neurologist, wrote a book called "in leadership -- in sickness and in leadership." and does two chapters. he saw reagan's brain scans while he was president. and he has said, as other doctors have, there were -- yes, he had dementia which some of us have learned about, unfortunately. of a man past a certain age, but that there were no symptoms of alzheimer's before until three years after he was gone from the presidency. >> steve, did you have -- if not, i have a question for you that's off this. >> i actually wanted to do a monty python term. now for something completely different. is that okay? >> yes. >> thank you. the question posed tonight is did these two men end the cold war forever? i have a different fix on that.

and let me try to provoke my colleagues here to disagree and the audience, too. i don't think that reagan and gorbachev ended the cold war. they thought they did. there's no question about it. and some of us, leslie and i, were in malta together in december 1989. some of us have may have thought in '89, '90, '9 when the first president bush joined them the cold war had ended but in fact, it had not. what happened was is that these two historic figures gave us an historic opportunity to end the cold war forever. and we didn't do it. by the 1990s, the mid-'90s, a new or renewed cold war, however you want to look at it, characterize american-russian relations. for example, in august 2008, in georgia, the former soviet republic of georgia, there occurred a war known as the

russian-georg russian-georgian war, but we had armed and created the georgian fitters. that was as close as we came to a nuclear war with russia. it was every bit as dangerous as the cuban missile crisis. that was cold war at its worst. and why would obama have asked for a reset -- a reset of the relationship with russia if he didn't think something had been lost? so the question becomes, who lost the historic opportunity that gorbachev and reagan gave us? the prevailing view in america is that putin did it. that putin was the villain. but putin became russian president in 2000. we were already in a very bad relationship with russia in the 1990s. and in my judgment, the historic opportunity was not lost in moscow but in washington under the clinton administration. partly because they didn't understand what we're talking about here today. i think jack would agree and maybe richard that gorbachev and reagan either ended or came

close to ending the cold war through negotiation. but the clinton administration went forward on the premise that america won the cold war. and therefore, they treated russia as a defeated power. and that triggered a new cold war that was fought at first in washington and then eventually moscow engaged it. so we now viewed in this light come to obama. is it possible that obama's reset 20 years later could retrieve, recapture the historic opportunity that gorbachev and reagan gave us? and that, i think, is a question of, you know, the daily news, the relationship today. >> let's go back and ask richard -- let's ask -- go ahead. >> i am -- >> and i'm happy. >> -- provoked by that. we did miss opportunities. and at two great points in american history. you mentioned the cuban missile

crisis. in both the cuban missile crisis in private and in the reproachment, both presidents kennedy and reagan again and again and again said do not use the word "win." never use the word "win" to the point that dean rusk was on "meet the press" after the cuban missile crisis was solved and marvin kalb used the word "win," and the president of the united states, john kennedy, personally called the studio and said, "do not use that word. we will pay a high price if you do. so it is an interesting -- >> so you agree. >> don't declare victory -- yes, i think that the clinton people wanted to ride that -- wanted to ride the white horse through the gates, and that was a dumb thing to do. >> jack, what do you think? do you agree that we're the

reason -- >> i think that's right. and certainly as far as reagan was concerned, he wrote a note -- read it to himself. it was given to some of his staff members in case he got something wrong just before he met gorbachev the first time in geneva. and the last statement in that statement he wrote was, whatever we achieve, we must not call it victory. because that will simply make the next achievement worse. and more difficult. and in his memoirs, he wrote that the end of the cold war was not a victory of one country over another but of one system over another which actually occurred when the other system was changing. so he never used the rhetoric we won the cold war. for a long time the first george bush didn't. but when he was behind in the election for re-election, he was the first to start saying, we won the cold war.

but it was actually -- i agree with steve -- that it was the clinton administration who really began to act not only as if we won the cold war but that there was a -- we were the sole superpower in a unipolar world at least with a unipolar moment, and we no longer had to cultivate our alliances or have a different foreign policy. >> we should add to that. >> i feel that clinton's administration missed opportunity which we had which were later actually destroyed by the bush/cheney administration. >> we should add to that from the lefty democratic side here, that republicans are now trying to ride the horse and saying that ronald reagan won the cold war without firing a shot and whatnot. the more they say that, the more

