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great success because Britain and the United States had stood together. This demonstration of NATO’s unity would be helpful to him when he went to Moscow to meet Mr Gorbachev in May. I regretted that it had not proved possible to get the Germans to accept explicitly that negotiations to reduce shorter-range nuclear weapons in Europe should only take place after parity on conventional weapons and a ban on chemical weapons had been achieved. But I said that it was quite clear to me that these were in fact the only circumstances in which NATO should negotiate on short-range systems. President Reagan said that he entirely agreed and that NATO could not go any further down this road until these conditions had been met. We were equally in accord on the approach to a START Agreement. I said that though I supported START as a goal it was more important to get the right agreement than to have it quickly. The President said that he too was being cautious in his public comments. He did not want people to say that the Moscow summit was a failure if no START Agreement could be signed. He also recognized that the START negotiations would be far more complex than those on INF, particularly as regards verification. I left Brussels reassured that the President and I were at one as we faced up to all the difficult and complicated arms control negotiations which would now ensue.

PRESIDENT REAGAN’S VISIT TO LONDON, JUNE 1988

President Reagan was as good as his word when he went to Moscow. Although the INF Treaty was signed there was tough negotiation and no compromise on START, where the Soviets wanted the United States to have Sea-Launched Cruise Missiles (SLCMs) included in the agreement. But, as with my own visit in 1987, it was the opportunity for President Reagan and the Russian people to meet one another face to face which was probably of greatest importance. He told me when he came to London on Thursday 2 June, on his way back from Moscow, how moved he had been by the huge, welcoming crowds there. The only thing which had upset him was the brutal way in which the KGB had dealt with the people who wanted to approach him. I told him that now the Russians had seen for themselves the sort of person he was it would be that much more difficult for the Soviet authorities to convince them that the United States was a dangerous enemy. He had given high prominence to human rights matters — particularly to freedom of worship — when he was in the Soviet Union and I said how right I thought he had been to do this. The President also told me about the difficult arms control talks. He said he had been determined not to give an inch on SDI and he was not going to be rushed on START. In the meantime, NATO must move ahead with modernization of its short-range nuclear forces and the West Germans must be persuaded to approach this in a positive way. He would continue to insist that a balance had to be achieved in conventional forces in Europe before there could be negotiations to remove short-range nuclear weapons.

The President spoke to a large City and diplomatic audience at Guildhall the next day. It was a vintage performance and one of some significance in the light of later events. He harked back to the speech he had made to Members of Parliament in 1982 in which he had enunciated what came to be called the ‘Reagan Doctrine’.* Neither he nor I knew how close we were to its triumphant vindication; but what was clear was that great advances had been made in the ‘crusade for freedom’ we had been fighting. It was now time to restate the cause, which was as much spiritual as political or economic. As the President put it:

Our faith is in a higher law … we hold that humanity was meant, not to be dishonoured by the all-powerful state, but to live in the image and likeness of Him who made us.

VISIT TO POLAND, NOVEMBER 1988

Just five months later — in November 1988 — I visited Poland. If anyone had wanted a demonstration of the value of President Reagan’s vision he would have found it in that country, where Catholic faith, national consciousness and