Fact vs. Fiction - Chapter Three

It takes two to tango...

While Ronald Reagan has been portrayed as having won the Cold War almost singlehandedly, it wasn't until Mr. Gorbachev showed up on the scene that he was able to achieve his objectives.

In Gorbachev's words: "But he had the foresight and the wisdom and the commitment to step over all of that, and start changing relations with the Soviet Union. We had the same wish, and we were able to do that."

As Mr. Reagan's obituaries uniformly proclaim, the late president won the cold war, but historians agree that the outcome would have been impossible had any man other than Mr. Gorbachev been sitting behind the Kremlin's red-brick walls and across the negotiating table."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/politics/11gorby.html

New York Times - June 11, 2004

Gorbachev Honors His Enemy and Friend by Thom Shanker

WASHINGTON, June 10 - His solemn duties for the day came first, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev bowed his head before the coffin of Ronald Reagan in the Capitol Rotunda on Thursday and stopped at Blair House to pay a condolence call on Nancy Reagan.

Only then did he pause and let the memories come flooding back.

It was December 1987, during his first superpower summit meeting in Washington, a time when the East-West divide seemed as permanent as the Berlin Wall.

But the Soviet leader broke all stereotypes when he ordered his limousine to stop on Connecticut Avenue, and with Vice President George H. W. Bush hanging back uncertainly and President Reagan waiting at the White House, he plunged like a hometown politician into the lunch-hour crowd.

"Ah! I do remember it," Mr. Gorbachev said with a laugh during an interview late on Thursday at the Russian Embassy, just blocks from the National Cathedral, where he will join mourners on Friday for Mr. Reagan's funeral.

Leaning in conspiratorially and tapping the arm of his questioner, he added, "The amazing thing is that some people were saying that this all had been planned by Gorbachev, that he came with this plan, that he knew where to stop the car."

It was an improvised excursion, Mr. Gorbachev maintained, and his goal simply was to greet regular Washingtonians. He said he did not know that the intersection of Connecticut and L Street was like Ground Zero for power restaurants, marketing firms and news bureaus.

"I had my own driver there, and I said to him, 'Let's stop here,' " Mr. Gorbachev recalled. His decision to press the flesh stunned Secret Service and K.G.B. bodyguards in equal measure, and left an indelible impression on a cynical city that can be recalled to this day with the clarity of the first moon shot.

"I think it was a wonderful encounter," Mr. Gorbachev said. "This was a time when the people of both of our countries were just tired of the strain of living under the spell of an arms race and of the cold war for so many years, and people really welcomed this reciprocal movement to create a healthier relationship between our two countries."

For Mr. Reagan's funeral, Mr. Gorbachev, 73, has returned to Washington, a capital he captured, as no Soviet Army ever could, during that crucial 1987 summit meeting with Mr. Reagan in a relationship that warmed from lecturing and hectoring to calling each other by their first names.

"He was a hawkish person," Mr. Gorbachev recalled of Mr. Reagan. "What is more, he said that he regarded the Soviet Union as an evil empire.

"But he had the foresight and the wisdom and the commitment to step over all of that, and start changing relations with the Soviet Union. We had the same wish, and we were able to do that."

As Mr. Reagan's obituaries uniformly proclaim, the late president won the cold war, but historians agree that the outcome would have been impossible had any man other than Mr. Gorbachev been sitting behind the Kremlin's red-brick walls and across the negotiating table.

The foreign policies of this pair of leaders are so intertwined that their legacies are forever joined at the hip, or at least at the wrist, as evidenced by the lone photograph covering the back of Mr. Gorbachev's autobiography, which shows the two men shaking hands.

Amid the adulation surrounding Mr. Reagan's death, Mr. Gorbachev seemed to carry with no great strain his own mixed legacy of post-democratic turmoil at home, where the Russian people continue to debate whether, for them, the glasnost was half empty or half full.

"He, himself, could not have changed the situation alone," Mr. Gorbachev said. "The new Soviet leadership could not have changed the situation alone."

As politicians and political analysts spent recent days applauding or criticizing the "Reagan Revolution" and its legacy to America, depending on their ideological persuasion, none in the West chose to diminish the tectonic political shift forced upon a brittle Soviet body politic by Mr. Gorbachev. His program of change, called perestroika, was bold and brilliant and fetchingly naïve all at the same time.

And it ended a Communist empire that spanned a dozen time zones from Central Europe, across Asia and to the Pacific Ocean, and with barely any loss of life.

Of course, that process was completed in partnership with the first President Bush, whom Mr. Gorbachev will join this weekend in Houston for the former American president's 80th birthday.

Compared with that of the man who plunged out of a limousine and onto television screens around the world, Mr. Gorbachev's hair is grayer, his gait a bit slower, his baritone - with that signature hint of a southern accent from his native Stavropol - growing softer.

And, like Mrs. Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev lost someone who was as much partner as spouse when his wife, Raisa, died of leukemia in 1999.

"A lot of good things and bad things have been said about Raisa and Nancy Reagan, but I can say that both these women bore their 'first ladyships,' so to say, with a lot of dignity," he said after his meeting on Thursday with Mrs. Reagan at Blair House.

"President Reagan was thinking in his second term how to go down in history as a peacemaker," Mr. Gorbachev added. "One of those who encouraged him in that direction was Nancy Reagan.

"And I will say more: She may have been the greatest influence in that regard because he truly believed her."<<