problems that i think it will lead to. >> but clinton had yeltsin. he didn't have gorbachev. and steve, you've written quite a bit about how you say that gorbachev -- gorbachev's ambition was to reform. yeltsin's ambition was to gain power. and you paint a pretty ugly picture of yeltsin as a person who grabbed power and diminished the democracy and the reforms that gorbachev instituted and set up this kleptocracy. you call it a grafatization. clinton had a different leader to deal with, and that must have been a factor here. steve? jack? >> well, that certainly was, but the problem -- the problem during, in my opinion, during the clinton administration was, first of all, the decision to

expand nato to the east without building a security system in which russia participated, at least in european security. therefore, we began to treat russia as a defeated country. whether we called it that or not. and then second, when we used nato to authorize an attack on serbia over kosovo without u.n. approval. now, this is -- these were the beginnings of the moves that set things up for the confrontation with russia that developed later. so i think that's where we began to get off the track. and i agree that many republicans today are distorting the reagan image and misusing it. on domestic as well as foreign affairs. he approved two tax increases, by the way. you wouldn't know that from the

position they take. and when you have 26 republican senators voting against new start, reagan must be twirling in his grave. these are not the heriotors of rain. they built a false image which they are using. >> i wonder, was gorbachev, when you mention gorbachev and yeltsin, two very different people, i often wondered, yeltsin was an old paul. i mean, i knew him from city hall in new york metaphorically. was gorbachev meant for politics, or was he meant for intellectual endeavor? >> probably not. gorbachev had several failures as a politician. one was he did not like to work with people who could attract more attention than he did. in other words, once yeltsin

began to get popular, he felt he had to put him down. instead of having strong supporters and being comfortable with that. so he made his share of mistakes, but yeltsin was basically going for power, but he was able to use the new democratic processes that gorbachev introduced to his advantage. and you're right, he was a good street politician. and gorbachev was not. >> steve, you wrote a book that's really a book about gorbachev. and his gifts and his determination to have reform. you talk about he's the only soviet leader who ever left -- ever left power without a fight. just walked away from it. set up democracy. this book is really sort of a

love poem to gorbachev. >> well, i hope it's not. >> it is. okay, it's not a poem. >> i mean, it is true. it is true that having known gorbachev for 20 years, i would not say i'm completely objective. but i've also studied russian and soviet history for even longer. and i understand gorbachev in the context of that history. and in that context, he was an absolutely extraordinary figure. remember what you might have forgotten. that in june 1991, he literally permitted, because he could have stopped it, yeltsin to be elected, popular elected, president of the russian republic. it was still inside the soviet union. nothing like that had ever happened in russian history. gorbachev's democratic reforms

were literally -- and any political scientist would be astonished by this -- a giving away of the enormous power that he had inherited when he became head of the soviet communist party. when you became head of the soviet communist party in 1985, you had power almost unrivaled by any executive leader in the world. tremendous power. and over the next five years, gorbachev was decentralizing. he was giving it to a congress. he was giving it to the republics. he was giving it to local parliaments. and he knew exactly what he was doing, by the way. in 1987, he turned to his closest aide, a man by the name of cherniyaf who jack knows very well. and he turned to him and he said, anatoli, even you have no idea how far i'm willing to go. and it was about democracy. so in my book, i formulate it like this. in the context of russian history, gorbachev had a

tremendous will to reform unlike any leader, i think, ever who had come to power in russian history, a will to reform the system. yeltsin -- and we might admire this because in many ways he was admirable. and i think he believed he was a democrat. yeltsin had a tremendous will to power. everybody noticed this when he appeared on the scene. but here's the thing. they appeared on the historical scene at exactly the same moment. and in that sense, the conflict was inevitable. so had they appeared at different moments in russian history, the outcome may have been different. in that sense, leadership really, really matters. i don't consider that a love poem to gorbachev but perhaps the most astute analysis of leadership politics the literature today. i did say, however, perhaps. >> let's stay with the word "love." and i'm going to get back to my question about the wives, nancy. and we haven't talked about resa

yet. but jack, in your book, you reveal something to wonderful about gorbachev's reliance on reza, which i'd love you to tell the audience. and also tell about ronald reagan's reliance on nancy. and i know steve, you can contribute to this. and i'm sure you can, too, richard. >> the one thing they had in common and one of the very few things was their very close relationship with their wives. by the way, their wives did not get along. >> we all remember that. >> but they didn't get in the way of their husbands bonding in a way. but, you know, gorbachev really had no close circle of friends in soviet union. his only close friend, his only real confidante was his wife. and we were told time and time again once we got to know our counterparts better, that he

