The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The darnedest things come from Ronald Reagan's heart.

"My first goal has always been to eliminate ballistic missiles," he telephoned TIME to say last week. "They are the most destabilizing weapons, the most frightening. Then it has always been my hope, as I've said before, that we could eventually get rid of all nuclear weapons."

There he goes again, his heart talking, way out in front of his mind, tugging at the world's iron realities to see if they might yield to a little soft yearning. Some of that happened in the Reykjavik meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and it has created a continuing frenzy in Washington, a city that admires ornate theories and prolonged process and is frightened by blurted hope.

This is nothing new about Reagan. He's often let his hopes overwhelm his head, like when he insisted that inflation could be subdued, terrorists apprehended and punished, the tax system reformed. Yes, he missed on some big ones, like that crazy budget formula that has given us scary deficits. But throughout all of this, those who worship process were incredulous. Reagan never understood what he could not do.

Now he is up against one of Washington's oldest and largest priesthoods -- the arms-control experts, who say hope must be locked out and megatons must rule. They may be right, but . . .

"I could see in Reykjavik that it came down to SDI," the President recounted. "I made a proposal to (Gorbachev) that if we got the SDI shield then, with the Soviet Union sharing that, we could eventually sign a treaty to eliminate all ballistic missiles.

"But by the way he was hassling me, I could see he was trying to find a way to sink SDI. I tried everything I could think of, even a little Russian, an old Russian proverb that means 'trust but verify.' All the chips were on SDI. The restrictions that the Secretary wanted would kill SDI.

"At the last there were two places in the wording of the agreement that were left open," said the President. "All of a sudden he is interrupting, and he says, 'Why just ballistic missiles? What would you say if we included all of them, bombs, artillery shells, everything?' And I said, 'O.K., we'll talk about everything, we can do that.' But then he came back to SDI, and that was the end."

That Reagan may have wandered farther into his golden vision of a world without nuclear weapons and Gorbachev misunderstood is likely. The President has done this on other occasions in the past. That his mind would have caught up soon, even without the jolt he got on SDI, is also likely. Certainly the world's nervous kibitzers would have pulled up short -- and have.

"Of course, I would never agree to anything that would leave them with an advantage," said Reagan. "He's the one who brought that (no nukes) up. We thought it would be something we could put on the table for discussion later."

The President did not say when or even if there would be another chance to sit down at a table and start talking again where he and the General Secretary left off so abruptly. But it was obvious that he may still try to pull off one of those accomplishments the experts keep telling him he can't do. There is something about Gorbachev that intrigues Reagan.

"No other Soviet leader I have dealt with has ever talked of eliminating nuclear weapons," mused the President, his heart almost surely searching for a new way to make another run for it.