Summit to Stay in Washington

WASHINGTON--It's expected to be a stay-at-home summit for President Reagan.

Dwight D. Eisenhower opened the gates of Camp David to Nikita S. Khrushchev in 1959. Lyndon B. Johnson rendezvoused with Aleksei Kosygin at a college in Glassboro, N.J., in 1967.

But when Reagan meets with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev on December 7, White House sources say the meetings are almost certain to be held at the White House itself.

For the thousands of reporters who will descend on Washington, however, there will be briefings at other locations around town.

Where the locations will be remains uncertain as U.S. and Soviet officials grapple with the logistical problems of a superpower summit.

The Washington Convention Center, the capital's biggest meeting facility, was checked but turned out to be booked for an automobile show.

"I'm not sure we are in a position to drive it away," said Robert Garrity, director of foreign press centers for the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), who is making arrangements for the foreign press.

At the only previous U.S.-Soviet summit held in Washington, when Richard M. Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev met in 1972, reporters were briefed at three different locations set up around town by the State Department.

"We are looking to a more coordinated approach," said Garrity, still hoping to find one room big enough into which to cram all the reporters.

Assistant White House Press Secretary Mark Weinberg said the White House has been having meetings and will be consulting with the Soviets on how to provide information for U.S. and foreign reporters in a way that is "fair and well organized."

Weinberg said locations away from the White House, where the regular briefing room seats only 48 reporters, will be used.

Garrity said the USIA was sending cables to its field offices overseas asking them to provide estimates of how many reporters were coming from their areas.

"It will certainly be up in the thousands," he said. There are 550 foreign correspondents regularly assigned in Washington, and most of those are expected to be augmented. Some foreign television networks are planning to anchor their news shows from Washington during the summit, Garrity said.

At the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit, in Geneva in 1985, authorities accredited more than 3000 reporters, more than three times the size of the largest previous press corps in a city that is no stranger to international meetings.

As soon as plans for the summit were announced last Friday, speculation began on where it would be held. Locations mentioned included Camp David, the presidential weekend retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, and Williamsburg, Va., the colonial capital in which world leaders held an economic summit in 1983.

Reagan, however, has never invited a foreign leader to spend the night at Camp David, preferring to reserve the mountain hideaway for private relaxation, although he has had British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to lunch there.

And presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater quickly discouraged such speculation, saying, "Anything's possible. The general secretary might say, gee, I'd like to go to Camp David or I'd like to go to Williamsburg, or something like that. But preliminarily at least, our planning is focusing on the city."