dozens of recommendations on quite conditional withdrawal from our french friends, the soviets, and others. i think having that touchstone and then the president within two weeks later saying this aggression will not stand set, again, the strategic direction for all that followed. i'd just like to talk a little bit, though, about the national security council team that we had. you're right. there were strongly differing points of view among the members of the nsc. i like to see bureaucratic friction. what you don't want to do is have that become personalized. it never became personalized in the bush administration because this was a group, president bush, dick cheney, brent

scowcroft who went back to service together in the ford administration, remained friends in some cases working together in the reagan administration, and it was a group that had exceptional respect for each other at a professional and personal level, even when they did have sharply differing points of view. i remember in march of 1989 one of my colleagues at the state department who didn't know secretary baker as well at that time came back from a meeting at the defense department. we were having a meeting of the senior staff. when it came to him, he said, mr. secretary, we have been over at the defense department dealing with a tough issue, we have beaten them into submission and the state department had a great victory today. the secretary said, well, thank you for that report. i'm sure you did what you thought was right for the country. as you know, dick cheney is a

close friend of mine, i think he has the toughest job in government and i would never want to do anything simply for the purpose of making his job tougher. that sent the message that only had no value but was a career dangerous move in this administration. and that hasn't always been the case in administrations. in fact, the record of friction both between the nsc and state and state and defense is legion throughout the research i'm sure you've done. but that group at the top, again, the fact they had known each other for decades by the time we came in i thought was quite important. it was also important that those of us at the next level down in the deputy's committee had grown up bureaucratically, since we were sort of young guys going back to the reagan years. dave jeremiah, paul wolfowitz, myself and others, a committee led expertly by bob gates. we long since figured out

whether we liked each other, what we thought of each other. we really got down to work. we knew we were working for a group of people who were just striving for the right answer, not some shallow, bureaucratic victory. i think the operation did operate extremely well, both for policy formulation, and i think, especially for crisis management. i would say that one perhaps not so positive effect is i think the deputy's committee became so effective during the bush years that we really sort of sucked the air out of the assistant secretary level of government, and the assistant secretary level of government really needs to be your engine of creativity, of operational implementation, but things were getting kicked up to deputy's committee so

quickly, so regularly, that it was the rare assistant secretary that had really good control over his or her area of responsibility. somewhat surprising because as was said earlier, no one had greater respect for the career service than president bush. and he felt that about the foreign service, certainly about the military service, certainly about the career intelligence service, but really just general civil servants, he felt and had chosen the highest calling, that is to serve their country. i can recall not infrequently at nsc meetings, people sit around the big table in the cabinet room, have discussion among the principals. we get to the end of the meeting and the president would say, well, are those all the good ideas? or, and then he would turn around at all of us lining the back and say you guys are the really smart guys, you know, what have we not put on the table. it was a tough question to answer, right? your boss sitting right in front of you. if he didn't put it on the table, i wasn't going to be the one to throw it on the table, but he had inherent respect for people at every level of government, and i think that

came through. i was really glad to hear phillip mention the economic dimension of the president's statecraft. i think in international economics and finance are integral part of the security equation. indeed for me, national security is the summation of foreign defense and international economic policies, all resting on a strong intelligence base. and if you think of times when the world is going through a significant transformation, whether it be '89 or some might argue today in the wake of the financial crisis, very often world leaders, the first thing they think about each morning in national and economic issues. sometimes to get them to focus on political and security issues, you have to make sure that you're engaged on the economic and financial issues. one of the reasons why i have been pushing for some time to make secretary of treasury a statutory member of the national

security council, not just an invitee, to make sure we have all components of national security policy. but if you look at what was done in the g-7, including the meeting president bush chaired in houston in july of 1990, if you take a look at the expansion of g-7 to the g-8, with gorbachev coming to london and yeltsin in '92, president bush played a very key role in making the g-7 a more effective organization, helping to bring the russians in and laying the ground work now for the broader collection called the g-20. we also set up asia pacific economic cooperation at that time. apec, which will be meeting at the leaders level in hawaii early next month. it is the prime body in the trans-pacific space to discuss not only economic and financial issues but also as leaders come together to have bilateral

meetings around important political and security issues. today, the structures in asia that we had in europe a long time. an initiative by president bush led by him, joint initiative of treasury and state i thought was very important. same thing in europe, set up something called the trans-atlantic business dialogue. might sound small, but it was recognition after the wall fell and europe changed that economics and finance would be as important part of the equation going forward as politics and security. those were all initiatives of his, let alone as phil said the very good work that was done on the brady plan in argentina and elsewhere during those critical times. so when you look at his statecraft, look at the persian gulf, fall of the wall in germany, unification, fall of the soviet union, the successful operation in panama, removing

