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When he came into office. bret: but nobody, including reagan, could know how close he was to pushing the soviet empire to collapse. >> didn't know at that point that he was going to win the cold war. moscow was still very much a superpower and the equal of the united states. bret: there were whispers, plenty of them that reagan, now 77 years old had, lost his edge. so what to expect from his last summit with gorbachev, three days in moscow. great theater, at the very least. >> the trip to moscow wrote itself. the great cold warrior, ronald reagan, in the heart of the evil empire. literally in ...

When he came into office. bret: but nobody, including reagan, could know how close he was to pushing the soviet empire to collapse. >> didn't know at that point that he was going to win the cold war. moscow was still very much a superpower and the equal of the united states. bret: there were whispers, plenty of them that reagan, now 77 years old had, lost his edge. so what to expect from his last summit with gorbachev, three days in moscow. great theater, at the very least. >> the trip to moscow wrote itself. the great cold warrior, ronald reagan, in the heart of the evil empire. literally in ...

The compound is named after him. and people have been putting flowers there. so he's a revered figure. in his remarks in 1999 when the compound was named after him, i took a look at those. he said some moving things. but the one line that stuck for me, he said "i came here and this place became part of my heartbeat." i thought that was -- you know, he just was a remarkable individual in that regard. and it frankly doesn't surprise me, brian, that the russians have this reaction because i happened to have briefed george bush a couple days before the berlin wall came down. he was going to a summ...

Great power. he had great power. when i first briefed him in the oval office, the first time i entered that place, rather nervous as a young man, a friend and i were there to brief him before a summit with gorbachev in 1989. he asked us, would you like coffee? i said, yeah. he poured it. and we were sort of stunned. we expected a butler to come in and do that. but he was that kind of person. there was no pretence there. he put you at ease and related to you on a human level, even though he possessed this great power. that's a very rare quality in a leader, i think. >> let's listen to president...

>> those first couple of years of the reagan first term, reagan didn't meet any soviet leaders. when asked about it, reagan said they keep dying on me. that was true, but he wasn't making much of an effort, and there was a fear that if you don't reach out to the soviets, they are so afraid of us, they'll do something stupid. >> president reagan has had a change of heart. he is now much more eager to meet with the new leader of the soviet union and he has sent mikhail gorbachev a letter suggesting a summit. ♪ >> all previous summits had had a communique worked out ahead of time by the two for...