The Kremlin had become a geriatric ward, with Red Square doubling as the world’s largest funeral parlor. The 40th president of the United States emerges here not as a geopolitical visionary who jettisoned the supposedly accommodationist policies of containment and detente, but as an archpragmatist and operational optimist who adjusted his own attitudes and conduct in order to encourage a new kind of Kremlin leader.ĭuring his first term, Reagan denounced the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” The name-calling riled many Soviets (and more than a few Sovietologists) but did little diplomatic harm, since relations between Washington and Moscow were already in a rut. But Matlock’s book bears out his former boss’s judgment. This quotation was much cited at the time as an example of Reagan’s graciousness, tact and self-deprecation.
Gorbachev,” he said, “deserves most of the credit, as the leader of this country.” Asked at a press conference in Moscow in 1988, his last year in office, about the role he played in the great drama of the late 20th century, he described himself essentially as a supporting actor. In both the title of his memoir and the story it tells, he gives co-star billing to Mikhail Gorbachev. A veteran foreign service officer and respected expert on the Soviet Union, he reached the pinnacle of his career under Reagan, serving first as the White House’s senior coordinator of policy toward the Soviet Union, then as ambassador to Moscow. writes in Reagan and Gorbachev, it was “not so simple.” He should know. Margaret Thatcher, Joe Lieberman, John McCain, Charles Krauthammer and other notables offered variations of The Economist‘s cover headline: “The Man Who Beat Communism.”Īctually, Jack F. Ronald Reagan was widely eulogized for having won the cold war, liberated Eastern Europe and pulled the plug on the Soviet Union.
Matlock Jr.’s book, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended.
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