The idea for the forthcoming U.S.-Soviet seaborne summit grew out of meetings last July between President Bush and the leaders of Hungary and Poland, including Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, the Chicago Tribune reported Wednesday.
"They expressed a hope that he would be meeting with General Secretary (Mikhail) Gorbachev and that he would be supportive of Mr. Gorbachev . . . all of which prompted the president to begin thinking about a way to have a meeting which would be short of the traditional summit," a White House official was quoted as saying Tuesday.This led Bush to broach the idea to a small circle of advisers as they sat on the veranda of the U.S. ambassador's residence in Paris following the July 14-16 economic summit there. Bush had flown there after his stops in Poland and Hungary.
On his way back to Washington aboard Air Force One, the official said, Bush wrote a letter to Gorbachev, which the State Department cabled to U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock in Moscow to relay to the Soviet leader. The official quoted Bush as suggesting in the letter that the two leaders "meet informally" and said it was in keeping with the president's "wanting personal relationships with world leaders."
By early August, Gorbachev had written back, although, the official said, "at that stage it was very general."
An exchange of letters and cables followed through most of August proposing details, dates and other essentials. There also was at least one meeting on the subject between Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Yuri Dubinin, Soviet ambassador to the United States.
At the same time but on a "separate track" was the planning for the formal summit in the first part of next year between Bush and Gorbachev somewhere in the United States, the official said.
Agreement on that, announced by Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in Wyoming in September, "allowed progress to accelerate on an informal summit," the official said.
He added that both Bush and Gorbachev "wanted the informal meeting to occur before the formal summit and on a timetable that would allow some distance between them."
More cables followed, the official said, and by late September or early October, the dates were set. The two governments agreed last week to announce the "non-summit summit" simultaneously Tuesday.
Amazingly, in Washington, a city that prides itself on ferreting out information, the December meeting remained a secret - at least until Tuesday when the Washington Post published a leaked account just hours before Bush held his news conference.