we have several guns and weapons in our collection. knowing the story behind this rifle and exactly who it killed and the circumstances we have several guns and weapons that major edwards was killed, it is a very moving object. just to hold in your hand, still to this day i get the chills and the hairs on my arms stand up just to know exactly the history of the object. just the other day, we had one of the lead investigators who came and talked to estimate sure we had the correct weapon. he talked about the scope, that helps identify, but he also talked about scratches that are right along here that came from the branch he held the rifle on as he shot the weapon.

when the weapon was found, it still had green marks from the branch and they were able to find exactly where he had the branch on. a few years ago, for the 50th anniversary of the freedom riders, they had a reunion here in town, and one of the gentleman that came into town -- this is his bus tickets he had carried with him all these years. it is also the receipt he received for getting out of jail. he was arrested with all the other freedom riders that came into town for a breach of peace. it meant so much to him he carried them with him all these years. he was from san francisco. he came as an 18-year-old student because he wanted to make a change. the impact it had. to immediately arrive here in

jackson and the throw to in jail, for trying to improve society. you can tell when he gave it to us, this held a deep lays in his -- a deep place in his heart. the freedom riders consisted of hundreds of different people from across the country, all of the african-americans, as well as a lot of white students who came to jackson, went into alabama trying to improve the intercontinental travel system. these are another freedom riders artifacts. these are some shower shoes were given out to the freedom riders when they were in the jail. this is ordinary plastic flip-flops, rubber flip-flops.

you can go buy them anywhere now. knowing the history of the impact and that small part of having a flip-flop would've helped these people survive a little bit in jail. these are ordinary household items that came from a local who would house the freedom riders when they came into town, other members of the civil rights movement. martin luther king would go to her house. she had several important meetings at her house. and this just shows an everyday object like a percolator or a salad plate, knowing who the , impact this one woman had by opening up her home and allowing these people to come into her home and potentially sacrificing her family. one of the main goals throughout the mississippi history museum,

it is not just the names you have always heard heritages every day persons who made an impact on the state. for the most part, people are excited about the museum. and i would say overall, people just want to make sure it is an honest story. the department of archives and history from the beginning, we have said we have to tell a very honest story. we have to tell the african american perspective as well as the white perspective. it has to be honest and truthful story of mississippi's civil rights movement. it will not be a pretty story. we have had a lot of negative things that have happened in in our lastbut gallery in the museum, we will talk about where we are now and where we need to go. that will help people see mississippi is growing and improving and things are getting better in mississippi. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> throughout the weekend,

american history tv is featuring jackson, mississippi. content vehicles team traveled there recently to learn about its history. learn more about jackson and others hops at c-span.org/local content. are watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> next, a preview of a withcript in process, george h.w. bush and the end of the cold war. author answers questions andd by his colleagues, others, including the deputy chief of staff. this event was hosted by the university of virginia.

>> this event is called a manuscript review. content vehim traveled it was suggested about 10 years ago. nelson said, it is a great conference, but you need something to tie the room together. why don't you have a leading scholar come in and present a manuscript in progress and really bring some of the leading scholars and practitioners who can critique that manuscript before it is too late? we have all been there when our book has come out and you participate in a panel and people always say, you should have done this, you should have done that. today, we do have one of the world's leading scholars, jeff engel, who i will say a word about first. jeff is presenting his manuscript very much in progress. the title is "when the world seemed new: george h.w. bush and

the cold war's peaceful end." jeff is an associate professor of history and the director of the center for presidential history at southern methodist university. he is the author of numerous books. two of the most recent include "into the desert" and "the fall of the berlin wall." and we are really fortunate to have jeff with us. he is going to say a few words about his manuscript. he put a few chapters of it up online. i know that some of you had a chance to look at it. ira said, you really should get a practitioner, someone who knows a thing or two about how government actually works. we are fortunate to have just the right person in this case. that is andrew h. card. mr. card was the chief of staff to president george w. bush from

january 2001 to april 2006, an extraordinary long tenure for a chief of staff, if i am not mistaken about my history. he also has experience with bush i. he was his deputy chief of staff and secretary of transportation for president george h.w. bush. mr. card is currently the executive director in the office of the provost at texas a&m university. and thank goodness that johnny manziel was finally picked in the draft because i was worried that we were going to lose a commentator, to be honest. ira said, you should get a leading scholar from history and a leading scholar from another discipline. and we have those scholars with us today as well.