could not make decisions without her. we were surprised, for example, when she came to the conference in ice land. gorbachev had invited reagan to london or ice laland. and he said for a purely working meeting. and i'm the culprit. i in the white house said, well, you know, we should then tell them that the first lady is not coming because if wives are there, there will be a requirement for social things and so on. and if this is a working meeting, we want to stress that. and so the answer -- they said, well, are you sure mrs. gorbachev will not come? i said, well, if we tell them mrs. reagan isn't coming, surely she won't. and sure enough, we sent that message. and the soviet foreign ministry

prepared an agenda for gorbachev, sent it to him, and he sent it back saying where is time for my wife? >> where is time to consult my wife? that's what you wrote. where's time to consult my wife. >> to consult my wife, yes. in effect, the person who told me this later commented, he couldn't make a decision without her. and of course, then she shows up in iceland, nancy doesn't come, that annoys her, and it annoys the president even more. and one of the reasons they didn't stay over an extra day and try to work out things was that she wasn't there. if she had been there, i'm sure reagan would have stayed an extra day and maybe we would have come to an agreement in iceland which we would have found we couldn't carry out.

>> reagan was no more surprised than nancy reagan when she showed up. reagan, one of the few times, i think, and he did swear, but he wasn't quoted, was when this came from you and schultz to stay and see if we can work this out and reagan's reaction was, oh, shit. what he was oh shiting about was i promised nancy i'd be home for dinner. >> it was a running joke with the press corps that reagan couldn't spend a night without mommy, which is what he called her. but i've always believed that she was a much more forceful influence over american policy in all kinds of spheres than has ever been recognized that she'll ever tell us. she'll never tell us. but i've just had that feeling. >> well, you know, she didn't --

i never noticed that she got directly involved in the policy or the policy decisions. but the people and their manner, she did not like anticommunist rhetoric or hostile rhetoric. and those that were feeding it, she would make sure that their tenure was fairly short. and, of course, when you got a chief of staff like don regan who did not get along with her, to put it mildly, he, too, didn't last all that long. so she had a tremendous influence. i think also hague. i've always said that the story hague tells in his memoirs, when he was asked to come and brief the president-elect, they were together. and he asked her to leave the room because it was going to be a classified briefing. i said, from that moment, his tenure as secretary of state was limited. >> jack was never seen standing

next to him after that. if we come here in part tonight to praise the wives of great leaders, it's another parallel. i guess i didn't fully recognize the role until now that mrs. reagan played. but reza gorbachev played, i would say, a parallel role and probably in the strict political intellectual sense even a greater role. she had a ph.d. in sociology. she was actually better educated than gorbachev. and he has often said in private that she taught him a lot. and he didn't mean just about life, but she brought him books that he needed to read that he didn't know. it's not correct to say that gorbachev wasn't a politician. he grew up in exactly the same bureaucratic rough-and-tumble party apparatus that yeltsin did. they just turned out to be different people which reminds us that that apparatus was more diverse than we often thought it

was. but certainly today as gorbachev turns 80 and his wife has been gone ten years, eight years and the sadness of her absence is plainly with him any time you get him near the subject. he's beginning to write about and think through the influence that she had on his life. and in some of the pages he's written, he actually says, i became gorbachev because of reza. and i think the anecdote that reagan didn't want to spend a night away from his wife, which i don't find particularly uncharming, i think gorbachev said the same thing. that in all the years together, they had only spent one or two nights apart in their 50 years together. so these were political relationships. >> partners. >> that are crucial to the biographies of these men and to the extent that we attribute these men with historic changes, these two are factors in

explaining these changes. and i think, you know, more than just an anecdote. these women need to be given their due in history if they, in fact, played this role. i'm sure about reza. >> someone made the point that gorbachev really had no friends. ronald reagan really had no friends either. >> same thing. >> that's another direct similarity between them. often people who had known ronald reagan could be in the room with him for 20 years, and they didn't remember who they were because they weren't of use to them at that moment. i'm kind of an anti-first lady guy except in my own home. that is, after all -- >> what do you mean, you are an anti-first lady man? >> i don't like the idea that it's in capitals. they're not elected. they just happen to be people married, and they have -- they do have an influence on history.

