Everyone who knows George Bush agrees he is cautious. So it is not surprising that his assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev has evolved very slowly, from skepticism to a kind of wary respect.
He wants proof of changes before he believes them, and in the high-stakes diplomatic poker between them, Bush wants Gorbachev to ante up.
After two formal meetings, there now is a personal relationship between the American and Soviet presidents. But they are not close friends about to sit down in casual clothes and catch up on what`s going on in their lives, what their wives have been up to, or what their innermost thoughts might be.
Instead, when they face each other at the summit later this week in Washington, it will be as representatives of their powerful countries. In its own stage-managed way, this is very much a business affair.
At the same time, Bush cannot help but realize that he is the first president in almost 50 years, since Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a position to see the Soviet leader as a potential force for positive change rather than an evil character who could blow this country to smithereens.
”It`s a totally different ballgame,” says Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a centrist Washington policy center, who has written extensively about the presidency.
”With FDR (Roosevelt), we were allies in World War II-suspicious allies, but allies nonetheless. Then there was the Cold War-Truman through Reagan-when we were potential adversaries. And now there`s post-Cold War. We don`t see an immediate threat from them and maybe (there will be) a great deal of mutual interest. Bush is the first president of that era.
”From Truman on, he is the first (president) to have a government where we may actually need to be supportive of the Soviet Union.”
Bush himself, in a Washington Post interview last summer, noted: ”I think I`m the first president to deal with these demonstrable changes in the Soviet Union . . . Keep your eyes open. Don`t make proposals that are naive or naive militarily. But think anew. We`ve got new conditions facing us.”
Perhaps facilitating Bush`s adaptability in this situation is that he is not a rigid ideologue. Unlike his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, Bush is more flexible, interested in finding common ground.
Says Thomas Lud Ashley, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio who has known Bush since they were classmates at Yale:
”I think his views (on communism) came into focus when he took the UN job (Bush was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1971-72). Before, he had the conventional views you might expect . . . not overly discerning, a broad-brush approach; the evils of the (communist) system were apparent.
”Bush`s time at the UN and in China (as head of the U.S. Liaison Office, 1974-75) did a lot to mature his thinking on foreign affairs. He became a lot more discriminating . . . His views of the (communist) system didn`t change, but he was better able to understand it. The depth and scope of his thinking was different.”
As recently as his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1988, Bush was calling for a ”prudent skepticism” in America`s relations with the Soviet Union. Two weeks earlier, in a campaign speech, he welcomed changes in the USSR but cautioned, ”We should not let our hopes outrun our practical experiences. Soviet ideology has proven bankrupt, but Russia remains a formidable military power.”
Bush held his first summit-style meeting with Gorbachev in New York on Dec. 7, 1988, when he was president-elect. He gave the Soviet leader a Russian-language edition of his autobiography, ”Looking Forward,” with a personal inscription, a gesture typical of Bush`s detailed style. It also may have given the Soviet leader a few insights into Bush`s mind-set-doubtless also a goal of the newly elected president.
In the first few months of his administration, as Bush and his advisers undertook an international policy review, some White House officials derided Gorbachev. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater deliberately referred to him as a ”drugstore cowboy” and accused him of playing a ”PR game” with a new string of arms control proposals.
Fitzwater, an experienced and savvy spokesman who rarely shoots from the hip, would not have made such a statement without feeling he had tacit support from above.
For his part, Bush announced about that time that in return for Soviet weapons cuts and political and economic reforms, Washington could move its policy toward Moscow ”beyond containment” to a broad economic relationship that could include favorable trade status.
Then several things happened, divorced from White House control, that accelerated new assessments.
Last summer Bush visited Poland and Hungary, where leaders encouraged him to support Gorbachev`s effort to continue internal reforms. By late fall, communism had crumbled across Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall, long the symbol of a divided hemisphere, was breached.
It was a staggering series of changes, and Bush was left in the position of constantly reacting to news, rather than creating it. Some analysts have suggested that only when Bush, an intensely competitive man, saw Gorbachev as a personal rival on the world stage, capturing the imagination of millions, did he know how to deal with him.
On Oct. 31, Bush announced that he and Gorbachev would hold a shipboard summit off Malta in early December. ”In this time of change, I didn`t want to miss something,” he said. ”I don`t want to have two gigantic ships pass in the night because of failed communications.”
It was after Malta that Bush`s view seemed to change most dramatically.
”As I watched the way Mr. Gorbachev handled the changes in Eastern Europe, I think he deserves new thinking,” Bush told NATO leaders in Brussels after the summit. ”It absolutely mandates new thinking.”
Now, as Bush prepares for a third formal session with the Soviet leader, it is with considerably more personal knowledge of the man himself, and also with some apparent degree of positive feeling.
”I think Bush feels he`s gotten to know (Gorbachev),” Ashley says.
”And Bush puts such emphasis and reliance on personal contact. . . . It`s not a superficial kind of relationship. He knows when he can trust him and the value system Gorbachev represents. . . . He feels it`s a trustworthy relationship.”
One senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the Bush-Gorbachev chemistry as ”quite good.”
”The president is just at ease with foreign leaders and Gorbachev is no exception,” he said. ”He is simply at ease. Gorbachev is someone who likes politics. He likes to talk politics. So when they are engaged that way, it is an interesting and energetic dialogue.”
Personal cordiality aside, another senior official, who calls Gorbachev a ”smart guy, a very skillful maneuverer,” cautioned that ”the president hasn`t changed in his view that we cannot gear U.S. policy to the fortunes of any one individual. Our policy has to be geared to U.S. interests and to the Soviet state.
”But underneath that, there is the realization that many of the changes and the way they have happened have been as a result of Gorbachev and the policies he has instituted,” the official said. ”And therefore one can say we want to encourage him because the results of his being there have been rather positive to the West.”
Hess agrees that Bush cannot link American policy to Gorbachev the individual. ”The president has to be very careful of anything that smacks of (too) personal (a) relationship,” he said. And if Gorbachev should be deposed, Bush has to be able to ”jump out of the way and avoid the fallout.” On the other hand, he notes, Gorbachev`s personality probably has made it easier for Bush to sell the American people on the idea of a new framework for dealing with the Soviets.
”Gorbachev is an attractive personality who has won over the American people more than you would expect a Soviet (leader to do),” he says. ”If you had the same situation with, say, (Leonid) Brezhnev in office, people would be more skeptical.”
