PAST SUMMITS

	June 5, 2000
	Now some perspective on these events called summits. It comes from NewsHour regulars presidential historians Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin, journalist/author Haynes Johnson, plus tonight Joan Hoff, a professor of history at Ohio University. I spoke with them earlier this evening. Tell us when where and what was the first real summit.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think probably the first one - because Churchill is the one that defined the word "summit" - would come from the first meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill and Roosevelt in August of 1941 off the coast of Nova Scotia. Churchill, it is said, was so excited at the thought of first meeting Roosevelt that he literally bounced on the grass - the whole way getting onto the ship that would take him across the ocean took seven days to cross - the whole way over he kept peppering everybody, what's he going to be like, does he get angry, is he a good guy? And the interesting thing is that one thing - remember at this time America is already helping Britain even though we're not officially in the war - this meeting was so important to congeal that friendship - they became not simply allies but friends, so much so that even a couple of years later at the Casablanca Conference, when Roosevelt took off to come home, Churchill said, thank God, I hope nothing is going to happen to that plane. If anything happens to that man, he's my truest friend, he's the greatest man I've ever known. So that summit brought these two leaders together at a critical moment in the war and created a friendship without which the war would have never been the same, in my judgment. JIM LEHRER: And, Joan Hoff, it also created an institution called the summit, did it not? JOAN HOFF: It surely did, and from that point forward, you have not only the wartime summits coming out of the Second World War, but then the Paris Peace Summits that settled the peace coming out of that war, but they really come into their own in a modern sense during the Cold War Years, and that's because the earlier summits tended to be multi-polar, that is, very often between more than one or two head of state, and what you find during the Cold War - because of the division between the Soviet Union and the United States - they're bipolar, and that's because the world faced this serious disagreement between these two superpowers and consequently when the two leaders would meet from the United States and the Soviet Union, it gave people a sense of reassurance that even though there was the possibility of a terrible nuclear confutation between the two that they, in essence, that they were meeting and war was not going to happen. So it's that bipolar Cold War summit that we have in our minds, and now that the Cold War is over, we've lost that and we're back to a multi-polar and a situation in which the summits are probably less important because they don't serve any longer that important psychological function of reassuring people that war is not imminent. JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that, Michael, that the reassurance element - their reassurance factor is gone? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Yes, because you're not in a Cold War where people have this idea that leaders have to meet. In 1984, when Walter Mondale was running for President, he got some headway out of the argument that Ronald Reagan was the first President since Herbert Hoover who would not -- met with a leader of the Soviet Union; this somehow showed that Ronald Reagan was a very dangerous character to have in the presidency. He go some headway. Of course, he lost 49 states, so I think that did not prevail, but at the same time you could have a situation like 1961. John Kennedy - newly in office - wanted to take the measure of Nakita Khrushchev in Vienna - got in a room with him for two days and Kennedy had this idea that if you got into a room privately with someone like Khrushchev, you could make some deals, you could get them to listen to reason, you wouldn't have to say all those propaganda things that you had to say in public. Khrushchev's purpose was to basically scare the hell out of Kennedy and show him that he meant business. He threatened war, which is a word that you rarely hear, and the result was to a great extent Khrushchev thought that Kennedy was weak. He later on put missiles in Cuba. you saw the biggest defense build up in human history in the 1960's; a lot of that was traced to that one two-day meeting. JIM LEHRER: And a lot of people said afterward that that was the last of the unscripted summits because of that. Would you agree with that? HAYNES JOHNSON: Yeah, I do. I think, Jim - what you see now is all theater. I mean, everything is a great stage, particularly in the television where you have this armada of the cameras following you around all set up with the grand entrances and all that, and in fact it is entirely scripted, so you know what's going in there. They don't want to have any mistakes. It doesn't mean mistakes can't happen. JIM LEHRER: They don't have these spontaneous gives and takes that - HAYNES JOHNSON: No. JIM LEHRER: -- that Khrushchev - HAYNES JOHNSON: ..That Michael was talking about. That was so important, "missiles will fly." Kennedy came back white-faced from that conference with Khrushchev, and that was indeed the coldest and the most frightening part of the Cold War, because it led directly, as Michael said, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost... The bell almost went off. JIM LEHRER: And that's when they decided, Michael, that no more of this kind of stuff. "If we're going to reassure, we can't get in a room and shout at each other." MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That's right, there was not a summit between 1961 and 1967, when Johnson... President Johnson met with Alexi Pasegan in Glassboro, New Jersey. But you know, the unscripted summit of 