Paving the Way to Moscow : The Long, Arduous, Minutely Detailed Process of Planning This Month’s Summit Itinerary Has Finally Paid Off

During the planning of President Reagan’s forthcoming summit trip to Moscow, White House aide Tom Griscom found himself standing with Soviet officials last March in a Moscow open-air pet market, packed shoulder to shoulder with people hawking “fish, dogs, chickens, cats, you name it.”

“It was almost a panic situation,” added Jim Hooley, director of the presidential advance, who thought the experience most resembled “being in a disco fire.” While the traveling team of a dozen top U.S. government aides scouted the market with its masses of people as a possible site for the Reagans to visit, Griscom recalled that “several Soviets sort of leaned over and whispered to me that this is probably not something the President and First Lady want to do.”

The pet market ultimately was scratched from the list of 25 possible stops on the Reagans’ May 29-June 2 summit tour, the first visit by an American President to the Soviet Union in 14 years. The list had been painstakingly culled from dozens of meetings and phone calls among officials in the White House, the State Department, the Secret Service, the National Security Council, the Library of Congress and the American Embassy in Moscow.

A Free Market Enterprise

The Embassy had suggested the pet market, Griscom said, “because if you want to look at their semblance of a free enterprise operation, this is it.”

No possibility, no detail was too small to be overlooked in the planning because each activity the President or First Lady participates in conveys a greater message that can stir controversy and even drive nations apart.

It was only three years ago that Reagan committed one of the biggest gaffes of his presidency by visiting West Germany’s Bitburg cemetery, which trip planners had not realized contained graves of Nazi SS soldiers until Reagan had already promised West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl he would see it.

With that disaster imprinted on their minds, Reagan aides planning the summit examined potential sites that would enable the trip to bolster, rather than damage, the President’s image at home.

After visiting and ruling out such sites as the Moscow Circus, a craft fair and a high school for future broadcasters, the aides pared down their recommendations to a slate of events Reagan later accepted.

Controversy, however, has already stirred among Ukrainian Catholics who have voiced strong objections to Reagan’s scheduled visit to the historic Danilov Monastery in the Moscow outskirts. There Reagan is to talk with Orthodox monks restoring icons in an event the Administration hopes will deliver a message of Reagan’s concern about religious freedom.

After the May 30 monastery visit and an afternoon meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan will meet with Soviet dissidents and refuseniks at the American ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, while Nancy Reagan is scheduled to visit a Moscow school. That evening, both will be the guests of honor at a state dinner hosted by the Gorbachevs in the Hall of Facets at the Kremlin.

On May 31, after a morning meeting with Gorbachev, Reagan will lunch with Soviet writers, artists and film makers at the House of Writers, the club of the Union of Writers. Nancy Reagan will spend the day in Leningrad, visiting the Monument to the Defenders of Leningrad and the Hermitage Museum. Late in the afternoon, Reagan is to give a speech and probably take some questions from students at Moscow University. Dinner that night is hosted by the Reagans for the Gorbachevs at Spaso House, with American food and California wines and champagnes flown in by Air Force jet from the United States and jazz pianist Dave Brubeck to entertain approximately 120 guests.

The next day will be filled with meetings and a press conference for Reagan, followed by a special 90-minute performance at the Bolshoi Theatre. The evening is to be capped by an intimate supper for the Reagans and Gorbachevs at a country inn outside Moscow.

On departure day, June 2, Reagan will do more than the usual, quick drop-in to the American Embassy, hosting instead a breakfast reception for Moscow-based U.S. personnel, a gesture signifying his appreciation of their difficult circumstances.

The trip will be preceded by three mostly restful days in Helsinki--a tradition insisted upon by Mrs. Reagan after her jet-lagged husband fell asleep during a meeting with the Pope during a tightly scheduled European visit in 1982--and followed by a brief stopover in London.

While in Moscow, the Reagans will be staying at Spaso House. On Reagan’s trip last year to the economic summit in Venice, a large, comfortable bed was trucked in for the Reagans from another European country, but it caused such an uproar in the press that the new rule became: They sleep on whatever beds are there. In Spaso House, there are twin beds.

The exact dates and the substance of what would be discussed were negotiated repeatedly at several meetings between Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Despite the recent assertions by White House Chief of Staff-turned-author Donald Regan that virtually all travel and event dates were determined by Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, White House spokesmen insisted that such consultations, while continuing, played no part in scheduling the Moscow summit.

Administration officials also claimed not to be dismayed about reports that surfaced in Regan’s book and in the press at the last summit that Nancy Reagan does not like her counterpart, Raisa Gorbachev.

