Free The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer

Charles Gati notes in
The Bloc That Failed.
Amid the confusion and uncertainty, they waited.
    Across the Atlantic, America also waited, all but oblivious to the drama beginning to take shape in Europe. It had been a distracting year, full of revolutionary developments. For the first time ever, in 1988, music CDs outsold vinyl. Prozac was introduced as an antidepressant. At the summer Olympics in Seoul, gold medal sprinter Ben Johnson was caught using steroids after setting a world record in the 100-meter dash. Robin Givens filed for divorce from boxer Mike Tyson. The Reverend Jimmy Swaggart was exposed as having a liking for prostitutes. Soviet forces began to withdraw from Afghanistan. In the skies over Lockerbie, Scotland, a bomb allegedly planted by Libyan terrorists exploded aboard Pan Am flight 103, killing 271 people from twenty-one countries and setting the stage for U.S. military retaliation.
    Most important, a new president had just been elected. George H. W. Bush, vice president under Ronald Reagan, defeated Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis in a campaign distinguished less by the quality of its debate over foreign policy and U.S.-Soviet relations than by silly photographs of the Democratic candidate ridingill at ease in an M1 Abrams tank and a flap over the furlough of a convicted-killer-turned-rapist named Willie Horton. As happens every four years, all but the most pressing issues got lost in the consuming obsession with gaining the White House.
    As the new administration planned its transition, attention turned first to filling jobs, and only secondly to policy. If the incoming team might logically have been expected to build on the momentum of their predecessors in the Reagan administration, particularly in relations with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet bloc, it was not to be. The newly designated secretary of state, James Baker, made that crystal clear. “There was a deliberate pause when President Bush succeeded President Reagan—in all foreign policy, not just matters involving the United States and the Soviet Union,” he told CNN. “We had a new team,” he added, including a new national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and his deputy, Condoleezza Rice. These “new players” were determined to put their “own stamp” on foreign policy, said Baker. In fact, he expected the “real action” to be in Asia, according to an aide, rather than “old hat” Europe where nothing much would change.
    The president-elect did not even try to conceal his skepticism about Gorbachev. Reagan had introduced them during the final days of his presidency. “I know what people are telling you now that you have won the election,” Gorbachev told the new U.S. leader over lunch on Governors Island. “You’ve got to go slow, you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to review. That you can’t trust us, that we’re doing all this for show.” But he was not doing this for show, the Russian leader told Bush, looking him square in the eye. “You’ll see soon enough. I’m not going to undermine you or surprise you or take advantage of you. I’m doing this because I need to. I’m doing this because there’s a revolution taking place in my country. I started it. And they all applauded me in 1986 when I did it and now they don’t like it so much. But it’s going to be a revolution nonetheless.” Yet that is exactly what Bush did: go slow, review. Like Scowcroft, in particular, he did not trust the Soviet leader the way Reagan had come to. “Everyone looked favorably on glasnost and perestroika,” Bush said years later in an interview with CNN, “but I thought it was prudent to take some time to reevaluate the situation.”
    Incredibly, this “pause” would become a freeze lasting nearly six months through what would prove to be some of the most dramatic developments in the twentieth