Mr. President, just say ‘neyt’
Biden and Putin have exchanged testy messages, with Biden threatening severe economic sanctions against Russia if Putin doesn’t cool his invasion plans.
The Biden-Putin “showdown” reminds me of a talk I had with my father the night he lost the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford.
Alone together in a hotel room, I asked, “Why in the world would you even want to run for the presidency of the United States?”
“You know, Michael,” he said, “for so long I’ve watched American presidents sit down with secretary-generals of the Soviet Union and watched them ask us to give up something to get along with them.
“I want to be the first president to say ‘Nyet’ to a Secretary-General of the Soviet Union.”
That was in August of 1976.
My father didn’t even know he was going to seek the GOP nomination again because, as I always joke, Nancy hadn’t told him yet that he was going to run again in 1980.
Then in 1986 — ten years after he told me that story – he was called to Reykjavík by Mikhail Gorbachev to sign a nuclear weapons agreement.
My dad arrived in Iceland and Gorbachev said to him, “I’m only going to sign if you give up the Strategic Defense Initiative” (aka, “Star Wars,” the outer space-based missile defense system then in early development).
Most everyone in my dad’s cabinet thought that signing the treaty would be Ronald Reagan’s greatest legacy and they wanted him to do what Gorbachev wanted.
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Copyright 2022 Michael Reagan, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com
