Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernyaev was in the audience. Having helped write the speech, he had expected it would make an impression but was not prepared for the reaction that morning. ‘For over an hour nobody stirred. And then the audience erupted in ovations, and they would not let [Gorbachev] go for a long time. He even had to get up and bow as if he were on stage.’[19] Gorbachev, a great showman, lapped it all up. Much of the press reaction was also positive. The New York Times editorialised, ‘Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points in 1918 or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed.’[20] But others looked behind the occasion and the rhetoric. The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, drew attention to what Gorbachev did not say. There was no suggestion that the Kremlin intended to pull back fully from its farthest positions of strategic influence gained in the Second World War – in East Germany and in East Asia. Indeed the speech said virtually nothing about Asia. Armed forces in Soviet Asia would be reduced, he promised, and ‘a major portion’ of Soviet troops temporarily stationed in the Mongolian People’s Republic would ‘return home’. But there was no mention of the bases in Vietnam, the Monitor complained, and not a word about the four northern Japanese islands seized by Stalin in 1945 whose disputed status had blocked a peace treaty between Japan and the USSR to formally end the Second World War.[21] The newspaper had a point – Gorbachev’s post-Cold War vision was selective – but the UN speech made clear that for him the cockpit of the Cold War lay in Europe. It was there that the tension had to be defused.
As soon as his show at the United Nations was over,[22] Gorbachev turned his mind to the next event in his packed New York schedule: a meeting with President Reagan and Vice President Bush on Governors Island, off the southern tip of Manhattan. Yet in the limo down to the pier at Battery Park, the Soviet leader had to take an urgent phone call from Moscow: a major earthquake had hit the Caucasus and the latest reports said that some 25,000 people in Armenia had died. Gorbachev decided to return home the next morning, without stopping over in Cuba and London as originally planned.[23] Controlling his anxieties, Gorbachev turned his mind during the short boat ride to what would be his fifth and farewell meeting with Reagan, the man he no longer considered an ‘unreconstructed Cold Warrior’ but instead with whom he had managed against the odds to develop a genuine fondness and friendship.[24]
As Bush watched the ferry coming towards him across the choppy waters of New York Harbor, he sensed a feeling of tense expectation among the waiting American and Soviet officials. He was certainly on edge himself. As president-elect, a few weeks away from inauguration and not yet in a position to set policy, he had to weigh his future role against his present status as merely Reagan’s deputy. He knew Gorbachev would be anxious to know in which direction he intended to take relations with the Soviet Union, but Reagan was still the man in the Oval Office. On this particular day Bush wanted to avoid doing anything that could be interpreted as undermining the current president’s authority or to circumscribe his own future freedom of action.[25]
Gorbachev walked off the boat – waving to the onlookers, a broad smile on his face – and an equally cheerful Reagan greeted him on the quayside. The two delegations were soon sitting in the commandant’s residence on Governors Island. Conversation during their meeting was mostly light and nostalgic: it was not a ‘negotiating session’, as Gorbachev remarked to the media present. Yet it was in some way ‘special’, as Bush put it, because of his own double role, looking to the past and the future.[26]
After the journalists and photographers had left, Reagan and Gorbachev reminisced about their first encounter in Switzerland a mere three years before, and the president offered the Soviet leader a memento – a photo of the moment they met in the parking lot with Reagan’s handwritten inscription that they had ‘walked a long way together to clear a path to peace, Geneva 1985–New York 1988’. Gorbachev was touched and said how much he valued their ‘personal rapport’. Reagan agreed. He felt proud of what they had ‘accomplished together’: two leaders who had the ‘capability of creating the next world war’ had decided ‘to keep the world at peace’[27] and so they had laid a ‘strong foundation for the future’. This was possible, he claimed, because they had always been ‘direct and open’ with each other. What Reagan did not mention – naturally, because this was a cosy wander down memory lane – was that their Moscow summit in May/June had failed to ‘crown’, as Gorbachev hoped, the procession of meetings with a treaty to reduce their strategic offensive weapons – START I. This, as Gorbachev emphasised in his UN speech, was significant unfinished business.[28]
Reagan asked Bush whether he wanted to add anything. The vice president chose to comment only on the symbolism of the photo. The two countries had come a long distance in the last three years, he said, going on to express the hope that in three years’ time there would be ‘another such picture with the same significance’. Bush said he wanted to build on what President Reagan had done, working with Gorbachev. Nothing that had been accomplished ought to be reversed. But he added that he would just need ‘a little time to review the issues’. Gorbachev wanted assurances that Bush would follow the path laid down by Reagan. Yet the vice president would not be drawn, using the need to construct a new Cabinet as his excuse. His theory, he said, was to ‘revitalise things by putting in new people’. He wanted to ‘formulate prudent national security policies’ but insisted that he didn’t want to ‘stall things’ or ‘set the clock back’. Bush was trying to keep the discussion loose and vague, using platitudes to keep his options open.[29]
There was, however, no let-up from the Soviet leader. His eyes firmly on the future, Gorbachev continued to probe Bush over lunch. He fished for substantive reactions to his UN speech. Shultz merely said the audience had been ‘very attentive’ and the final burst of applause was totally ‘genuine’. Bush, apart from commenting that Gorbachev seemed to have had ‘a full house, with every seat filled’, stayed silent. Gorbachev stressed that he was committed to all that he had said at the UN about cooperation between their countries.[30] While admitting that there were ‘real contradictions’ between them, particularly on regional issues, he insisted that Washington should not be suspicious of the Soviet Union. Turning directly to Bush, he said that it was ‘a good moment to make that point, with the vice president there’. The Soviet leader did a quick tour d’horizon of crisis hotspots around the world and then reprised his main theme about the cooperation he and the president had managed to build up. Glancing pointedly again at Bush as well as Reagan, he declared that ‘continuity was the name of the game’ and that ‘we should therefore be able to work together on all regional problems in a constructive way’. There was still no reaction from Bush, so Gorbachev tried to put him on the spot. ‘If the next president has studies under way, and has some remarks or suggestions on these issues I would like to hear from him.’ Bush again declined to be drawn. In the end Gorbachev simply joked that ‘the important thing was to make life easier for the next president’.[31]
Throughout the meeting, Bush remained buttoned up and stayed on the margins – sometimes, according to journalist Steven V. Roberts, edging ‘awkwardly into the picture’.
George H. W. Bush – The marginal man
Speaking to the press later that day in Washington, the vice president stuck to this non-committal tone: ‘I made clear to the general secretary that I certainly wanted to continue the progress that’s been made in the Reagan administration with the Soviets, and I also made clear that we needed some time, and he understood that.’[32]
*
George H. W. Bush was inaugurated on 20 January 1989 as forty-first president of the United States. He was the first serving vice president to be elected to the White House since Martin Van Buren in 1836. To many, in fact, George Bush had always seemed in the anteroom of history, doing useful jobs but on the edge of greatness: ambassador to the United Nations, US envoy to China and head of the CIA in the 1970s. And when he finally stuck out his neck in 1980, by running for the Republican nomination to