Reagan and Gorbachev: How mortal enemies became deal-making friends
Take a close look at this photo. You would never know that these two world leaders showed their mutual distrust and disdain by pointing tens of thousands of nuclear missiles at each other’s nations. And yet there they are in a loving embrace of each other, knowing that they helped each other rewrite history.
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev’s first meeting in Geneva, Switzerland is the focus of the Goodman Theatre’s production of Blind Date, running through Feb. 25 in Chicago. Over the course of the play, you get to see how a conversation between diplomats over shrimp cocktails in a Washington, D.C. hotel led to a landmark arms control treaty that eventually thawed the cold war.
Even if you don’t see the play, studying the stretch of history from the Geneva summit in November 1985 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 is entirely worthwhile. It may even be required reading for anyone interested in techniques of how to engage with someone worlds apart from you — after all, what greater divide could there have been but for the democratic west and the communist east during the cold war. What Reagan and Gorbachev achieved in their time is a brilliant example of how the most incorrigible opponents with the most irreconcilable differences can come together and make a deal that can change the world.