david farber is a professor of modern american history at temple university. he is author of a lot of books, and even more very influential articles. two of his most recent books are "everybody ought to be rich." and "rise and fall of modern american conservatism." so thank you for joining us today, david. and commenting last, but certainly not least, is melani mcalister, who is an associate professor of american studies, international affairs, and media and public affairs and she is also the chair of her department, american studies, at george washington university. melani is the author of epic encounters, culture, media, and

the u.s. interest in the middle east since 1945. she is also the coeditor with marie griffin of "religion and politics in the contemporary united states." so ira, i know you are watching , like a hawk, this webcast, along with several other people. so we, i think, are fulfilling not only our obligation to dream mentors, but a dream panel for your idea of a manuscript review. so without further a do, i am going to hand things over to jeff. take it away. >> thank you, brian. it is traditional, at this particular moment, to say how pleased the speaker is to be here. but i have to admit that last night was the nfl draft and i was fully expecting my way to be winging my way to a new city at this point.

but there is also around two and threend two and round coming up, so i have hope still. let me begin by thanking brian and evan mccormick and everyone here for this tremendous opportunity. it is a wonderful opportunity for me to get important feedback at the precise moment when it is think, from such esteemed commentators. i also want to say that it is wonderful to be here at the miller center again because this is one of the institutions that is a model for how the academy of policymaking can come together and work together and move forward together. having just founded a new center for history at smu, i can tell you a number of times where an issue came up, an idea came up, and we say, how does the miller center do it? because they do it well. >> we ask the same question.

[laughter] >> we should coordinate on that. let me also take -- thank the panel for taking the time out. i am going to do two things in[] my brief commentary. i am told to speak for about 10 minutes or so. i have to say that my wife says i cannot clear my throat in 10 minutes, so we will see how far i get on this. first am i will give you a little bit of discussion about what the book is about, how the book is set up, the methodologies involved and the areas i am trying to cover. then i will tell you a little bit about george h.w. bush. the book tries to do several things at once. it is simultaneously a study of u.s. foreign-policy during the tumultuous end of the cold war. it is also simultaneously a group biography, looking primarily at george h.w. bush. and i should mention for the , rest of the talk, whenever i mention president bush, i am of course referring to our guy

41. , him and those around him, and those around him, the collective biography of america national security's decision-making during this period. but then it tries to do something else. it also tries to situate american policymaking within a broader international milieu. time and again, we go over events that occurred during 1989 during 1991 that were not generated by the united states. the united states was reactive during these times. more than prescriptive during these times, and one of the arguments that i make is that this is the essence of president bush's policymaking and his foreign-policy as a whole was to be cautious and reactive, realistically reactive without being too overly exuberant in reacting to foreign events. because there were, of course, dramatic foreign events going on through this period. it is important to recall all

that occurred during the four years of the bush presidency. this has to include the end of the cold war with ensuing events such as the fall of the berlin wall, the breakup of the soviet empire and eastern europe, the breakup of the soviet union itself. something commentators did not even anticipate. such as the fall of the berlin wall, the breakup of the soviet empire and eastern

not only the gulf war, but further difficulties in the middle east vis-à-vis ethnic cleansing. speaking of ethnic cleansing, we have the beginning of the tragedy that was post-cold war yugoslavia. looking at these events, it is astounding to think that all of them occurred within the same 4 years. i would make the argument that more accord -- more occurred during president bush's tenure in u.s. office then faced any other president in u.s. history, with the exception of maybe fdr during the height of world war ii. during each of these events, president bush and his staff adopted what i like to call hippocratic democracy. that is, first, do no harm. a world was, to their minds, going in the proper direction. democracy was on the rise. markets were on the rise. the soviet union and communism were clearly on the decline. what would happen when this decline occurred was something no one could put their finger on.

