margins, he started sending them out to other people. of course, as soon as he did that, they were leaked all over the place. they were in the newspahepers, consequences of that. so pat had the memos, he had the process. he had this humor, this irrepressible humor. if that doesn't sound like something much, but remember, this was not the white house that larry was writing for "west wing." this was bob haldeman's gray white house. [laughter] the president went off in july, i guess, to san clemente, a wonderful time. we were all very quiet, could get our work done. pat has gone off to go swimming in the white house pool before the president boarded over from the press, and suddenly i get a call. both our offices are in the basement of the west wing. quick, quick, come up to the oval office. so i went up one flight to the oval office, door is open, and we look at it and, my god, it's

been redecorated. redecorated like an mgm technicolor musical. my children later said he felt the gold was so bright, it was hurting his eyes. and on every chair there's the seal of the president. and pat, there's a phone right there, picks up the phone. he said, could you get me mr. haldeman, please? bob, i'm outside the oval office. yeah, yeah, i know, very famous new york interior decorator, i hear she's a great friend of pat nixon's, mrs. nixon. bob, if you don't do something, every member of congress is going to be farting on the seal of the president. [laughter] the seals instantly came off, and that was what pat added. okay. [laughter] so we have memos, we have process, we have humor, and then a funny thing happened that only if the you had been part of the nixon group would know.

we said to each other, the boss is in love. it seemed every spring for a short period of time nixon had somebody, some person who was going to be so creative that he wanted to have that person around. might be jim connolly, might be pete peterson, in april it was pat moynihan. and they retired to talk about books. and the president said, what should i be reading? pat said, read blake -- [inaudible] [laughter] okay. now, everything is going fine except presidents know that they've got 100 days before they're going to be attacked. and moynihan and burns are fighting this thing out, and it's may, june, july. the president wants to be rid of both of theme n at that point. and it comes to be august 6th, and he calls all the cabinet together at camp david, a six-hour meeting.

and he's going to tell the cabinet that he's decided for f. he says, mr. president, that's political suicide. you're supporting everybody who voted against us and will continue to vote against us. the president says after the fact, he's only got three of the cabinet, three of the 12 with him. fortunately, he has george shultz, by far thebinet, but th. so he announces that to the cabinet. the next day, august 7th, he announces it to the staff, and he says, well, as randolph churchill said about israeli -- [laughter] torrey politicians and liberal policies are what they create in the world. okay. [laughter] and on august 8th he announces this remarkable proposal to the american people. well, arthur burns was a very wise man, and he offered the

president caution. he may have been right. but pat moynihan offered the president greatness. he offered him a chance to dream, he offered him a chance to dream greatly. and the president in that moment took that opportunity. the rest of the history is not happy. the bill went through the house easily and then, ultimately, was defeated in the senate finance committee where, ironically, pat would someday be the chairman. that's the story, and that's the story. [applause] >> peter, seeaughter] peter galbraith, one of the great memos -- thank you, senator, again. [applause]

one of the wonderful memos in this book is one that grew out of a trip that pat moynihan took into the heart of the balkans as it was collapsing into sectarian warfareolution of senator moynin foreign policy issues. he was not the same at the end of his term as he was at the outset. >> well, steve, thank you and congratulations on bringing this all together. and i was just looking at that memo and what an extraordinary piece of writing it is. and how vividly he captures that trip. and i'm going to come back to it after i, first, address the question you posed. because there is the superficial paradox of patynes to be their man.

