At the October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan had agreed to eliminate all nuclear weapons, to the consternation of his advisors, until Gorbachev insisted that testing for the Star Wars missile defense shield in outer space be suspended. Two of Reagan's utopian dreams collided. But after the exposure of the Iran-Contra scandal, Gorbachev furiously rewrote the script, dropping the objection to Star Wars. (Nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov told him it was a fantasy.) Instead, he crafted a practical arms reduction agreement, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty. Despite the opposition from ideological conservatives and "realist" conservatives, including Henry Kissinger and Reagan's own vice president, George H.W. Bush, Reagan seized upon the treaty. He was encouraged by his ultimate handler, his wife, Nancy, who was also instrumental in empowering Secretary of State George Shultz to act as negotiator.

With script in hand, Reagan was Reagan again. In September 1987, he addressed the United Nations General Assembly: "I occasionally think how our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." That December, Gorbachev came to the White House to sign the INF treaty. Reagan, through the succeeding months, kept musing, "What if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by a power from outer space, from another planet?" Then, in June 1988, Reagan, the arch-anticommunist, went to Moscow, where he declared that "of course" the Cold War was over and that his famous reference to the "evil empire" was from "another time."

Reagan did not bring about the downfall of the Soviet Union, which was crumbling from terminal internal decay. But to the degree that he gave Gorbachev political time and space, he lent support to the liberalizing reform that hastened the end. In reaching out to Gorbachev, Reagan blithely discarded the right-wing faith that totalitarian communism was unchangeable and that only rollback, not containment and negotiation, would lead to its demise.

Reagan was acutely self-conscious about his about-face, and on his trip to Moscow he explained it in the terms with which he was most comfortable. "In the movie business actors often get what we call 'typecast,'" he said. "The studios come to think of you as playing certain kinds of roles, and no matter how hard you try, you just can't get them to think of you in any other way. Well, politics is a little like that too. So I've had a lot of time and reason to think about my role."

Reagan's embrace of Gorbachev rescued his own political standing. His rise in popularity to the mid-50 percent was essential in lifting his vice president's presidential ambition, for elder Bush was moon to Reagan's sun. Yet Bush distanced himself, adopting the realist's view that Reagan suffered from "euphoria" and that nothing fundamental in the world was changing.

Now, President Bush eulogizes Reagan as his example. To the extent he was studying the Reagan presidency at the time, he took away the myths, not the lessons, of history. Bush has his own doctrine, a Manichaean battle with evildoers and an army of neoconservatives to lend complex rationalizations to his simplifications. Reagan was saved by the wholesale firing of the neoconservatives, the rejection of conservative dogma and a deliberate strategy to transcend his old typecasting. It is why he rose above his ruin, and rides, even in death, into the sunset of a happy Hollywood ending.

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