The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 57 difference of opinion in Washington. There were people who thought basically the Soviet Union was there and they would never really change. Reagan had a different idea. If you read his Westminster speech in 1982, it is very striking because he thought they were basically weak, and they would in the end change if we were strong enough in deterrence. I think George F. Kennan in his Long Telegram said something similar: If we can contain the Soviets long enough, they will look inward; they will not like what they see, and they will change. And for my part, I had a lot of experience with the Soviets when I was Treasury Secretary and saw the deficiencies in their system. So, for all those reasons, I thought they would change. The CIA people were really focused on military hardware and did not think change was possible. DoD did not like the idea of negotiating, but President Reagan did. So we had some back and forth, and in the fall of 1985 we had the big meeting in Geneva between President Reagan and then-Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev. I remember [Defense Secretary Caspar] “Cap” Wein- berger opposed the meeting and tried to sabotage it, but he did not succeed. Out of that meeting came this phrase that President Reagan had already used in his State of the Union message: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That was a big statement from those two leaders, and it was the start of bringing the numbers of nuclear weapons down. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz (right) greeting new Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze at the White House, Sept. 27, 1985. From left: Eduard Shevardnadze, interpreter Pavel Palazhchenko, President Ronald Reagan, George Shultz. COURTESYOFTHERONALDREAGANPRESIDENTIALLIBRARY President Reagan knew that I would tell him what I thought, and he also knew that I knew it was his foreign policy, not mine. So we had good conversations, but underneath it all was trust.