was Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War and brought it to an end. That is why the system’s collapse is a clear and definite victory for the West—for President Ronald Reagan, in particular, who raised the cost of potential victory for Moscow so high that it collapsed from the strain.”31
Of course, this was Reagan’s intention. Trofimenko said that SDI “was the most effective single act to bring [Gorbachev] to his senses—to the understanding that he could not win….[H]e had to cry ‘uncle’ and to vie for a peaceful interlude.” It is interesting that Trofimenko used the phrase “cry uncle”—exactly the words Reagan had once written in his diary.32 Trofimenko maintains that “ninety-nine percent of all Russians believe that Reagan won the Cold War because of [his] insistence on SDI.”33
Outside the USSR, there is widespread agreement on SDI’s impact, including from liberals like Strobe Talbott and the toughest Reagan biographers.34 Edmund Morris insists: “And as we all know, the Strategic Defense Initiative was what brought about the final capitulation of the Soviet Union.”35 Agrees Lou Cannon: “SDI turned out to be very useful in getting the Soviets to the bargaining table. Reagan was right.”36 Even Secretary of State George Shultz, who once deemed SDI a form of insanity, later called it “the propellant that would lead the Soviets to agree to deep reductions” in missiles. SDI “in fact proved to be the ultimate bargaining chip,” Shultz writes in his memoirs. “And we played it for all it was worth.”37
Shultz’s words would have thrilled SDI progenitor Edward Teller. When I interviewed Teller as he laid on his deathbed, he kept bringing up the summit meeting in Reykjavik. He understood that SDI prompted Gorbachev’s dramatic offers at Reykjavik, and that Reykjavik was crucial to ending the Cold War. He returned to the point again and again. “I believed then and I believe now that Reagan made a great contribution to stopping Communism in Russia,” said Teller. The Soviets “could not match” the U.S. missile-defense effort; the pursuit of SDI contributed to the Soviet demise. “Without Reagan,” contended Teller in July 2003, “there would be Communism now.”38 This was a sentiment that Margaret Thatcher reiterated when she maintained that SDI turned out to be the single most important decision of Reagan’s presidency.39
Alas, despite the passions of liberals like Ted Kennedy, decisions like the pursuit of SDI and the deployment of INFs made the world a vastly better place—by ultimately cutting, not increasing, nuclear weapons and the risk of war. Eminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis commends the impact of both SDI and the INFs on Soviet behavior and in eventually defusing the Cold War.40 Even liberal Cold War scholar Raymond Garthoff grudgingly concedes that the Reagan military buildup and pursuit of SDI posed a military challenge that the Soviet Union was economically and technologically hard pressed to meet. He concedes that Gorbachev understood that the Soviet Union could not afford to match or overmatch the United States.41
MUTUAL PRAISE: REAGAN AND GORBACHEV
By the start of 1992, even the most recalcitrant Cold Warrior could no longer deny the obvious: the Cold War was over, as one of the two nations in the long battle no longer existed. Now, a second struggle commenced as historians and journalists sought to credit either Reagan or Gorbachev with the Cold War’s demise.
While those partial to Reagan often fault Gorbachev’s role, it is important to recall that Reagan himself repeatedly said that Gorbachev was a “different kind of leader.” He came to view Gorbachev in an endearing way; indeed, as a “friend.”42 He said from the start that Gorbachev “has faith in” and “believes in” Communism and was “totally dedicated to their system.”43 Yet, he learned that Gorbachev was committed to reform and a better world. He nonetheless always insisted on a “trust but verify” relationship— translated into a Russian phrase he repeated so often to Gorbachev that it annoyed the general secretary: dovorey no provorey. Reagan captured Gorbachev quite well when he later summed up in his memoirs: “Whatever his reasons, Gorbachev had the intelligence to admit Communism was not working, the courage to battle for change, and, ultimately, the wisdom to introduce the beginnings of democracy, individual freedom, and free enterprise.”44
Like Gorbachev, Reagan too had his detractors who were willing to gloss over the extent of Reagan’s involvement and lavish Gorbachev with praise for his role. This position is one that Gorbachev himself disagrees with. In a letter to Reagan following the May–June 1988 Moscow summit, Gorbachev gave the president major credit for Soviet developments. “The Soviet people,” he wrote in the letter, recently declassified, “have met you up close and have come to appreciate your goodwill, and your role in everything (emphasis added) that has been accomplished by our two countries.”45 Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs: “In my view, the fortieth President of the United States will go down in history for his rare perception.”46
In an interview, he added: “He [Reagan] is really a very big person—a very great political leader.”47 When Reagan and Gorbachev met together for a seventh time, on September 17, 1990 in Moscow, when Reagan was no longer president, Gorbachev toasted Reagan “as a man who did a lot to make relations with our country the way they are now.”48 Over a decade later, at a dinner in Cambridge, England in 2001, a British academic called Reagan “rather an intellectual lightweight.” Gorbachev would not tolerate the slight, and reprimanded his host: “You are wrong. President Reagan was a man of real insight, sound political judgment, and courage.”49
In 2002, Gorbachev called Reagan “a major individual,” and added: “If at that time someone else had been in his place, I don’t know whether what happened would’ve happened.”50
IN THE END, THE TRUE CREDIT IS DUE TO BOTH SIDES, AS EACH of the two leaders played vital and essential roles in the end of the Cold War. The dissolution of the Soviet Communist empire was something that they accomplished together, but the chief difference lay in the fact that of the two of them, only Reagan had intended that outcome from the start. Intentions are critical to bestowing credit and even greatness upon a leader. On the issue of Cold War intent, Reagan stands on much firmer ground than Gorbachev—which is not to deny Gorbachev’s magnificent reforms. In regard to the Soviet empire, Reagan achieved his central intent, impossible as it seemed; Gorbachev failed in his primary intent. This failure haunts Gorbachev to this day, having told USA Today in April 2006 that, “The Soviet Union could have been preserved and should have been preserved.” Reagan wanted to undo the Soviet empire and the USSR itself; Gorbachev’s central objective was to hold the USSR together. It was Reagan who accomplished what he aimed to do.
And yet, despite initial intentions, Mikhail Gorbachev’s epitaph, like Ronald Reagan’s, will rightfully read: he peacefully helped end the Cold War. For that, we should be forever grateful to both men.
22. Drifting Back
“THIS IS WHERE I WAS A LIFEGUARD FOR SEVEN SUMMERS.” So said Ronald Reagan to his biographer on December 9, 1994, pointing to the painting of the Rock River hanging in his Los Angeles office. His longtime biographer sensed that his subject no longer recognized him. A month earlier Reagan had informed the world that he had Alzheimer’s disease, which, he said in the words of only the most hopeful optimist, was now riding him into “the sunset” of his life. Though forgetful of much else, he clung to his memories of the Rock River. “I saved seventy-seven lives,” he said, staring at that painting. “And you know, none of ’em ever thanked me.”1
By the mid-1990s, the White House, the Soviets, and the great Cold War victory were vague, flickering memories to Reagan, sometimes accessible, but only rarely. The Rock River, however, seemed seared in his consciousness. One day in 1997, Michael Deaver paid a visit to Reagan at his office. Though he had spent thirty years at Reagan’s side, he was not recognized by his old friend. Still, Reagan was cordial and polite, and somehow reflective. Trying to make conversation, he spoke to Deaver about the image on his wall, gazing longingly at those colorful brushstrokes of the spot where he patrolled the beach at Lowell Park.2
Ronald Reagan was not the only Dixonite who remembered his river days while battling the loss of other memories. On June 22, 2001, I sat with three elderly women at Heritage Square, a nursing home located among a
