Transcript: Chapter 27

Announcer: Miene damen und herren, Mr. Ronald Reagan und Mrs. Nancy Reagan.

Morris: The one thing that Reagan was more passionate about than anything other was the unsupportable phenomenon of totalitarian power enslaving a large part of the world's population. In other words what he was really looking forward to was the collapse of Soviet communism. He wanted to see the Wall come down.

Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

Morris: He wanted to see free elections and freedom, and liberty and Christianity in Russia. It's as simple as that.

Narrator: Reagan's "Mission to Moscow" in May 1988 was his final crusade. It began with a threat that forced the Soviets to let a Jewish couple emigrate.

George Shultz, Secretary of State: He said, well, ah, on the way to the Kremlin, what I'm going to do is go to the apartment of this couple that you're not allowing to emigrate and visit with them. With 2,000 press along, you know. So he said that that's what he intended to do. By this time they knew Ronald Reagan well enough to know that if he said that was what he was going to do he would do it. He did not, ah, make idle threats.

Narrator: The next day he mortified the Soviets by entertaining 100 dissidents at the U.S. Embassy.

Reagan: On human rights, on the fundamental dignity of the human person, there can be no relenting. For now, we must work for more. Always more.

Narrator: At the Danilov monastery he pushed for more religious freedom.

Reagan: Our people feel keenly when religious freedom is denied to anyone anywhere and hope with you that all the many Soviet religious communities will soon be able to practice their religion freely and instruct their children in the fundamentals of their faith.

Narrator: At Moscow State University, Reagan tried to convert the next generation of Soviet leaders with his simple message of freedom.

Reagan: Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free. We do not know what the conclusion will be of this journey. But we're hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope.

Narrator: Until the end, Ronald Reagan tried to undermine the foundations of Communist rule, to preach his dream of freedom. In his convictions he never changed. But his behavior did change. He found a Communist he could trust.

Reagan: Before things get too far out of hand, we'll find ourselves standing like this.

Bessmertnykh: He was a different man by the end of the '80s from what he was at the beginning of the '80s. And he realized the importance of the improved relationship with the Soviet Union and he has personally contributed to that very, very much. And that has changed the world. It presented the scene for the end of the Cold War completely which happened just several, a couple of years after that.

Reporter: You still think you are in an evil empire, Mr. President?

Reagan: No.

Reporter: Why not?

Reagan: I was talking about another time. Another era.

Mikhail Gorbachev: This statement, I think, really focused, concentrated, all the changes that happened to Ronald Reagan, himself. It means that even a person who had a kind of bias and who was at an age when it's not easy to change, he showed that he was able and ready to change his position, to change his evaluation. So he is really a very big person. A very great political leader and, well, the rest is up to you.

Narrator: When Reagan was in Moscow in May 1988, the Cold War was ending. He never expected the tide would turn so quickly. That same month Gorbachev began withdrawing Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The next year, in June 1989, Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland. Gorbachev refused to intervene. As Reagan had foreseen, the rest of Eastern Europe followed. In November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. In February 1990 in free elections in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas were voted out of power.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet system's best response to the challenge of Ronald Reagan, could not control the reforms he had begun. On Christmas Day 1991 he dissolved the Soviet Union. What Reagan had predicted before Parliament came true. The Soviet Union was consigned to the ash heap of history.

Lewis: You can't deny credit to a president who was in power at a time when, the Cold War was, though we may not have known it at the time, approaching its end -- can't deny that credit. On the other hand, we paid a terrible price for that, and we are continuing to pay it, and our children are going to pay it, because we ran up budget deficits cumulatively larger than everything from the beginning of this country to that date which makes the ability of the national government in this country to govern very limited.

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