Escalating the Propaganda War

In agreeing to an interview with TIME, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev was obviously hoping to have his words read and analyzed around the world. As it turned out, his well-informed if one-sided comments made the desired splash. In the U.S., the interview and a subsequent meeting with a group of visiting Senators got such heavy TV play that a State Department official grumbled about "Gorbachev getting more camera time than Brooke Shields." In Western Europe, France's respected Le Monde front-paged the interview, while the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, generally considered to be the most influential newspaper in Italy, gave it Page One play for two days in a row.

American officials were apprehensive that Gorbachev had raised "the level of expectations for the summit" by dangling hints of a sharp reduction in nuclear weapons only if the U.S. would stop development of its Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly known as Star Wars. White House Spokesman Larry Speakes tried to downplay any idea of substantive arms-control bargaining at the summit. Said Speakes: "The important thing is to get to this meeting, to have the two men look each other over, size each other up, lay out their views on these various topics and then be able to set an agenda ) to deal with these in the future." Speakes gamely asserted that "we are pleased that Mr. Gorbachev was able to present his views to the American public." Now, he said, Moscow should give President Reagan "a comparable opportunity to express his views to the Soviet people" by arranging to have him and Gorbachev appear on television in each other's countries.

Moscow let this offer pass, while barely containing its glee over Gorbachev's urbane performance. The main Soviet evening TV news program, Vremya, devoted a full hour to reading the interview text, while TASS, the official news agency, rounded up favorable comments from as far away as Zimbabwe. The U.S.S.R.'s state publishing house put on sale, at ten kopecks (12 cents) each, 200,000 copies of a 30-page booklet containing the text of the interview as compiled --and slightly censored--by TASS. The agency deleted a joking allusion to an aged Soviet Finance Minister and a glancing mention of Nikita Khrushchev, who apparently is still a nonperson in the U.S.S.R. Most striking, TASS changed a Gorbachev reference to "God on high" to "honestly . . ."

The censorship did not go unnoticed. TASS PURGES GOD jeered a headline in the Milan daily Il Giornale. But otherwise the reaction in Western Europe, a prime target of Gorbachev's comments, was both impressed and worried. A common opinion among political analysts there was that "the charm offensive of Gorbachev," as the Paris daily Le Matin called it, might succeed in putting Reagan on the defensive at their November meeting in Geneva. The Bonn daily General-Anzeiger noted the "knowledge of details" that Gorbachev had demonstrated in the interview and added delicately that Reagan "is not known for having on hand in ample measure all the time the political facts that the leader of a great power needs." Summed up Le Monde: "The American 'Great Communicator' has met his public relations match."