The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

54 DECEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL White House person did a little checking and said OK. But once they shoveled the snow off the gravestones and discovered SS troops were buried there, all hell broke loose. I remember Elie Wiesel came to the White House and said, “Mr. President, your place is not with the SS; your place is with the victims of the SS.” It was lots of pressure. We tried to get the Germans to change the site. We made a lot of suggestions for alternatives, and they would not change. So, in the end, he went. After that, he went home and I went to Israel to be the speaker at the unveiling of the outdoor Yad Vashem [Israel’s official Holocaust memorial]. When I came back to Washing- ton, I stopped in London for a talk with [British Prime Min- ister] Margaret Thatcher. She said to me, “You know, there is not another leader in the free world that would have taken the political beating at home your president took to deliver on a promise that he made. But one thing you can be sure of with Ronald Reagan: If he gives you his word, that is it.” And that is a very important thing to establish: that you are good for your word. JEG: Another thing you said in your memoir is that it is not just having strength that gives an advantage to a nation, but knowing what to do with it. President Reagan was ready to negotiate [with the Soviets], but some of his advisers were not so ready. You backed him up, and that contributed to his strength. I presume you thought that he would be as successful as he was with your support. Could you tell us a little about that part of it? GS: I have always felt that strength and diplomacy go together. If you go to a negotiation and you do not have any strength, you are going to get your head handed to you. On the other hand, the willingness to negotiate builds strength because you are using it for a constructive purpose. If it is strength with no objective to be gained, it loses its meaning. So I think they go together. These are not alternative ways of going about things. JEG: You have also said that there is a tendency in Wash- ington to go to one extreme or the other, either to all military strength or to all diplomacy, and that the task of blending the two together is very difficult. Can you give us some real-life examples of that from the Reagan administration? GS: Actually, I don’t think it is difficult. I think it is like breathing. Of course, they go together. There is no other way. When I went into the job of Secretary of State, our relations with the Soviet Union were almost non-existent, very strained. President Jimmy Carter had cut off nearly all ties after they invaded Afghanistan, and it was still tense. I’d had quite a lot of experience in dealing with the Soviets when I was Secretary of the Treasury. I had worked out quite a few deals and spent time there. So I managed to negotiate. I worked a deal to meet with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, once a week. The object was to resolve little irritants so they did not grow into big problems. In early 1983, I returned to Andrews Air Force Base from a visit to China on a Friday morning, and it was snowing so hard I was lucky to land. It snowed all day Friday, Friday night and into Saturday morning. So the Reagans are stuck in the White House. They cannot go to Camp David. Our phone rings, and Nancy says, “How about you and your wife come over for sup- per?” The four of us sit around, we are having a good time, and they start asking me about the Chinese leaders. What kind of people are they? Do they have a bottom line? Can you find a bottom line? Do they have a sense of humor? And so on. Then they knew I had dealt with the Soviets when I was at Treasury, so they started asking me about them. A lot of them were still in office. All of a sudden, it dawns on me: This man has never had a real conversation with a big-time communist leader, and he is dying to have one. So I said to him, “Next Tuesday at 5, Ambassador Dobrynin is coming in for one of my regular sessions. What if I bring him over here and you talk to him?” He said that would be great, and it will not take long, just 10 minutes. All I want to tell him is that if their new leader, Yuri Andropov (who had just succeeded Leonid Brezhnev), is interested in a constructive conversation, then I am ready.” DoD did not like the idea of negotiating, but President Reagan did. …And in the fall of 1985 we had the big meeting in Geneva between President Reagan and then-Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev.