Reagan’s Script at the Summit

George Will writes in his column (Editorial Pages, Nov. 4), “Human Rights Script Tailored for Reagan,” that President Reagan, “like most people, only more so, has a cinematic mind. He clarifies his thinking and animates his passions with reference to particular cases, identifiable individuals whose situations can be framed, focused and frozen in clearly imagined scenes. This is not a weakness, least of all one peculiar to actors. It is a common and useful habit of mind that can yield moral strength.”

Will wants Reagan at the summit meeting to “raise with Gorbachev the case of Sergei Khodorovich.” Khodorovich, once the manager of the Russian Social Fund, founded by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is now a victim of reported imprisonment and torture. Will would like this to be uppermost in Reagan’s mind, obviously in his “cinematic mind.”

It had been my impression that the summit meeting was to promote peace in our world. It must rank first as a worthy cause, especially now. But how much could Reagan or Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev do toward removing or at least minimizing the nuclear threat over mankind if Reagan brings with him a mind “frozen in clearly imagined scenes” starring one Sergei Khodorovich?

I deplore cruelties wreaked upon those who have deprived of their human rights in Russia. I deplore the suffering due to man’s inhumanity to man wherever it occurs.

But I hope fervently that Reagan does not “see, cinematically, in his mind’s eye the methodical breaking of Khodorovich’s ribs,” as Will suggests in the last line of his article, but sees instead scenes of all life vaporizing in the nuclear furnace that had once been our green world.

PAUL DUCHON

Laguna Hills