The history of US-Russia summits - 9 April 1993

Perhaps we should think of abolishing the word "summit" and maybe the institution it has come to describe. We've come very far from the intention of the first summits and today, the mere announcement of summit balloons our hopes way beyond the possibility of their being fulfilled.

I think it might be worth a long look back to the beginning, to the idea of a summit meeting and to its originator who was nobody but Winston Churchill. I was present at the birth, if Bermuda was the birthplace, in December of 1953. Churchill was then in his second administration and he was meeting with President Eisenhower who had been in the White House only since the previous January. Eisenhower had turned down a previous invitation to a meeting with Churchill because he suspected correctly that whatever agenda, the Foreign Office cooked up for a conference, Churchill would release a new bee from his bonnet to urge on Ike a three-party meeting with the Russians … because Churchill declared, in the first meeting in Bermuda, the British people not yet able to resume a pre-war standard of living, would not forever go on burdening themselves with the cost of armed forces strong enough to deter a Russian advance across Europe.

Two points here for the young and innocent and indeed for some friends of my own generation who'd forgotten the long austerity of the post-war years and also forgotten the rampant fear of the Soviet Union once it had added the atom bomb to its huge arsenal and its enormous armies. The other point is that Churchill in relation to the Russians has been remembered most for his warning in the famous Fulton, Missouri, speech about the menace that lay behind the Iron Curtain. The popular deduction has been that Churchill went on for the rest of his life to nurture the worst suspicions of Soviet motives and to shun its leaders, quite the contrary as we shall see in recalling that forgotten conference at Bermuda.

So as I say, Churchill opened it in the presence of the French prime minister and Eisenhower by saying that our peoples would simply not go on making sacrifices in order to maintain a cripplingly costly defence if we neglect all chances of an easement in relations with the Russians. We always talked about the Russians then when we meant the whole Soviet Union because the boss man who spoke for Russia spoke for the Union. To this eloquent speech, some president thought it statesman like others, Foreign Office men thought it a disastrous beginning. Nevertheless, President Eisenhower responded at once in, one diplomat put it, "very violent and coarse terms". I doubt if such language has ever before been heard at an international conference.

It's true that bearing in mind the certainty that the Russians would learn overnight what was said there, even a diplomatic novice would have polished up his language and softened his objections as the American diplomat Averell Harriman once said, "conferences at the top level are always courteous, name calling is left to the foreign ministers", but not this time!

What Eisenhower said was literally this, he didn't believe there was any new look to Soviet policy, Russia he said is a woman of the streets and whether her dress is new or just the old one patched, she is certainly the same whore underneath. And the United States intends to drive her off her present beat into the backstreets.

The British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden thought this opening riposte had just about wrecked the conference, he asked Eisenhower when he thought the next meeting might be? Ike got up and said, "I don't know, mine is with a whisky and soda," and he stomped off.

Well the conference lasted over a long weekend, but most of what was said and done there has faded into the dust of the archives, but Churchill came away with his desire for a meeting with the Russians strengthened by an alarming hint from Eisenhower that if the truce talks then going on to settle the Korean War broke down, the Americans might use tactical atomic weapons. Churchill was dismayed, his whole stress and focus for the rest of the 18 months he would be prime minister was on the, to him, quite new situation that faced the world since the skies over a remote Pacific island had thundered with the first hydrogen bomb. That had happened just one year before the '53 Bermuda Conference.

Later on at the conference, Eisenhower confided to Churchill's secretary John Colville what was at the root of their disagreement. Whereas Winston looked on the atomic weapons as something entirely new and terrible, he, Ike, looked upon it as just the latest improvement in military weapons, all weapons he said in due course become conventional weapons.

