The President in Europe : Reporter’s Notebook : Reagan and Gonzalez Play ‘Can You Top This?’

During an “often hilarious lunch” Tuesday at the Moncloa Palace with Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, President Reagan was in great form, according to Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who said they tried to “match each other” with jokes and stories.

But when asked to repeat some of their stories, Shultz begged off, saying: “I’m not in a class with either (of them) when it comes to telling stories. I’d ruin . . . I’d step on their lines, so I won’t try.”

At the same lunch, which Gonzalez put on at the palace’s wine cellar, a favorite retreat of his, the Spanish prime minister, as he usually does, offered his guest a Cuban cigar. Reagan turned it down.

Asked later why the President had done so, Shultz told reporters: “He doesn’t smoke cigars.”

Spanish journalists were upset when White House deputy press secretary Larry Speakes, commenting at a press briefing on anti-Reagan demonstrations, said: “Five presidents who have visited here . . . have experienced a similar type of expression on the part of the people.”

The Spaniards felt that the remark showed a woeful ignorance of recent Spanish history. As the Spaniards pointed out, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford made official visits to Spain when the dictator Francisco Franco was still alive. If anyone had tried to protest, the Spanish journalists told their American colleagues, Franco’s police would have quickly clubbed them to the ground.

Jimmy Carter, the only other American President to visit Spain, came in 1980, five years after the death of Franco, and he was not the object of mass protest demonstrations.

The kind of light moments that Reagan customarily uses to drop his famous one-liners were few and far between at the economic summit conference in Bonn and nonexistent during his solemn visits to the military cemetery at Bitburg and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

But the atmosphere lightened considerably once Reagan arrived in Madrid, and he quickly adapted to it.

After bumping into Gonzalez when his host stopped suddenly in a garden behind the Moncloa Palace to answer a reporter’s question, Reagan smiled broadly, turned to the reporter and said: “See what you made me do? That could be a diplomatic incident.”

Reagan’s one attempt at humor during an otherwise serious talk to a group of Spanish community leaders, most of them businessmen, fell flat, perhaps because few of them know any English.

Declaring that he had wanted to visit Spain ever since he became President, Reagan said he was delighted to have finally made it, then added: “After all, it’s already been almost five centuries since your first delegation visited our country.”

He paused, smiled and cocked his head as if waiting for a response. There was none, and he went on, “We have much to celebrate as we approach the 500th anniversary of the voyage of Christopher Columbus.”

Notebook contributors were Stanley Meisler, Jack Nelson and George Skelton.