all proxy forces from occupied countries around the world, soviets out of afghanistan, cubans out of angola, vietnamese out of cambodia, laying the foundation for normalization of relations with vietnam. if that's prudence, we need more of it. thanks. >> thank you, bob. before i open the floor to the audience, let me ask each of the three of you this question. if you were giving advice to scholars about the aspect of the bush presidency or foreign policy that you think has been most neglected, is there any particular area of negligence or omission that comes to mind, perhaps that's been thrown out to you by looking at some of the oral history material, some stuff that you think that the oral history is calling attention to that scholars and people who study the presidency had missed? tim? >> well, i would just suggest that they actually put george

bush back in the story at the end of the cold war. i mean, really, if you look at a lot of literature on the end of the cold war, the bush period is a coda. and i just think and it is hard for historians to do this. we don't like to engage in counterfactuals. publicly we say we don't want to, privately, we do it all the time. it didn't have to end the way it did. let me give you one example. think about if we had made gorbachev's life more difficult for him, would he have helped us in the gulf war? you think about we know that the russians to the very end were calling us, calling james baker, he was secretary of state, he was talking with them, they were talking to the president, but in

the end, they became part of the coalition. imagine everybody just for a minute, people old enough to remember this. people who were too young to remember it but might have read about it. for decades we tried to keep the soviets out of the middle east, and then they were in the middle east, egypt was their ally. we were concerned about soviet power in the middle east. we managed to achieve soviet participation in an operation designed and directed by us. that would never have been possible had we not managed, the president not managed reunification of germany and nato so skillfully. the two could never have happened. you don't see that in the literature. you don't see that stovepiping. if they studied the cold war or panama, panama changes the

decision making system because it was, if you will, the bay of pigs, not as bad, but bay of pigs in this administration, the first coup. but the problem is that people don't pull these together. then if you add the domestic piece, as i mentioned, in may of 1990, the president is not just if you will making the big play for germany, he's also deciding for the sake of the country he has to break that no new taxes pledge. if you pull this all together, you get a very different portrait of this man and you understand his diary entries. which if you read them alone, he seems very hyper and emotional. you pull it all together, you realize he is a self controlled man that needs to vent, who is emotional, but has a strategic vision. you don't get that at all from the literature. >> bob? >> it is common when people talk

about foreign policy in the bush administration to say what we heard a few moments ago, that this was an unusually-talented team, that they had known each other, worked together from the ford administration, that they didn't do a lot of back stabbing, and they had a particularly strong set of deputies that could get a great deal of things done. that's well known. it is a really good team. there's not enough attention paid to how important the president is in both choosing that team, but even more importantly, getting the most out of them and working with them. and a president who doesn't boast about himself and compliments those around him reinforces the idea, well, it was those skilled people that got together. and let me give one example. this might be a controversial one. i think the way that team worked and how well they worked had

something to do with an early failure in the administration. the john tower nomination in which the president stays loyal to his nominee to the bitter end and it's really bitter. and it takes a long time to end, as some people in the room may know. loyalty in the white house is talked about all the time. it usually means my assistants ought to be loyal to me, the president, and why are they not being loyal to me, the president. examples of presidents sacrificing their own political capital on behalf of their friends, their nominees, and people they think are being mistreated in the press, those are rare. and setting one of those examples early in the

administration would have told that team this is a president who will back me up on my bad day, not just on the days when i get things right. >> i'll pick right up on that. i think more needs to be looked at in the transition period. i am a fan, not a scholar, but i have done some writing on transitions. i think transitions generally are interesting because you have to be ready to govern on day one. you have a relatively short time to get that team together, to set your strategic direction. i think intraparty transitions are particularly interesting, and especially when the vice president elevates. and i think this is the only instance in the modern presidency, of that happening, it has a procedural and substantive element, procedurally, given the guy george bush was, he didn't want to throw on the street his reagan bush appointees as the bush quayle team came in. he said if you would like to stay in your position until your successor is confirmed, you can do that. took until late spring, early summer.

