Reagan: The Life (134 page)

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s “Iron Lady,” was the only person who sometimes intimidated him. But he loved her politics and determination, and she reciprocated.

They should have been the oddest couple in world affairs: the American president who denounced the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of that very empire. But they developed a close working relationship and a personal friendship. Here the much older Reagan, coatless and hatless in the Geneva cold, greets the bundled Gorbachev.

They came very close at Reykjavik to an agreement that might have led to the abolition of nuclear weapons. Their faces show their disappointment.

The Iran-contra scandal was the darkest blot on the Reagan administration’s record. The president gets the embarrassing investigative report from Tower Commission chairman John Tower and member Edmund Muskie.

It wasn’t the world-changing pact he and Gorbachev wanted, but the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was still a big deal.

Reagan bids the American people farewell on his last day as president: January 20, 1989.

From the complexities of politics to the simple pleasures: at Rancho del Cielo.