THE MALTA SUMMIT : Bush’s Voyage: The Presidency Stranded at Sea

VALLETTA, Malta —  In the end, it was a pier-side summit. Only George Bush went to sea, and at the height of a fierce gale on a cold and Gothic night, the President of the United States became the sea’s prisoner.

From around 6 p.m. Saturday until well after dawn Sunday, Bush and his queasy brain trust were as helplessly stranded aboard the U.S. cruiser Belknap as marooned sailors on a desert island. There was literally no place they could go, accounts of one of the most extraordinary nights in the history of the modern presidency made plain Sunday.

Bush made light of the experience Sunday, and the White House version of it read like an updated “Captains Courageous,” but neither account obscured the concern of American officials alarmed by the sea’s captivity of their commander in chief.

At one point, it was decided to move the presidential party to a hotel on Malta. Guests were rousted from their rooms to make way, but by then it was too late.

“I don’t think anyone can say that the saltwater get-together was anything other than an adventure, at least not in the harbor here,” Bush said Sunday.

Said Mikhail S. Gorbachev after Sunday’s summit schedule was modified yet again by a savage storm from the northeast: “This shows we can adjust to changing circumstances very well.”

The issue was not Bush’s safety aboard the big cruiser anchored in Marsaxlokk Bay on Malta’s south coast, planners said Sunday after Air Force One had left for Brussels, but rather his inability to move if there was need to.

At the height of the gale Saturday night, with winds gusting above 45 m.p.h. in rough seas, planners had run out of contingencies, they conceded Sunday.

The presidential party could see land on three sides from the pitching cruiser. They could talk instantly to the ends of the Earth. There was ample backup for a ship-to-shore telephone cable snapped by the storm. But there was no way anybody could leave the Belknap, and no place the ship could easily go.

“The President had his doctor aboard, and the ship’s medical facilities are good, but in the case of really serious trauma, I don’t know what we’d have done,” said one planner.

With winds far too high for safe helicopter operations, the best of bad options for getting the President off the ship would have been for the Belknap to sail around Malta and attempt to enter Grand Harbor on its north side, one planner said. That would have required sailing into the teeth of the gale and counting on the skill of a Maltese harbor pilot in a nasty following sea.

Capt. John F. Sigler, skipper of the Belknap, described Saturday’s gale as the worst in-port storm he had seen in 24 years.

On the summit’s opening day Saturday, after sleeping aboard the Belknap, Bush was to have begun talks with Gorbachev on the Soviet cruiser Slava, anchored about 400 yards away. Gorbachev never went to his cruiser at all, remaining snug on the docked cruise ship Maxim Gorky.

With seas too rough for him to safely board the Slava, Bush went by admiral’s barge to the Gorky around 10 a.m. Saturday.

As the two leaders talked for five hours, the storm worsened. By one account, the U.S. Navy advised Bush not to return to the Belknap in rising seas. He decided to go.

The accommodation ladder on the Belknap’s lee side broke on the barge’s first attempt to board the President. On the second pass at the ladder, he boarded safely.

When an American official told Gorbachev of the broken ladder, he replied with some asperity: “Better teach your Navy how to repair.” By then, the original schedule had been modified to a second round of talks on the Gorky, followed by dinner there rather than on the American cruiser.

The sea kept rising. The Navy decided to swap the admiral’s barge for a Maltese tugboat for the return to the Gorky. A longstanding contingency plan went into operation: Nobody wanted to risk a late-night return to the Belknap.

Under the plan, after dinner Bush and his party would ride--by limousine--from the Soviet liner to the Holiday Inn on the north side of the island.

Frenzy descended on the third floor of the hotel in a cloud of vacuum cleaners. While battalions of housekeepers attacked the third floor, official American guests, who had been earlier warned that it might happen, were doubled up in other rooms.

No, said the sea.

At 6:45 p.m. Saturday, American officials said, Gorbachev was pacing the Gorky, impatiently awaiting Bush’s return.

The President wanted to go, but he couldn’t.

The White House waited until the last minute, then canceled: no talks, no dinner.

By 7:30 p.m. Saturday, the President and his retinue, including a seasick secretary of state, were settling in for a long night as sea-enforced guests of the Belknap.

Ashore, Administration officials fretted.

Aboard, by official accounts, former naval officer Bush was enjoying himself. Sliding plates made a presidential dinner with his staff “a little shaky,” Bush’s spokesman said Sunday, but afterward the President wandered fore and aft speaking with the Belknap’s captain and crew about handling a ship in storm conditions.

“The President is in excellent spirits. He loves the sea,” a White House communique said Sunday morning. “The President seemed energized by the intensity of the storm.”

He was the only one.

The wind fell Sunday, and seas moderated, but Marsaxlokk Bay was still no place for a landlubber. Bush decided to attend church services aboard the Belknap instead of on the island.

Gorbachev, the schedule said, would come to the American cruiser for Sunday’s talks. He didn’t even try. Bush offered to make a courtesy call on the Slava. The Soviets said no.

An American planner said that Gorbachev, a son of the soil, refused to leave the rock-steady, firmly moored Gorky to go to any location on water, on advice from an admiral on the Slava, who told him it was unsafe to try.

“The Soviet delegation notified us this morning that they were unwilling to attempt to go to the Slava or to Belknap. Therefore we have agreed to continue the meetings on the Gorky,” said an American communique, finally and officially taking the sea out of a seaborne summit that never was.

When someone asked him why Gorbachev hadn’t gone to the Belknap, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, a Kansan survivor of a stormy night in Malta, never missed a beat: “He doesn’t share our love for the sea.”