When History Reaches a Peak

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By Wednesday night it will all be over. Ronald Reagan will be packing to leave for Brussels to report to NATO allies, then will hurry on to Washington to address a joint session of Congress that will be televised to a waiting nation. Mikhail Gorbachev will be getting ready to head back to the halls of the Kremlin, where he will weigh his impressions of the American leader. Soviet officials, newly savvy about influencing public opinion, and American officials, veterans in the art, will be struggling to put the proper spin on what took place in the first encounter between their two leaders--just as these officials spent the previous week trying to manipulate the expectations. After the 3,000 journalists who converged on Geneva file their final reports, after the last evening broadcasts by Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw are transmitted from specially built new ground stations, it will be possible once again to get a hotel room and a table in a restaurant--and easier than ever to get an outside phone line in a city where 1,250 miles of new cables were laid for the most heavily chronicled superpower summit in history.

For 40 years the world has watched with growing concern every move in the fitful drama of Soviet-American relations. As arms-control talks sputter and arsenals inexorably grow, so do the fears and, perhaps miraculously, so do the hopes. That is why Geneva was destined to be, more than any of the ten summits that have preceded it since the end of World War II, a global extravaganza, an event whose very occurrence transcended in importance whatever might be put on paper at its end.

Yet for all the hoopla, the most important moment in Geneva was likely to have been the most personal and private one. On Tuesday morning at 10:05, shortly after meeting for the first time, Reagan and Gorbachev were scheduled to excuse themselves from the ceremonial opening din and sit down together in a tranquil room in the villa Fleur d'Eau with only their interpreters. No battalions of advisers, no swarms of reporters. Alone in the room with just their wits and their heavy sense of responsibility. That is when, in all likelihood, the full wonder of the moment will have most powerfully gripped them. Two humans out of 5 billion somehow chosen to carry the hopes of all, searching each other's eyes, listening to the timbre of each other's voice, looking for some familiar signal that could lead to a better way to live together on this planet.