1986, when Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev, that was probably the most important one of the Cold War. JIM LEHRER: That was up in Iceland. MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: That was in Iceland. It was done by surprise. Gorbachev surprised Reagan by surfacing this plan, this proposal to abolish all nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapon delivery systems, and Reagan seriously bargained over this. At the last minute, it fell apart because Gorbachev insisted that Reagan give up SDI, Strategic Defense. But that led to the next three years and the end of the Cold War. JIM LEHRER: That was... Yes? Who was that? Was that you, Joan? JOAN HOFF: Well, yes, because very little diplomacy usually goes on at these summits. Haynes is quite right; they're all scripted. But that's necessary if you're going to sign an important agreement or have anything significant come out of them, other than a photo op. And that's why the ones that Nixon participated in, in 1972, both in China and the Soviet Union, were so important. It took months of preparation for them to be able to sign the agreements that they did. And even with the Soviet one, which was ten different agreements, at the very last one, they signed the protocol. Officially, it had to be re- drafted and signed in private later because there was still negotiations going on. The complexity of disarmament conferences especially require a great deal of preparation, so the impromptu conference is the exception to the rule, if it's successful at all. You need the preparation. JIM LEHRER: Doris, Churchill used the word "summit;" what did he have in mind? Where did that come from? DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, I think what he had in mind was these two great leaders going to the top of a mountain, in a certain sense, and meeting there. I mean, one of the great things about Churchill and Roosevelt is, they both understood how important that they both were. There's one moment where Roosevelt writes to Churchill and says, "it's fun being in the same decade with you." So I think that's part of it. You know, one of the differences from the old days is that travel was so primitive in those older days that it took the President or Prime Minister a long time to go to these summits, and therefore there was worry that, what would happen at home with all the domestic problems? When Wilson went off to the peace conference after World War I, there were even resolutions* introduced in Congress saying he should vacate the office, let the Vice President run it, because he couldn't do it while he was away. Now, of course, we have jet travel, we have communications that are instant, but that's all the more important why then they could take the measure of each other. Think of this: Churchill and Roosevelt had never seen each other. It's not like they'd watched each other on television. They'd seen each other in action, as the counterparts do today. So they flew halfway around the world to do this. It's wonderful. Churchill came in an unheated bomber at one point, and he'd insisted on wearing his silken vest. That's all he ever wore to bed at night. So, in the middle of the night, his doctor found him crawling around looking for a blanket with his big, bare bottom sticking up. JIM LEHRER: Oh, boy. DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: But I think in those days, before they knew about each other in the same way that these leaders do now, it was even more important to take the measure of the other person. JIM LEHRER: And Haynes, here we are with a Putin/Clinton summit just completed. First of all, it didn't get the press attention. I mean, I remember every time there was a Gorbachev/Reagan summit, either Robin or I went wherever it was, either to Geneva or Moscow or wherever. We had commentators on around the clock, one of them being Madeleine Albright at one time, when she was a professor at Georgetown. In other words, these were really major events. But this one, still the President of the United States, the President of Russia, but very different. HAYNES JOHNSON: And the Cold War is over, and you also have this poignancy of a President of the United States playing out his last hours on the stage. Here is the last hurrah for Bill Clinton, trying to leave a stamp on history, desperately trying. He's gone off to India and Pakistan before. That didn't work very successfully. Now he's off to Russia, and then he's going to go next month to Japan, and he's doing this. But his time is ebbing very much, so his ability to really make differences seems to me is much minimized. JIM LEHRER: But the stakes are also smaller, are they not, Mike? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Sure they are. JIM LEHRER: As Doris was talking about, my goodness, they were talking about the original ones were trying to either avert or end World War II. All of the Cold War ones had the possibility of nuclear warfare riding on it. What's riding now? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: A lot less. This is sort of like a meeting between the leader of the United States and a leader of a country that perhaps is not an ally, but not very much of an enemy. But the other thing that historically goes behind what we're seeing with Bill Clinton and Putin is that Presidents like to have big summits in their last year to consolidate their legacies. Eisenhower in 1960 wanted to meet with Khrushchev in Paris, seal a deal that would confirm Eisenhower as a man of peace. Even Lyndon Johnson in 1968, after the election which Richard Nixon had been elected the next President, Johnson, as a lame duck with a new President in place, still wanted to go to Leningrad and have a meeting with the Soviet Premier. Nixon, in the end, had to tell him to knock it off. JIM LEHRER: Doris... I was just going to ask Doris, and then you, Joan. Is the day of the big summit, the kind that we've been talking about, are they over now? DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Well, probably