Book Review

FEARFUL SUMMITRY

Freedman, Lawrence D, Lawrence D. Freedman is a professor of war studies at King's College, London, and the author of "The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy."

1989

Overview

There is a wealth of material about the three summits that will be of great value to historians of these events. Mr. [Kenneth L. Adelman] illustrates the extent to which these occasions are completely overstaffed. He gives a delightful description of the ''talking points'' the State Department suggested to Nancy Reagan for her meetings with Mikhail S. Gorbachev (''The great expanse of California - the symbol of the golden American dream - is my home. Russians had the great free spaces of Siberia. Our people think and dream on a grand scale''). He does not mention the circumstances in which he took his job. In early 1983 his predecessor, Eugene Rostow, was fired after leaking details of the 1982 ''walk in the woods,'' when [Paul Nitze] almost cobbled together an agreement with his Soviet opposite number on intermediate nuclear forces. Mr. Adelman, a young neoconservative who was Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick's deputy at the United Nations, was nominated by President Reagan as Mr. Rostow's surprise replacement. He was confirmed by the Senate on a 57-42 vote after the Foreign Relations Committee recommended against his appointment. That vote was largely an effort to punish the Administration for its lack of enthusiasm for arms control. Certainly Mr. Adelman was anything but an enthusiast. His description of himself in ''The Great Universal Embrace'' as a ''skeptic'' is mild.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: ADELMAN, KENNETH L / FREEDMAN, LAWRENCE D