Blessed are the peacemakers, Reagan and Gorbachev
By Mike Haynes
I couldn’t
resist climbing the eight steps in front of the boxy white house in Iceland.
While my wife and the rest of the tour group stayed in the bus on a dreary December
2015 day in Reykjavik, I wanted to plant my insulated boots where pictures show
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev stood in 1986.
Out front
of the city-owned Hofdi House, which sits a snowball’s throw from the North
Atlantic Ocean, are some stone plaques written in Russian, English and
Icelandic. One reads:
“In this historic house 11-12
October 1986 the Reykjavik summit meeting of the superpowers took place between
Ronald Reagan, president of the United States of America, and Mikhail
Sergeyevich Gorbachev, secretary general of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
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Hofdi House in Iceland was the site of the 1986 summit
meeting
between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at which the
United States
and Soviet Union made progress on denuclearization.
In the foreground is a
section of the Berlin Wall, covered in
graffiti, installed after it fell in
1989. (Photo by Mike Haynes)
|
“This summit meeting is regarded as
heralding the beginning of the end of the Cold War.”
Not every historian agrees that
President Reagan ended the decades-long Cold War between the United States and
the USSR, but many do, especially if you also give Mikhail Gorbachev part of
the credit.
Reading about that short Iceland
encounter and the other three meetings between the two leaders described as
summits – in Vienna, Austria; Washington, D.C.; and Moscow – reminds me what
can be accomplished when people meet face to face.
As eyewitness Ken Adelman recounts
in his 2014 book, “Reagan at Reykjavik,” and journalist Bret Baier describes in
this year’s “Three Days in Moscow,” those two world leaders not only became
friends over three years but reduced their nations’ nuclear arsenals
substantially. And the firm stance that Reagan consistently projected plus his
encouraging words of freedom to the people of the Soviet Union and its
satellite countries were major factors in the 1989 fall of the Berlin wall and
the breakup of the USSR in 1991.
Reagan started his presidency with
tough talk, calling the USSR an “evil empire” in a 1983 speech to the National
Association of Evangelicals. The same month, he announced plans to develop the
Strategic Defense Initiative, envisioned as a way to shoot down nuclear
missiles before they could hit the United States. SDI, which many ridiculed as
“Star Wars,” turned out to be unrealistic, but it was taken seriously by the
Soviets and contributed to their willingness to negotiate.
It is clear from those present at
the four summits that both Reagan and Gorbachev sincerely wanted to rid the
globe of the danger of nuclear destruction. This chief Communist operated in a
more human way than the stiff Soviet leaders of the past, and his motivation
apparently was an honest desire to make the world a better place.
Reagan’s inspiration was a strong
patriotism and belief system born in his small-town Illinois upbringing. Ron
and Nancy Reagan didn’t attend church much during their White House years,
which author Baier attributes to the disruption it would have caused. But the
president often quoted Abraham Lincoln about praying on his knees, and in a
letter thanking a reporter for a story, Reagan wrote:
“…there are a lot of people in the
media who are very ‘broad-minded’ except when it comes
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This display in Reykjavik, Iceland, describes the 1986
summit meeting there
between Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and Ronald
Reagan
of the United States. The words are in the Icelandic language. (Photo by
Mike Haynes)
|
Reagan’s “evil empire” speech
included a quote from C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters”: “The greatest evil is
not done now in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is
not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final
result. But it is conceived and ordered … in clear, carpeted, warmed, and
well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and
smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
But as he warned about evil
creeping in, Reagan was adaptable, as was Gorbachev. By the time of their third
summit in Washington, they knew each other well, and I think they realized they
both genuinely wanted peace. When in 1988 during a walk in Moscow’s Red Square,
reporter Sam Donaldson asked Reagan, “Do you still think you’re in an evil
empire?” the president replied, “No, that was another time, another era.”
The climax of Baier’s book is a
speech Reagan gave during that Moscow summit to students at Moscow State
University. By then, the purpose of the man who had been so hard on Communism
and the USSR was to encourage and inspire the students and, by extension, the
Soviet people.
He talked about the shared yearning
for freedom of all humans, including Americans and Russians. He quoted Russian
writer Boris Pasternak about “the irresistible power of unarmed truth.” Standing
under a huge bust of Vladimir Lenin, Reagan finished with the hope for “a new
world of reconciliation, friendship and peace.”
Since Gorbachev and Reagan passed
the reins to others, the U.S.-Russian relationship has regressed. We don’t see
the same desire for peace or the same goodwill. The current leaders don’t, like
those two did, bring to mind Jesus’ words:
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they will be called children of God.”
(This column was in the Amarillo Globe-News Oct. 2, 2018 - with the last
line, the Bible quote, left out!.
(It’s plenty long already, but I had intended to include
something about the Czech woman who led a tour in the Czech Republic on another trip
Kathy and I took. She remembered when the Communists left her country around
1990 and said she and everybody she knows love Ronald Reagan for that. –Mike H.)
