A Rocky Range of Summits Past

By Hugh Sidey

Our hostility to the Soviet Union is deep, but our hope that there is an area of accommodation endures. In the onrushing SALT debate Jimmy Carter rejects the idea that we could "trust" the Soviets, but in the end his trip to Vienna shows a belief that the human spirit in both nations understands the hideous potential in nuclear arsenals.

It has been a long, tough journey for the U.S., and maybe if we could fully grasp the view from the Kremlin it would appear the same for the Soviets. But as Henry Kissinger said last week, the process rests "on the recognition of the responsibility to mankind."

Carter feels that as deeply as any President--maybe more so--and yet his dilemma in some ways is greater. The adversary is stronger, his own nation more in doubt about its strength.

Harry Truman never had this kind of summit opportunity, but he set the context for it. One night early in his presidency, while sitting in the Oval Office, he sadly abandoned his hope that the Soviet Union would be an ally in peace as in war. Glancing up from his desk, he told his counsel, Clark Clifford, that Stalin would have to be confronted in Greece and Turkey, and so the Truman Doctrine was launched. But even through the Berlin airlift and the Korean War, Truman searched for contacts with the Soviet Union, whether ballet dancers or scientists. Eisenhower continued to probe for the elusive understanding at Camp David and Paris, even as he sent the U-2 into Soviet airspace.

Because John Kennedy flew to Vienna 18 years ago to meet with Nikita Khrushchev, that mission is most in mind as Carter prepares for a similar journey. The U.S. was buoyant then, Kennedy young and cocky. But even with our huge margin of terror still intact, J.F.K. was shaken by Khrushchev's seeming indifference to nuclear confrontation. The personal assessment these men made of each other was important.

Khrushchev is believed to have decided that Kennedy could be intimidated, and the Soviet leader sent missiles to Cuba. Far from being frightened, Kennedy was jolted into reality and got tougher, as he demonstrated in the 1962 showdown.

In August 1968, at one of Lyndon Johnson's Tuesday lunches, Johnson was jubilant. He allowed his men a little sherry to celebrate the announcement scheduled the next morning that nuclear arms talks between the superpowers would begin, that Johnson and Kosygin would hold a summit to seal the deal. That afternoon Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. The summit vanished.

Nixon picked up the thread. He went to Moscow in 1972 as an unpredictable and dangerous opponent to the Soviets, the man who had just bombed and mined Haiphong. He succeeded in opening a channel to Brezhnev and invited him to Washington. That channel soon began to close. On the day that Brezhnev headed home from the U.S., John Dean began his Watergate testimony on the Hill. Nixon's political life was rushing toward its end, and the Kremlin sensed it. Gerald Ford was no master of the details of nuclear arms control at Vladivostok that November, but again the measure that he and Brezhnev took of each other proved important. This time it kept hope alive.

SALT II was almost ready for Carter by 1976. Just weeks before he took office he sat in his Plains living room and said rather casually that he thought he and Brezhnev would meet the next September. Perhaps we are all lucky that Carter's education about the Soviets came in the 29 months before a summit. A miscalculation by either man of the other could have been disastrous.

The U.S. is hardly buoyant these days. Carter is far from cocky. He is weakened politically, but that may be matched by Brezhnev's poor health and the doubt that it casts over Soviet leadership. It is a pattern in the exercise of power that in times of stress, these leaders respond in an elemental human fashion.

Their future actions will inevitably be keyed to their conclusions about the man sitting across a table in Vienna.

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