November 18, 2024"The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend, not a 20 percent enemy." — President Reagan ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ Hey look, a chance to support the newsletter!
Please let me know here if you can't see the ads. Thanks! ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ "No doubt about it."If you were here seven or eight months ago, you might remember me talking about just how bad 1983 and 1984 were. Oh sure, we got some fantastic music that we're still playing all these years later, and some classic movies that people still watch and rave about. Plus, in researching this I found a book arguing that 90 days in 1984 that included everything from Michael Jordan signing with the Chicago Bulls to the U.S. Olympics in Los Angeles to a bunch of court cases that leveled the playing field in various ways were the most important three months in sports in the last 50 years. Still, everything that happened then in our lives -- Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Karate Kid and all that, plus whatever great things happened in our lives -- came against the backdrop of a looming potential nuclear war. Am I remembering this right? I was in my early teens yet and I seem to recall this undercurrent that, yes: you might be going to the prom and rooting for your team and studying hard and growing up -- but also that the entire world and everyone you love could be destroyed with about 15 minutes warning if the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. just finally decided to go at it. Heck, as I wrote here in September, we just passed the 41st anniversary of the date on which a Russian lieutenant colonel in charge of missile defense for the Soviet Union basically saved the world by not responding as he was trained to, when all of his computers lit up showing (incorrectly) that the U.S. had launched an intercontinental ballistic missile attack on Russia. "I had a funny feeling in my gut," he later said. "I didn't want to make a mistake. I made a decision [not to respond], and that was it." Anyway, it was against this background that 41 years ago tomorrow, November 19, 1985, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev met for the first time, holding a two-day summit in Geneva. They discussed the arms race and international diplomatic relations. The meetings ran long, which was a good sign. Fun story: A senior U.S. aide tried to interfere and wrap things when one 30-minute session stretched past 60 minutes, only to get a strong rebuke from a higher-ranking aide. Can you imagine? Anyway, there weren't any big agreements at the Geneva summit. But, Reagan and Gorbachev set the stage for five other summits: Reykjavík in 1986, Washington, D.C. in 1987, Moscow in 1988, and then again that year in New York City, with then-President-elect George H.W. Bush attending as well. Probably just as important, they seemed to build rapport on a personal level. And there's a fantastic little vignette that came from this, and that Gorbachev didn't share until many years later -- after he was nearly broke, literally doing a Pizza Hut commerical in Russia to raise funds, and also giving interviews and going on talk shows. At one point, Gorbachev explained, they took a private walk, accompanied only by their interpreters. And, Reagan the former actor asked a question that I think only a world leader who had spent a lot of time in movies might have thought to ask. Here's how Gorbachev described it: President Reagan suddenly said to me, 'What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?'
"I said, 'No doubt about it.'"
"He said, 'Us too.'”
Fortunately, we weren't attacked by anyone from outer space; fortunately as well, the Cold War ended a few years later. And while we certainly have tensions with Russia right now ("tensions," that's a nice word), we've managed to have at least a few decades of relative peace and cooperation. I think the relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev played a part in setting that up. Of course, so did goading the Soviets into a decades-long arms race that their economy simply couldn't support, but we'll focus on the relationship part for today. I've probably quoted Gorbachev more often than Reagan in the five years I've been writing these newsletters, so let's give Reagan the quote of the day: "The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend, not a 20 percent enemy." Words worth remembering in our current era, too.
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