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At Summit Meetings, Kremlin Often Tried to Steamroller U.S. Presidents

President John F. Kennedy, Austrian President Dr. Adolf Scharf and Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev in Vienna on June 3, 1961.Credit...Daily Herald, via Getty Images

Whether in Helsinki or elsewhere, a summit meeting held by any American president with a Kremlin counterpart has proved to be a momentous occasion, particularly during the Cold War when such talks held the promise of staving off Armageddon.

Not that they always went well.

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President John F. Kennedy greeting Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union at the United States Embassy in Vienna in 1961.Credit...Ron Case/Keystone Press, via Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

In June 1961, newly elected President John F. Kennedy brushed off the need for a preset agenda during two days of meetings in Vienna with Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Soviet premier. Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, said he had worried that the president was ill-prepared for the steamrollering he received from Mr. Khrushchev on issues ranging from control over a divided Berlin to nuclear arms.

“Worst thing in my life,” Mr. Kennedy later told a New York Times columnist, despite the smiles all around at their gala dinner. “He savaged me.”

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President John F. Kennedy traveled to Vienna for talks with Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, meeting outside the United States Embassy on June 3, 1961.Credit...Daily Herald/Mirrorpix, via Getty Images

Barely two months later, the Soviets constructed the Berlin Wall.

Relations warmed in the 1970s, leading to a series of agreements that slackened the nuclear arms race.

The negotiating technique of Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev resembled that of Mr. Khrushchev — he would berate the Americans for not working as allies in the Middle East, say, or accuse them of sabotaging world peace. “It would be his way of testing my resolve,” President Gerald R. Ford wrote in his memoirs. “He would be curious to see if I would bend or fight back.”

As Mr. Ford was departing after their first meeting in the city of Vladivostok in November 1974, he noticed Mr. Brezhnev eyeing his Alaskan wolf coat and in a spontaneous gesture, handed it to the Soviet leader.

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President Gerald R. Ford shaking hands with Soviet Communist Party chief and the state leader Leonid I. Brezhnev after he tried on Mr. Ford’s fur coat when the two met in Vladivostok on Nov. 24, 1974.Credit...Associated Press

That set the stage for the first Soviet-American summit ever held in Helsinki, in 1975. The two made progress toward limiting their nuclear weapon stockpiles, but Mr. Ford left disappointed that the lack of an overall agreement had denied him a foreign-policy success.

Instead he was criticized at home for having joined the 35 leaders, most Europeans, who signed the Helsinki Accords. Even if the human rights clauses later helped to undermine the Soviet Union, at the time the overall agreement was seen as a concession to Moscow, which wanted its expanded, post-World War II borders declared inviolable.

The domestic outcry, especially among Republicans, inhibited Mr. Ford from inviting his Soviet counterpart to visit the United States.

By having seized Crimea in March 2014, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who is meeting President Trump in Helsinki on Monday, breached the very accords Moscow pushed for in 1975 to cement Europe’s borders.

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President Gerald R. Ford, Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko, in front of the Soviet embassy in Helsinki at a 1975 conference in Helsinki.Credit...Vesa Klemetti/Lehtikuva, via Associated Press

In an extraordinary historical revelation made last year on the pages of The Atlantic by a former White House arms control adviser, Jan M. Lodal, Mr. Brezhnev used a brief, one-on-one encounter with Mr. Ford to offer to help him win the next presidential election.

The Russian transcript of the conversation, recovered from Mr. Brezhnev’s ashtray, indicated that Mr. Ford demurred.

One of the most successful summit meetings occurred in Washington in December 1987, when President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed an accord banning intermediate-range nuclear missiles, a landmark treaty that both sides now accuse the other of violating.

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General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and President Ronald Reagan sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty at the White House on December 8, 1987.Credit...Getty Images

In their personal conversations, the two men agreed to call each other “Ron” and “Mikhail.”

President George H.W. Bush and Mr. Gorbachev established a good rapport before their September 1990 summit meeting in Helsinki. Photos from their previous meeting in Camp David that June showed the Soviet leader chauffeuring his grinning American counterpart around in a careening golf cart.

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Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush riding in President Bush’s golf cart on June 2, 1990. The two leaders were on their way back to their helicopter for the return flight to Washington after a day at the presidential retreat in Camp David.Credit...Jerome Delay/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Their Helsinki meeting came weeks after Saddam Hussein, the Iraq leader who was a friend if not an ally of Moscow, had occupied and plundered neighboring Kuwait.

Mr. Bush, fashioning an international coalition to expel the Iraqis, needed assurances that the Soviets would not bolster Baghdad. The meeting produced an agreement that called on Iraq to respect United Nations resolutions to withdraw.

The fanfare surrounding summit meetings began to fade after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union — the fate of the world no longer seemed to hang on face-to-face encounters between the superpower leaders.

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President Bill Clinton and President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia spoke to reporters at news conference in Helsinki on March 21, 1997.Credit...Jerome Delay/Associated Press

In March 1997 in Helsinki, President Bill Clinton met President Boris N. Yeltsin, who had suffered a heart attack during his re-election campaign.

Mr. Yeltsin chose to minimize Russia’s anger and humiliation over NATO’s eastward expansion, instead accepting promises of a closer strategic partnership and agreeing to guidelines for a further reduction in nuclear arms.

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President Bill Clinton and President Boris N. Yeltsin at their news conference in March 1997.Credit...Dirck Halstead/Getty Images

Mr. Clinton, hoping to bolster Mr. Yeltsin as a democratic leader, pledged to welcome Russia into international institutions like the World Trade Organization and the club of main industrialized countries, the Group of 7, despite its anemic economy. (Russia was expelled from the club over the Crimea annexation, although Mr. Trump has said Russia’s membership should be restored.)

Relations decayed steadily after Mr. Putin became president in 2000. Every American president since has tried a “reset.” President George W. Bush infamously declared in 2001 that he found Mr. Putin “trustworthy” because after looking the Russian leader in the eye, the American “was able to get a sense of his soul.”

In March 2009, President Barack Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov in Geneva with a symbolic red button labeled with a Russian word that the Americans thought mean “reset,” but turned out to mean “overloaded” or “overcharged.”

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia during a meeting on March 9, 2009 in Geneva, where she gave him a red button meant to “reset” U.S.-Russia relations.

Credit...Fabrice Coffrini/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

An oracle could not have stated it better.

For the summit meeting to be held in Helsinki, Mr. Trump seeks yet another reset.

Despite Russia’s election meddling in the United States and Mr. Putin’s open attempts to curb American influence elsewhere, Mr. Trump’s praise of him and animus directed at traditional American allies have raised the question of whether this summit meeting will help push a Putin-Trump version of the world order.

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President George H.W. Bush holds a framed cartoon presented to him by his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in Helsinki on Sept. 9, 1990. The cartoon shows a boxing referee holding up the hands of both leaders after their knockout of the Cold War.Credit...Doug Mills/Associated Press

In Helsinki in 1990, Mr. Gorbachev presented Mr. Bush with a framed cartoon showing both men dressed as boxers and the globe serving as referee. A melting figure labeled “Cold War” lies at their feet as the referee holds both their hands aloft. “Knockout” was the Russian caption for the work.

With the Cold War showing signs of revival, one question going into this summit meeting is whether some other version of “Knockout” might emerge.

Follow Neil MacFarquhar on Twitter: @NeilMacFarquhar

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Momentous Meetings, Not Always Agreeable. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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