On July 3, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev selected Eduard Shevardnadze — the political boss of Georgia who professed to know nothing about foreign policy — to be his foreign minister. Gorbachev had known Shevardnadze since the early 1970s. “He is a fully formed public figure, a principled person, who understands the interests of the party,” the general secretary announced to the Politburo. “Eduard Amrosievich has shown himself as an experienced, resilient person, capable of finding needed approaches to solving problems.” The swiftness with which Gorbachev consolidated power impressed Jack Matlock. It was a “brilliant tactical move which puts [Gorbachev] in direct charge of foreign policy,” he wrote McFarlane, who forwarded the message to the president. “We’re all agreed the new Soviet Foreign Minister is there to hold the fort for Gorbachev,” Reagan wrote in his diary the next day.

Shevardnadze indicated that he might be more forthcoming than his predecessor, Andrei Gromyko. A few weeks after the new appointment, Matlock met with Larry Horowitz, a legislative aide to Senator Edward Kennedy and occassional back channel to the Soviets. Horowitz had just returned from Moscow. “In regard to Afghanistan, if the U.S. would suspend temporarily and publicly assistance to the resistance, there would be a solution,” Shevardnadze had admitted to him. “Gorbachev has decided to solve the problem.”

First impressions of Shevardnadze boded well. “Perhaps,” Gromyko had once replied to an American diplomat who asked whether he had enjoyed his breakfast. “I like it when a person does business with a smile and gets the point of a witty remark,” Shevardnadze wrote in his memoir. “We achieve little with dour solmenity and immobile facial muscles.” When, on July 31, 1985, Shevardnadze and Shultz met for the first time in Helsinki, it pleased Shultz that Shevardnadze assented to use simultaneous translation (suspicious of technology, Gromyko had always refused), which allowed each side to read the body language of the other. He liked that Shevardnadze did not drone on for hours about arcane details and procedure and that their wives toured the city together as the two men negotiated.

Shultz assured Shevardnadze that his country bore no hostility toward the Soviet Union. He acknowledged that history had led Soviets to fear invasion and shared the story of his visit to a Leningrad war cemetery. Possible some fringe elements in the United States did wish to see more Soviets die, but the vast majority of Americans did not. Nor did Washington desire an Afghanistan that threatened the Soviet Union; it sought to arrange a peaceful settlement. The gravest threat lay not in the ideological struggle between capitalism and communism, Shultz contended, but rather in the very existence of nuclear weapons. He reiterated the “common purpose” of January 1985. “Both sides have set as a goal no nuclear weapons,” he stated, but “we have to take a radical step to get there.” That step was to put aside ideology. If significant reductions could be achieved, then the two sides could approach the United Kingdom, France, and China and tell them “that they must join us if we are to proceed to zero nuclear weapons.”

Although Shevardnadze seemed to like Shultz, he was not yet prepared to stake out new positions. “To be honest, the performance was ok,” the Georgian later recalled. His tone differed from Gromyko’s, but their positions were not all that far apart. “It is clear that U.S. medium-range missiles are an addition to the U.S. strategic arsenal,” Shevardnadze recited, using words Shultz had heard Gromyko say before. “Their purpose is not only to upset the regional balance but to gain superiority and a first-strike capability on the part of the U.S. and its allies.”

With new ideas and increased confidence, Shevardnadze went on to garner the trust of his American interlocutors and play a key role in the end of the Cold War.