Searching for a Pen Pal

By Hugh Sidey

The idea is that Ronald Reagan leans back in his leather barrel chair, takes out his felt-tipped pen, looks out over the Rose Garden and writes a note to the other member of the superpower club, Konstantin Chernenko.

About that time Secretary of State George Shultz drops by for a private gab with the boss, who shows him the letter. George likes it and says the President ought to send it. So Ron gets it typed up on the azure linen stationery, embossed with the Presidential Seal, that Presidents have used for more than 100 years.

The idea is that the note, once in the chubby fingers of Chernenko, suggests a certain intimacy and shared responsibility that only the two of them can appreciate. The hope is to plant in the Soviet leader's mind the hint that Ron might not be all bad and maybe the two should warm up.

In fact, Reagan has written half a dozen letters on his azure linen paper and sent them to Moscow. They all had a personal touch. Sometimes Reagan added a postscript, not the usual form in diplomatic messages. Other times he made certain to foreshadow events, like the fact that he would announce an idea for a chemical-warfare treaty and send Vice President George Bush to Geneva to present it. So far, Reagan is still waiting for a warm, even a human, reply.

It has been an enduring act of faith for all Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt that somewhere within their Soviet counterparts is the same human stuff they possess and that if they can touch it, there will follow some understanding. They write letters and wait. Mostly they are disappointed. The replies are boilerplate committee jargon. Roosevelt did a little better with Stalin because they were allied in a great war. But Harry Truman, who sort of liked "old Joe" after Potsdam and tried to make him a pen pal, soon found there was not enough of a relationship to discourage Stalin from trying to consolidate his grip on Eastern Europe and starve out West Berlin.

John Kennedy figured he had made a strike by persuading Nikita Khrushchev to meet with him in Vienna. But man-to-man he could not even get Khrushchev to admit that killing 70 million people with nuclear weapons in ten minutes was a bad idea. "I never met anybody like that," J.F.K. marveled. There was something else where the heart was supposed to be.

Or was there? That is the question that continues to intrigue Presidents. Are these Soviets really heartless or are they so intimidated by the system that they cannot act human? Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed they had found at least an auricle of Leonid Brezhnev, and detente followed. Jimmy Carter, who hand-penned some notes to Brezhnev, even thought the replies were special--until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

Presidents cannot give up. Reagan, while recovering from his gunshot wound, wrote out six or seven pages to Brezhnev with his feelings about making the world better for the plain people of both countries. The President showed his draft to the bureaucrats, who translated it into incomprehensible language. Reagan rejected the rewrite and sent his version instead. Back came the boiler plate.

Brezhnev's failing health was believed to be one reason for the sterile response to Reagan's first Kremlin missive. The exhaustive analysis of each phrase and word that the national-security experts made of Yuri Andropov's replies gave hope there was a personal heartbeat coming through. But when doctors hooked him up to the kidney-dialysis machine, they must have plugged in his pen too. His later responses seemed drained of life. The latest letter Reagan sent to Chernenko met with such a canned response that Reagan brought it up publicly two weeks ago, an unusual show of frustration. Discouraged? Reagan has rarely met another human that he felt he could not soften a bit. Even now he may be looking at the red geraniums outside his office window and on a yellow legal pad be scribbling "Dear Mr. Chairman . . ."