"Good Chemistry"

By Hugh Sidey/Moscow

"There is no way I really can explain how I came to be here." It is Wednesday evening, his fourth day and final night in Moscow, and Ronald Reagan's voice is frazzled with fatigue. Yet it also conveys a sense of wonder at his remarkable odyssey. It is the voice of baseball on radio in Des Moines, of Hollywood flickering off the screen, of Sacramento, of Washington, and now of Moscow: friendly, unhurried in the midst of planned chaos. He ventures the thought that so many shared while watching him co-star with his fellow showman Mikhail Gorbachev in Red Square. "I never expected to be here," the President says.

The most powerful anti-Soviet crusader of the modern era has become its most determined summiteer. "If we have accomplished something," Reagan says in a telephone conversation with TIME from Spaso House, the U.S. Ambassador's residence, "if we have made war more distant, then that is a source of satisfaction." He says it so simply, so matter-of-factly. His manner is still rooted nine time zones west, in the Cornbelt, but his sympathy seems to have shifted east by a continent or two. Reagan is now Gorbachev's hiking buddy around Red Square, his point man as Gorbachev goes into a contentious party conference.

Reagan is also a preacher -- or, perhaps, a traveling salesman. He believes that the mashed-potato circuit, and now the caviar circuit, is made for hustling. He came to Moscow firm in his intent to discuss human rights rather than wrestle with the details of arms control. And discuss he did. Partly this reflected his need to burnish his hard-nosed conservative credentials back home: there was worry that he seemed more glowing in his endorsements of Gorbachev than of George Bush. But mainly it was because Reagan enjoys being a missionary and a teacher.

"I wasn't speaking to the American Legion," Reagan says. "I wasn't speaking to the Chamber of Commerce. I was trying to explain America and what we are all about." In his speech to Moscow's cultural elite, he gave new insight into why he finds himself breaking out of his stereotype as an unvarnished foe of what he once called the "evil empire." "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 also touched on the soul of his nation. "Political leadership in a democracy requires seeing past the abstractions and embracing the vast diversity of humanity, and doing it with humility; listening as best you can, not just to those with high positions, but to the cacophonous voices of ordinary people, and trusting those millions of people, keeping out of their way . . . And the word we have for this is 'freedom.' "

His relentless lecturing on human-rights abuses in the U.S.S.R. sometimes jangled Soviet sensibilities. Reagan is defensive about that. "I did not want to kick anybody in the shins," he says. "I didn't think anything I said was too harsh."

Yes, he answers, he'd heard the great chorus of bells ringing especially for him from the Danilov Monastery, a spiritual island in the embrace of Moscow. There he had summoned all his stagecraft to read lines from Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "The secret of the pacifying Russian countryside . . . is in the churches . . ."

"George Shultz told me about Red Square," the President confides over the phone. "I wanted to see it. I asked the General Secretary if he could take me by for a look, and when we went there we had that little walk. I was very impressed by the size and expanse of the square. And there were several groups of people out there, and we stopped to talk with them. Here, too, they were so warm and enthusiastic, just like all the others I had met in the city."

But why hadn't he asked to go see the body of Lenin in the tomb on Red Square? He was so close. "The tomb is only open four days," Reagan says. "And the line was so long we did not want to interrupt it." The voice of Dutch Reagan seems to grow a little tentative. Was there an ideological limit to photo opportunities he would allow in this Kremlin pilgrimage? Was there a deal with his host, spoken or not, that Lenin and Reagan should lie and stand apart? Reagan doesn't say.

That Reagan believes Gorbachev is far removed from Lenin is plain. The friendship with Gorbachev, he admits, is real. "There is good chemistry between us," Reagan says. "I think progress has been made by us. I think that through this succession of summits there is a much better understanding. I think we made gains this time."

There is something so personal about this summit, the President explains. Systems may be brutish, bureaucrats may fail. But men can sometimes transcend all that, transcend even the forces of history that seem destined to keep them apart. The idea that he would ever go to Moscow was only a dim possibility until he met Gorbachev. Then it sprang to life in an intimate inkling.

At their Geneva summit in 1985, Reagan recalls, "we went down to the pool house which I had prepared and we sat in front of the open fire and talked. On the way back, I turned to him and said, 'You've never been to our country. I'd like you to see it.' And he said, 'All right. I'll go to Washington for a summit. But then let's have another one in Moscow and you can see our country.' When we went back and told the others about two summits they nearly fell out of their chairs. That was the first time I really had a feeling that I would see Moscow."

From then it was only a matter of time before Reagan would be face to face with Lenin's legacy. He and Nancy entered the Kremlin on a red carpet that led up a grand staircase toward St. George's Hall. Reagan looked up and the whole world seemed filled by the huge and powerful painting of Lenin addressing the Communist Youth League in 1920. Reagan never missed a step. "I sort of expected him to be there," Reagan says. "I knew I was going to see a lot of Lenin."

"The biggest thing about this visit," he declares, "the thing that impressed me the most, was the people. They were lined up along the street by the thousands. I was amazed by their sincere warmth and pleasure at us being there. At first I was trying to wave from inside the car. Then I decided to open the window a little bit and stick my hand out so that they could actually see there was a person in the car. They seemed to respond to that."

Because their son Ron had urged the Reagans to see the Arbat, Moscow's lively pedestrian mall, the first thing they did after the greetings was take a stroll through the area. It turned into a crunch. "We thought we could sneak out," Reagan relates. "But the word must have gotten around. A lot of people showed up and it was the same warm welcome. The damper was how the KGB security men treated their own people. Our problems are not people to people, they are government to government."

Inside the Kremlin, he noted the religious paintings that adorn the walls. He did his share of neck craning at the dinners and ceremonies, and the cameras, thus directed, followed his gaze to the figures of Christ and the Apostles. He wondered to himself whether, if something were to happen to the decorations, they could be restored. "I looked up at all the beautiful work," says Reagan, "and I thought about our great technology and our & ability to build skyscrapers and all that, and I had to wonder if we could duplicate this. Could we find people in the world to do that kind of work?" This was, perhaps, another subtle reprimand for all nations that repress individuality, a theme he preached from the Danilov Monastery to Moscow State University.

When he mentions his visit to the university, Reagan seems to get a surge of enthusiasm. "That was very encouraging," he says. "Their interest was genuine. When I finished talking to the Soviet students, I met with 35 American students who are studying at the university. I can't believe this interrelationship does not affect governments. That's why I want to set up a program for more exchange, for thousands of students."

The summit meeting is waning, a remarkable free-form talkathon that flowed across the city from the elegant Kremlin chambers to the sullen, gritty streets. It may prove, when history looks back, to be Reagan's finest hour, not to be measured by the treaties and agreements signed, because they were of modest nature, but by the easing of tension and the nurturing of understanding between the suspicious superpowers. During his visit Reagan defined his presidency in more detail and feeling than he has ever done. He was making a bid for history to look up and take notice.