Not since John F. Kennedy arrived to denounce the Berlin Wall in 1963 have West Germans lavished such adulation on a foreign visitor as they did last week on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. But the messages left by the two travelers, their visits separated by 26 years of history, were nearly as disparate as the directions from which they arrived. Whereas Kennedy's aim was to spread a message of resolve at the very height of the cold war, the Soviet leader proclaimed a new era in which East and West could peacefully share their common continent.
Everywhere he went, Gorbachev and...
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