Momentous Meetings, Not Always Agreeable

Whether in Helsinki or elsewhere, a summit held by any U.S. president with a Kremlin counterpart has proved to be a momentous occasion, particularly during the Cold War when such talks held the promise of staving off Armageddon.

Not that they always went well.

In June 1961, newly elected President John F. Kennedy brushed off the need for a preset agenda during two days of meetings in Vienna with Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, said he had worried that the president was ill-prepared for the steamrollering he received from Khrushchev on issues ranging from control over a divided Berlin to nuclear arms.

“Worst thing in my life,” Kennedy later told a New York Times columnist, despite the smiles all around at their gala dinner. “He savaged me.”

Barely two months later, the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall.

Relations warmed in the 1970s, leading to a series of agreements that slackened the nuclear arms race.

The negotiating technique of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev resembled that of Khrushchev — he would berate the Americans for not working as allies in the Middle East, say, or accuse them of sabotaging world peace. “It would be his way of testing my resolve,” President Gerald Ford wrote in his memoirs. “He would be curious to see if I would bend or fight back.”

As Ford was departing after their first meeting in the city of Vladivostok, Russia, in November 1974, he noticed Brezhnev eyeing his Alaskan wolf coat and, in a spontaneous gesture, handed it to the Soviet leader.

That set the stage for the first Soviet-U.S. summit ever held in Helsinki, in 1975. The two made progress toward limiting their nuclear weapon stockpiles, but Ford left disappointed that the lack of an overall agreement had denied him a foreign-policy success.

Instead he was criticized at home for having joined the 35 leaders, most Europeans, who signed the Helsinki Accords. Even if the human rights clauses later helped to undermine the Soviet Union, at the time the overall agreement was seen as a concession to Moscow, which wanted its expanded, post-World War II borders declared inviolable.

The domestic outcry, especially among Republicans, inhibited Ford from inviting his Soviet counterpart to visit the United States.

By having seized Crimea in March 2014, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who is meeting President Donald Trump in Helsinki on Monday, breached the very accords Moscow pushed for in 1975 to cement Europe’s borders. In an extraordinary historical revelation made in 2017 on the pages of The Atlantic by a former White House arms control adviser, Jan Lodal, Brezhnev used a brief, one-on-one encounter with Ford to offer to help him win the next presidential election.

The Russian transcript of the conversation, recovered from Brezhnev’s ashtray, indicated that Ford demurred.

One of the most successful summits occurred in Washington in December 1987, when President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed an accord banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles, a landmark treaty that both sides now accuse the other of violating.

In their personal conversations, the two men agreed to call each other “Ron” and “Mikhail.”

President George H.W. Bush and Gorbachev established a good rapport before their September 1990 summit in Helsinki. Photos from their previous meeting in Camp David that June showed the Soviet leader chauffeuring his grinning U.S. counterpart around in a careening golf cart.

Their Helsinki meeting came weeks after Saddam Hussein, the Iraq leader who was a friend if not an ally of Moscow, had occupied and plundered neighboring Kuwait.

Bush, fashioning an international coalition to expel the Iraqis, needed assurances that the Soviets would not bolster Baghdad. The meeting produced an agreement that called on Iraq to respect U.N. resolutions to withdraw. The fanfare surrounding summits began to fade after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union — the fate of the world no longer seemed to hang on face-to-face encounters between the superpower leaders.

In March 1997 in Helsinki, President Bill Clinton met President Boris Yeltsin, who had suffered a heart attack during his re-election campaign.

Yeltsin chose to minimize Russia’s anger and humiliation over NATO’s eastward expansion, instead accepting promises of a closer strategic partnership and agreeing to guidelines for a further reduction in nuclear arms.

Clinton, hoping to bolster Yeltsin as a democratic leader, pledged to welcome Russia into international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the club of main industrialized countries, the Group of 7, despite its anemic economy. (Russia was expelled from the club over the Crimea annexation, although Trump has said Russia’s membership should be restored.)

Relations decayed steadily after Putin became president in 2000. Every U.S. president since has tried a “reset.” President George W. Bush infamously declared in 2001 that he found Putin “trustworthy” because after looking the Russian leader in the eye, the American “was able to get a sense of his soul.”

In March 2009, President Barack Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva with a symbolic red button labeled with a Russian word the Americans thought meant “reset,” but turned out to mean “overloaded” or “overcharged.”

An oracle could not have stated it better.

For the summit to be held in Helsinki, Trump seeks yet another reset.

Despite Russia’s election meddling in the United States and Putin’s open attempts to curb U.S. influence elsewhere, Trump’s praise of him and animus directed at traditional U.S. allies have raised the question of whether this summit will help push a Putin-Trump version of the world order. In Helsinki in 1990, Gorbachev presented Bush with a framed cartoon showing both men dressed as boxers and the globe serving as referee. A melting figure labeled “Cold War” lies at their feet as the referee holds both their hands aloft. “Knockout” was the Russian caption for the work.

With the Cold War showing signs of revival, one question going into this summit is whether some other version of “Knockout” might emerge.