Word: summiter
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Reagan and Gorbachev had a shared interest in putting the best face on their meeting. When American and Soviet leaders go to a summit, they are loath to come back with nothing to show after months of mounting expectation. Failure risks disappointing, and perhaps losing, domestic and international constituencies. "The pressure to succeed is enormous," says William Hyland, the editor of Foreign Affairs and, as a former aide to Henry Kissinger, the veteran of numerous summits. "These guys don't want to go into a session like this and then have to explain why it was a mistake." Gorbachev, although...
...next summit meeting, little more than eight months away, it will not suffice for Reagan and Gorbachev to declare that they have achieved a better understanding of each other. The pressure will be on them to produce results, or risk letting the hope of arms control forever slip away. At the very least, the fact that they will soon be meeting again, with the whole world watching once more and by then hoping for more than just smiles and handshakes, will help concentrate the minds of Reagan and Gorbachev and their advisers, and force them to face some hard...
...pattern for the summit was set: though each leader had brought with him a wide array of senior advisers who had labored for months to lay the groundwork, the essential work would be done one to one, face to face. "All that machinery, all those cars and buildings and communications and people, and then, by God, two personalities just took charge," a top Administration official later mused. "Everything was different once those two leaders shook hands...
...week before the summit, Reagan had intimated that he wanted to take personal charge by demanding that he be shown no more briefing books, be given no more lectures. "That was when he started calling it his summit," recalled an aide. Shultz had even advised his counterpart, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, that "my guy likes to size up his opposite number and see what he's really like, and the way for them to do that is for them to spend some time alone...
...time the two men finally emerged from their 64-min. tête-à-tête, they had already begun to hash over regional issues, which, according to the summit agenda, were not supposed to be discussed until the next day. While Reagan found the large number of Soviet advisers in Nicaragua "intolerable," Gorbachev insisted that the U.S.S.R. was bound by its constitution to aid "wars of national liberation." Disavowing imperialist ambitions, he went on, "We have no commercial interests or desire for bases. We are just helping people achieve freedom." The Soviets, he added, in a dig at Reagan for supporting anti...