invitation made it clear that the U.S. no longer insisted, as it had during the Andropov and Chernenko regimes, that there be a specific agenda for a superpower summit. Gorbachev accepted invitations to visit both France and West Germany during his more than 15 hours of meetings with world leaders last week, but according to Shultz, who returned from Moscow last Friday to brief the President, the Kremlin was still pondering the Reagan offer. Administration officials characterized Gorbachev's response as "We are interested and we will get back to you."