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After emerging from a nearly four-hour meeting with Gorbachev in the Kremlin, the lawmakers responded as though they had sat through a bravura performance. House Speaker Tip O'Neill gushed, "I was tremendously impressed. He appears to be the type of man who would be an excellent trial lawyer, an outstanding attorney from New York. He's a master of words, and a master of the art of politics and of diplomacy."
At the start of the meeting, Gorbachev spoke, with only minor interruptions, for 1 hr. 45 min. "Maybe I'm taking too long," he said, "but maybe it's worth it for the world that we spend three or four hours together." He said he hoped that Congress would refrain from applying embargoes against East-bloc nations. He gave no ground on the shooting of the U.S. officer in East Germany and was noncommittal about the possibility of increasing Jewish emigration. He sarcastically lamented that the American press depicts Soviet citizens as "living in caves"--to which Massachusetts Congressman Silvio Conte responded that the Soviet press portrays U.S. citizens as sleeping on gratings. Gorbachev was particularly disturbed by what he later described as the "absolutely incomprehensible haste" with which the U.S. rejected his freeze proposal.
O'Neill had been carrying a letter from President Reagan. When he handed it to Gorbachev, the Soviet leader read it immediately. The letter, described by one U.S. official as an "Emily Post-type" missive, simply reaffirmed Reagan's interest in meeting. Gorbachev reiterated his own amenability, but again without being specific.
Reagan's evolution from hard-line Soviet baiter to softer-line summiteer dates to an Oval Office parley last fall with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Says a White House aide: "Reagan's notion of personal diplomacy took off from that meeting." He was nudged along by Wife Nancy, a believer in the irresistible magic of her husband's personality, and by master Image Maker Michael Deaver. Both felt deeply that Reagan's warmonger image was a bad rap.
The President's original proposal for a meeting was contained in a letter carried by George Bush to Konstantin Chernenko's funeral. The offer was meant to be private, but White House operatives, eager to have Reagan appear as the prince of peace, leaked it. Had the offer remained confidential until some agreement had been reached, Reagan would have retained greater leverage; once the proposal was out in the open, Gorbachev had the upper hand, and Reagan, though the icebreaker, was reduced to the role of supplicant.
While Gorbachev's tactics last week somewhat flummoxed the Administration, the impact in Europe was muted. The center-left French daily Le Monde headlined its story A SETBACK FOR GORBACHEV: EUROPEANS REJECT THE MISSILE MORATORIUM. As usual, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was quick to line up with Reagan. Said she: "The place for negotiations was across the table in Geneva, not in the pages of newspapers." A few peace groups took heart from Gorbachev's message, but even some of them seemed disappointed. Said Pierre Galand, head of a Belgian organization opposed to nuclear weapons: "The moratorium is fairly weak. We had the right to expect something more." That something more might be what Dobrynin hinted at in Atlanta: Soviet reductions in Euromissiles in exchange for U.S. concessions on Star Wars.