to the extent that they've become more regularized, that we're used to seeing these people from other countries, that we've seen their countries before. It will never have the dramatic impact public relations-wise that it had, but I'm still not so sure that there might not be a time when two leaders getting together... Politicians know how to feel out one another, can they can do that best when they're in person. So I hope these things continue, whether or not we view them as great events. I think they're important to happen. JIM LEHRER: Joan? JOAN HOFF: Yeah, I think that in the post Cold War decade that we've just experienced, they've become, they've devolved into photo ops, largely, and also I think Presidents and heads of state are using them for their own domestic political position. I think that's true both of Putin right now and of Clinton at this last one, so that in the future, I can anticipate a major summit between an American President and a leader of China as China emerges as the major rival to the United States in this century. JIM LEHRER: So Haynes, you agree that maybe... It's still possible we may have a very important summit sometime in the future. HAYNES JOHNSON: Personal diplomacy is going to be important but it's not quite where it was. You have to have the great issue that drives two together. Then you can resolve something. We're not going to see it the way it was. Now we learn they had Cold War and maybe space war and that was the essence of it. JIM LEHRER: It is the essence of it. Michael, do you agree? MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I do. If you need a Cold War to have a big summit, I'm not delighted not to have big summits and I think you can probably wait a while before you have to go to Beijing for the next big American-Chinese summit. JIM LEHRER: Thank you all four very much. JIM LEHRER: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, the drought in the Midwest and the Supreme Court's decision. Elizabeth Brackett of WTTW-Chicago has the drought story. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Farmers' tractors are kicking up a lot of dust in the Midwest this year - the warmest and in many states, the driest, winter on record has produced drought conditions in the Midwest from Indiana through Nebraska. Recent rains have helped with the topsoil, but on this farm near Renssalear, Indiana, Kendall Culp says it's not the topsoil he's worried about. KENDALL CULP: Well, there's been no recharge of our subsoil during the last year. Last summer, we were five or six inches short on rainfall, and we've had the driest spring that we've had in recent history, so yes, we do have plenty of moisture on the surface, but in the subsoil, which is what needs to grow and sustain a crop during the summer to get through don't have that right now. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: A warm spring allowed Culp to get his corn in early, but now he worries about the impact of the dry subsoil on his yield, as he keeps his eye on the rest of the country. KENDALL CULP: If this is more of a localized drought, and we have poor yields but other parts of the country are able to produce enough corn to make up for our shortfall, then the price is not going to be high. So we're going to lose on both ends that way. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The outlook across the U.S. shows drought conditions in four major areas. The national drought policy commission says crop losses, water shortages, and wildfires can be expected in those regions. Wildfires have ravaged the southwestern drought area, causing millions of dollars in damage. In the Midwest, concern over crop losses pushed corn and soybean futures to 17-month highs in May on the Chicago Board of Trade, though late May rains brought prices down somewhat. County Indiana Extension agent Mike Manning says farmers are just beginning to recover from some of the worst farm prices in history. Last year, prices for the four top commodities-- corn, soybeans, cattle, and pork-- were lower than the cost of production. Now, he says, drought could cut into this year's yields. MIKE MANNING: Right now, if a person from the city came out and they would look around, they would feel pretty confident that we are not short on moisture. But nonetheless, the subsoil is fairly dry. And we feel like that if... if in fact we did have rainfall that stopped or was short, that we could find ourselves sitting on a ticking time bomb that might be waiting to go off. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The land is not all that is affected by the drought. Despite May storms, the lack of rain over the last several years has had a huge impact on the Midwest's best-known natural resource, the Great Lakes. Lake Michigan has had the largest two-year drop in water levels ever recorded. The low water has made beach- goers happy. Lake Michigan beaches are the widest they have been in years. But for those on the water, the low levels have meant trouble. The shipping industry has been hit the hardest. LARS BOUMAN: Well, actually right in here, there's shallow water. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Captain Lars Bouman has to figure out the best way to navigate his cargo ship down the Calumet River in South Chicago, into Lake Michigan. The president of the shipping company that handles Marine logistics knows it won't be easy. PARKER MELLINGHAUSEN: We are finding things on the bottom of the rivers that nobody knew existed before, and we usually find them in an accident that'll punch a hole in the side of a ship, or... In this river here, so far we haven't had any serious accidents, but we're having situations with loaded ships in transiting are shearing off because of hitting sand banks. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Below-normal levels of rain and snow are the biggest cause of the low lake levels. High temperatures have caused faster evaporation of the water that is there. LARS BOUMAN: It's the lowest that I can recall in my lifetime, and certainly the lowest in my position here as captain or as a navigating officer with Canadian shipping lines. