President George H.W. Bush approached the Malta summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 20 years ago this week determined to avoid arms control topics and simply promote a public image of "new pace and purpose" with him "leading as much as Gorbachev"; but realized from his face-to-face discussions that Gorbachev was offering an arms race in reverse, according to previously secret documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive (www. nsarchive.org).
The documents include the most complete transcript of the Malta summit ever published â?? excerpted from the forthcoming book, "Masterpieces of History": The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989 (edited by Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok for the Central European University Press). The transcript is a translation of the Soviet record from the Gorbachev Foundation, since the U.S. memcons remain, astonishingly, still classified at the George H.W. Bush Library in Texas.
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