Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Adelman Ken

Author:Adelman, Ken [Adelman, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-05-06T07:00:00+00:00

Monday, October 13, 1986

Washington, DC

Because this was Columbus Day and thus a federal holiday, and because of clear skies and unseasonably mild temperatures, Washingtonians flocked to the National Mall. They pushed strollers alongside the Reflecting Pool, played Frisbee at the foot of Capitol Hill, and generally enjoyed glorious fall weather.

Congress was in recess, but reporters and cameras had little trouble finding members eager for the media spotlight. Reykjavik was the topic of the day and every politician formed a quick reaction to its outcome and was eager to expound it for the media. The complexity of the issues and the absence of hard information on what actually happened in Iceland were no deterrents. Their interest was not educational but presentational, to be pithy or witty enough to make it on the air or front page of the leading papers.

Claiborne Pell, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called this “a sad day for mankind” and hoped that “second thoughts may persuade our President . . . [to take] a bird in the hand . . . for two in the bush.” Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was sure that SDI would lose its support after Reykjavik (in fact, support for SDI jumped, to 64 percent of Americans in favor, the highest level ever attained). Speaking from the departure lounge at Dulles airport, Nunn urged the administration to “immediately pull [Reagan’s] proposal off the table before the Soviets accept it.”

Freshman Senator Al Gore trashed Reagan’s performance as “bumbling . . . a fiasco” and blamed the conservative president for being too radical, as he “departed from arms control to the less-charted waters of disarmament.” The ever-inflated Senator Ted Kennedy concluded that, “A grand and historic opportunity was there in Iceland, but it has been sacrificed . . . on the uncertain altar of SDI.” And the ever-sensible Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan cautioned that it would “make anyone suspicious if they could negotiate agreements in eleven hours at Reykjavik that the two countries have been arguing about for thirty years.”

On the House side, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin, called the anti-nuclear discussion at Reykjavik “cuckoo.” Winner of the best quip went to liberal Democratic congressman Edward J. Markey, who said that Reagan had missed “a chance to cash in Star Wars for the best deal the Russians have offered us since they sold us Alaska.” The winner for the wisest comment went to liberal Republican congressman Jim Leach, who called Reykjavik “the most significant discussions that have ever taken place between heads of state in peacetime.”

Adding to the cacophony were voices of the foreign policy establishment. In a grand display of bipartisanship, these were all critical. Preeminent Democratic wise man George Ball said dismissively, “SDI is not only fantasy, it is fraud. If the president persists in his SDI fantasy, there is no possibility of success in arms control.” On the Republican side, Reagan’s first secretary of state, Al

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