Behind Closed Doors

By LANCE MORROW

Kings in the 15th century were known to have held their summit meetings in the middle of a bridge. The two sovereigns did their talking through a stout oak lattice set up between them, like the prison grate during visitors' hours. That way, neither could kidnap the other.

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev talked in Geneva through more complex lattices. They sat by the fire in the Chateau Fleur d'Eau and interpreted the world for each other through their distinctive mental grids--different societies, different interests, minds formed by different histories. Walter Lippmann wrote, "We are all captives of the pictures in our head--our belief that the world we experience is the world that really exists." Reagan explained America to Gorbachev. Gorbachev explained the Soviet Union to Reagan. Neither man was moved to defect as a result of the education. More useful than cross-cultural perspective was what each man learned about the other, the lessons of eye contact, of close human inspection.

A summit meeting is in part a public ceremony of reassurance, an international soothing. To many, the ritual seemed past due. The U.S. and the Soviet Union, the great apes of the nuclear age, had not ascended to the summit since 1979. The superpowers used the intervening years to build their nuclear stockpiles and menace each other, glowering across a distance. The rest of the world skittishly watched.

Ideally, a summit should produce some formal, leather-bound outcome, like the SALT I treaty that Richard Nixon brought home from his Moscow meeting with Leonid Brezhnev. A summit represents high history, the great encounter above the tree line. It sometimes excites almost sacramental expectations. Geneva produced neither great treaties nor triumphant rhetoric. The gray prose in use for such occasions reported that "the meetings were frank and useful. Serious differences remain." If Geneva represented anything, it was the triumph of candor and realism. No one got carried away.

And yet it was an extraordinary encounter--the most powerful forces in human history suddenly condensed, embodied in two men coming in out of the mountain cold and sitting down by the fire to talk. What mattered, for now, was less the treaties not signed than the conversation begun. The important moments of one of the century's great public encounters transpired in sealed privacy. The top advisers on both sides paced in the outer rooms, consulting their watches, muttering.

Aside from the official photographers from the White House and Kremlin, the only person permitted to record these scenes behind the scenes was TIME's David Hume Kennerly. On the following pages, TIME presents a portfolio of his exclusive pictures. --By Lance Morrow