(FORTUNE Magazine) – Caught up in the turn-of-the-year fever of list making, your correspondent herewith submits his nominations for the ten most depressing events of 1985. (1) Lou Cannon's exclusive story in the Washington Post stating that just before Reagan and Gorbachev appeared together to read their final statements at the Geneva summit, Ron turned to Misha and said, ''I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands.'' No matter how many times we read that line, it kept implying that Reagan thinks the Russians are impressed by baby talk. The story next says that ''Gorbachev nodded in agreement'' to Reagan's remark. Unfortunately, the narrative stops there, so we never learn whether Misha subsequently went back and told the Politburo hard-liners he was no longer one of them, and if so whether they cried. (2) The comment by New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, in explaining why maybe somebody should indict Bernhard Goetz, who had pulled a gun and shot four predatory young men with criminal records after they came up to him on the subway and asked for money. Comment: ''There's no law that says you can't ask someone for five dollars.'' (3) The collapse of the U.S. defense buildup. After years of fretting because America's NATO allies weren't meeting their commitment to keep defense spending growing in real terms by at least 3% a year, and only one year after a campaign deriding Mondale as weak on defense (Fritz wanted to cut spending growth to around 3%), the Reaganites are now hoping that in 1986 Congress will give them 0% growth in real terms but expecting, assuming that they can count, to be in negative territory. (4) The provision in the 1986 federal budget, released early last year, for domestic transfer payments of $377.6 billion, which works out to an inflation- adjusted level roughly 30% above that attained during Jimmy Carter's last year in office. (5) The decision by the U.S. Attorney's office in Washington, D.C., to prosecute human-rights activists arrested during a demonstration outside the Soviet Embassy after conspicuously not having prosecuted their infinitely more numerous and persistent counterparts at the South African Embassy. (6) The upholding of the above double standard by Washington Superior Court Judge Warren R. King, who said the U.S. Attorney could be selective about such prosecutions because he had to take into account the safety of American diplomats abroad, meaning they mightn't be safe from the KGB if we overdid it for human rights. (7) David Rockefeller's staunch defense of the Marxist-Leninist-Cuban-Soviet alliance now running Angola, a major theme in his remarks last November being that the regime there had been effective in protecting the properties of American oil companies. (8) Reagan's refusal (as of late December) to reach for a pen and with a stroke thereof illegalize the quotas in employment he had priorly lambasted for a dozen years or so. (9) Mounting evidence that a lot of people out there like their business heroes strong on protectionism and Carter-like energy plans, as evidenced by the endless landslide for Iacocca: an Autobiography, never off the best-seller lists last year. (10) The cheerful confirmation by the White House press office when asked whether Lou Cannon had that story right.