THE WASHINGTON SUMMIT : Weeks of Preparations for Talks With Gorbachev : President Thoroughly Briefed, Aides Say

It began with the drafting of detailed briefing papers by scores of bureaucrats over the past month and culminated in a series of White House briefings every morning last week.

And by the weekend it had all come down to this: a thick, vinyl-covered, red-white-and-blue loose-leaf binder that contains everything President Reagan’s aides feel he needs to know before he can sit down and talk with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

In briefing the President for his week of high-stakes superpower diplomacy, White House aides were haunted by the specter of the summit last year at Reykjavik, Iceland. Some presidential aides say Reagan had been insufficiently prepared for that summit, which was held barely 10 days after it was arranged.

The Reykjavik summit, which the U.S. side had expected to be dominated by discussions of medium-range nuclear missiles, ventured far beyond that into a discussion of eliminating almost all offensive weapons and broke down in deadlock over Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program.

At the same time, White House aides say they have also taken care this year to make sure that Reagan is not overprepared--burdened by volumes of confusing detail better left to experts.

Private Summit Sessions

Making Reagan’s preparation all the more important is the intensely private nature of his four private meetings and a lunch with Gorbachev, which begin Tuesday.

When the two leaders settle into the cushioned wing chairs of the Oval Office, only four note-takers and two interpreters will be with them. A variety of policy experts from both countries will be standing by only yards away in the Cabinet Room, but they will not be present to assist Reagan in the private give-and-take with Gorbachev.

White House officials say they are confident that Reagan is so familiar with the issues most likely to be raised that he will have no difficulty articulating carefully thought-out positions that accurately reflect U.S. policy.

“I doubt that any President has ever been better prepared or more psychologically prepared for a meeting with a world power than President Reagan is at this time,” White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. said Sunday on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.”

“Not only does he have his own ideas--and they’re very strong ideas--about where we should go next in the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union,” Baker said, “but he’s had daily briefings with his national security adviser (and) with me.”

Administration officials say they do not expect the discussions to take any surprising twists, as they did in Reykjavik. But that has not stopped dozens of experts on everything from Afghanistan to X-ray lasers, Soviet Politburo member Alexander N. Yakovlev and even Zimbabwe from preparing information for Reagan on such topics as regional conflagrations, space weapons, Soviet personnel and Soviet interests in the Third World.

Pouring Over Briefing Papers

“He’s been going over briefing papers all week,” said a senior White House staff member at week’s end. “A lot of people don’t give him the credit he deserves for knowing the issues and knowing what he wants to do.”

As portrayed by former and current White House officials, including one who helped write some of the documents given to the President, the preparation of a President for the delicate task of negotiating with his Soviet counterpart involves compiling vast amounts of detailed documents on every topic that could conceivably be raised--and then hacking away until they are reduced to a page or two each.

Even at that, the final book that Reagan was given to ready himself for this week’s summit was described as four to five inches thick.

The task of preparing Reagan for his private meetings with Gorbachev was simplified by the fact that he has already met twice with the Soviet leader--last year in Reykjavik and two years ago in Geneva.

Before the first two summits, Reagan was given a videotaped biography of Gorbachev as well as videotapes on Soviet military capabilities and on ordinary Soviet life--a format reflecting his apparent preference for visual aids.

‘It Was a Dumb Idea’

This time, with Reagan already familiar with Gorbachev and his efforts to restructure Soviet society, the videos have been abandoned. Besides, said a former staff member of the White House National Security Council, the videotape effort “wasn’t very good.” A current White House staff member added: “It was a dumb idea.”

According to a former National Security Council staff member who has briefed Reagan and three other Presidents for summits, Reagan devotes more attention to his briefing papers than some of his predecessors.

“Compared to (Gerald R.) Ford, he’s a bookworm,” the former official said. But “his great ability, what he does best, is to ask questions. Reagan has a real gift for asking the right questions in a meeting, for getting straight to the heart of things.”

Final preparations for the meetings with Gorbachev began at least a month ago, when the detailed papers on every aspect of arms control were written in the depths of the national security bureaucracy of the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.

“The State Department produces an enormous number of background papers, usually unreadable and too long,” said the former National Security Council staff member. From those, he said, is prepared a much shorter set, given to Reagan after White House aides take out “the more obvious irrelevant points and get down to the bare essentials.”

Short Paper from Shultz

Secretary of State George P. Shultz normally sends Reagan a short paper, the former official said, adding: “I wasn’t so sure that he read it in the past.

“The President gets a lot of talking points, too, but you’re not so sure what the President reads,” he said. “Sometimes a long paper would come back that he’d clearly read, but these books are extremely daunting, these loose-leaf binders full of papers. He once looked at a pile of these briefing books two feet high and said, ‘What are you guys thinking? How do you expect me to read all of this?’ ”

In advance of this summit, the documents were filtered through the National Security Council staff, which drafted summary memos, laid out policy options and added its own views. The NSC summaries are particularly important, the former NSC staff member said, because Presidents rarely if ever plow through the lengthy documents that bubble up from the bureaucracy.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Reagan met every morning last week with Lt. Gen. Colin L. Powell, the President’s national security adviser, as well as twice with Shultz and twice with the full National Security Council.