Joseph Petro, speaking to the Allentown Rotary Club Feb. 21 at Bell Hall restaurant, Allentown, took his audience back to the mid-1980s, when he was head of President Ronald Reagan’s Secret Service protective detail.

Petro sat in on a private meeting between Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, Switzerland.

The cordial relationship struck up between Reagan and Gorbachev in that meeting, Petro asserted, had a tremendous influence on the trajectory of world relations.

Petro was a special agent and senior executive in the Secret Service from 1971-93.

He was lead agent in Reagan’s personal protective detail for four years.

Petro wrote of the behind-the-scenes details of that era in his book, “Standing Next to History,” published in 2006.

The Geneva meeting was one of four stories Petro shared with Rotary Club members.

The 1985 meeting was the first of several world summits between Reagan and Gorbachev. The two leaders met for the first time in a massive château for talks on international diplomatic relations and the arms race.

Petro explained that Reagan’s inner circle knew the president believed personal relationships always trumped choreographed diplomatic gatherings.

As the two leaders sat in the château’s formal meeting area, surrounded by advisors, Reagan knew there was a nearby private cabana that would only accommodate the two leaders, their interpreters and a bodyguard for each.

As the two leaders sat stiffly in the formal meeting room, Reagan leaned to Gorbachev, Petro said, and suggested, “Let’s take a walk.”

Reagan steered the delegation toward the cabana and deftly slipped inside minus diplomatic hangers-on.

An iconic photo shows the two sitting in front of a fire privately taking the measure of the other.

“They weren’t agreeing on anything the other was proposing, but it was obvious they were getting along very cordially,” Petro said.

Several world summits between the two followed in the months and years ahead, leading to a lessening of tensions between the United States and the Soviet empire, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Looking back on the private tête-à-tête he witnessed in Geneva, Petro said that one-on-one “was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.”

Another anecdote Petro related was an accidental elevator meeting between himself and Vice President Gerald Ford in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 8, 1974.

Petro said Ford acknowledged he had not met Petro before and held out his hand and introduced himself.

The next day, President Richard Nixon resigned and Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States.

Two other amusing stories Petro related revolved around his protective detail for Pope John Paul during a visit to the United States in 1987.

After leaving the Secret Service in 1993, Petro was a managing director and chief security officer at Citigroup Inc. from 1993-2013 and a senior vice president and chief security officer for Time Warner Inc. from 2014 until his retirement in 2018.

Sidebar discussion’s between Petro and older Rotary Club attendees, before and after the luncheon, included reminiscences of the days when Petro was Allentown High School’s football quarterback in the early 1960s.