Bush Acts to Allay Allies’ Fears About Summit

President Bush sought Wednesday to allay concern that he and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, preparing for their summit meeting at a time of turmoil and uncertainty across Central and Eastern Europe, will use their private conference “to negotiate the future of Europe.”

In a speech to the AFL-CIO, Bush said that he wants to hear what Gorbachev “thinks of the challenges that he faces at home and of the new course that he has set out for Soviet policy in Eastern Europe.”

The meeting, on U.S. and Soviet naval ships in the Mediterranean Sea near Malta on Dec. 2 and 3, appears certain to focus on the wave of political reform that has swept through East Germany and other Soviet allies in Eastern Europe.

Bush spoke to the union convention--which his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, refused to address for eight years--with Lech Walesa, the leader of the Polish trade union Solidarity, at his side. It was the Walesa-led movement that spearheaded the Polish political reforms that have themselves become models for the political openings occurring in Hungary and East Germany and showing signs of taking root in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria.

The President called on the American labor movement, the business community and the government “to look for ways to support a partnership for progress in Poland.”

U.S. support for the non-Communist reform movements led to a warning from Gorbachev on Tuesday not to read the sudden political relaxation as an invitation to export capitalism eastward. In response, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that the United States would not take such advantage of the turmoil--but that it would continue to condition its support on economic and political reform.

Fitzwater said that the steps taken by the Administration to encourage the reform movements in Eastern Europe--limited mostly to verbal encouragement and offers of financial assistance and food--”have had the desired effect of offering our support without inciting revolution or other actions that would take the process backwards.”

The two summit partners, in Moscow and Washington, have found themselves in the midst of a carefully orchestrated performance leading up to the Malta meeting, with each side trying to position itself so that it can emerge from the conference claiming success. Fitzwater sought to play down the likelihood that the meeting would produce specific agreements.

The Soviets, he said, “have had a tendency in past summits to build expectations before a summit, and we have a tendency to play them down. I suspect the reality is somewhere in the middle.”

Bush, in emphasizing that he and Gorbachev would not meet to decide the future of Europe--as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill presided over the partitioning of Europe at Yalta in 1945--told the AFL-CIO:

“The peoples of Eastern Europe are speaking their own minds about that future. They are calling for democracy. Freedom of press and of conscience. The right of the governed to choose their leaders.

“At Malta, I will work to advance that process of reform and democracy,” Bush said. He vowed to talk with Gorbachev “about the opportunities to move beyond containment in U.S.-Soviet relations--to find areas of mutual advantage in our relationship.”