bob gates, who went on to become secretary of dispense -- of defense, was deputy national security advisor and gates who had trained as an historian, was fond of going around the white house and telling everybody that he could that never in human history had a massive empire collapsed without a major war ensuing. consequently, when people in the white house saw the soviet union begin to collapse, they feared the next step in that logical chain. at every step, it ministration would approach their difficulties by thinking to themselves not what can we do, but how can we promote stability? how can we keep things, which are already going in the right direction, continuing to go in the right direction without speeding them up to the point where they derail or perhaps doing something to stop the process of change, which is going in the right direction? and, in fact time and time , again, i come back to a quote uttered by otto von bismarck

decades before. who said, and i will quote directly, "the stream of time flows inexorably along. by plunging my hand into it, i am merely doing my duty. i do not expect, thereby, to change its course." now, what bismarck is telling us here is that the move is moving in a direction. policymakers might attend to change things, but they are never going to change the current. never going to change the flow. this is something which president bush, though i never heard him quote bismarck, something that president bush , and that theely only thing that he could do as president of the united states was to make sure that we continued on that path without hitting the rocks along the way. in fact, to give you a singular example of this, president bush was pilloried in the press during the initial aftermath of

the fall of the berlin wall. an aftermath which was covered on national television to great acclaim, which people around the world saw celebrations occurring that no one particularly ever imagined even weeks before could have occurred peacefully. and president bush invited, at one point, reporters into the office to witness him watching these events on tv as he was watching them in real-time. he was leaning back at his desk and cbs' leslie stall says to him, you just do not seem excited. the culmination of the entire half-century cold war effort, we won and you do not seem excited. he responded in a very important way. he said, "well, i guess i am not just an excitable guy." that was not actually the truth of why he was trying to lay down

his excitement. later on, he did point out that one of the great things about dynamic change is that it is all moving in our direction. he did not want to change direction. in fact, he knew something which the other reporters in the room did not, which was that he had spent the previous night and hours on the telephone with margaret thatcher, cole, and gorbachev, who pleaded with him not to do anything. the great concern for all of these leaders at the time was that this excitement of the crowd would get out of hand. that violence would ensue. that no one could control this incredible change. each of them had in the back of their minds a singular example of violence -- of celebration going too far and being turned into violence by those who

thought it had gone too far, which, of course, was tiananmen square, which only happened once before. at the time, president bush and his staff suggested, let us not go too far in celebrating those who are democratizing from the streets up. let us not go too far in celebrating reformers because those reformers have enemies and those enemies, i.e. those in control of the communist state, have tanks and guns and we can -- and we have seen what can happen when they get pushed too far. ultimately, the great fear of the administration was that those conservatives in the communist world would react to remove gorbachev, tried to push the world forward through reform. of course, we see this coming true in august of 1991. at that point, with a very low likelihood of success, the fear that that could generate into civil war and ethnic violence and the like. i argue that there are only two moments when president bush essentially took off the

hippocratic gloves, if you will, and decided to push forward with initiatives. the first was reunification of germany. he believed that the reunification of germany was necessary in order to keep future stability in europe. having nato in europe allowed americans to also stay in europe. he believed firmly that the only thing that had truly cap the peace was the american president. he pushed hard for reunification on the terms they needed, which was keeping germany in nato. the second one was the gulf war. this strikes me as a moment where we see the end of the cold war. we see two things, first, the soviets coming along with the international community in a way they had never done before, working with britain and france and the united states on a central issue of importance to all of them, the security of the

middle east. secondly, this is the one where president bush begins to lay out what the world would look like after the cold war. it is the first time he has been willing to admit that the cold war is over. and then we come to the final point which i will make today which is what the world order came to mean. in many ways, this is a phrase that has been deemed by historians as being somewhat hollow, that there was nothing the within bush's new world order. i think this is the central idea that is driven the administration, that change is moving in the right direction. if we look at the tenet of the new world order, it was not to suggest that the world was going to be perfect, but rather better. the words president bush used for more just, more free, more secure, not just free and secure, but more so. ultimately, that the world would be able to take the opportunity which had been afforded it before the cold war even

occurred. president bush's vision for the post-cold war world was something franklin roosevelt would have wanted but never came to fruition because of the cold war. with that, i want to thank my commandeers once more and let them begin to pillory me. thank you. [applause] >> my name is andy card and i am an engineer by training, a politician by disease, and not an academic. i am barely called a practitioner, but i have been blessed to be invited to read jeff's manuscript and i found it to be very good. i will start off by saying that i think it is mistitled.