having been known for vocally bushing the unite -- bashing the united nations and as a strong cold warrior who by the time he left the u.s. senate had written a book on international law, was the strongest defender of the united nations and who was the advocate of dissolving that preeminent cold war institution, the cia, because it had been so ip competent on the issues of the cold war because it had failed to predict the dissolution of the soviet union and because as of 87s i've said the per capita gdp in east germany exceeded that of west germany two years before the fall of the wall, failing to notice that there was not a great number of people crossing the wall west to east. [laughter]

and i could go further. this was a man who tart -- assistants, elliott edwards as and later i became a close associate. but there isn't, actually, a paradox. it's a superficial one. the fact is that pat was never a neoconservative because the neoconservatives -- first, his objection to the soviet union was, essentially, to it lawless behavior. to its lawless behavior internationally, and to its lawless behavior internally. but where he differed from the neo, with the neoconservatives is they believed the soviet strong. jean kirkpatrick, in fact, famously wrote -- she was reagan's first ambassador to the u.n -- wrote an article in '79,

dictatorships and double standards. the essential argument was communism was such a powerful force in the world that once a country became communist, it would never escape. it was like a black hole. whereas pat -- and this is what distinguished him from so many others -- he simply looked at the facts. and he thought two things were important, history and can the facts. and even from 1980 or '79 as he was asked to write an article for "newsweek," he basically said, you know, the problem with the soviet union is not that it is so strong, it is that it is so weak. and what are we going to do when it dissolves, and what's going to happen to all those nuclear weapons? and with regard to the united nations,on was not that it was a bad institution, but that it was one that had lots of bad people, that it was a place where countries would

vent against the united states, and he was not enamored with some of the leadership of the united nations in the secretariat. it's a point be, actually, i have a certain sympathy for even as i continue to believe in the united nations as an institution. brought out and its captured wonderfully in this memo x what i think is one of of the things that we totally miss in foreign policy is the importance of ethnicity. i see it today, we went to war in iraq describing a country inhabited by iraqis, and today we discuss afghanistan in terms of afghans. and, of course, one of the reasons we are not succeeding is because that is our -- [inaudible] when, in fact, iraq is a country of kurds, shiites and sunnis, the kurds who don't want to be iraqi at all, want to be independent, the shiites and

sunnis at each other's throats. afghanistan, the problem of afghanistan is confined to the pashtun part of the country, something that pat certainly would be talking about, totally missing from the dialogue. i would just like o conclude with a word about our trip to sarajevo which is the subject of a memo that he sent from zagreb on november 28, 992. i was then a staffer with the senate foreign relations committee, and actually i didn't work directly for senator moynihan, but committee staff would travel with senators. we enjoyed each other's company, he liked to go with me, and i was quite popular with the moynihan office because i would take him away twice a year for a week or two -- [laughter] and this is an era when there were no cell phones or internet. so, but anyhow, he called me up in october, and he said, peter, i would like to go and hear the

thunder of the guns. i want to go to sarajevo. i had a certain reputation for going to places that were perhaps a little dangerous because i unintentionally had been caught in northern iraq when saddam's troops went to put down the kurdish uprising. so liz was absolutely convinced that i had inspired him to take this trip. [laughter] and she wouldn't speak to me. and if you know in the moynihan world if you're in the staff, if liz is angry with you, you are in big trouble. the senator was forgiving, but liz -- [laughter] less so. and it wasn't true. but my protestations were amiss, and we went off to india with liz, and moira was there. and then pat and i flew to frankfurt, and the memo describes the efforts to get into sarajevo. we thought we had a military flight. then the secretary of defense, richard cheney, yanked it, and

pat fulminates in this memo about the lying secretary of defense, richard cheney. [laughter] but we finally got in thanks to the canadians. and what did pat want -- though the city was besieged, there was no electricity, basically no food, and it was november in the morning as we went out the next day the fog was across the city. so you could wander around the city because the fog was in the city, and the snipers, the zerbe sniper -- serb snipers were in the hills. pat wanted to go to to the spot where the 20th century began, namely where the archduke was shot. and we went with the bosnian deputy foreign minister, we in our flak jackets, this poor man in his suit. pat refused to wear his helmet which, of course, meant i couldn't wear my helmet.

[laughter] companied by journalists -- accompanied by journalists because if you're going to go to sarajevo, you want to make a point about this besieged situation. and he proceeded to recount a story which i would love to recount. basically, in a very abbreviated form, they try today assassinate the archduke earlier, the plot