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Captain Bouman was in port loading up his ship with petroleum coke for a six-day trip through the Great Lakes to Montreal. Once out of Lake Michigan, he has to worry about water on the St. Clair River, where Lake Huron connects to Lake Erie. The next hurdle will be the Welland Canal connecting Lake Erie to Lake Ontario. To get through, he will have to cut down on his load. LARS BOUMAN: Through the Welland Canal we would take 32,500 tons. Today we will probably be taking out around 29,000 tons. So consequently we are looking at 3,000 tons, ballpark figure, that we're not carrying. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: In a normal year, Great Lakes Ships transport 125 million tons of cargo through the largest freshwater system in the world. This year the Lake Carriers Association estimates that will leave ten million tons of cargo on the dock because of low lake levels. That adds up to a projected $30 million loss. PARKER MELLINGHAUSEN: It's not the first cargo, the first ton that you load that pays the... That makes the profit. It's the last tons. And with the lower water, you get, you know... Pretty quickly you get closer to break even. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: The impact reaches around the globe. LARS BOUMAN: You are shipping some product from Japan or from Europe, and you say, "well, I want to make a delivery to Chicago," and they say, "well, the water's down, you know?" And they say, "oh, you mean I can't fill my ship up here in the LaHavre, France, or Genoa, Italy, or whatever?" "No, you're going to have to come less." And some of them will probably think twice whether or not they're going to making the trip. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: It's not just the commercial shippers that are losing money, recreational boat owners across the great lakes and the facilities that serve them are being hurt as well. The low water means marinas around the country are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. On a normal year, all these slips would be filled with boats. But right now, the water behind me is only about four inches deep. Empty slips, docks hanging above the water-- it all means over $100,000 in lost revenues for this Michigan City, Indiana, Marina, where the water is 14 inches lower than it was last year. As in most places around the Great Lakes, pleasure boats are stored off the water for the winter. The trick this year has been getting the boats upriver to the harbor. Assistant harbormaster Scott Westphal was carefully guiding this sailboat that needs five feet of water up a river that has been as low as four feet. SCOTT WESTPHAL: Almost every sailboat that comes up, we can add about an hour to the process of getting them upstream. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Across the lake in Chicago, tourist boats that line up along Navy pier have had to find creative ways to get passengers to boats now much lower in the water. STACE WISELOGAL: We've been able to modify. We used to load on the lower deck; now we're loading on the upper deck. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: City engineers are puzzling over what to do about exposed wooden timbers that rot quickly, once out of the water. Repairs could add millions to shoreline renovation already under way. There are ways to bring some immediate relief to those affected, but most are time- consuming and expensive. PARKER MELLINGHAUSEN: Our personal hope is that we're going to be able to get enough funds for the Corps of Engineers to do some dredging. This river would still be safe and economical to operate if we had the dredging, but the corps hasn't had the money for the last two years, and it looks like they won't have any done this year effectively. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Longer-range solutions are being considered by the international joint commission, the group charged with resolving boundary waters disputes between the U.S. and Canada. The commission is considering a proposal to let water out of Lake Superior to boost water levels in the lower lakes. But it is a tricky proposition, says Army Corps of Engineer Commander Colonel Jim Hougnon. COL. JIM HOUGNON: About half of the water of the great lakes is in Lake Superior, and much of it is in storage there. If you let more water out than should be let out, then you've mined that water. You take it out of storage, and you can never get it back. If you do that prematurely, and then you continue to have dry conditions, you may need that water downstream more later than sooner, and so we have to be cautious in our approach. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Cameron Davis heads the oldest environmental group on the lake, the Lake Michigan Federation. He worries about a loss of water to all the Great Lakes if a diversion from Lake Superior is made. But he says lessons have been Learned from the low water. COL. JIM HOUGNON: I think the fact that lake levels are so low right now, just because of natural causes, that it visualize and understand that the great lakes are a limited resource. They are not renewable. The water that we have in the great lakes, by and large, we just can't get back again. So we need to conserve what we have. I think what that means is we need better efficiency standards for the Great Lakes and our use of them. ELIZABETH BRACKETT: Davis is hoping the joint commission will consider conservation and efficiency standards this year. The federation and other conservation groups are also working on federal legislation that would develop water conservation principles for the great lakes. Short term, it's up to Mother Nature, though weather watchers say it will take at least two to three years of normal to heavy rains to bring water levels in the great lakes back to normal.