Reagan and Thatcher by Richard Aldous

Author:Richard Aldous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Despite Reagan’s gesture in the autumn of of 1984, it was clear as winter set in that uneasiness still pervaded the relationship. For Thatcher, her acceptance of “how large powers behave” was combined with an acute sense of personal disappointment in the president himself. He was the most powerful man in the world, yet—say it quietly and never in public—she did not consider Reagan to be her intellectual equal.37 Nothing illustrated that gulf, not to mention the limited power of a British prime minister, better than the new relationship she struck up a few days before seeing Reagan at Camp David.

On the morning of December 16, Thatcher welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Politburo to Chequers. This visit, she noted later, was “the next step in my strategy of gaining closer relations—on the right terms—with the Soviet Union.” Beforehand, she had held another seminar with Soviet experts in preparation for what they warned her would be a dynamic exchange of views. Gorbachev was part of a new generation—one of the “children of the 20th Party Congress”—that many hoped would fulfill Khrushchev’s aim of “socialism with a human face.” He was known to read widely, including Western studies of the Soviet Union, and by virtue of having been a protégé of Andropov was thought to be a tough political realist. By 1984, he had risen to the suitably Orwellian post of secretary in charge of ideology—in effect the party number two, and favored to be the next Soviet leader.38

Gorbachev arrived in Britain with a tantalizing reputation as a reformer. He did not disappoint. “The second he came into the great hall at Chequers you knew that here was an entirely different sort of Russian leader,” recalled private secretary Charles Powell. “Here was a man bursting with energy, a broad grin on his face, a readiness to engage in argument.” When the talks began, Thatcher found her exchanges revelatory. “His personality could not have been more different from the wooden ventriloquism of the average Soviet apparatchik,” she recalled. “He smiled, laughed, used his hands for emphasis, modulated his voice, followed an argument through and was a sharp debater. . . . He did not seem in the least uneasy about entering into controversial areas of high politics.” At one point, Gorbachev produced a sheet of paper from his pocket. “I showed her a kind of diagram with 1,000 little squares,” he recalled, “and every little square represented 1,000th of the nuclear weapons accumulated in the world by that time. Each square by itself contained enough weapons to destroy life on earth. So life on earth could be destroyed 1,000 times over, and the arms race continued.” A robust debate followed. “We had a very open dialogue,” Gorbachev wryly observed. For Thatcher, the contrast with Reagan was striking. The Russian wasn’t glued to his prepared notecards. He relished the strategic tour d’horizon as much as the prime minister herself did. “I found myself liking him,” Thatcher reflected. These were not words she used often.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.