Word: reagans
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...determined challenge, delivered Friday by Ronald Reagan with his back to the Berlin Wall, across from the Brandenburg Gate in Communist East Germany. But the necessity the President felt to remind West Berliners, of all people, that the Soviet leader still commands a totalitarian society underscored a melancholy aspect of Reagan's nine-day journey through Western Europe. For all his eloquence, the aging President was repeatedly upstaged by the youthful and suavely dynamic image of the man who was not there: Mikhail Gorbachev...
...When Reagan met with the leaders of the non-Communist world's seven principal industrial powers last week in Venice, almost the entire opening dinner was taken up by an animated -- and inconclusive -- discussion of Gorbachev's arms-control maneuvers and campaign for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring) within the Soviet Union. At a press conference after the summit, a reporter reminded the President of polls showing that West Europeans put more faith in Gorbachev than in Reagan as a leader working for peace. Reagan replied, correctly, that the prospective agreement to rid Europe of intermediate-range nuclear missiles...
...Bush is trying to establish a sense of direction, but he's having a hard time doing it, and one reason is the fact we're so bogged down in Iraq." On Iran, I asked whether the Administration should consider negotiating directly with the ruling mullahs in Tehran, as Reagan did with the Soviets. "I think we should figure out a way to communicate," he says. "We've seen the beginning of that in the recent meeting in Baghdad. When you have two ambassadors meet in high-publicity setting it's not likely to produce much. But anyway...
...Later that evening, Shultz would deliver a speech of his own at an event hosted by the American Academy in Berlin, marking the 20th anniversary of the Reagan address. As our plates were being cleared, I asked why "Tear Down this Wall" remains more resonant than any of the thousands of Presidential speeches delivered in the two decades since Reagan went to Berlin. Shultz sipped some green tea. "It's become famous, first of all, because what he called for happened. If you look back to the day after the speech, or the month after, I don't think...
...that ideas matter a lot, the underlying ideas that stand behind policies. When you don't have ideas, your policies are flip-flopping all over the place. When you do have ideas, you have more consistency. And when you have the right ideas - then you can get somewhere." Reagan had the right ideas...