How He Sharply Moderated Opinions Since Gorbachev Arrived : Reagan’s View of Soviets Loses Hard Edge

At a recent black-tie dinner, President Reagan entertained guests by reading captions a la Johnny Carson as news photographs flashed on a giant screen behind him. As a picture appeared of the President standing by as Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a book, Reagan deadpanned:

“I even made him write a hundred times, ‘I will not cheat, I will not cheat.’

“I like Mikhail, but you have to watch him,” the President quipped.

Despite the joking nature of the remarks, aides say Reagan was expressing his candid view of the Soviet leader he is to meet again in Moscow beginning Sunday: Although he likes Gorbachev personally, he still distrusts the Soviets and believes they have to be watched closely to prevent cheating on arms control and other agreements.

Attitude Change

Even so, Reagan, who visits the Soviet Union for the first time next week, has sharply moderated his views since early in his Administration--when he expressed his distrust in terms perhaps as extreme as any American President had ever used. And that change in the President’s attitude, no matter how hedged with caution and lingering suspicion, has helped launch potentially profound changes in U.S.-Soviet relations.

In his early days in the Oval Office, Reagan not only portrayed the Soviet Union as the “focus of evil in the modern world” but declared the atheistic Communists who run it “reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat” to further their goal of “world domination.”

The Russian language, he once asserted, “has no word for freedom.” In fact, it does-- svoboda-- but the remark reflected Reagan’s apparent willingness to believe even the most extreme things about the Soviet Union.

‘Benefit of Doubt’

Now, by contrast, Reagan describes Gorbachev as a leader who could be trusted and should be given “the benefit of the doubt.” Whereas previous Kremlin rulers cared nothing for the welfare of the Soviet people, in Reagan’s current view, Gorbachev is “quite different than past Soviet leaders.”

And, where once he saw the Kremlin as intent on spreading Marxism-Leninism around the world, Reagan now says, “I no longer feel that way.”

Has Ronald Reagan, now 77 years old, in fact changed his core beliefs about Moscow? If his views were too simplistically negative before, are they too naively hopeful now? How and why has a new Reagan perception emerged, and will it evolve further as a result of his Moscow visit?

Definitive answers to those questions are not easy to get, but among Soviet specialists and knowledgeable members and former members of the Administration, there is a widespread belief that greater knowledge and familiarity have indeed modified Reagan’s view of the Communist superpower and its current leader.

And in the view of some at least, even the President’s most strident rhetoric has always been accompanied by a practical willingness to do business with Moscow--if only on Reagan’s own terms.

One U.S. government expert on the Soviet Union, noting that Reagan’s rhetoric has waxed and waned on Soviet issues, said, “He’s been very tough some times and probably too soft at other times . . . but overall his tone about Gorbachev and about the Soviet Union under Gorbachev has undergone a sea change.

“The way I see it, watching where he was and where he is now, it’s an enormous difference,” the official said.

‘Evil Empire’ Days Over

Former Reagan spokesman Larry Speakes says that Reagan’s “core beliefs are the same, but the hard edge, the absoluteness of his ‘evil empire’ days, is gone.”

“Despite his obvious biases, he has made the right decisions all along,” insisted one senior State Department official who harbors no conservative sympathies. “His calls (decisions) have been pragmatic, based on what was presented to him,” the official added, much as Reagan, when governor of California, made pragmatic decisions that clashed with his philosophical views--and at one point approved a tax increase when convinced it was necessary even though he had pledged never to do so.

Even former President Jimmy Carter, who had been sharply critical of Reagan for his earlier hard-line, anti-Soviet stance, told The Times in an interview that he believes that Reagan is more practical in his approach to the Soviet Union now and “his recent statements have been fairly realistic.”

Carter, who has never particularly liked Reagan and is known to feel that the President has unfairly shunned him, nonetheless praised his successor for helping to improve U.S.-Soviet relations and praised the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty as “very helpful as a prelude” to future arms control programs.

Reagan realizes that Gorbachev is a new type of leader who is much more self-confident and independent in his actions than previous Soviet leaders, much more inclined to change the status quo, and one who is “a master at international public relations or propaganda,” Carter said.

Some of the President’s former conservative allies and aides are less charitable in their view of the new Reagan, however. John Lenczowski, a former presidential national security aide now at the Council for Inter-American Security, complains that Reagan has the vice of “foggy thinking” about Gorbachev and holds “a romantic view” of the Soviet people.

‘The Major Detentist’

“Ronald Reagan was once the major critic of detente,” said Lenczowski. “Now he is the major detentist.”

To the degree Reagan’s perception of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev has changed, what caused the shift?

At least two answers are given by specialists: briefings on the Soviet Union as he began, mainly in his second term, to move toward serious negotiations, and his encounters with Gorbachev himself, who was the first Soviet politician--as distinct from diplomat Andrei A. Gromyko--with whom Reagan had direct contact.

Some experts, such as Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former national security official in the Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford administrations, contend that whatever Reagan was saying about Soviet morality in 1981-82, he had by 1983 concluded that U.S. strength was sufficiently rebuilt to put out an “amber light” for a summit with Soviet leadership.

Other specialists, among them Raymond Garthoff of the Brookings Institution, argue that Reagan’s signals during his first term were equivocal at best, with positive signs emerging only with hindsight.

