Bob Swan, Jr., a genial man with warm blue eyes who has befriended many Russian athletes and met a number of Russian dignitaries, including Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, is hopeful that citizen diplomacy can fill some of the gaps in policy making. He sees lots of connections between Kansas and Russia, everything from the red winter wheat brought to Kansas by Russian Mennonites, to the American and Soviet soldiers who met and embraced at the Elbe River in April 1945 on their way to jointly defeating Nazi Germany. (He proposed and helped organize a 40th anniversary celebration of the meetup in Torgau, Germany, for veterans of both armies.)

A few months after The Day After began filming, Swan founded the first of several groups dedicated to improving relations between Americans and Russians. He called it Athletes United for Peace. The goal was to promote athletic competition instead of nuclear hostility. When I visited him in August, the dining-room table in his home was covered with neatly stacked papers and memorabilia documenting his persistent efforts during the 1980s and ‘90s (the University of Kansas research library has 37 boxes of material from Swan in its archives). He thought he had “retired” from the volunteer work that had consumed so much of his time—and his first marriage—during those years, but now he is thinking about a possible comeback.

Swan met his current wife, Irina Turenko, in 2002 during one of several dozen trips he made to Russia. She was in Russia visiting family when I met Swan at their home, but he showed me a picture from their wedding day in 2006; he and Irina are standing between an American flag and a Russian one. Swan had another visitor on the day I was there: his sharp-tongued fraternity brother Mark Scott, who speaks fluent Russian and was in Lawrence for medical treatment. In 1982, Scott came up with the idea to invite a delegation of Soviet athletes to participate in the Kansas Relays, a three-day track-and-field meet that has been held at the University of Kansas every April since 1923.

Former mayor David Longhurst remembers attending the 1983 reception for the athletes. It was awkward. The Kansans and the Soviets viewed each other with suspicion. Longhurst didn’t speak Russian, and the visitors didn’t speak English. “I was trying to talk to a Soviet shot putter, and we weren’t communicating at all,” Longhurst recalls. “I took out my wallet and showed him a picture of my son. He took out his wallet and showed me a picture of his kids. All of a sudden, we understood one another. The barrier just melted.”

The next day, at the start of the “friendship relays,” Longhurst told the story to the crowd in his welcoming remarks. He said it had occurred to him that it would be wonderful if the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union could meet in “a place like Lawrence” and discover how much they had in common. “The press got hold of that and went nuts,” says Longhurst. The headlines said he had invited the two leaders to come to Lawrence.

Some of his constituents were so enthusiastic about the idea that they launched a campaign to organize what became known as the Meeting for Peace. Dole and other politicians endorsed the initiative. Longhurst and Swan joined a delegation of schoolchildren (including 10-year-old actress Ellen Anthony) that traveled by train to Washington to deliver thousands of postcards to the White House and the Soviet embassy, asking the nations’ leaders to come to Lawrence.

It took Swan and others more than seven years to make it happen, but the Meeting for Peace was finally held in Lawrence and six other Kansas cities in October 1990. By then, it had become a “people-to-people” event rather than a summit. About 300 prestigious Soviet citizens from a variety of regions and backgrounds—including the son of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev—visited Kansas to attend conferences and art shows, stay with Kansas families, celebrate the 100th birthday of Kansas-raised President Dwight D. Eisenhower (a big proponent of people-to-people exchanges to promote international understanding and friendship), and “bury an era” (as a New York Times headline reported). At the opening assembly, the Kansans and their guests applauded wildly when it was announced that Gorbachev had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

After Trump’s inauguration, Swan wrote a long letter to the president and his foreign policy team, proposing a number of ideas for what he called “a remarkable opportunity to improve US-Russia relations,” but he received only a very general reply six months later. Today, Swan remains hopeful about better relations between the two superpowers but says “it’s got to be from the bottom up this time, because our political system is in such disarray.” He hopes that young people will lead a fresh effort to improve relations between Russia and the United States, but it saddens him that “we’ve already done this.”