that's when you have to do the policy review process, looking for new ideas, jolting ideas. how can an assistant secretary come up with a new or jolting idea in january or february if he or she didn't come up with that in november, december, of the previous administration. sort of a self limitation on that. i recall when we went through the policy review process, "the new york times" in a lead editorial said they've come up with status quo plus. actually, i was sort of happy with the plus, given the fact there were so few new people involved in that process, and that goes into the whole question of nominations, confirmations and how do you get a presidency off the ground. substantively, though, i would look really closely at how much work was done during the transition on trying to set that strategic direction. i would look particularly at jim baker's statement for the senate foreign relations committee, when up for his hearing, look at things released on his first

presentation when the nsc met. i think it does give a good strategic direction, but i think it is also fair to say we were a little on our back foot early on, because gorbachev had frankly more momentum than i would have expected him to have as we look back, especially on force reductions, nuclear moves and so forth in europe. substantively, i think that that direction was set. the other thing that was interesting is, and i think it was a discussion between and among the senior people, and at that time it was early in the transition, so it would have been the vice president and president-elect, brent scowcroft, jim baker. they identified three issues that were particularly difficult in managing from a congressional relations perspective. they were central america, south africa and war powers. quite interesting.

and one of the things we were assigned to do in the state department transition team is to figure out a way to put each of those into a process that would not undercut our ability to achieve those broader national security perspectives. i took war powers in south africa, bob zoellick, bernie aronson took central america. if you think about how contentious those issues were in the reagan administration, particularly late reagan, and how they really became almost nonissues or moved in a positive direction as in the case of south africa, that didn't come about just by magic, you had to think that through. so i would look at the transition a little bit more closely for what hints it gave of what was to come later. >> so let's throw the floor open to questions from you.

please wait for the microphone to catch up to you. fred? >> i came in a little late, phillip, so i didn't hear your remarks. but one question i think this panel could clarify is doing teaching in the anti-terrorism sort of era, growth of the taliban, the increasing strength of osama bin laden after that period of time when he was shepherding the arab brigades in afghanistan when the mujahideen was trying to drive out the russians. the account seems to be fairly steady from steve call and others that reviewed it that at the end of the soviet era in afghanistan, the united states really pulled back. we won the cold war, we won the covert action issue with respect to afghanistan, and as you all have very well pointed out, there were other fish to fry,

germany, gorbachev taking a lot of time and effort on the part of the administration. i guess my question is was there any consideration given during that time, to your knowledge, of trying to stay in there in that region, trying to keep an eye on what osama might become, trying to deal with the disease that began with the iranian revolution of going back to a more fundamentalist, islamic approach. i tend to credit the stories that say the administration was busy on another front, but it's worth looking at, because the taliban that had its roots there is still with us. >> i didn't wrk after -- work afghan issues in 1989. maybe you will remember this. hi to look back a bit. as a historian, the interesting thing, you have to remember

before the soviet invasion of afghanistan, it is not like afghanistan had been an important place to the united states. in other words, the united states contrary to what people in the bureau thought in though in the late 1970s was not playing the great game in central asia. it wasn't actually very interested in the great game. it wasn't really interested in afghanistan. it took a very mild interest in the back and forth of afghan politics, so really the reason that america got interested in afghanistan is because the soviets invaded the place, and the main interest of the americans with respect to the invasion of afghanistan after the initial alarms and overreactions to what it might mean were, you know, to make life difficult for the soviets in afghanistan, and once the soviets left afghanistan, american interest in afghanistan really almost just returns to the default mode of disinterest which is where it had been for the fair part of the previous generation. remember, too, that the united

states wasn't actually in afghanistan. the united states, mainly the stuff that was being run in afghanistan, was being run by the pakistani government, and the pakistani government was getting support and aid and assistance and advice from the united states and also from other countries like saudi arabia. so, it's not like the america withdrew from afghanistan. america wasn't there. america was in pakistan, but even in pakistan it wasn't there with troops. it was there with people who were giving advice and money to the pakistanis. so the issues in '89 and '90 turned basically were lapsed back into what are our relations with pakistan? and islamic fundamentalism is not really coming on the radar as a key issue except with respect to what's happening with pakistan and trends in pakistani politics, and very quickly in pakistan, the dominant issue will soon become pakistani nuclear and war and pakistani

proliferation efforts that will end up resulting in a series of sanctions in which the united states options were constrained but were not the subject of grand strategy. one more issue though, and where i'll leave this, because it's an interesting subject, and bob will remember this better. in that tumultuous month of may 1990, that tim naftali so helpfully i think spotlighted, there was one other huge issue going on in may 1990, first class nuclear crisis between india and pakistan. bob gates wasn't around for a chunk of that month in may 1990 because bob gates was on a secret mission trying to prevent a war between india and pakistan which actually was a fairly close-run thing at the time. but as tim mentioned in other context, it's one of the things you don't hear about because it didn't go boom. bob? >> yeah, fred. first of all, i'd recommend everybody that's interested in this brand new book that's just come out by peter tomsen, who

