Let`s skydive together, Bush Sr. suggests to Gorbachev

History has credited Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush with leaping into the unknown. But when the former US president was reunited with his Soviet-era counter number, he had a different kind of jump in mind: Bush invited Gorbachev to go skydiving.
"You have to have goals in life, and this is one," Bush told a group of around 300 students at a Moscow foreign relations institute, with Gorbachev by his side. Gesturing toward the last Soviet leader, Bush added: "I today gave him a formal invitation to join me on the next parachute jump."
But Gorbachev's answer, Bush said, was "nyet, nyet, nyet."
Bush, the father of the current US president, told the students that he had been "deeply touched" when Gorbachev showed up on a previous parachute jump made by Bush and greeted him as he floated to the ground.
"He was there when I landed, with a nice bouquet of flowers and a bottle of vodka -- and life was pretty good," Bush said, to knowing chuckles from the students. "I vowed to make my fifth" parachute jump "on my 85th" in 2009.
The elder Bush made international headlines when he made a tandem parachute jump eight years ago on his 73rd birthday. He has since made several others, most recently last year on his 80th birthday.
Bush hailed Gorbachev as a man to whom history would be "exceptionally kind" for his role in bringing down the Iron Curtain that divided eastern and western Europe until the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse.
Gorbachev, "more than any single individual deserves credit -- I mean it from the bottom of my heart," Bush said at the meeting at Moscow's State Institute of International Relations.
 

 Agence France Presse, May 23, 2005