Reagan Unbound

Ken Adelman had an inside track for understanding Reagan at Reykjavik, the apparently failed but ultimately epoch-making negotiations about nuclear arms between Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland.

According to the NYTBR review, Reagan “spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of ‘the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.’ In Reykjavik, with Gorbachev, ‘he was pretty much on his own,’Adelman writes, ‘which suited Ronald Reagan just fine.’ . . . Reagan’s own national security adviser was so dismayed that he restricted distribution of the meeting notes. ‘After Reykjavik,’ a staff member told the journalist James Mann, ‘Reagan was watched by someone all during the rest of his term in office.’”

Adelman’s book reveals the role of Reagan’s talk about “Star Wars” defense systems: “Many, including Adelman, recognized that ‘S.D.I. was little more than pie in the colorful sky of Ronald Reagan’s imagination.’ Yet a combination of Reagan’s hopeful fantasy and the Soviets’ desperate paranoia about American technological prowess made it into a dazzling bluff: ‘Reagan wanted so badly to build it and Gorbachev wanted so badly to stop it, that it assumed for them, and practically only for them, a reality it actually lacked.’”

Though nothing came of the specific negotiations, Adelman’s book indicates that the event was the beginning of a bond between Reagan and Gorbachev, a bond that was essential for their enduring legacy, the end of the Cold War.