‘Very Different View’

“It’s not clear he knew where he was going during the first term. If he had not been reelected in 1984,” said Garthoff, “we’d have been left with a very different view of the Reagan Administration--one in which it begrudgingly returned to arms negotiations (in 1984) for effect, not for real, with the ‘evil empire.’ ”

But as Reagan was briefed on Soviet affairs, he came to believe--correctly or incorrectly--that the Soviets had a self-interest in arms control analogous to that of the United States, and moreover, that they were a “sick bear,” with deep economic problems.

“He saw history on our side, not theirs,” said a senior State Department official who was closely involved in the process.

Probably more important in modifying his views were the President’s meetings with Gorbachev who, as Sonnenfeldt said, “humanized the Soviets for him.”

The senior State Department official said: “He saw in Gorbachev a fellow politician who had his own problems with the economy, as he did, and different interest groups to contend with--the military, for example--one who was realistic, who was confident of his ability to communicate, as the President is. And finally, one who was different from previous Soviet politicians.

‘The Human Dimension’

“The President has always been a people person, looking for the human dimension, and he found it in Gorbachev--not someone he identified with, not at all--but someone, a Soviet leader, with whom he established at least some rapport,” the official added.

His chemistry with Gorbachev played into what Donald T. Regan has termed one of the President’s “few fundamental convictions:” a perhaps exaggerated view of the importance of national leaders. The President holds, according to Regan’s controversial memoirs, that “despite the conflict between the two systems, no question was so complicated that it could not be reduced to its basic elements and resolved by personal agreement between two men of good will who had the power to act in the names of the United States and the Soviet Union.”

Regarding the general improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations, British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe gives the United States, and Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz in particular, much of the credit.

“The West has always presented itself as wanting to talk and search for a way ahead. That position has been presented with increasing conviction by President Reagan himself and through the enormous skill of Secretary of State Shultz. We both are really working to a common perception: the management of relations between East and West is a long (term) business. You must avoid the temptation to pull down the shutters across the board (and) keep up the calm tempo. That is the style that has characterized the U.S. approach.”

He continued: “It has had the good fortune of being matched by the arrival in the Kremlin of Mikhail Gorbachev, who has seen the lack of success of Soviet policy up to that point . . . and been prepared to go through the foreign policy agenda and ask himself, ‘Are we playing this right?’ ”

Tendency to Idealize People

Another facet of Reagan’s evolving attitude toward the Soviet Union is his tendency to idealize the people--as distinct from their political system--as God-fearing and hard-working. In part, this may reflect the heroic view of the Soviets that prevailed in this country during a formative period in Reagan’s life: World War II, when, in Churchill’s phrase, they were “our gallant Russian Allies” fighting off the Nazis with the help of American Lend Lease.

It may also be a reflection of a larger American tendency to believe that people are good but rulers are bad.

In this case, Suzanne Massie, a scholar on Soviet affairs and author of the book “Land of the Firebird,” was instrumental in making the President see the Russian people as human beings and in pursuing increased cultural and people-to-people exchanges.

Several Consultations

Before his first meeting with Gorbachev, the President invited Massie and a handful of other non-government experts on the Soviet Union to the White House. She has been consulted several times since then, enough so that one European critic complained, “All Reagan knows about the Soviet Union he got from her and that Russian comedian with one-liners.” (The comedian is Yakov Smirnoff, whose forte is anti-Communist jibes and who with Massie was a guest at the White House dinner for Gorbachev in December.)

“I tried to give him a sense of the variety and complexity of the Soviet Union, that it was not a monolith,” Massie said in an interview. “He was attentive, curious and very interested in the people. I stressed the Soviet versus Russian aspect (Soviet rulers of Russian people), and how people there define themselves by nationality, are still religious.

“He sees the average American in Russians, wanting religious freedom and economic freedom. He feels this is the greatest country in the world and everyone wants to be here and be like us,” Massie added. “He is a man of his own age and time, with experiences in Hollywood, a lot of which stayed in place.”

Echoing that assessment, Speakes says that Reagan “feels leaders start wars, not people, and that if you could get through to the Russian people, with people-to-people programs, they’d see we want peace too.”

New Era ‘Daydreams’

Reagan apparently still “daydreams” about personally ending the Cold War and ushering in a new era in U.S.-Soviet relations by a heart-to-heart conversation with the Soviet people, according to Moscow-born Dmitri Simes, a Sovietologist at the Carnegie Institution for International Peace here.

Administration officials, said Simes, are trying to “control the President’s enthusiasm” along these lines in speeches being prepared for his delivery to Moscow University and the Writers Union.

“If he had his way, he’d speak of the inherent goodness of the American people, their desire for peace, the benign nature of our foreign policy and all that,” Simes said.

“He was wrong in his previous perceptions of Soviet objectives (of taking over the world),” he added, “and he’s wrong now in believing Gorbachev reflects the sentiments of the Russian people.”

And what will Reagan find when he sees the Soviet capital face to face?

“The trip will certainly stretch his perceptions,” said Massie. “It will be an eye-opener, seeing the Kremlin with the terrifying facade from afar that shrinks in reality when you are inside looking out. Everyone comes away astonished that it (the Soviet Union) wasn’t what he thought it would be. But how the reality will differ from his picture of it, we’ll only know after the President tells us.”

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall, in London, contributed to this story.