TAKE HIM TO OUR EX-LEADERS : Carter, Ford, Nixon and Reagan Can Tell Gorbachev About Unemployment Benefits
As 70,000-odd employees of General Motors can confirm, sudden unemployment hits pretty hard. For Mikhail Gorbachev, it may have hit even harder. After all, American workers have grown accustomed to being tossed aside by companies whose twin obsessions are downsizing and maintaining executive pay scales. But in the entire history of the onetime Soviet Union, unemployment for general secretaries of the Communist Party has usually been achieved only with the aid of death.
Nikita Khrushchev managed to survive his ouster. He retired to a farm, presumably banging his shoe on the hay wagon for the subsequent decades. But one of the things the Soviet Union never managed to come up with, along with an efficient food-distribution system, was a method of occupying the time of its former leaders.
So, as Gorbachev gazes into the abyss of Life After Power, there are few home-grown examples for him to follow. Fortunately, this country has made dramatic strides in medical as well as political science, so our former Presidents, after peacefully handing off the mantle of office, spend ever-increasing amounts of time living emeritously. Mikhail Gorbachev, if only he would look in our direction, could find a variety of model ex-presidencies to emulate.
He could, for example, forswear worldly fame and fortune and dedicate himself to the task of building shelter for the poor, actually taking hammer to nail and wood in the humblest of surroundings. This is the Jimmy Carter pattern, and its seeming generosity, as well as its inherent photo-oppability might make it ideal work for a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The danger is that the intended recipients of the housing might turn up their noses at the gift. We’ve all heard about the pathetic quality of Russian apartments. Gorbachev might find his face in Esquire under the caption “Would you buy a used dacha from this man?”
He could go the other way and become a capitalist with a vengeance, accepting--or even soliciting--offers to appear at everything from university symposiums to 19th-hole corporate booze fests on the PGA tour, as long as his hefty price was met. This could be called the Gerald Ford model, and it might make the appropriate statement about a former Communist’s newfound appreciation for the magic of the marketplace. Given the smidgen of gossip we’ve heard about Raisa’s tastes in expensive clothing, the Ford option might be Gorbachev’s best bet for maintaining the only domestic tranquillity that’s still his responsibility.
You can make a substantial amount of money in a somewhat less sleazy fashion, however, if you use your ex-presidency as the platform for launching an unending series of expensive, pompous, unreadable books on the state of the world and how to run it better. This, of course, is the Richard Nixon approach. Like the L.A. driving school of the 1950s that used to boast “We taught a horse to drive,” the Nixon method is near-miraculous in its ability to confer dignity on the terminally undignified.
Gorbachev has already taken a tentative step in this direction, decorating shelves around the world with his largely unread version of life during the abortive coup. Additionally, Gorbachev actually might have useful things to say about international affairs. The danger here, of course, is that one can easily slip into a sour-grapes mode. Gorbachev clearly has some axes to grind, and it might be unseemly for him to keep working on them in print. Nixon, faced with the same danger, has mastered such an impenetrable writing style that, if he’s grinding any hardware at all, we don’t notice.
Perhaps the best model of an ex-presidency, the one that might appeal most to a stressed-out Gorbachev, is the Ronald Reagan example. You sit at home and watch TV. You occasionally venture forth to Chasen’s for a big dinner. And, if you need a big paycheck, you make a quick pit stop in Japan. Best of all, if anybody asks Gorbachev what went wrong during his time in office, he can just smile warmly and respond, “Well, gee, fellas, I don’t remember.”
