Word: reagans
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...Reagan and Gorbachev talk at length on missile reductions, but the summit ends in a stalemate over the Strategic Defense Initiative. Icelanders greet invading summiteers with souvenirs, a swimsuit competition and a pony show. The Soviets take the lead in public relations. At an ancient peacemaking site, Roger Rosenblatt ponders the meaning of the talks. See NATION...
Reporting the news is rarely a Monday-through-Friday job, and TIME often goes to extraordinary lengths to cover late-breaking events. By any standard, however, last weekend's Reagan-Gorbachev meeting in Reykjavik posed a challenge. It was a big story, of course, big enough for TIME to send eight reporters and five photographers to Iceland. The meeting, moreover, was set to conclude early Sunday afternoon, well past the hour that TIME's presses normally start to roll...
...history, personalizing the complex issues involved. It was their second meeting in less than a year, and it was intended to provide what the Soviet leader called an "impulse" for future meetings in Washington and Moscow. Though they clashed in Reykjavik over Star Wars, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan still might end up encountering each other more frequently than Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev did during the heyday of détente...
There would be an irony in that distinction. Not since Harry Truman discovered that "Uncle Joe" Stalin was more than merely the hack political boss he had first thought have two superpower leaders seemed so ideologically at odds. Reagan and Gorbachev both came to office not with their hands outstretched but with their dukes up. They seemed headed not for the summit of diplomacy but for the back alley of rhetorical scrapping and unbridled competition. Each took over at a time when his side felt threatened. Each gained power in part because he seemed to offer the best antidote...
...Reagan came into office after waging a campaign against summitry and all it stood for. He wanted the U.S. to negotiate less and compete more. He devoted much of his first term to denouncing the Soviets for their misdeeds, calling on the free world to mount a "crusade" to cast Marxism-Leninism onto the ash heap of history, punishing Moscow's expansionism through a global counterattack on its clients, which became known as the Reagan Doctrine, and unveiling a Strategic Defense Initiative that would, at least as he conceived it, disarm the Evil Empire by dint of Yankee ingenuity...