was always a lucky politician. Along came Gorbachev.” Essentially what had changed was that Gorbachev was more in touch with the actual inner workings of the Soviet Union. “They [knew] it was a bad scene. . they were quite different people than their predecessors . . . we saw in that an opportunity,” George Shultz notes. The opportunity was there and Reagan captured it. The thaw in relations led to the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union....
