Former Reagan administration officials pay tribute to unlikely pair who shared a determination to pull the world back from the brink of a superpower war
, then assistant to the president. Now 70 and based in Alexandria, Virginia, remembers that Thatcher came to Camp David to discuss her meeting with Gorbachev and convinced Reagan that he was different and willing to listen.The thing that made the difference most to Reagan was when Thatcher told him he never cut me off, he never interrupted me whenever I was making my point. That opened up Reagan’s mind about Gorbachev so he went in there with an open mind.
“That set the tone for the summits going forward. Gorbachev was very highly intelligent and prepared himself. He understood that things had to change and that Reagan was the kind of guy that he might be able to work with and one summit led to another and then another.” “So he would come back and attack Reagan, saying, don’t lecture me on how to run my country or how we treat our people; you’ve got people living on sidewalks and on grates and you’ve got crime out of control.”
“He was intellectually honest about human aspiration. He didn’t turn the guns on people in Berlin. He didn’t turn the guns on people that came to the embassy in Hungary. He decided the answer to the Soviet Union’s problems isn’t to shoot a bunch of innocent people.”
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