it is more of a biography than it is just a description of the end of the cold war. but i loved the biographical information and i do think it is instructive to understanding kind of what made george h.w. bush the man that he is. and so i loved the trip down memory lane and i loved reading about the most respected individuals i have met in my experience in government and politics, and that is george h.w. bush. i will also say that the instructive part of the book is the relationships that jeff has shown the president developed over a long. of time -- over a long period of time, especially those who had to counsel him as he dealt with challenging experiences. he discovered the value of

wisdom and it was not wisdom that came from him. it was wisdom that he invited from other people. i think that is part of what jeff has put together. he has shown that the collection of advisors that were helping president bush manage a process that was really not part of the political calculus when they entered into government long before president bush became president. i do not think they anticipated that the soviet union would change the but the wisdom that they had in understanding it and dealing with it was invaluable. i think that was how you develop relationships that ended up being very important. i did find that there was some tendency to forget that the rest of the world was functioning or not functioning and amerco was

functioning or not functioning at the same time. the president had to wrestle with unbelievably fabulous opportunities. i do agree that he came at that opportunity with a desire not to manage it, but to invite its continuance. and so it was phenomenally restraining for any leader to say, this is going in the right direction. i do not need to put my hand on the tiller every moment. that ship is headed in the right direction. i could have an emotional response that might cause the tiller to turn the wrong way. and i do not want that to happen. having said that, i want to know where the shoals are. if the ship is heading into the shoals, i would like somebody to blow a whistle and tell me so i can pull the tiller a little bit right and left and see if we can avoid the shoals. i think that description is really personified with james a. baker the third and colin

powell, who helped bring a breath of experience and observations and helped make a difference. and there were others as well. some the president did not want to invite to be around him at first. i like how jeff describes each strained relationship -- the strained relationship with the former secretary of state, who was quite prominent and is still quite prominent in the dialogue of dynamic change in the world. and yet that wisdom, i think, was facilitated in dealing with people who shared that view. president bush, i do believe, was that the cost of change -- cusp of change of philosophy in the white house at the same time that he was on the cusp of change with the world powers, if you will.

and it does not look very dramatic going from reagan to bush. i am not sure it was really dramatic, but it was a change. his views were very different than his predecessor's views, george schultz. the views of the foreign-policy community when president reagan was dealing with the opportunity for change that had already started to emerge from gorbachev and that comes through in just -- in jeff's book, too. the seeds of change were actually planted overseas by others and he wondered how well-fertilized they would be or when they would be watered or when they would produce beautiful flowers or whether it would produce weeds. the seeds themselves were not our seeds. i think they were invited by our government and how our

government functions of, by, and for the people and how our economy thrives through entrepreneurship and creativity and the courage to take risks. those were things that were lacking in the soviet union. and i think gorbachev recognized they were lacking and he needed to make changes so he helped to identify the seeds that should be planted and where they should be planted. we had to make sure did not -- that somebody did not round up -- use round-up on the seeds. i think that is what president bush did very well and he did it by having the benefit of counsel from lots of different people who did not all share the same view, except the same commitment. i think that was of great benefit to the president and i think that is reflected in the

early stages of the book. the challenge that i have reading this book as it is maturing, i do feel as if i am anxious to turn on the radio -- and this dates me -- but i used up love listening to paul harvey, "the rest of the story." i want to know what the rest of the story is. and i want to make sure that you set the stage for the rest of the story, and i think there is something still missing in the book. i would suggest the relationship that margaret thatcher was going through in her own caucus, in her own country. also had an impact on the debate that took place in washington dc and in other capitals, especially in europe. especially when you consider that europe was trying to give itself a position -- definition as an entity rather than the sovereign definition of its members. that was a strained time in the relationship between the british and the french -- wait a minute,

