Page 190 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

LEADERS ARE PERSUASIVE

bilateral context. With the Soviet Union, for example, the president needed
to arrive in Geneva with a very high approval rating at home so there would
be no issue about whether Americans agreed with what he was advocating
at the table,” McFarlane said. “He needed to have the ability to pay for his
proposals as indicated by congressional support, and that had to be dem-
onstrated in a visible way through polls, articles, and public statements.
Then he needed to have the allies concurring so the Russians wouldn’t
think they could drive a wedge between the Europeans and us. So during
the six months running up to that November 1985 encounter with the
Soviet Union, Reagan totally focused on those constituencies. He gave four
major policy speeches on each dimension of our relations with the Russians:
bilateral, human rights, regional disagreements, and arms control.”
It was a systematic approach to persuasion. President Reagan used
every opportunity to spell out his position publicly and explain why he
believed it was sound as well as why he believed the Soviets’ position was
not. The president and his advisors held weekly bipartisan meetings with
congressional leaders and met with the Republican leadership weekly too.
The purpose of those gatherings was to drive home the message and get
sufficient resources appropriated to demonstrate that the United States was
serious about SDI. The president courted his allies, and one month before
the first summit meeting in November 1985, the nation’s most powerful
friends—leaders from the United Kingdom, Japan, France, West Germany,
and Italy—stood together at a press conference and professed their support
for President Reagan’s positions, signaling that the United States and its
allies were indeed a united force.
“By coordinating the lead-up to the 1985 summit, we were able to send
Reagan to Geneva with strong allied support and two solid years of appro-
priations for SDI. By that time, there was no question that he could fund
his program,” said McFarlane. “Going into those summit meetings, as I
recall, Reagan also had a 73 percent approval rating at the grass roots too.
It took a lot of bureaucratic effort to get all those speeches written, the
trips to Europe done, and the background sessions with the press that took
about a third of my time by the time I left office, but that’s how it works
in a major democracy.”
President Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met five times in all, and
their efforts resulted in the signing of the historic Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987, which eliminated certain nuclear

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