Partners in bringing an end to the cold war, then Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs Shevardnadze, and the first American President Bush, exchange friendly greetings at one of many meetings.

President Shevardnadze has developed extremely close relationships with a long list of influential American leaders and is seen here shaking both hands with Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Eduard Shevardnadze completely fits the phrase “Presidential.” He is tall, well-dressed, calm, affable and very charming. From under a mop of white hair, deeply receding at the forehead, large brown eyes study a questioner and an answer comes after a dramatic pause, perhaps indicating thoughtfulness. In the female of the species, dark brown Georgian eyes are famously beautiful, but a visiting reporter senses wisdom in the lines and wrinkles of this 74-year old Presidential face. Shevardnadze, known to be a seven-day-a-week workaholic, has seen it all.

Indeed a quick “No” to the question, “Do you have hobbies?” gets an elaboration when the issue is pressed. “I am told that you cultivate your own vineyard,” insists the questioner. “Well, it is true that when I was First Secretary of the Communist Party I did have a vineyard, and, to tell the truth, I loved to watch it and carefully trim it.” But now there is no time for hobbies, insisted President Shevardnadze in a lengthy August interview with the Washington Times.

Shevardnadze is now in the last couple of years of what will almost certainly be the final phase of his public career. Earlier he had risen through the ranks of Georgia’s Communist establishment, becoming security chief and then top boss of the Party. In that job, in the 1970s, he came to the attention of the national political leadership in Moscow initially by jumping on board a campaign to cut out corruption among Party professionals and others. His success in Georgia was sensational and made him a major figure in the Soviet Union. It was in this context that he became a political ally of another relative puritan in the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1985 new Party Boss Gorbachev, in his first appointment, created the second big career platform for Shevardnardze, naming the Georgian Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev had sought a fellow-reformer and knew that Shevardnadze shared the view that the USSR had to change or else. The years of their leadership, lasting to the early 90’s proved to be a turning point in world history and these two were at the center.

Of course this large role in 20th Century history adds to Shevardnadze’s stature, his ease of discourse and the respect he automatically obtains. Even knowledge that he was a top leader of a system that ruled millions of lives with an iron fist–always subordinating civil liberties to Party necessity–and that he helped impose an economic ideology that failed, does not get take away his clear authority and vast experience.

“I had to save my country,” he says, with great passion, in telling what his intentions had been in March, 1992, upon being asked by a Georgian military council to come home to Tbilisi from Moscow after the break-up of the Soviet Union. An ardent Georgian nationalist, Zviad Gamsakurdia, had been elected with a vote in the high 80 percent but his extremism, resulting in an inability to govern, was threatening to destroy the new nation. Shevardnadze was ready saying, “I am a son of Georgia, born and raised here.”

Elected to a full term of his own in 2000 Shevardnadze’s rule has been filled with problems. The enormous difficulty of transition from state control to a market economy is made so much more problematic by local issues: Always dangerous Russia sprawling across the northern border, numerous internal geographic enclaves of separatist political movements always clamoring and, most important, never enough capital for investment or to generate decent wages for the population. More than twenty assassination attempts on the President’s life in ten years gives dramatic testimony to the job as a hardship position.

Georgian polls show a severe decline in the President’s popularity but most everyone seems to respect his prowess in international affairs, particularly a calm ability to keep the Russians at bay while winning new friends from the West, especially from within the American government.

By the fall of 2002 the struggle for succession is fully underway, with the 2005 presidential elections to be preceded in 2003 by a contest for the 235 seats in Parliament. Still not a name is yet seriously mentioned as successor to Georgia’s first President. From all appearances this national icon will be on duty to the very end.