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While rejecting Gorbachev's offer was easy enough, the Administration was in a muddle over what posture it should adopt on a Reagan-Gorbachev summit. At first White House aides in Santa Barbara, Calif., where Reagan was vacationing at his mountaintop ranch, retreated to the President's previous position that a summit had to be "carefully prepared," with an agenda negotiated beforehand. Chief of Staff Donald Regan told reporters that the President was against "just having meetings for meetings' sake." Regan went on, "We think it would be a big letdown . . . if the two leaders were to meet and accomplish nothing."
But a day later National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane began edging away from the notion of a precooked summit in favor of an initial get-acquainted meeting. McFarlane counseled reporters not necessarily to label a meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev a summit. Whereas summits are often "romanticized" and "inflated," he said, meetings are not freighted with such impossibly high expectations. McFarlane said the purpose of a meeting would be "to get to know each other . . . and assess each other's commitment to the resolution of problems." One opportunity for such a meeting could come this fall, when Gorbachev may travel to New York City for the opening of the General Assembly or the celebration of the U.N.'s 40th anniversary. In the end McFarlane wanted it both ways. The President, he said, "is open to a meeting now, and he believes that we should press on with an agenda that can lead to a summit."
As if Gorbachev's machinations were not enough, Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin sprang another surprise at week's end. Appearing in Atlanta at an international conference on arms control organized by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Dobrynin called for immediate resumption of negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear test ban. Reagan has consistently balked at such talks on the scientifically dubious ground that a complete test ban could not be adequately verified. In fact, his reluctance stems from a belief that the Soviets have cheated on limited test-ban agreements in the past. Yet the idea of a test ban has great public appeal, and by raising it now, Dobrynin obviously hoped to have added to Reagan's discomfiture over the summit. On Saturday, Dobrynin further tantalized the conference with what appeared to be another Soviet stratagem. He hinted that the Kremlin was prepared to consider "something good on strategic missiles or on European missiles" if the U.S. would make some accommodation on Star Wars. Said he: "Solutions must be simultaneous."
Moscow's multipronged maneuver showed that Gorbachev is a tough customer with a flair for public relations. While the Administration publicly belittled the Soviet proposals, in private a number of top advisers expressed a grudging respect for the Soviet leader's showmanship. Especially deft was the way he used the visiting U.S. Congressmen, with their retinue of reporters and cameramen, to put himself into the world's spotlight.