Reagan and Gorbachev

Ronald Reagan was technically the second president in my life, Jimmy Carter being president until 1981, but I really don’t remember much about any president from my life before George H. W. Bush.  In fairness to the presidents, I don’t remember a whole lot before 1989 anyway, just sporadic incidents, and some of those are somewhat nebulous memories that lack a lot of specifics.  I certainly wasn’t paying attention to politics.  Later in life, I started to learn about Reagan and have come to greatly admire him and much of what he did while in office as the president.  I was slightly more aware of who Mikhail Gorbachev was because he was at the helm of the Soviet Union when it fell apart, and the Eastern Bloc’s downfall holds a rather prominent place in those few early memories of mine (in part because some of it was broadcast on TV and because of a strong family history tie I have to Germany that made some of those happenings seem interesting to me).  I remember the Russian words glasnost and perestroika being bandied about in the American press, but was largely unaware of most of the events leading up to those policies and then to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended by Jack F. Matlock, Jr. (ISBN: 0-679-46323-2) is a very detailed, play-by-play recounting of most (all?) of the diplomatic events leading up to the end of the Cold War.  Matlock was a career diplomat that served on the National Security Council.  This position and his academic and diplomatic career as a specialist on Russia provided him with an insider’s perspective on the processes that led up to the end of the Cold War.  The book chronicles, often in great detail, various meetings, negotiations, summits, and communications that involved leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union.  The focus was, of course, on what the two countries’ leaders, Reagan and Gorbachev, did, including their preparations before their meetings, their political efforts in their home countries in order to secure the ability to push their preferred policies forward.  Matlock talked about the papers prepared for Reagan and how Reagan studied them.  He talked about the negotiation processes.  He recounted meetings between secretaries of state and foreign ministers.  Those meetings, though, and the preparations were made possible by the leaders’ efforts to put people in place that would assist them.  The preparations were made because the leaders desired that, something that was not always the case with the leaders who came before them.  While Matlock endeavored to explain that so-called summit meetings weren’t the most important things in the diplomatic arsenal, those are what got headlines and what, ultimately, required the most preparation and resulted in the headline deals that moved the West and the Soviets away from nuclear war and toward peace.  He, therefore, spent most of the book talking about these meetings that took place in Moscow, Washington, Geneva, and Reykjavík.

The book was interesting since it presented a lot of detail about the diplomacy the two leaders were involved in, but was not what I expected since it presented so much information on the processes and not as much about the two leaders themselves.  I realize that they have had so many biographies written about them that new information might be difficult to present, so respect the author’s decision to explain more about how they drove the process and how their respective personalities influenced politics and people toward their ultimate goal of peace.  The agreements reached were significant by any standard and led to the end of the Cold War, a seminal event in the history of the world that continues to shape today’s world.  The level of detail was sometimes excessive, I thought, and it felt like I had to push through some passages.  In general, though, the writing and information presented were relevant to the story and points being made, and it was kind of interesting to read about the great level of effort required on so many levels to bring a couple heads of state together.  The book only cemented by opinions of these two men further.  They were visionary and extremely able politicians.  They made mistakes on the way, but learned from them and ultimately reached their goals (Reagan more than Gorbachev, but Gorbachev is worthy of a lot of credit since his policies led to even greater changes).  In today’s world where the East and the West are set against each other, there may be something to learn from Reagan and Gorbachev’s efforts to lessen conflict in the world.

   

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