Not Losing Sleep

“You don’t lose sleep over it,” said Griscom, who is the top aide to Howard Baker, Reagan’s chief of staff. “It’s something that the media makes more out of than is there. Nobody comes into this anticipating, ‘We’ve got to keep them separate.’ ”

The first planning meeting for this summit took place immediately after the conclusion of Gorbachev’s visit to Washington for the summit there in December. At the meeting, Griscom, Hooley and two or three others from the State Department and National Security Council met to develop basic concepts and themes. Griscom said he had also consulted, among others, White House pollster Richard Wirthlin and Vice President George Bush’s pollster, Bob Teeter, for their ideas. The theme of the recently concluded U.S.-Soviet summit had been “The First Step,” and the group decided the theme of the next would be “Building on a Foundation,” Griscom said. “A foundation of trust, a foundation of peace, a foundation for a safer world.”

The theme was tested in focus groups and surveys. Meetings continued over the next several months, with participants seeking input from Soviet specialists at the State Department, the American Embassy in Moscow (which had suggestions from the Soviets), and James Billington, the librarian of Congress and an expert on religion in the Soviet Union.

Griscom took the first of three advance groups to Moscow and Leningrad in early March to scout out the final 25 possibilities they had settled on. On the plane on the way home, aides were able to narrow the list to a nearly final schedule that was presented to the President back in Washington. Griscom said Reagan approved the list without adding or subtracting anything.

A second advance group returned to the Soviet Union at the end of March to present the Soviets a schedule of what they wanted to do, and to walk through it. The sites were chosen to present Reagan as a champion of freedom: Freedom of religion at the monastery, freedom of speech at Moscow University, cultural freedom at the House of Writers.

A Bit of Negotiation

“There was a little bit of negotiation with the Soviets,” Griscom said. “We spent maybe 45 minutes trying to work out who would host the president at the House of Writers. Would the government host it? Would our Embassy host it? That was probably the biggest discussion we had. We came full circle on it and finally decided the House of Writers would host it.

“There was no reluctance on their part on anything we asked, to show it to us.”

The Soviets expressed some puzzlement about various things, including the fact that Reagan had been an actor before he became President.

“They don’t have that latitude to do that,” Griscom said. “That’s also the reason that we felt it was important that this president meet with people who were part of his profession, film-makers, because it shows that even as President he still has a kinship to those people, and he can deliver a message to them that they can pass on through their medium.”

A third advance group, which this time included representatives of the press and telephone company, went to the Soviet Union on April 11 to set up final logistics, including communications and hotels. A White House speechwriter also went along to get a feel for the places where Reagan would be speaking; press office personnel checked out what kind of space will be available for media, Secret Service agents looked for security problems.

Newsweek photographer Larry Downing went armed with “pockets full of trading devices, Mickey Mouse pins, gum, M & Ms and cigarettes.” His planning turned out to be fruitful when a teen-ager traded him a brass Soviet military belt buckle for a single pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum, after first asking that the price be a pair of American Levi’s blue jeans.

Unspectacular Food

The food was less than spectacular but Downing was prepared for that too.

“I took all my own water, my own tuna, artichoke hearts and dried fruits,” Downing said.

Photographically, the sites where the President will be turned out to be bountiful.

“I’ve traveled with Presidents for 10 years all over the world and there is nothing more spectacular than the Kremlin,” Downing said.

Hotel rooms were another matter. Advance team members were warned by American personnel to assume the rooms were bugged. The lack of shower curtains was jokingly said to be for the purpose of getting better pictures.

Of all the activities planned, “I think the whole religious thing is probably the biggest problem,” Griscom said. “It is a very difficult subject to deal with. People (in the administration) are worried about how to present it and how to handle it. The Ukrainians said that visiting the monastery is like re-visiting Bitburg.”

The Ukrainians have told the Administration the visit to the state-owned monastery sends a message of American compliance with Soviet religious barriers, and they would rather have the president visit Kiev, the birthplace of Russian Christianity.

But Griscom said the Danilov monastery is not another Bitburg, figuratively or literally.

“I know it’s not,” he said. “There’s nobody buried in this place.

“I understand their problem. They want the President to go to Kiev. But the President ain’t going to Kiev. The point is, this is a meeting to talk about freedom for all religions. To not do something that talks about religious freedom would send the message that this is not important to Americans and that’s not right. It is important.”

Planning the summit “is like a running fire drill every day,” said Griscom, who had just gotten off the phone with someone who wanted the President to stop off in Paris on his way back to attend a luncheon commemorating the invasion of Normandy.

“The President is not going to Paris,” Griscom repeated, exasperated. “(American Ambassador) Joe Rodgers wants him to, and everybody’s telling him, ‘No.’ This Paris thing keeps coming round and round and now all of a sudden they’re shooting it to somebody (in the White House) who is totally out of the process. It’s sort of like the thing with the Ukrainians. You listen to them, you’re very polite, but you also say, ‘In putting the schedule together it’s not like we haven’t really looked at everything he’s doing and aren’t trying to decide the best approach to use, the right words.’ We’re all aware of potential nuances in what the President says and does.”