Bear in mind here that Yeltsin is a massive man, more than 6 feet, and Garrison is a wisp of a fellow. All the same, Garrison had had enough. Although he does not speak Yeltsin's language, he confronted the raging politician and said in his halting Russian something like, "Hey, motherfucker, I got you here and my rep is on the line so you are just going to behave and do what I say." A stunned Yeltsin obeyed and eventually won an audience with Bush, Quayle and Scowcroft.
Not surprisingly, Garrison never suggested establishing a joint foundation with Yeltsin.
It's May 1992, and Garrison is organizing Gorbachev's first tour of the United States since his ouster. One of Gorbachev's destinations - Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri - suggests Garrison and Gorbachev's intent.
Churchill, one of Garrison's heroes, made his famous Iron Curtain speech here. Why not have the man who lifted that curtain talk about the future from the same place? Such a symbolic moment, such a grand act of imagination.
The Gorbachev/Churchill parallels extend from there. At the time of his defining address, Churchill was, like Gorbachev, hailed as a hero but was chased from office all the same. Both were haunted by a sense of things undone.
So Gorbachev comes to Missouri, not far from where Garrison's family once lived, in hopes of memorializing himself. After Churchill's speech, the town built the portly prime minister a memorial - a museum, a statue and a library. As Gorbachev makes his speech on the post-Cold War world, nearby is a far less grand icon of Gorbachev's legacy: a 32-foot-long sculpture fashioned from pieces of the Berlin Wall.
The day of the speech everyone wonders: Will Gorbachev make history like Churchill? Will he utter a pharse to define the new age? Will he retake the world stage?
Today, the answers are clearly no, no and no, says Richard Starr, a former arms negotiator for the Reagan administration who is now a Hoover Institute scholar.
"The man is irrelevant," Starr says. "No one is paying attention. Maybe with this foundation he can rub shoulders with statesmen. But I don't think he has anything left to contribute anymore. He already made his contribution, which was immense and courageous. But his time has passed."
Starr and other Russian scholars believe Garrison and Gorbachev's hopes for international cooperation on a grand scale - even world government - are bound to be dashed by reality.
"You can build an intellectual construct and say it's necessary, " Starr continues. "OK, it's necessary. Yes, you want to stop a Chechnya from even starting. But there are no common denominators. You would have to assume norms of behavior. But you have nothing in common between the major powers. China is testing nucelar weapons. Iran wants to build nuclear weapons. It's completely impossible."
To establish the world governing bodies proposed by Garrison and Gorbachev, Starr estimates it would require "two or three more Gulf Wars."
Does this sit well with Garrison? "There's going to be conflict, coercion and consensus," he says. "That's all part of what will be required as we give birth to the first global civilization.
"We have to set up a judicial and executive force to punish the bad guys," he adds.
Speaking in such inevitabilities comes easy to Garrison. Going by what he says, he's a firm believer in the immutable forces of history. But his theory of history also calls for a great figure who can see the coming shape of things and seize what is possible.
"I've always admired Alexander the Great," he says. "Can you imagine being taught by Aristotle, to have as one of your teachers one of the greatest thinkers of all time, to have him train your mind and then at 18 get on your horse, Bucephalus, and ride across the Hellepont, with a couple thousand Greek soldiers who passionately believe in you and you conquer the entire known world?
"One of the greatest lines of Alexander," Garrison continues, "which has been very powerful in shaping my sense of things, which is one of the few things that was ever recorded, that he said, was that it is a great thing to live with courage and to die leaving an everlasting fame.
"And fame to the Greeks was not an Andy Warhol 15 minutes. Fame for the Greeks was living the authentic life that personified the virtues. I've always thought that there was a purity to that. To live with courage, to go out there and do what you know is the right thing even if nobody else is doing it. If you see the possible, have the courage to fill it with your imagination. But always, in the course of implementing your vision, be as morally clear with yourself as you possibly can be.
