Our favorite story about Mikhail Gorbachev, the one-time Soviet party boss who died Tuesday at age 91, concerns the scoop that brought his name to the American public. He was, after all, essentially unknown to the world until a telephone rang at the foreign desk of the New York Post. 

The phone was picked up by a young editor named Eric Fettmann. At the time Yuri Andropov was still the Soviet strongman. Mr. Fettmann picked up the phone to discover that the caller was one of the greatest reporters of the era, Uri Dan, the Post’s correspondent in Israel.

Except that Uri Dan announced that he was calling from a pay phone in some place like Cyprus. Dan was excited. He asked Mr. Fettmann to fetch from the Post’s “morgue,” meaning library of clippings, the folder on Soviet agriculture. Dan said he would stay on the line until Mr. Fettmann returned.

When a panting Mr. Fettmann came back on the line, Dan asked him to read every name in the file. Fettmann went through scores of names and then said, “Mikhail Gorbachev.” At which Dan exclaimed, “That’s it! That’s it! Take a story!” Then he proceeded to dictate a world exclusive.

It was that the Soviet Politburo, meeting in secret session, had decided on a relatively obscure official who’d done great work on agriculture in the Stavropol region to lead the Soviet Union toward the 21st century. Uri Dan broke the story two years before Gorbachev actually assumed power. 

What strikes us about that yarn is how different the Soviet Union was from our democracy. What happened to Gorbachev couldn’t have happened here — an obscure figure suddenly tapped, in secret, without any such daintiness as getting the consent of the governed, and introduced to the world as a fait accompli.

That means that Gorbachev, however sympathetic a person he might have been, could have nothing like the self confidence of President Reagan, who, after all, was a powerfully unifying figure  who’d won his first term by carrying 44 of our 50 states and his second by carrying 49 states.

Yet Reagan professed to like Gorbachev, whom he called — in the prologue to his own autobiography — “a different sort of Russian.” That impression arose, Reagan wrote, from a correspondence of letters he had been conducting with the Soviet leader. 

Reagan reckoned that to “break down the barriers of mistrust” between the Soviets and America, “we had to begin by establishing a personal relationship between the leaders of the two most powerful nations on earth.” He sought to achieve a breakthrough at the Geneva Summit in November 1985.

Yet while Reagan sensed Gorbachev might be a reasonable man, the Gipper harbored no illusions about him as the Summit began. “I knew very well the Soviet Union’s record of deceit and its long history of betrayal of international treaties,” Reagan wrote. “I had met Gromyko. I had met Brezhnev.”

Every Soviet leader “since Lenin,” Reagan explained, “was committed to the overthrow of democracy and the free enterprise system.” He knew their “strategy of deceit” from experience, having “gone head to head with Communists who were intent on taking over our country and destroying democracy.”

This wisdom had served as the backbone of Reagan’s strategy for defeating communism. He knew, he wrote, that he had to “negotiate with the Soviets from a position of strength, not weakness.” Reagan had spent his first term in office building up America’s military power to force the Soviets to the negotiating table.

So while Gorbachev, like his communist predecessors, “believed completely in the Soviet way of life,” Reagan reckoned, “I knew that he also had strong motives for wanting to end the arms race.” Reagan saw that Russia’s “economy was a basket case, in part because of enormous expenditures on arms.”

Gorbachev, Reagan said, “had to know we could outspend the Soviets as long as we wanted to.” The diplomatic breakthrough at Geneva signaled, in Reagan’s telling, that “something fundamental had changed in the relationship between our countries.” It spoke to Gorbachev’s character, but even more to Reagan’s strategic insight.

Reagan called it “not only a better relationship between our countries but a friendship between two men.” It led, within four years, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then the demise of the Soviet Union itself. Reagan’s victory vindicated personal diplomacy, and the strategy of never bargaining from a position of weakness.