it is always a strained relationship. but it was particularly strained at this time. the british were reluctant to be part of the full definition and the french were demanding that their definition be the definition. that was a dynamic that impacted some of the discussions about changes that were taking place in the soviet union and how we should respond to those changes. there was also the economic opportunity that was perceived by europe before it was perceived by the united states. some of the opportunities for change in the soviet union. and so i think there were other interests at play as the soviet union was struggling to deal with the reform that really was not invited, it was imposed. but it was invited, i think, for a normal reason and a noble expectation. however at the time, most of us

, in the united states were cynical of the person who presented the reform. and is there a more machiavellian reason for gorbachev to do what he is doing? history has shown that it was more noble. but he came from a machiavellian society so i'm sure machiavelli guided a lot of people around him and some of those layers are -- layers are still on the stage , and they are looking for a for him to give them another opportunity and i think that we are witnessing that now. you touched a little bit on what was happening in the soviet union or in russia. they seldom called it russia at the time, but there was still an influence within the soviet union. while i will reflect on our own revolution, i am on the board of

the museum of the american revolution, which is a brand-new museum being constructed in philadelphia. i love going to the board meetings because great historians come and tell us about our own revolution and i learn something every time. george washington was not winning every battle. in fact, he lost most battles as they were building up to the opportunity at yorktown. my friends in massachusetts were hanging tough. it were going to be in it until the bitter end no matter what. people in pennsylvania were saying, wait a minute. we want to be with the winner. some people in virginia started to think, hey, maybe we want to be with the winner too. in south carolina, they figured they were not going to be the winner so they were looking to get on the other side.

i suspect a lot like that was happening in the soviet union as gorbachev is wrestling with the reforms that he wants to put in place. obviously, we know that the coup attempt had an impact on the relationship that gorbachev had with not only the soviet union, but with russia. and that was, i think, an undercurrent all of the time that gorbachev was bringing his view of reform to the people of the soviet union and to the countries. satellite countries were definitely trying to decide who is the winner. there was a dynamic there that i think president bush managed better than historian technology -- then historians acknowledge. he was cognizant of the ease germans and the czechoslovakian's and the balkan states. balkans. he was cognizant to what their challenges were as they try to deal with the unsettled relationships that they had

either liked or not liked. who is the winner going to be? and do they have the courage to wait until there is a winner? or do they want to wait to see who emerges? that was a challenging time for president bush and his team. increasingly sensitive to it. in larry eagle brook's experience, it was very helpful to deal with these dynamics in the extended family. i would say that you have a great start. you told the story of how president bush became so grounded in his responsibilities and expectations. i think you have developed a great understanding for us to know why the players that president bush brought around him would gather to be around him and what the relevance was. i think you have given a good description of how europe was starting to observe what was

happening. i do not think you have gone enough into the relationship between some of the french and british leaders that actually did impact the dialogue that took place in diplomatic circles and nato and how nato was responding at the same time, because there were real skeptics within nato. and schultz-reagan expectation was more optimistic. the bush team coming in was more pessimistic as they made the change from a reagan philosophy to a bush philosophy, which was not supposed to be a dramatic change. but it was definitely a change. president bush, i think, benefited from having been in

the reagan administration and had an understanding of what their observations were, but he also had the benefit of people who were out and had been observing and had different expectations with how to deal with them. i think that dynamic is interesting. but i am ready for paul harvey's rest of the story. i want this to be a productive effort rather than destructive. i would like to see the book published and i think it will have an appeal far beyond the academic community. i also would remind you that president bush, number 41, was truly remarkable in that not only did he have to deal with the things that jeff talked about that we all can remember on the path -- on the foreign-policy front, but he also got the americans with disabilities act passed, the clean air act passed, negotiation the first agreement to reduce ozone-depleting gases.

