Ronald Reagan: Good Chemistry

"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."