When Mikhail Gorbachev walked into the room for our interview in Moscow, he brought with him the impressive aura of a man who was still a sitting president, a confident leader who was prepared to devote just a bit of his busy schedule to yet another ho-hum exercise of message deliverance, with yet another Western journalist. This one with a camera crew.
I had hoped for something more journalistically promising — a somewhat spontaneous (and more productive) give-and-take. After all, it had been 11 years since his Soviet Union collapsed around him.
So, as he entered the conference room of his Gorbachev Foundation, I decided we needed a change of pace. I walked up, shook his hand, and said it’s nice to be back in Moscow again. My first visit, I said, was way back in 1972 when as Newsday’s Washington correspondent, I flew there with President Richard Nixon to cover the first-ever superpower strategic arms limitation summit with Leonid Brezhnev. And I added something like this:
