During his first four years in office, President Ronald Reagan had difficulty forging any kind of relationship with his counterparts in the Soviet Union. “They kept dying with me,” he later explained. It fell into the hands of his vice president, George HW Bush, to attend the funeral. “You die, I fly” became Bush’s witty slogan.
So when the latest in a string of Soviet leaders died in 1985, Reagan once again sent Bush to represent him at the mission – and took the temperature of his young new successor, Mikhail Gorbachev . Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s hard-line prime minister, declared Mr Gorbachev “someone with whom we can do business”. But Reagan and Bush weren’t so sure.
After meeting Mr. Gorbachev at the funeral in Moscow, Bush sent a telegram back to Reagan with his impressions. In his view, Mr. Gorbachev is just a polished version of the same old Communist machine, a party machine with a “disarmed smile, warm eyes and a charismatic way of making points. unpleasant”, but as a person needs to be vigilant. Mr. Gorbachev was charming and presented himself as a reformer, but neither Reagan nor Bush believed he was real.
Regarding that, both will be proven wrong. First Reagan and then Bush saw Mr. Gorbachev as a genuine agent of change and a trusted interlocutor who could ultimately help end the four-decade-long, nuclear-armed Cold War. . No American president has ever had a closer working relationship with a leader in Moscow than Reagan and Bush could have with Mr. Gorbachev, even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorable alliance with Joseph Stalin in The War II.
In this era when President Vladimir V. Putin has once again pitted Russia against the United States and the two sides are waging a proxy war in Ukraine, solidarity has developed between Reagan and Reagan on the one hand. Bush and Mr. Gorbachev on the other. is all the more remarkable to remember. It is a testament to what has been lost in the two decades since Mr. Putin came to power and effectively destroyed Mr. Gorbachev’s legacy.
However, it took a while to get there. Still doubting the “evil empire”, as he called the Soviet Union, Reagan famously went to Berlin in 1987 and challenge Mr. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” But a series of meetings in Switzerland, Iceland, Washington and Moscow led to a real friendship, and the two negotiated a landmark arms control treaty and was at one point close to reaching an agreement to completely eliminate nuclear weapons.
During his final year in office, Reagan praised Mr. Gorbachev for the thaw in Soviet-American relations. “Mr. He told reporters at a press conference in Moscow, Gorbachev “deserves most of the credit, as the leader of this country.”
When he ran for president in 1988, Bush initially thought Reagan had gone too far and trusted too much. After taking office, Bush delayed the relationship for months, in what has been called a “pause,” much to Gorbachev’s displeasure.
But Bush also came to befriend the Soviet leader and, with the help of secretary of state James A. Baker III, navigate the fall of the Soviet empire and end the Cold War as a partner. Mr. Gorbachev’s rather than an enemy. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Bush and Mr. Gorbachev negotiated the reunification of Germany and their own arms control treaty. Under the “new world order” Bush envisioned, he and Mr. Gorbachev worked together to fight Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and seek a Middle East peace deal.
“History will remember Mikhail Gorbachev as a behemoth who guided his great nation in the direction of democracy,” Baker said in a statement Tuesday. Despite Bush’s initial doubts about Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Baker said, “I see him as an honest broker and can be trusted with his word despite domestic pressure in Moscow.”
No US president could say that about Mr. Gorbachev’s predecessors and mean it. And it will never be possible to say that about the man who now holds Mr. Gorbachev’s office in the Kremlin.
