The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

56 DECEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL had a more operational one in a meeting which Gromyko and I attended in Stockholm that January. We were not yelling at each other. It was sort of constructive, and it was a huge moment. Then, as time went on, things gradually cooled off a little. I was out here at Stanford for summer vacation, and the president was in Los Angeles. I went down there for a meeting and asked him for a little private time. I said, “Mr. President, at three or four of our embassies in Europe, a Soviet diplomat has come up to one of ours and he said virtually the same thing, which we think boils down to this: If Gromyko is invited to Washington when he comes to the United Nations in Septem- ber, he will accept. Mr. President, you may want to think it over because President Carter canceled those meetings when they went into Afghanistan, and they are still there.” Reagan replied, “I do not have to think it over. Let’s get him here.” In other words, the Soviets blinked. So Gromyko came, and it was a good meeting, with an interesting little sideline. I had a good relationship with Nancy Reagan and said to her, “Nancy, the routine here is he comes to the West Wing, we have a meet- ing in the Oval Office, and we walk down the colonnade to the mansion for some stand-around time. Then there is a working lunch. How about you being there during the stand-around time, since this is your home and you are the hostess?” She agreed. We walked down there, Gromyko sees Nancy, and he goes right after her. At one point—and you know Nancy can bris- tle—Gromyko said, “Does your husband want peace?” Nancy bristled, “Of course, my husband wants peace.” Then Gromyko says, “Please whisper it in his ear every night before he goes to sleep: ‘peace.’” He was a little taller than she was, so she put her hand on his shoulder and pulled him down so he had to bend his knee, and she said: “I will whisper it in your ear: peace.” Anyway, after the 1984 election, which President Reagan won by a landslide, we resumed our meetings in Geneva from a position of strength. Our economy was really moving by that time, and we had built up our military strength. And the showdown over the INF missiles put us in a good position to negotiate. Then along comes [Mikhail] Gorbachev. All of the preced- ing is pre-Gorbachev. I remember going over there with the U.S. delegation for the Andropov funeral. The president had given me a few things to say, but Vice President [George H.W.] Bush was there as the delegation head. We were one of the last delegations to meet with Gor- bachev. We met for over an hour. He had all these notes in front of him, but he shuffled them around and never looked at them. I had just a few things to say, which I said, and then I had the luxury of watching. Afterward, I said to our people, this is a different kind of man than any Soviet leader we have ever dealt with: more nimble. He is smarter, better informed. Still a hard-edge communist, but you can talk to him. He listens and then he answers, and he expects you to listen and answer back, and have a conversation. Usually, you say some- thing, it goes by my ear, and I say something, it goes by your ear—and that is not a conversation. With Gorbachev, you can engage. And that was how our negotiations started: from a position of strength. We knew what we wanted, we were strong, and we negotiated. JEG: You and President Reagan had a very clear view of what you wanted to accomplish. You had trust between you and yet, as you mentioned earlier, there were people in the White House who did not agree with what you both wanted to do. So that makes me wonder how Secretaries of State, in general, manage to get and keep a president’s ear in spite of all of these other pressures to do something else. What is the secret of your success in this? To quote another striking line from your memoir: “I learned to exercise responsibility in a sea of uncer- tain authority.” How did you manage that? GS: I think I would rewrite that line now, because there was no uncertain authority. The president was the authority, I had my meetings with him, and I had my insight from that long evening about where his instincts were. So that gave me the basis for proceeding, but there was a huge analytical I tell myself not to look at my inbox; instead, I go sit in a comfortable chair with a pad and a pencil, take a deep breath, and ask myself: “What am I doing here? What are our strategic objectives and how are we doing?”