U.S.-Soviet Summits: An Account of East-West Diplomacy at the Top, 1955-1985
“The failure at Geneva was guaranteed by the absence of an agreed conceptual framework; both sides ultimately decided to treat the summit as a get-acquainted session that would be the first step in a new process. This, plus the fact that when the time came, Reagan and Gorbachev tossed aside the agenda and positions carefully structured by their professional aides, made the Geneva summit extraordinary in terms of the mechanics.”
From the epilogue by Dusko Doder
During the Cold War, when the question of an East-West summit meeting was raised, a standard answer from both sides was: “We are prepared to meet at the summit, provided preparations are made for such a meeting.”
In this book, Gordon R. Weihmiller reviews the preparatory phases of eleven postwar meetings between leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union from the 1955 Geneva Heads of Government meeting to the Vienna summit in 1979, analyzing the circumstances, lead-up, and outcome of each. Dusko Doder examines the background and results of the 1985 Reagan-Gorbachev summit, and David Newsom’s foreword notes the relationship of summit preparation to summit success.