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Later, realizing he had failed to dissuade Bush from launching a ground assault against the Iraqi army in Kuwait, Gorbachev took pains to assure the U.S. President that there were no hard feelings. He signed off after one of their last wartime calls, in English, "O.K., goodbye."
At every key moment over the past two years, Bush has gone out of his way to save Gorbachev's face, to make it easier for him to give ground. When Bush set off in July 1989 for Eastern Europe, then in the midst of liberating itself from Moscow, he told his aides and speechwriters to avoid any appearance that he was "poking a stick in Gorbachev's eye." Later that year, when the East German Communist regime threw open Checkpoint Charlie at Moscow's behest, Bush vowed he would not "dance on the Berlin Wall." And during the climax of the gulf war, he deliberately avoided humiliating Gorbachev over the failure of his last-minute interventions.
There is more to this bonding than the chemistry between a couple of pols. Bush is convinced that Gorbachev's survival in power still matters to the future of the U.S.S.R. as well as to the continuation of favorable trends in international relations. Lately, though, Bush has heard a good deal of theorizing to the contrary. Some, like Robert Gates, the President's Deputy National Security Adviser and nominee to head the CIA, believe in the cyclical theory of Russian and Soviet history: every interlude of reform inevitably gives way to a resurgence of repression; the good Gorbachev of glasnost and democratization in '89 turns into the bad Gorbachev of Bloody Sunday in Lithuania last January. Others believe in a linear theory: the breakup of the Soviet Empire and the transformation of the internal order have passed the point of no return, the keepers of the Stalinist flame are on their last legs, it is too late for a rightist coup; therefore Gorbachev's accommodations with the right accomplish nothing except to render him irrelevant.
Bush doesn't entirely buy either view. He still sees Gorbachev as the one Soviet figure who can maintain the balance between the forces of liberalization and those of reaction -- a balance more crucial to world peace than the one between U.S. and Soviet strategic nuclear might.
Bush doesn't see history moving in either circles or straight lines, but in zigs and zags. After all, he's done a bit of zigzagging himself over the years. And he has certainly had plenty of experience glancing nervously over his right shoulder. Most important, though, Bush is partial to the idea that at moments of great uncertainty and great opportunity, individual leaders matter more than abstract forces. The President of the U.S. sees the President of the U.S.S.R. as such a leader, and he'd like to be one himself.