Bush-Gorbachev Summit

I will always remember the event of the BushGorbachev Summit in Malta, just a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, for an amusing Maltese bread anecdote rather than its undoubted contribution to world peace and the end of the

Cold War, now of course being resurrected by the right-wing clowns ruling most of Western Europe.

I can’t believe it’s already thirty years since the leaders of the two then super powers came over on a wild winter day when gale force umpteen was rocking the island and threatening to blow it away altogether, to discuss the future of the world. We had all been hoping the occasion would take place under a blistering Maltese sun for the Island to get as much exposure as a holiday destination as possible courtesy of the hundreds of international media covering the event.

While all deliberation was taking place as to whether to hold the talks on terra firma or on board ship, as it was eventually decided, the foreign newsmen were seeking comments and glimpses of the rest of the island for them to fill the opaque hours of transmission. I was among a nap hand of local journalists contacted by CBS to give my modest thoughts on the drama unfolding against the Shakespearean background provided by the elements.

Bob Simon, an award-winning newsman who only two years later was to spend 40 days as Iraq’s hostage during the Gulf War (he tragically died in a 2015 traffic accident in New York), wanted us to have the interview very early in the morning at Mdina.

Though not much of an early bird, I still vividly recall the bread-seller and his donkey demurely entering the old city with that day’s load for its stillsleeping residents and the Americans immediately wanting to know what he was selling at that unearthly hour. The fresh Maltese bread smelled like nothing as beautiful in the world. I put in my small contribution to the nation by insisting it is arguably the best bread in the world. The TV crew, who obviously had had no breakfast, fell upon the poor seller like hungry wolves, devouring most of his day’s payload!

In the meantime, George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev went on the with business of saving, at least temporarily, the world from extinction...