Not bad for Joe Sixpack

Lou Gannon writes, on Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday:

Soon after Reagan's first meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985, I interviewed him for a book and asked him what was the most neglected aspect of his biography. Negotiating for the Screen Actors Guild, he replied. What did he learn in these negotiations, I wanted to know. "That the purpose of a negotiation is to get an agreement," Reagan said.

And so it turned out in the fullness of time that this most conservative and anti-communist of all presidents sat down with Gorbachev and, after many ups and downs, on Dec. 8, 1987, signed the first treaty of the Cold War that actually reduced nuclear arsenals instead of stabilizing them at a higher level. It was an agreement by the way -- the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty -- that Reagan's ideological mentor William F. Buckley opposed and that columnist George Will called "moral disarmament."

Henry Kissinger, who retrospectively acclaims Reagan, said at the time that he had "grave reservations" about the INF Treaty, giving aid and comfort to the right in its campaign to prevent ratification. Reagan took his case to the people, and the Senate ratified the treaty.

It was a precursor to other agreements, the most recent signed by Barack Obama, which made deeper reductions in nuclear arsenals. Today, U.S. and Russian specialists inspect nuclear weapons on each other's soil, an action that would have been seen as unbelievably utopian when Reagan became president.

Via Steven Hayward. Photo link here.