>> that's why -- >> talk about provoking. >> no, i'm agreeing with you. that's why these wives don't admit how powerful they are because they're not elected, and they know the public doesn't like unelected power. but i believe that -- >> jack touched on their -- at least as far as the presidents that i've studied, where the wife's influence is is in personnel. they don't take on -- >> i think it's deeper than that. i think it is to policy, and they don't talk about it because of what you just said. the public recoils against that. i'm going to change the subject because soon we're going to invite the audience to ask some questions. and i want to bring us up to today, especially since steve just got back from moscow. the soviet -- russia. russia. it's not the soviet union anymore. i know that in your books, steve, you say that yeltsin is the one that really smothered

the democracy that gorbachev tried to establish. but we do have putin. and putin seems, at least to us watching from here, to have brought the soviet union back at least in terms of government to the kremlin days where other parties are smothered, the press is smothered. now we see what's going on in the middle east. all these protests. you're in moscow. people have been turning television on there and seeing in the middle east protesters in the streets against their corrupt governments with that same kind of dictatorial powers. what are the people in russia thinking when they see what's going on in the middle east about their own situation? and i'd like you all to comment after steve does. >> well, i can only report what my wife, katrina, and i saw and heard in moscow. everybody was talking about it. it was being shown on the television. but there are 150 million russians, thereabout.

and they reacted very differently. the very small contingent who call themselves real democrats openly said, we wish that would happen here. and they say the reason it doesn't happen here is the russian people aren't capable of it. i personally regard that as a slander on their own people and evidence of why they will never come to power in russia. nobody's ever going to vote for them. more thoughtful analytical people point out the following. that these -- i don't call them revolutions because until the regime is actually gone, it's not a revolution. when a leader goes, it's not a revolution. it's a change in leadership. but these turbulent protests on the streets in the middle east were driven by young people. russia's an aging country. and there are enough jobs for young people in russia today where you don't have this kind of mass discontent. secondly, whether we understand it or like it or not, putin's honest-to-gosh popularity ratings continue to be around 70%. >> still.

>> still. and this is from the lavata polling agency which is said to be kosher. the others are cooked. you can usually trust lavata to give you accurate figures. putin is a separate issue. mubarak presumably didn't have 70% approval ratings, nor does gadhafi. so the situation in russia is very different. on the other hand, i'll end on this, there's no doubt but that the two leaders of the country, president medvedev and prime minister putin, are paying very, very, very close attention to what's unfolding in the middle east. there's no doubt about it. they want to know if it's an omen or not. >> is it? >> i don't think it is, but the fact that they worry about it is significant. >> jack, talk about the soviet union today. i mean russia today. >> russia today. first of all, i think we have to understand that it is nothing

like the soviet union. people have still the great majority of the freedoms that gorbachev's reforms brought them. the ones which they can enjoy. they can travel freely. many of them leave. they can leave the country. they can come back. you know, it was like a prison before. you couldn't even travel freely within the country. and so on. yes, many of the democratic procedures are very flawed. it is a very corrupt society. and one could talk about that a lot. but it is, for most people, much better than it was in the '90s when the rest of the world called what they had democracy when it was anarchy. it was not democracy. and of course it gave democracy a bad name. but i think that the problems we

have had with russia, particularly during the bush/cheney administration, are really not a replay of the sort of cold war problems. most of those we created ourselves, to be quite honest. and you do not have a conflicting ideology. you do not have a country that is, i would say, invading other countries. the georgian situation is a special one. it would take a long time on that one. obviously, they are very sensitive about big, powerful countries doing military bases right along their borders in countries that were once part of them. and i remind americans that one of the things that brought us into the first world war was an attempt by germany to make an alliance with mexico. you just don't play around that way without consequences. but this has nothing to do with

the sort of issues we had during the cold war. so -- and i would say to americans, you know, the russians and others didn't stop dealing with us when the supreme court elected a president who got fewer votes than his successor, which didn't have much to do with democracy. and we would resent foreigners telling us. many americans seemed to think that we have to be nannies to the world. or teachers, to give them grades. you're not democratic enough. you're too democratic. i don't think that's our role. and i think that much of what you hear about russia, most of it's true. the corruption and whatnot. but that is going to be to russia's disadvantage. and as steve has pointed out, about 70% of the people still

will back putin because he brought some predictability to their life. and this is important. he brought a sense of respect for russia which they felt they had lost in the '90s. largely a result of our policies which i've already mentioned which treated them as a defeated country. >> jack, let me ask you, do you agree with steve that the cold war either didn't end or we have a new one? >> no, i don't see any ingredients to the cold war because the cold war was based on a deep ideological divide. and communism as an ideology and as a system of government is -- doesn't work anywhere. you know, you've still got it in cuba and north korea. you don't have it in china. the old communist party is ruling. and by the way, on human rights and other things, russia is better off than china. and