NOTHING ABOUT MIKHAIL GORBAchev's triumphal two-week tour of the U.S. $ suggested that he was a politician removed from power. Americans, who still see the last President of the Soviet Union as the man most responsible for ending the cold war, received him with standing ovations from Stanford University to the New York Stock Exchange to Capitol Hill. Though he resigned his office more than four months ago, he has lost neither the aura nor the trappings of a major political figure.
Nothing about Gorbachev himself, when he met for an hour with TIME's editors at the Waldorf Towers in New York City last week, suggested a diminution of power either. This was, his press representative explained, not an interview but only an informal conversation, and he could not be quoted directly.
Riding the transcontinental wave of applause and buoyed by his days of high- profile meetings, the ex-President was as ebullient and voluble as ever. He looked fit and sounded feisty. This was not a man nursing a sense of regret or meditating on mistakes he might have made. Though his visit to the U.S. was ostensibly to raise funds and make contacts for his new political think tank, the Gorbachev Foundation, it also eased him smoothly into the rarefied ranks of senior statesmen whose pronouncements are expected to reverberate around the globe. His theme is a corollary of his own perestroika: the whole world is in need of change and reorientation.
Gorbachev's speaking style, usually discursive and indirect, is more hortatory than ever, almost condescending in its certitude. He can pontificate, but then compensates by flashing his grin, bouncing in his chair and making a sweeping gesture to pull in his listeners. There is much that is theatrical in his performance, beginning with his voice, which he projects like an operatic baritone. He takes many questions as personal criticism and obviously believes the best defense is a good offense, demolishing the questioner's premise as he bulldozes into the points he wants to make.
Gorbachev would not be drawn into an admission that socialist theory had failed or that communism was dead. An alternative between capitalism and socialism is in the offing, he said. The use of force for political ends is being discredited. The 20th century has little to teach the 21st, and new thinking is needed.
Looking back at perestroika and glasnost, he did concede that he had no idea what those changes would lead to. He thought at the outset that he could tinker a bit to ease the pressures on the Soviet economy and make society more comfortable. He blames the system for making that impossible. Initially, he said, some progress was visible, but when senior officials of the party and state saw how the reforms might threaten their power and positions, they put on the brakes. If the ruling hierarchy's grip was to be broken, he decided, a more democratic form of politics would have to be introduced. He assumed that power would have to be decentralized and that he would have to give up some of his authority. But he could not and did not know where it all was headed.