In response to my U-2 posting, former US Ambassador to the former Soviet Union -- Jack Matlock Jr. -- provided me this link to a Washington Post blog promoting Ambassador Matlock's new book "Superpower Illusions."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/04/how_myths_about_the_soviet_uni.html#more
I was a student of Ambassador Matlock's during my time at SIPA and it was fascinating to hear him tell first-hand, fly-on-the-wall stories about his dealings with Ronald Reagan, James Baker III, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and so many others who helped usher the end of the Cold War.
Although I don't agree with all of his foreign policy criticisms about recent administrations, one thing Ambassador Matlock emphasized in class was how the end of the Cold War shouldn't be looked at as a zero-sum game where the US won and the Soviets lost. There were many reasons for the remarkably peaceful collapse of the USSR and it should be stressed how magnaminous Reagan (and, later, George Herbert Walker Bush) was when events unfurled. In particular, I recall at one news conference during a Reagan-Gorby summit, a reporter asked Reagan if he thought the Soviets were still an evil empire. He responded by saying -- and I'm paraphrasing -- "No, those days are over. This a new time and the Russian people have new leaders."
I think it's noteworthy that Reagan never crowed or gloated over foreign policy successes. There were no "Mission Accomplished" moments but -- and I want to strongly emphasize this next point -- neither was he a president who couldn't get through a teleprompted speech praising some scanty international agreement he took part in without using the word "unprecedented" multiple times.
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