Reagan Seeks to Reassure Critics on Iceland Talks

President Reagan, seeking to reassure his conservative critics, said Monday that he will press the issues of “Soviet human rights violations and military intervention” in regional conflicts when he meets with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Iceland this weekend.

“It would be simply unthinkable for world leaders to meet in splendid isolation, even as the people of Afghanistan, Central America, Africa and Southeast Asia undergo terrible sufferings as a result of Soviet invasion or military intervention,” Reagan told an audience of supporters at the White House.

The President sought to play down expectations that he and Gorbachev would reach an arms control agreement at the Reykjavik meeting, which he said was “not intended to be a signing ceremony or media event” but a planning session for a full-dress summit in the United States.

Reagan said he found “suggestions that I’m getting soft on communism” a new and “titillating” experience. This remark drew laughter, but Reagan followed it with a serious appeal to conservatives to rally behind him.

“I would ask those of my old supporters who may have voiced doubts to simply consider three facts that I think may make the current summit process very different from that of previous decades,” Reagan said. “First, the United States has made it plain that we enter these negotiations without illusions and that we will continue to be candid about the Soviet Union, the moral implications of its ideology (and) the grave danger of its geopolitical intentions.”

The second “fact” cited by Reagan was the Administration’s commitment to world freedom. The third was his contention that the United States will enter the meeting from a position of strength.