Like Gorbachev, Reagan too had his detractors who were willing to gloss over the extent of Reagan’s involvement and lavish Gorbachev with praise for his role. This position is one that Gorbachev himself disagrees with. In a letter to Reagan following the May–June 1988 Moscow summit, Gorbachev gave the president major credit for Soviet developments. “The Soviet people,” he wrote in the letter, recently declassified, “have met you up close and have come to appreciate your goodwill, and your role in everything (emphasis added) that has been accomplished by our two countries.”45 Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs: “In my view, the fortieth President of the United States will go down in history for his rare perception.”46
In an interview, he added: “He [Reagan] is really a very big person—a very great political leader.”47 When Reagan and Gorbachev met together for a seventh time, on September 17, 1990 in Moscow, when Reagan was no longer president, Gorbachev toasted Reagan “as a man who did a lot to make relations with our country the way they are now.”48 Over a decade later, at a dinner in Cambridge, England in 2001, a British academic called Reagan “rather an intellectual lightweight.” Gorbachev would not tolerate the slight, and reprimanded his host: “You are wrong. President Reagan was a man of real insight, sound political judgment, and courage.”49
In 2002, Gorbachev called Reagan “a major individual,” and added: “If at that time someone else had been in his place, I don’t know whether what happened would’ve happened.”50
IN THE END, THE TRUE CREDIT IS DUE TO BOTH SIDES, AS EACH of the two leaders played vital and essential roles in the end of the Cold War. The dissolution of the Soviet Communist empire was something that they accomplished together, but the chief difference lay in the fact that of the two of them, only Reagan had intended that outcome from the start. Intentions are critical to bestowing credit and even greatness upon a leader. On the issue of Cold War intent, Reagan stands on much firmer ground than Gorbachev—which is not to deny Gorbachev’s magnificent reforms. In regard to the Soviet empire, Reagan achieved his central intent, impossible as it seemed; Gorbachev failed in his primary intent. This failure haunts Gorbachev to this day, having told USA Today in April 2006 that, “The Soviet Union could have been preserved and should have been preserved.” Reagan wanted to undo the Soviet empire and the USSR itself; Gorbachev’s central objective was to hold the USSR together. It was Reagan who accomplished what he aimed to do.
And yet, despite initial intentions, Mikhail Gorbachev’s epitaph, like Ronald Reagan’s, will rightfully read: he peacefully helped end the Cold War. For that, we should be forever grateful to both men.
22. Drifting Back
“THIS IS WHERE I WAS A LIFEGUARD FOR SEVEN SUMMERS.” So said Ronald Reagan to his biographer on December 9, 1994, pointing to the painting of the Rock River hanging in his Los Angeles office. His longtime biographer sensed that his subject no longer recognized him. A month earlier Reagan had informed the world that he had Alzheimer’s disease, which, he said in the words of only the most hopeful optimist, was now riding him into “the sunset” of his life. Though forgetful of much else, he clung to his memories of the Rock River. “I saved seventy-seven lives,” he said, staring at that painting. “And you know, none of ’em ever thanked me.”1
By the mid-1990s, the White House, the Soviets, and the great Cold War victory were vague, flickering memories to Reagan, sometimes accessible, but only rarely. The Rock River, however, seemed seared in his consciousness. One day in 1997, Michael Deaver paid a visit to Reagan at his office. Though he had spent thirty years at Reagan’s side, he was not recognized by his old friend. Still, Reagan was cordial and polite, and somehow reflective. Trying to make conversation, he spoke to Deaver about the image on his wall, gazing longingly at those colorful brushstrokes of the spot where he patrolled the beach at Lowell Park.2
Ronald Reagan was not the only Dixonite who remembered his river days while battling the loss of other memories. On June 22, 2001, I sat with three elderly women at Heritage Square, a nursing home located among a line of cool shade trees standing along North Ottawa Avenue in Dixon, Illinois. The three, who had grown up with Dutch Reagan decades ago, reclined in the facility’s “Ronald Reagan Room,” a roughly ten-by-ten-foot unimpressive space with a sink, refrigerator, bland cabinets, a desk with an enlargement apparatus for reading, and a simple table with a piece of paper taped to the surface that read in capital letters: “NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THE REAGAN ROOM DUE TO SENSITIVE EQUIPMENT THANK YOU.” Pictures of the hometown boy adorned the walls. Marion Emmert Foster and sisters Olive and Savila Palmer squeezed around the small table and reminisced. Olive had been baptized with Ronald Reagan at the First Christian Church in June 1922 and was introduced by an administrator for the facility in this way: “This is Olive, she became a Christian the same day as the president.”
Of all the topics they could have discussed, the three ladies brought up Reagan’s lifeguarding and self-confidence, explicitly connecting the two. “Those lives he saved…really affected that,” said Marion, the daughter of Reagan’s beloved Sunday school teacher, Lloyd Emmert. “He was an extremely confident person,” Savila Palmer chimed in, “all the way back to when he was a boy.” “Yes,” Marion summed up. “That was always true for him.”3
Ronald Reagan often said that those he rescued from drowning never thanked him, but in truth their gratitude came forth in a more intangible way, one for which mere words could never do justice: Reagan was paid back through the self-confidence that those seventy-seven rescues brought to his various endeavors, particularly his can-do willingness to take on the Soviet Union. As his son Ron has pointed out, lifeguarding ingrained in Reagan a broader life-saving mentality, one that followed him through his life, guiding his decisions until his final days.
Pushing seventy years old when he arrived in Washington, DC, his new self-appointed rescue mission was directed at many more lives than just those swimming in the river. His was a self-appointed mission to save the world from the evil of atheistic, expansionary Soviet Communism—an ideology that took the lives of tens of millions in the USSR alone, and over 100 million worldwide throughout the twentieth century, twice the death toll of the first two world wars combined.4 The lifeguard would lead the charge from the shores of the United States toward the “captive peoples” behind the Iron Curtain. He decided it was up to him to play the role of world saver.
Indeed, a rescuer rescues. By the end of the 1920s, Dutch Reagan had not yet become a crusader. A crusader is a rescuer driven by an ideology, a deeper, grander cause, sometimes even a religious mission. But a crusader needs something to crusade against. That target resided in Moscow.