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At Chernenko's funeral in 1985, Gorbachev encountered Armand Hammer, the American businessman who has been trading with the Soviets since Lenin's day, and denounced Ronald Reagan to him as a man who wanted war. He mellowed after meeting the U.S. President later that year at their first summit in Geneva, and today speaks respectfully of Reagan. Still, when Hammer called at the Kremlin in 1986, Gorbachev told him, "Your President couldn't make peace if he wanted to. He's a prisoner of the military-industrial complex," which in Gorbachev's mind seems to be both all powerful and moved by an implacable hostility to the Soviets. Hammer tried to dissuade him but got nowhere, largely, he suspects, because Gorbachev had been put in a defensive mood by U.S. and other foreign criticism of his handling of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear-plant accident. Says Hammer: "Gorbachev's weakness is that he has a temper, and that he flares up, and that he has a lot of pride, of course, and self-confidence." The Soviet leader has generally managed to keep his temper under control in public. Indeed, friends and opponents agree that he is almost invariably polite. But he does blow up now and then -- especially, as foreign TV viewers have discovered, when he is questioned sharply about the Soviet Union's human-rights record.
Gorbachev, however, need not admire Americans in order to live peaceably with them. Nor is it necessary for the U.S. to enroll in a Gorbachev personality cult in order to recognize the Soviet leader as being a figure of hope, for all his contradictions. His upbringing, schooling and rise to power have produced a man of immense incongruities, stubborn and flexible, a faithful ideologue and a radical experimenter.
He could be the most dangerous adversary the U.S. and its allies have faced in decades -- or the most constructive. Molded by famine and war, promised a measure of hope after Stalin's demise and then abruptly disillusioned, Gorbachev is not the sort of man who would willingly drag his country back into the dark days of repression, economic hardship and international obloquy. If there is a lesson in the 56-year education of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, it is that a new, unfamiliar kind of leader has risen in the Soviet Union, and that the old rules of dealing with that long-suffering land are suddenly outdated. For the West, the education is just beginning.
"Like mountain climbers on one rope, the world's nations can either climb together to the summit or fall together into the abyss."
On a visit to Prague, April 10, 1987