An Encounter Sabotaged

Beginning yesterday, National Review is publishing three excerpts in three days from Solzhenitsyn’s just-released memoir, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978–1994, translated by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore. Today’s selection, written in 1982 but published here for the first time in English, relates the inside story of President Reagan’s invitation for Solzhenitsyn to visit the White House in May 1982, and the circumstances surrounding the scuttling of that meeting by then–White House advisor Richard Pipes. NR is also posting a companion piece, Solzhenitsyn’s letter to Ronald Reagan.

“We availed ourselves of the kind mediation of Edward Bennett Williams, who had access to the White House — and he managed both to hand my letter to the president and to explain how basely Pipes had tricked him. And on May 7, Williams phoned us: the president had “understood everything” and “not been offended.” Thank God for that.

For us in Cavendish, it was a great relief.

But not in the White House.

If they themselves had not leaked the news that Solzhenitsyn was to be received by the president, it would have been quietly swept under the carpet by now, and that would have been the end of it. But now — they’d have to explain my absence somehow, wouldn’t they? And within a very few days.

We received feverish phone calls, seeking our agreement. First of all the White House proposed as its wording for the press: “Solzhenitsyn’s schedule prevented his attendance.”

We rejected it.

Then, at the crack of dawn on the 10th — the day before the lunch — Williams passed on an insistent message from the president’s chief adviser and friend: think again! — do come!

No, impossible.

Around midday, a call with a new formulation: “He was unable to accept the invitation right now, but the president is expecting to meet Solzhenitsyn later.”

Agreed.

But I doubted that Pipes would allow that through to the press.

And indeed, that afternoon of the 10th, already aware of my refusal, they were still prevaricating in the State Department, that Solzhenitsyn would be attending the following day. But then they probably decided not to release any official explanation at all from the White House, just to allow a “leak.”

And, just as before, the “leak” went to Kaiser, and from him into the Washington Post, which offered this pathetic twist: Solzhenitsyn “was displeased that news of the invitation appeared in the press before he received it.” It was not enough — not strong enough. So they offered another little scrap: he felt it inappropriate to count him among the dissidents.

That was instead of any of the substance of my arguments.

That was forcing us to make public the essence of the matter, that is, my whole letter.”