When it was all over, Churchill now in his 80th year became more and more obsessed with his view of a radically changed world and he decided that the last act of his 50-year parliamentary career should be to urge and achieve a meeting with the Russians with their leader – a parley, he said, at the summit, and not one meeting but the first he hoped of a continuing series. His view of the bomb and how it had changed the world was very different from Eisenhower's. After that first explosion of the hydrogen bomb at Enewatek in the Pacific, he told his secretary, "we are now as far from the age of the atomic bomb as the atomic bomb itself is from the bow and arrow". I don't think there were many leaders on either side, who would have agreed with him but that's what he believed.

Now to wind up this melancholy tale, Churchill had been promising and threatening to resign for at least two years, he was declining visibly but like a, like a dying fire the flames spurted up at surprising times. He could be frail and forgetful all day and then bristle with sap and mischief at night, but he never lost this new zeal for a series of meetings with the Russians, at the summit. But the news from America, the best intelligence about Eisenhower's policies had convictions gloomily convinced Churchill at last that there was little chance now of that first summit. So one day, on 5 April 1955, 38 years ago last Monday he dusted off the rather faded long frock coat he'd always worn for audiences with the Queen, put on his top hat went off to Buckingham Palace and resigned.

But as the Cold War grew more frigid, Eisenhower did yield to the advocates of a summit. In the summer of 1955, he went off to meet Mr Khrushchev in Geneva under the impression, he said, that there was evidence of new friendliness in the world. The evidence wasn't helped later that year by Soviet manoeuvres in the Middle East, but four years later Mr Khrushchev came here to the presidents mountain retreat in Maryland, Camp David, and they had what I called a very convivial get together, which generated what was hopefully known as the "spirit of Camp David". The spirit burned bright enough to light the way to a summer summit in Paris, but it was brutally doused when on the very eve of the meeting, the Russians spotted and brought down an American reconnaissance spy plane. At first, Eisenhower denied there was any such flying animal, but very soon he said, "Well, you do it, too", and went home,

Two years later, the young President Kennedy met Mr Khrushchev in Vienna; I'm not quite sure this late in the day why. Two months before, the United States had suffered enormous laughable humiliation with its disastrous failure at invading Castro's Cuba. Mr Khrushchev must have felt the young Kennedy was very green indeed, he was to learn later it was not so. But the Vienna summit became distinguished only for Kennedy's parting words to the Russian, "it's going to be a long cold winter". Now the motives on the other, the Soviet side for holding summits are perilous to guess at, but plainly Mr Khrushchev, Mr Andropov, Mr Gorbachev were not just sitting there waiting to be friendly at America's bidding. Mr Khrushchev in particular later confessed he was eager to have Kennedy beat Nixon for the presidency and then later still he wanted to help restore Nixon's shattered prestige after the Watergate revelations.

It's ironical to realise now that both Reagan and Bush rallied to back Mr Gorbachev when the first threat to his power came from, guess who, Boris Yeltsin.

Looking back over all the summits to see if any have had a permanent or profound effect on Russian/American relations I should say, "yes, Reagan in Iceland, Reykjavík 1986". Now I know the official verdict is that the meeting was a catastrophe because Mr Reagan wasn't well briefed, he went beyond the briefing anyway and uttered the naive, outrageous but quite sincere remark "why not abolish all nuclear weapons?" That blab of the tongue was possibly the best thing Reagan ever spoke. The impossible vision began to hover on the horizon and led to more summits at which for the first time both sides agreed to dismantle all medium- and short-range nuclear missiles and then all intermediates.

By this time, every arranged meeting between Russia and the United States is called a summit, but the game is not the same, they're no longer equal supermen and though Mr Yeltsin and the Russian people evidently don't like it, Mr Yeltsin came begging.

In fact, this summit was about summitry old or new, it was the American stop in Mr Yeltsin's presidential election campaign. He hoped, and the Clinton administration hoped fervently, that their meeting, their photo exposure, the general warmth and ceremony of the occasion will boast the Yeltsin vote on 25 April. Vancouver was an effort to bide time against the old Communists in power throughout the old Union and against their cunning bureaucracy, which so far has collared and kept most of the billions sent to the aid of the Russian people.

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