THE SUMMIT AT GENEVA : At the Negotiating Table--a Reversal of Historic Roles

In his own folksy style, President Reagan summed up the dramatic role reversal that will take place when the leaders of the United States and Soviet Union square off at the historic summit that begins here Tuesday.

“It’ll be the first time we’ve ever had someone on our side of the table who’s older than the fellow on the other side of the table,” he told congressional leaders before leaving Washington. “So maybe I can help this young man with some fatherly advice.”

Reagan, in the twilight of his political career at age 74, represents his country’s most conservative and traditional lines of thinking--usually the posture of the Soviet representative at past summits.

Vigorous Soviet Leader

And across the negotiating table from the American President will be a vigorous Soviet leader who represents a relatively aggressive and forward-looking faction of the long-ossified Kremlin. Mikhail S. Gorbachev, 54, general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, only recently reached the pinnacle of power and may stay there for two decades or more.

Personalities alone, of course, will not determine the success or failure of the summit. To a considerable extent, both Reagan and Gorbachev are prisoners of their nations’ long histories of mutual distrust and animosity and they will find themselves severely constrained if they try to engineer abrupt policy shifts.

Yet one guiding principle of summit diplomacy is that two leaders, together in the same room, can cut through historic obstacles to accommodation and reach personal understandings on the issues that divide the superpowers.

Fears of Domination

For that reason, concern has mounted in the United States that the vigorous Gorbachev might dominate his older adversary, that Reagan might fall victim to the same wiles that enabled the Soviet leader to climb to the top of the Kremlin at such an early age.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz got a taste of what Reagan can expect when, in a meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow two weeks ago, the Soviet leader interrupted him several times during the course of a feisty exchange. A State Department official suggested that Gorbachev’s heavy-handed treatment of Shultz may have represented an attempt to “alert us to the contrast” between Gorbachev’s vigor and relative youth and the possibility of “a faltering performance by Reagan.”

But Shultz predicted that Gorbachev will meet his match in Geneva. “If it is a question of a good strong presentation of positions, Ronald Reagan is no slouch at that,” Shultz said. “They are both strong, engaging personalities.”

And beyond their forcefulness and vigor, Reagan and Gorbachev will bring with them a host of other personal strengths and weaknesses when they sit down across from each other Tuesday to begin a scheduled eight hours of discussions that could, ultimately, influence the very survival of the globe.

Reagan Has Strong Hand

Reagan will deal from strength as a decades-long crusader against communism. But even his renowned skills as a communicator will not enable him to reach Gorbachev’s constituency--the Soviet and Eastern European public--in the same way that the Soviet leader will be able to broadcast his message to the United States and, perhaps more important in the jockeying for strategic advantage, Western Europe.

On a personal level, at stake are the political fortunes of the two leaders--and history’s judgment of each. Even if, as most analysts predict, the summit turns out to be little more than a propaganda and public relations battle, the impressions it leaves of Reagan and Gorbachev could have important consequences for the President who is making one of his last appearances on the world stage and the general secretary who is probably making one of his first.

“And in the longer term,” former Carter Administration Defense Secretary Harold Brown said, “impressions or misimpressions resulting from the summit can affect U.S.-Soviet relations for 10 to 15 years.”

Studying the Opposition

Reagan, realizing that personalities of the two leaders and the chemistry between them could have a significant impact on the summit’s outcome, has been extensively briefed on Gorbachev and has studied the role of personalities of U.S. and Soviet leaders in past summits.

The President has read news accounts of how both Western and Soviet leaders regard Gorbachev as not only shrewd but charming, witty and politically astute--a much more polished public figure than any of his recent predecessors. Watching videotapes of Gorbachev in action, Reagan had an opportunity to learn why the Soviet leader is regarded as a formidable adversary, unlikely to be awed by the President’s reputation as “the Great Communicator.”

Reagan has shown no signs of being unduly impressed by Gorbachev’s press notices. As the summit approached, he cited his experience as a negotiator with the Screen Actors Guild as among his credentials for the face-off with the Soviet leader.

During an interview, a foreign broadcaster told Reagan, “You’re up against a formidable figure. I wonder, are you nervous at all?”

“Not really, no . . . ,” the President replied. “I’m the first President of the United States who was ever president of a labor union, and I think I know something about negotiating. And I intend to go at it in the same manner.”

Although Reagan’s aides have echoed their chief’s confidence that he will acquit himself well at Geneva, a trace of anxiety runs through some of their comments. One official conceded that there have “always been doubts about him in these large moments of his political life” but he said Reagan will triumph because “he has inner confidence and a set of convictions he’s comfortable with.”

“The White House,” noted another Administration official, “seems to be running scared that the poor old man has nothing going for him. But Reagan goes into the summit as an extraordinarily popular leader with much more experience than Gorbachev. He goes in with all the cards.”