he took tremendous effort to make changes in how congress work. he got a budget deal done and he did that all in one term. i think it was the most reductive -- i think he was the most productive one-term president in the history of our country. >> are you launching his reelection campaign? [laughter] >> it may be somebody with other initials. thank you. [applause] >> that is the proverbial tough act to follow. thank you so much to the miller center for inviting me here and to jeff for giving us the opportunity to talk about his manuscript. jeff brings to this roddick a tremendous breadth of understanding regarding american international relations at the cost of the 1980's and 1990's.

reading through this portion of the manuscript, i felt quite confident that jeff knows in depth the key individuals and events that compromise the history he wants to explain. i learned a great deal from this manuscript about president bush and how -- and i understood how an extraordinary man faced a challenge with his nation. in the pages of this manuscript, president bush is warmly portrayed, but the broad history read at a critical accounting of his decision-making and the limits of his worldview that he cautiously and prudently oversaw the american government's response to the end of the soviet union, the restructuring of europe. up front, jeff told us before that his project attempts to bring together three key narratives.

one, the ark of president bush's leadership in ending the cold war. the second is the relationship between president bush and gorbachev. the third is the tale of a group of world leaders that played key roles in the unfolding of the last years of the cold war. overall, jeff wrote that it is history from above, a history in which leadership matters. because it is a story of leadership as much as how jeff explores the tale -- and i am kind of following up on andy's comments. not only presidential history, the politics figure far left and international policy. through discussions with president bush and several other key figures as well as an extra ordinary scouring of the white house and archival material, jeff delivers a portrait. president bush's decency shines through in this history and so does his caution. so is his playing the tortoise

to gorbachev's hare, which he calls it -- hippocratic diplomacy. well-suited to the complex unfolding of events that comprise the end of the cold war. what does not much appear in these pages is the bush that his critics saw. there were for the citizens of bush's ideological limits in chapter 7. but not a distance understanding of bush that one might expect from a historian so well first -- so well-versed. for example, he was a practitioner of free-market economics and lived in a world in which economic success was normative and expected, but by no means the be-all, end-all.

president bush had little or no interest in the social, political, and economic conventions in which he inherited the -- he inherited. the accepted social hierarchies of all kinds. that the world was created to benefit some and limit the life courses of others. engel, in the relatively few pages, calls bush's point of view moderate progressivism. what does that mean in a broad historian -- historical context? that he would cooperate between international labor and business? that he would advocate progress for women's roles in society? the bush and engel's work is, to some extent unproblematized. , some of them i would think,

quite hard-nosed and aggressive, are unquestioned. the biographical detail unveils jeff's work. demonstrative of worldview and social position and the historical markers are left unexplored here. jeff calls bush a company man. it is a telling phrase, but a largely unexplained term. bush is a leader and not a middle manager. he works well in certain kinds of organizations but is uninterested in solving a great many other sorts of problems. he is a great patriot, but his interest in using american power abroad is reflective of a particularized generation of american interests. those are largely left undefined here. even though president bush did not articulate those values, i think jeff has to do more

inductive reasoning to explain those views and get at those issues. how such a beleaguered and energetic will to power and leadership goes to a strategy in an international arena in the late 1980's and 1990's is largely left unsaid. sometimes i think he needs to not take president bush at his word and think about how his actions and policies demonstrate what bush meant when he used words like "freedom." in more concrete terms, i think that jeff might make bush more vivid by giving us a sense of how he made decisions and process the massive flow of information that came at him. the pocket portraits of james baker and a few other of bush's

key advisers are well told. as far as i can tell, at least in the section that we have, the cia, the nsa and the state department rarely appear in these pages. why understanding is that president bush was a firm believer in the products produced i the taliban's community and was a regular consumer of such briefings. we do not see that material here. maybe it will come later in the manuscript. in the page i read that in the pages i read, he relied on his own feelings in pursuing international policies. this vision of bush might be true, i do not know, but i would think that agents in the executive branches would be channeling information to the white house and i wonder why this info did not reach bush or

