Returning to the main theme of my speech, the issue of an equal and mutually beneficial partnership between our countries, I said:
I am, of course, aware that there are people in the United States who believe the interests of your country would be better served by a weak, fragmented Russia relegated to a secondary role in world affairs. I will not argue with them, but just ask two questions that I think are important.
The first. Is it really wise to base a policy on an impossibility? It will be impossible to keep Russia out of global politics. In the longer term that is a fruitless endeavour whose only result will be to damage the prospects of democracy in Russia.
The second question is, does the United States not actually need a good, rather influential partner in order to conduct a rational foreign policy? There is no reason why Russia should not be such a partner. She is not opposed to the United States, has no wish to compete with America and, in any case, the era of superpowers looks increasingly like becoming a thing of the past.
Reading these words, spoken more than 20 years ago, some will doubtless wish to accuse me of naivety in the light of much that has happened in the world and been done in US foreign policy in the meantime. I do not take them back. The United States chose to go in the opposite direction, behaved like a ‘hyperpower’, and got its fingers badly burned in the process. The world will, in the end, be obliged to return to the principles of international law, equal partnerships and shared security. Today, many in America have come to recognize this. It would, of course, have been much better if it could have been recognized sooner and by all of them.
My trip was coming to an end. The last venue was Boston, for a dialogue with the students and professors of Harvard University and a visit to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. For many of my generation, Kennedy was special. I still remember the impression his death made on us and cannot believe, as I have said openly, that his assassination was the deed of a loner. Some years ago, I visited the Sixth Floor Museum at the School Book Depository building in Dallas, now a memorial to Kennedy, and looked down at the street from the window from which Oswald shot. A chill ran down my spine. I wrote in the visitors’ book, ‘He looked far ahead and wanted to change a great deal. Perhaps that is the key to the mystery of the death of President John F. Kennedy.’[5] Later, when I met Oliver Stone, who directed a film about Kennedy, I told him what I had written. Stone agreed.
The hours spent at the Kennedy Library were amazingly warm and sociable. Our trip had ended, I said, among friends. We were welcomed by the president’s widow, Jackie Kennedy, a woman of great charm, his brother Senator Ted Kennedy, whom I already knew well and appreciated, and other members of the extensive Kennedy family which has suffered so many tribulations. Raisa and I made no attempt to conceal our respect for them.
I felt it was important to talk of the continuing relevance of the heritage of John F. Kennedy. I recalled his words two years into the presidency that the problems had been more difficult than he anticipated, and that the resources of the United States for solving them were not limitless. I said these words encourage us to reflect seriously. ‘Already in those days the world badly needed states to cooperate in combating the challenges it faced. The world needed thinking that looked beyond pretensions to dominate and solve all problems single-handed.’
I recalled, as I was often to do subsequently to American audiences, the president’s advice, referred to above, at the American University in Washington, DC on 10 June 1963, ‘not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats’.
That is precisely what we were guided by when we embarked on the huge challenge of changing the international climate together with Presidents Reagan and Bush. Even more relevant is that President Kennedy’s appeal was backed by an audacious specific proposal to conclude a nuclear test ban treaty and the US decision to conduct no more such tests in the atmosphere.
In the light of how swiftly negotiations proceeded to conclusion of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater, or in space, it is particularly noticeable how many opportunities were missed during the decades that followed, I said.
The politicians of that later period proved capable only of keeping the world away from a global nuclear disaster: they were unable to halt the build-up through inertia of nuclear stockpiles and the growing threat of catastrophe. What was it they lacked? I believe they lacked the ability to look beyond immediate problems, to make a moral choice and act accordingly.
On this last day of my major visit to America, I attempted a summary. I shared my impressions with the guests at this concluding lunch:
I have had revealed to me a huge, multifaceted land. The greatest impression is from conversations with ordinary Americans, people I met in the streets of the cities we visited. I saw not an arrogant America, looking out with smug self-satisfaction on the rest of the world, but a reflective, thoughtful America. The United States is pondering its problems and questions of justice. It is turning its attention to those who, to date, have been bypassed by the American dream, and while this society retains its dissatisfaction and capacity for critical self-evaluation, we can be confident that America will overcome its problems and cope with its difficulties.
Many Americans I spoke to told me that the ending of the Cold War had changed their lives. The explanation was simply that for decades people had been living under the constant shadow of the nuclear threat. In the United States, just as in the Soviet Union, people were instructed on how to behave in the event of a nuclear attack, what supplies they would need to stock up on, how to shield themselves from deadly radiation (assuming they were not killed instantly). The end of the Cold War freed them from a nagging fear which, over time, they might get used to or forget but which was always subconsciously there.
The role of the United States in the world
Since then, I have been back to the United States many times, visiting dozens of towns and states, giving lectures to students, business associations, Russia analysts and international relations researchers, and social activists. Americans are good listeners: you can always tell from the reaction of the audience how they are responding to what has been said. After the talk there is always time to answer questions, most of which show a genuine desire to make sense of what is happening in the world and to understand the speaker’s standpoint.
American newspapers, as a rule, report the talks objectively and in detail, and after these sessions I am curious to know what people are saying about them. I remember the comment of one American who had come from another city to hear me in Denver, Colorado. He said, ‘When Gorbachev is visiting, I always try to get to his talks even if I have to travel miles. I don’t always agree with what he says, but always find it interesting. I respect his opinion because I can see he is stating it honestly and directly. Including when he is criticizing America.’
I have, of course, often criticized US policy. When you meet Americans you notice that literally all of them, ordinary people and politicians alike, believe that America is a special country, exceptional, as Barack Obama once said, and that it has a right to lead the world. That can sometimes grate, but what is more important, I think, is not which words are used but what kind of world leader America wants to be: an exclusive, monopolistic leader or a leading partner cooperating with other countries and taking account of their opinions. After the Soviet Union disappeared off the political map, that question became supremely important.