Some analysts have expressed concern that Reagan may be no intellectual match for Gorbachev, that the President’s propensity for verbal blunders and lack of detailed knowledge of foreign policy and arms control could give the Soviets the wrong impression of his strength as a leader. Former President Jimmy Carter, who signed the second strategic arms limitation agreement with Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev at the last summit in 1979, has said he doubts that Reagan “would be adequately capable of mastering details” of an arms agreement.

On the other hand, Reagan himself has repeatedly said he has no intention of discussing the arcane details of arms control.

Moreover, Gorbachev may be as inclined as Reagan to stick with generalities because of his own lack of detailed knowledge. A senior Administration official who accompanied Shultz in his meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow said he was surprised to find the Soviet leader so ill-informed about the details of the counterproposal that the United States had put on the table four days earlier in answer to the Soviets’ offer of a 50% reduction in strategic nuclear forces.

Although both Reagan and Gorbachev are eager to take home tangible evidence of success from Geneva, some analysts hold out the possibility that one or the other of the sometimes unpredictable leaders might blunder into an inflammatory statement that could torpedo the talks.

Gorbachev demonstrated at his recent meeting with Shultz that he is capable of flying off the handle when his position is challenged. U.S. officials who accompanied Shultz to the session were also surprised by the stereotypes Gorbachev expressed about Americans.

One U.S. official, observing that a Soviet leader of Gorbachev’s sophistication could be expected to know better, surmised that it was his way of demonstrating his solidarity with traditional Soviet ideology and cautioning the United States not to expect too much from the summit.

As for Reagan, David D. Newsome, director of Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, said his deep distrust of the Soviets might bubble to the surface if Gorbachev says something that catches him off guard. “Whenever Reagan is caught with something unexpected to which he has to react suddenly, his inner feelings come out and that’s the problem,” said Newsome, a former State Department official.

But Reagan could also use his decades-old antipathy toward communism in a more constructive way--to provide credibility for any agreement he reaches with Gorbachev on arms control or any of the lesser issues the two leaders will discuss. The same factors that immunized President Richard M. Nixon from right-wing criticism when he opened the American door to China in 1972 should insulate Reagan from the charge that he sold out to the Soviets at Geneva.

This would not be the first time that Reagan used his hard-line reputation to good advantage. When the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983 at the expense of 269 lives, he was able to get away with a relatively mild response that kept the incident from escalating into a major setback in East-West relations.

May Face New Criticism

At the same time, however, Reagan’s reputation could be turned against him at home if he fails in Geneva to put the superpowers on a path toward arms control. Those same critics who branded Reagan as a warmonger for his unprecedented peacetime military buildup during his first term could charge that a man of his background could never have brought himself to deal with the Soviets.

How all this will affect Gorbachev’s negotiating stance is impossible to gauge. Will the Soviet leader, who can look forward to dealing with many more U.S. Presidents, decide to wait for a less doctrinaire anti-Communist? Or will he conclude that Reagan’s unique credibility on matters involving the Soviet Union makes this an opportunity not to be missed?

For all the unusual personal qualities that Reagan and Gorbachev will bring to the summit, some analysts see striking parallels between the two leaders meeting this year in Geneva and the two who met 30 years ago in the same city.

Ray Cline, a former State Department official who served on the U.S. delegation to the “Big Four” summit in 1955, attended by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet party leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, pointed out that powerful personalities were involved then as now:

“Eisenhower was an international hero and Khrushchev was emerging as a leading world figure. There was the same kind of media buildup to create an atmosphere for negotiation and cooperation.

Playing the Propaganda Game

“Reagan has the same kind of healthy skepticism of the Russians that Ike had but, like Ike, he is willing to play their propaganda game and will do it well,” said Cline, now senior adviser to Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Ike was the dominant figure at the summit and everybody clustered around him. The Russians will try to keep that from happening this time but, if Reagan plays it right, they may not be able to prevent it.”

Reagan and Eisenhower have another trait in common: Both resisted attendance at summits for some time before finally bowing to national and international pressure to meet with the Soviet leader. Just as Reagan, in his 1980 presidential campaign, denounced Carter’s summit with Brezhnev the year before, so was Eisenhower quoted as telling his Cabinet in July, 1953:

“This idea of the President of the United States going personally abroad to negotiate--it’s just damn stupid. Every time a President has gone abroad to get into the details of these things, he’s lost his shirt.”

Reagan’s associates are convinced that he, like Eisenhower, has set aside his mistrust of the Soviets sufficiently that he is willing to bargain with them in good faith. Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-Nev.), Reagan’s 1984 campaign chairman and longtime confidant, said he believes the President is determined to reach an arms control agreement.

Laxalt said he bases his view in part on a conversation with Reagan while the President was recuperating from a bullet fired by a would-be assassin early in his first term.

“I told Ron that God let him survive out there on the sidewalk not so he could save the economy but so he could save the world through a meaningful arms control agreement,” Laxalt said. “And he didn’t disagree.”