History:On a grey, freezing winter's morning in 1985, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived at a lakeside chateau in Geneva for his first meeting with the US president, Ronald Reagan, writes Richard Aldous
Muffled against the cold in heavy coat, scarf and hat, Gorbachev on leaving his limousine became instantly aware that he was walking into a propaganda disaster. There, greeting him, was a tanned and sleek president dressed simply in an elegant navy suit, apparently impervious to the weather.
The American seemed the personification of glamorous vigour, appearing almost the younger man despite actually being 20 years senior. A visibly flustered Gorbachev immediately whipped off his hat, only for the wind to ruffle the strands of hair combed across his balding pate. The bouffant-haired Reagan towered over him, beaming a Hollywood smile for the cameras thronged below. Round One to the Americans. As David Reynolds shows in this fascinating study of international summitry, the smallest details can make the difference between triumph and humiliation when world leaders meet face-to-face.
Most historians agree that summits played a central role in 20th-century international relations, but explaining how or why these meetings mattered so much has often proved frustrating. Historians such as Margaret MacMillan in Peacemakers, a study of Versailles, have written beautifully on individual conferences, but trying to see patterns between the great summits has been a difficult task. David Reynolds - a Cambridge historian - has now filled the gap with a book that is as penetrating in its overarching analysis as it is rich in detail about individual encounters at the summit: the result is a study in international history at its very finest.
At the outset, Reynolds sets the analytical framework that shapes the book - summits are "personal", "plenary" or "progressive"; each is assessed for its "preparation", "negotiation" and "implementation"; their objectives are those of "appeasement", "containment", "détente" or "transformation". Reynolds illustrates this broader argument with six dramatic stories of meetings between world leaders: Chamberlain's encounter with Hitler at Munich in 1938 that turned out not to deliver "peace in our time"; Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin's shaping of the postwar world at Yalta in 1945; Khrushchev's pummelling of Kennedy in Vienna in 1961; Brezhnev and Nixon's awkward moves towards détente in Moscow in 1972; Jimmy Carter's knocking together of heads on the Middle East at Camp David in 1978; and finally that meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev that "helped ensure the cold war ended not with a bang, or a whimper, but a handshake". Reynolds tells these stories with great insight and even humour (such as when a terrified puppy is brought to the White House by the Soviet Ambassador, leaving Jackie Kennedy to explain to her bemused husband that she had asked Khrushchev for it in Vienna after "running out of things to say".)
THE DRAMA OF head-to-head meetings is captured with great verve, not least in the chapter on Vienna. Kennedy arrived with acute back pain and drugged up by "Dr Feelgood", his travelling quack. Yet amphetamines could not dull the pulverising shock of confronting a man so utterly opposed to his entire thought system. JFK had the effortless ease of a Boston Brahmin who believed that elites could sort matters out between themselves through reasoned debate: at Vienna he encountered a man who was not only alien to that mindset, but abhorred it. That realisation, Kennedy said afterwards, was "the roughest thing in my life". One presidential adviser compared the plane journey out of Vienna as like riding with the losing baseball team after the World Series. Khrushchev sensed that too. The president, he concluded, was "weak" and "immature".
It was the assessment by which he (mis)calculated the following year that Kennedy would crumble during the Cuban missile crisis. Each man had taken the measure of the other at Vienna - Khrushchev that the president could be bullied; JFK that the Soviet leader could not be reasoned with. Those judgements played a crucial role in the assessments of each as they went "eyeball to eyeball" in the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.
That summits can produce real outcomes, for good or ill, helps explain why professional diplomats and foreign ministers dislike them so much. Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, principal private secretary to British prime minister Anthony Eden during the Suez crisis, scathingly noted that although his boss had earlier opposed attempts by Churchill (who coined the term "summit") to parley with world leaders, "when we ourselves are involved and playing the beau role, it is a very different matter. These politicians are two-thirds prima donna". True - but as David Reynolds's outstanding book makes clear, some are better at hitting the top notes than others.
Richard Aldous is head of history at UCD. His most recent book is Great Irish Speeches just published by Quercus
Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century By David Reynolds Penguin/Allen Lane, 497pp. £25