was the second and last special envoy for afghanistan, he succe succeeded azad and our own special envoy in the bush administration that i recall certainly at the state department, i just had lunch with him yesterday, it's a tome, but i would look at it because he actually was just about to go to press when osama was killed and has add ed some additional chapters that i think tie it together particularly well. remember, when we came in on january 20th, 1989, the soviets were still in afghanistan. two months later they were gone, but we had with the soviets a very active really tri-part agenda, arms control, bilateral issues and then regional issues which is, again, as i said earlier, to get proxy forces out of occupied countries, soviets out of afghanistan, east germans

out of eritrea, cubans out of mozambique and angola in central america and once we got the soviets out we did achieve a strategic objective, and would i say it's fair to say that it may not have had the sort of secretarial nse presidential look that it had before, but it was still a quite active matter at the deputy's committee because we had a lot of interest at play. naji buhla was still in power there. the mujahadin basically had resisted shooting the soviets in the back as they protest to give them a pretext for staying longer, but they obviously didn't like the soviet proxy that had been left behind. would i travel to the region, go into islamabad and talk to the pakistanis, talk to the political leadership, the army, the isi, and then i would go up to peshawar which is where the mujahadin was hanging out. i knew from the first moment i was there that they were no longer the cohesive group that

they had been before because hechtier refused to sit in a room for an american. that should have been bit of a signal to us. osama really wasn't on the radar screen at least for us at that time, let's say '90-'91. at phillip said, we were trying to figure out a way to sort of make sure that afghanistan stayed relatively stable. didn't give the soviets any pretext for coming back in or causing troubles on the northern border and to help the mujahadin in trying to take -- retake control of the country, but we were also looking at things like getting as many of our stingers back and all the rest, as you recall, because we worked together at that time. pakistan though, those discussions in pakistan were not just about the mujahadin in afghanistan. we had certified pakistan positively under the pressler and glenn amendments in the fall of 1989. james baker told me, he said i'm

not going to do that again unless we get some movement on their part. we made that very clear to them. they didn't, and then as phil said they were sanctioned the next year. so we had to get our relationship with pakistan right, and that was still at the time that a senior person couldn't fly just to pakistan. if you went to pakistan, you had to go to india. if you went to india, you had to go to pakistan so every time i was out there i would be in both places. we were trying to get them, particularly the military to military side that helped, to sort of build up their confidence-building measures and they had a hotline. they used to talk fairly frequently, but as phillip said it flaired to something that could have been quite a bit more serious, and when it turned that serious on pakistan's eastern border, i would say we probably didn't have quite the high level intense look at their western border to our regret later. >> fred, you write about not seeing the future, although, as you know, it's through a glass darkly, but in terms of counterterrorism, that was a very successful period for the

united states. the united states undermined its -- if you look at list of top terrorist objectives of our counterterrorist community in that era, '89 through '91, we got them. anidal was considered the most dangerous terrorist. he was decimated by covert action involving a number of countries. two, shiningpath. we deserved some credit for getting guzman, working closely with the previousians. if you went and talked to counterterrorism specialists. >> hezbollah. >> if you want to counterterrorist specialists in 1991 and said which brand of islamic fundamentalism is the most dangerous, they would have said shiia because, in fact, the most successful muslim terrorist group was hezbollah. they killed more americans than any other terrorist organization, and we hadn't and, of course, he wouldn't die until a few years ago, but the fact of

the matter is hezbollah was a great challenge and with the exception of abu nidal sunni terrorists were considered second rate in that era. it's unfortunately not until the '90s and really not until after the african bombings, the twin bombings in east africa, that people really started to see sunni muslim terrorists as -- as operationally sophisticated as hezbollah, but that would take another six years, and sadly it did, but that's -- that's history. >> last -- any last comment or question? boyden? >> it's really a question of you because i didn't understand. you said the five-vote margin or whatever it was on the authorization in the first gulf war was a puzzle, a political pudsle compared to 43. >> the puzzle is bush takes this really radical, a in the teeth of much more strenuous domestic

political opposition on that war than his son would encounter in 2002 on the second iraq war, and so it redoubles the puzzle as to why he -- as to why bush 41 was willing to take such radical action when we had this picture of him as this rather cautious and genial fellow. >> that's a good question, and you're right. i mean, republicans didn't control the house or the senate, and the continental united states hadn't been attacked so you're quite right. >> but the point -- let's remember this. there was a very strong vote in the house. it was much closer in the senate, and the house we had guys like steve solars and others who had basically said this guy is a threat to regional peace and security, including israel. the thing that was disappointing to me in the senate, in the narrowness of that vote, is remember what they were asked to vote on. for the u.s. to live up to its