Free Between You and Me by Mike Wallace Page B

projected throughout his eight years in Washington.
    W A L L A C E : We’ve heard the presidency called the loneliest job in the world, a splendid misery, whatever, and I have never sensed that you have been the least bit miserable or the least bit lonely in this job. Why hasn’t this job weighed as heavily on you as it has on some other occupants of the Oval Office?
    R E A G A N : Well, Mike, I don’t know what the answer to that would be. Maybe none of them had a Nancy. But I came here with a belief that this country, the people, were kind of hun-gering for a, call it a spiritual revival. The whole thing of the sixties and the rioting and so forth and the disillusionment with Vietnam, it seemed that the people had kind of lost faith in the destiny of this country and all. And I came here with, as I say, plans, and set out to implement them. No, we didn’t get everything we asked for, but you don’t fall back in defeat.
    There was no doubt inmy mind that Reaganhad infused the White House with a pride and self-assurance that had not been seen there since the invigorating years of Kennedy’s New Frontier
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    and the early days of the Great Society, when LBJ was still a commanding presence. In the process, Reagan made millions of Americans feel better about their government, their country, and even themselves. After all the disruptions and setbacks we had been through, we needed anemotional uplift, and Reagangave us that.
    Intangible though it was, I regard that as one of his most impressive triumphs.
    As for substance, I think Reagan deserves a large share of the credit for one of the towering achievements of our time: the collapse of Soviet power in Europe that brought an end to the cold war. It’s true, of course, that by the time he became president, the Soviet system was already sliding into serious dysfunction. But Reagan’s decisions to beef up the U.S. military and expand the frontiers of nuclear technology put so much pressure on the Russians that they came to realize that a peaceful solution was their best option. When the time came for critical discussions at the summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan proved to be an adept and flexible negotiator. To the astonishment of many—especially his detractors—the old cold warrior, who had once denounced the Soviet Union as “an evil empire,” transformed himself into an ardent peacemaker.
    In our interview, Reagan recalled how that transformation began in earnest in 1985, at his first summit meeting with Gorbachev. At one point, he said, the two leaders slipped away from the arms negotiations and went off by themselves to a lakeside cottage, accompanied only by their interpreters. For over an hour, they sat in front of an open fire and chatted. Here’s part of that conversation as Reagan remembered it four years later:
    “I said, ‘We don’t mistrust each other because we’re armed. We’re armed because we mistrust each other. And while it’s all right to talk about arms and limitations on arms, why don’t you and I see if we
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    can’t eliminate the things that caused the mistrust.’ I further said to him that here we were, two men in a room together, and we probably had the power to start World War Three. But by the same token, we had the power to bring world peace.”
    By the time their tête-à-tête came to an end, Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed to visit each other in their respective capitals, and the president recalled with relish the reaction of his negotiating team to that startling development: “I want to tell you, when the general meeting was over, and I told our people that it was already agreed upon that there were going to be two more summits in the United States and in Moscow, they fell down. They couldn’t believe it!”
    I am hardly the only member of the journalism fraternity who awards high marks to Reagan’s presidency. At the time of the millennium,