it was simply dismisses it. i do not know it i would think it would figure more prominently in the white house. jeff is dedicated to arguing that leadership matters and that different leaders do things for their own reasons. i have little sense in the pages that i read that president bush is the head of the executive branch who sits atop a mountain of information resenting different bureaucracies, administrations, political views and agendas. residential decision-making under bush seems extraordinarily circumscribed and based on little and." information. in contrast, the book produced by the miller center on the bush presidency that was just published by cornell, in the essay by arthur lemieux spero -- bartholomew sparrow argued that the bush administration's success was in measure a part of their policy process. i know jeff is writing for a broad audience and that demands

a focus on the president and his tight circle of leaders. after goodwin's great lincoln biography with its genius term, "a team of rivals," we were looking at a way to encapsulate how the presidency work. i think jeff can do more in explaining how the company man orchestrated such a fine foreign-policy team and how he was able to receive the kind of advice he did. while issues of administration can be dull, they can also be fascinating. and i think demonstrative of the jury to which good administration are the lifeblood of decision-making. i have a feeling that as historians look back at the bush white house, administrative processes will be a key aspect of the modern presence. bush i think will stand out for that set of talents. while spero is right, i think we

need to know where the white house failed to deliver key information or insight. in other words, what did the system failed to produce and what kind of advisers were unable to make themselves heard in the white house? leadership is a critically important aspect of the history of the cold war. greater attention to how bush led his white house into the unavoidable fog of policymaking would strengthen the analytic power of this work. i was surprised by how little attention jeff gives to congress, public opinion, or the political context in which bush operates. of he gives readers about five pages on such matters, but the treatment is fairly cursory. is it indicative of the kind of leader bush was? or what? jeff says he is not much interested in accounting for the behavior of crowds, but the near absence of the american people

as actors in their own right or subjects of president bush's concerns is striking. president bush was clearly not president clinton, interested in interacting with individual americans of all kinds. i do wonder what the president made of his duties to the dimos he was charged with leading. finally, i want to comment on the foray into international history. he spends it -- he spends a great many pages writing about the parallel histories of other nationstates approaching the ending of the cold war. china and chinese leaders figure prominently in the manuscript sections i read. a main reason the manuscript has

so many pages is that jeff, in a tour de force job of research and writing, gives his readers long narratives with how the end of the cold war appeared to those nations. that greatly expands the breath of jeff's story and even his explanations of how american policymakers must act to -- must act. such an international perspective has become the fashion in the writing of diplomatic and international relations history for good reason. such broad history has made clear that the united states policymakers act in a world bound by different interests, which makes the american position in the world both clear in its distinctions and similarities to other powers both great and small. this internationalizing project has its strengths and the pages jeff spends the accounts on our compelling. i also see a weakness in this approach. i think i am following a little bit of what andy card said. jeff almost never laid these

parallel histories the u.s. policymaking. president bush's understanding of the strategic environment in which you must operate. rather than give readers a lengthy accounts of different nations and different leaders' historical understandings and trajectories, it would be more useful if he told us what bush administration officials did and did not know about these foreign leaders' views. instead, he just shows them as concurrent events happening in the bush administration. perhaps what these foreign leaders understood and did not understand about the united states and the white house would better understand the interaction between those nations and the bush-led white house.

it would do more to analyze what the white house under stood and did not understood -- understand in the political context in which those leaders feel they must act. here too the lack of historical accounting by engel about international affairs is striking. the process of policymaking and the information of ideological understanding is quite often missing from this kaleidoscopic history. his parallel stories are informative, but given that the core story here is how the bush white house managed the end of the cold war, i think an opportunity is missed. i wonder if you are pages on the -- if fewer pages on the historical trajectory of other nationstates and more pages on how the white house under bush perceived these key nations and how they perceive the united states might make for a sharper analytical approach to the role of sharper leadership in the role of the leadership in bringing the cold war to an end. to some extent, i hope you see that my critical concerns here are just a way to see that i have read the manuscript and have earned my reputation here. -- my invitation here. many thanks to the miller center

to read this. i cannot wait to see the rest of this manuscript. thanks so much. [applause] >> wow. i got friday afternoon at 1:00, huh? [laughter] it is great to be here. i am really happy to be a part of this discussion. thank you so much for letting me be a part of it. i presume jeffrey might had -- might have had something to do with this and i am very happy to have had the opportunity to get to read this manuscript as it is. he read about -- a little less than half of the final manuscript. one of the great things is that you can stand up and say that all of this will be taken care of in the last happy -- in the last half.

