Three ironies/points of historical evidence in a stormy sea of nonsense and deliberate disinformation.
St. Ronnie: Three ironies/points of historical evidence in a stormy sea of nonsense and deliberate disinformation.
Mikhail Gorbachev, together with Eduard Shevardnadze, deserves the lion’s share of the credit for ending the Cold War and the era of Soviet tyranny. Ronald Reagan was among the last of Western leaders to embrace Gorbachev’s effort—long after Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Hans Dietrich Genscher—who was roundly mocked by Reagan supporters—for knowing something they didn’t. Reagan passed up a golden invitation to end the nuclear arms race when Gorbachev offered it to him on a silver platter in exchange for giving up his nutty dream of a star wars system. Reagan refused and today we are nearly eighty billion dollars poorer for it. Had it not been for Nancy Reagan’s worrying about her husband’s historical legacy, it’s quite possible that the Reagan hard-liners would have continued to reinforce the Soviet hard-liners and history would have been much less kind to both sides. From Sound and Fury:
In March, 1985, Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikhail Gorbachev's closest friend and adviser, turned to his new boss, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, and blurted out the fact that had eluded virtually the entire Soviet leadership since Stalin's time. "Everything's rotten," observed Shevardnadze, "it has to be changed."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/