>>The right-wingers in his time skewered him for talking to Gorbachev!
>Where'd you read this at? Reagan was great after crawling around with our tails between our legs with Carter...
Reagan's popularity at home imporved -- except in the hard-line conservative precincts. A few months earlier, activists in the new right and conservative Republicans were defending the militant president and railing at the critics of Iran-contra as the plotters of a liberal coup d'etat. Now Reagan was castigated as the problem. Howard Phillips denounced him as a "very weak man with a strong wife and a strong staff" who had become "a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda." William Buckley and his National Review began a campaign to kill any treaty regarding the missiles in Europe. The familiar hard-liners in Congress such as Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina -- including Senator Dan Quayle -- complaining that control of the White House's foreign policy had been seized by dupes and liberal quislings. The Washington Times likened Reagan to Neville Chamberlain, the weak-kneed Brithish prime minister who tried to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. Neoconservative columnists, such as Charles Krauthammer, repeatedly denounced the wider phenomenom of going "dizzy over Gorbachev."
The conservatives' frustration was understandable. Since the exposure of the Iran-contra affair, the exit of foreign policy hard-liners from the administration, their replacement by moderates, and the enlarged influence of Secretary of State Shultz had, indeed, dramatically shited the balance of power in the White House. But Reagan also knew very well what he thought he was doing, and tried to explain himself to old allies like Buckley, though with little success. At the summit in Washington in early December, Reagan not only signed the INF accord... but also indulged Gorbachev's media offensive and did nothing to hide the basic warmth that the two leaders had developed. "Doveryai, no proveryai," the president said at the signing ceremony, using a Russian phrase he had learned that meant "Trust but verify." "You repeat this at every meeting," Gorbachev replied, to great laughter. "I like it," Reagan retorted, to even greater laughter. The superpowers' antagonism had turned into vaudeville repartee.
The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz, pp. 261
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