i really enjoyed the book as it stands now. one of the things i appreciated is that it took careful attention to the characters, the people around bush in particular. he has a lot of short biographies of important policy makers. i have seen this in other histories too. sometimes it can have the feel of early vaudeville, where a character comes in and speaks for a minute and then a crook pulled them off and another one comes in. and that does happen here. it helps us understand what the bush white house looked like and what people brought to the discussions. and that i appreciated. i have one fairly large question and three more specific ones that i would like to talk about.

one is to ask jeffrey what you thought about some of the recent scholarship on the cold war that asks us to think about the cold war as something that happens in the third world. a lot of the scholarship that has followed from that argues, as you do, that the cold war is not just an east-west, soviet union-u.s. conflict, but that china is central. and i know that the iraq war is coming in the manuscript and i cannot wait to read that. but i wonder -- several times in the manuscript, you talked about the proxy wars happening elsewhere. some fellowship has argued that when we think about the wars that are happening elsewhere, we need to think of the cold war as a factor, but not as a puppet master for what else is going on in the world. bringing the cold war and -- cold war in or bringing other

places into our thinking of the cold war seems to complicate the narrative of what else is going on in the world, the proxy wars, but also to think about -- but also to how we think about the cold war itself. i have been doing research on south africa and as we think about what is going on in the 1980's, we can think of south africa as something that was understood, the events in south africa and the slow end to apartheid was something that was understood by reagan and was also something else altogether. when you talk about the cold war and reagan's relationship to it, south africa is barely mentioned. of course, you cannot do everything. i know that. but from 1984-1989, soon-to-be president bush's developing of his thinking of foreign policy, including the revolts in south africa, the state of emergency for five years. in 1989, the desegregation of public facilities in south africa. mandela in that year. he was released in 1990.

unbanned, and the appeal of apartheid laws in 1991. we know the elections were a couple of years later. so the end of the cold war does involve the slowing down and the end of u.s. support for apartheid, but it also involves a great many other things. the u.s., nonetheless, is central to that whole conversation. in south africa, it is also central to thinking about the cold war. at least a certain subset of people, so i would like to hear from you, whether you agree with the take on the importance of the cold war as a story of the global south. in other words, what other parts of the story might you have told if there was enough time and how does the goal itself figure in before iraq or simultaneously to it? i have three more specific questions. i think david quoted the line in the introduction when you say

the story you are telling is not a story of crowds. yet i want to ask, where are the social movements in this story? there was a great moment. it was brief, in one part of the manuscript, talking about the movement against medium-range missiles in europe and the nuclear movement. but there is very little talking about social events in the united states, those which may have shaped the world in which president bush had to make decisions. i think sometimes, and i suspect a little of this, that u.s. diplomatic historians might allow that other countries have social movements, but mostly the u.s. has tv. you know so there will be a lot , about social movements in china and eastern europe, but in the united states, liberals in particular are involved in anti-apartheid activism and activism against the contras in

the 1980's. liberals and conservatives involved deeply in human rights activism vis-à-vis eastern europe and the soviet union. and that activism really does shape the response to gorbachev in the ways in which his popularity becomes such an issue for the bush white house. so there is a great moment when jeffrey talks about his reaction to the day after the 1983 movie, which i also remember very well, that scared everyone to death about nuclear war. but there is no mention of one million people showing up in central park the year before to protest nuclear war as well as nuclear war, as well as nuclear weapons, the potential of nuclear war and nuclear power. so i think that some of the embrace of gorbachev, both in the u.s. and europe, has to do with an activist and activated social movement, one that links human rights issues going on in eastern europe with anti-nuclear activism. these folks are coming together

and they are so excited about gorbachev and the possibility of the end of the cold war. maybe the disappointment with the pause. this deep disappointment with the pause where the bush administration comes in and says, we are going to think a lot now for the first five months.