Weekend TV : Gorbachev’s Visit to U.S. Will Be Previewed in a Variety of Programs

Previews of Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s first visit to the United States will dominate the small screen this weekend.

ABC will devote an hour of prime time Sunday at 10 p.m. to the “Jennings/Koppel Report: The Summit in America.” The network’s two top newsmen, Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, will explore the mood of the Soviet Union and the United States on the eve of the superpower summit, the circumstances that enabled the meeting between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev to take place and the impact this meeting could have on the future of the cold war.

C-SPAN cable network also will provide pre-summit programming from 3-6:30 p.m. Sunday, including interviews with Paul Warnke, former U.S. arms control negotiator; Richard Perle, former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, and Thomas Griscom, director of communications for the White House.

The program bloc also features segments on planning the summit agenda, coordinating the schedules of Mr. and Mrs. Gorbachev, the INF Treaty, Soviet-style negotiating, the Strategic Defense Initiative, human rights and the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. The last 90 minutes is reserved for a live viewer call-in show with Gennadi Gerasimov, chief spokesman for the Soviet foreign ministry, and a U.S. official.

KCET Channel 28 has summit plans as well. Today at 10 a.m., the station will rebroadcast this week’s Tom Brokaw one-on-one interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. Sunday at 10 a.m., KCET will air both a debate about the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings, with Sovietologists Richard Pipes and Stephen Cohen, and an interview with Henry Kissinger.

Many of this weekend’s network news programs will be filled with pre-summit maneuverings, commentary and predictions as well.